Volume 5, Issue 1: Spring 2009
Behaving Like Brando:
Transgressing Race and Gender in The Wild
One
Julie Willett
One
of most unforgettable moments in The Wild
One (1953) occurs when a small-town girl asks “What're you rebelling against, Johnny?” His iconic reply “Whaddya got?” projects a sense of angst as complex as his own understanding and
portrayal of masculinity. Judith Butler reminds us that gender is a performance
and Marlon Brando’s way with words, his posture, movements, and sense of style
reveal a particularly unique rendition. In her path breaking study of the male
body in twentieth century popular culture, Susan Bordo casts masculinity as
inseparable from an often hidden sense of vulnerability that was visible in
Hollywood stars like Brando. Bordo points to Brando’s
role, before his turn as Johnny in The
Wild One, as Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee William’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), in which he “brought an emotional expressiveness, a willingness to portray male
need, helplessness, [and] dependency that helped to shape a very different kind
of romantic male ideal than the violent action hero” (Bordo 112).
Yet
to fully understand Brando’s appeal to women and generations of male imitators,
one must delve into Brando’s own brand of racial cross-dressing, on and off the
screen. “Whaddya got?” may be Johnny’s retort, but a much more poignant response to the status
quo was emerging in African-American communities. During WWII, the Double
Victory Campaign demanding twin defeats of fascism abroad and racism at home
emerged alongside Zoot Suiters who, as Robin Kelley so brilliantly reveals, had
already created their own sense of masculine performance through leisure,
dress, mannerisms, and speech. Brando’s legacy reflected his ability to distort mid-century
constructions of gender and race and borrow much from what has been assumed to
be black and/or feminine. In other
words, Brandon refashioned a “manly bearing” (Montgomery) by embracing his own
sensuality, vulnerability, dependency, and a not-yet-white identity that stood
in sharp relief to the realm of work or middle-class ambition. Consciously or not, for generations of
men, “behaving like Brando” has meant adopting that which they may have defined
as other. Thus even those who have
longed for exclusively white male companionship, clubs, and organizations, have
perhaps also transgressed race and gender boundaries to forge their own sense
of male rebelliousness (Bordo 133).
In
the mid-twentieth century, masculinities were being refashioned thanks to film
icons like Brando and James Dean. Against the backdrop of the Cold War,
domestic containment begged for distinct gender roles that did not simply
domesticate women, but also channeled white, middle, and working-class men into
bread winning, marriage, and increasingly segregated, suburban lifestyles
(May). In film and television, the
images of domesticated fathers who knew best stood in sharp contrast to Brando
and Dean’s virile boyishness (Bordo 121). Indeed, their influence on contemporary
and future generations, Bordo insists, has been profound. “Among popular entertainers, the
only one whose style of masculinity they [her high-school boyfriends]
consciously emulated was that of folk singer Bob Dylan, who combined poetry,
domestic rebellion, and anti-establishment passion with lousy posture, a
Salvation Army wardrobe, a voice that defied convention, and a sense of
indifference to his audience, even when bellowing lyrics of protest.” Bordo recalls how her “friends
slouched like Dylan, they mumbled like Dylan, they scoured the Newark thrift
stores in search of Dylan-like clothing.” Of course, “What most of them didn’t know, however,
was the young Robert Zimmerman (Dylan), and many other singers and public
politicos of the sixties, just slightly older than the boys I knew, had gotten
their inspiration from two movie stars of the fifties: Brando and Dean” (Bordo 132).
The
full extent of Brando’s cultural influence is often overlooked, however.
Although Dean is typically given credit for creating a new masculine style, Bordo
insists that “actually it was Brando who originated the new elements of
masculine style with which Dean became associated, and which Dean consciously
tried to copy . . . from Brando’s voice, walk, gestures, and clothing to his
iconoclastic opinions” (Bordo 133). But Brando’s sense of style came “long
before he put on the black leather jacket,” or—I would add—rode a
motorcycle. Indeed, “even before
he became a star, Brando flouted the establishment with his body,” showing up
in fashionable places wearing ripped clothing and preferring to stand “alone in
the corner all night” rather than make polite conversation. The press mocked
him and cast him as “uncivilized” and “primitive.” Bordo notes that even Life
Magazine described Brando as “‘a harlequin who had not been house-broken” (Bordo 134).
The
“harlequin” who refused to be “house-broken” was a perfect assault on
domesticated images of masculinity that dominated much of post-war popular
culture. In The Wild One, released just two years after A Streetcar Named Desire, Brando
is less violent and more easily understood than in his previous portrayal of
brutish Stanley Kowalski. Nevertheless, his potency stands
in bold relief to an out-of-touch small town that seems to suffer from a crisis
in male authority. The local
sheriff who tries to keep Johnny and his gang on the straight and narrow fails
miserably. Even the sheriff’s own
daughter Kathie (Mary Murphy) admits to Johnny that her father is “afraid of
making a mistake . . . afraid of losing his job . . . the town joke.” Age, in
this case, contributes to a sense of the town’s collective impotence. As Johnny’s friends run amuck they
accentuate their youthfulness through playful pranks and disregard for the
powers-that-be. After pulling an old-timer up out of his car, they toss him
about with complete disregard for or fear of any retribution. Indeed, Johnny’s brethren despise
authority and have little patience for the mundane. They transform Main Street into a makeshift playground where
they hop along like children on pogo sticks, circle beer bottles with their
bikes and, just for kicks, proceed to trash a string of local businesses. When Johnny’s rival Chino (Lee Marvin)
picks a fight outside Bleeker’s Cafe, it seems no accident that the two, caught
up in their own bravado, crash through the glass windows of a bridal boutique. In a “town where people get married”
and not much else seems to happen, they disrupt
any notion of familial bliss the town or 1950s America claimed to offer.
Johnny
(as one of my students pointed out) is not the name given to a man. Indeed, he
is strikingly boyish, nothing like uncaring Chino, and thus perhaps an unlikely
emblem of masculine rebellion. Yet this is a moment when being a boy may have
made it easier to be a man, or at least an undomesticated version. What made
Johnny a different kind of man was this willingness to embrace a feminine,
out-of-control emotional vulnerability and sensuality. In the limelight of A Streetcar Named Desire, Brando once
again cultivates the erotic along with a sense of immaturity and
dependence. He is not the not the
father who knows best, but a clingy, troubling child. Like Stanley Kowalski,
who screamed helplessly for “Stella,” Johnny clings to a stolen second-place
trophy that he drags everywhere like a security blanket. “An
object that signifies absolutely nothing,” scoffs Chino, but that makes Johnny
“feel like a big strong man.” The
trophy has more meaning than it should and in the last scene of the movie when
he finally relinquishes it to the only one who understood him, it seems as
though Johnny might indeed be growing up, but he is still brandishing a
different kind of manliness than that portrayed by Chino or the unsympathetic town.
Johnny’s
maturity is perhaps most in question not when he is around other men but women,
in particular Kathie, the object of his desire. In response to his every
mistake, she reaffirms his dependency on her through a kind of maternal
stance. She corrects Johnny’s poor
manners, asking (as if she were his mother), “What did you do that for? Why are you trying to be so rude?” His
boyishness is often amplified with simplistic responses. And when he refuses to
speak, it is Kathie who finishes his sentences, explaining
that “he doesn’t know how,” for example, to say thank you when someone
finally has done him right. At
times the gender roles seem inverted. Even when caught in his violent embrace,
Kathie never seems to fear Johnny but realizes, “I’m not afraid of you. You’re afraid of me.” She is the rational
one, not Johnny.
At
the same time, The Wild One leaves
little doubt of Johnny’s masculine prowess. Dressed in a black leather jacket,
jeans stretched tightly across his crotch, always ready to mount his bike,
Johnny exudes a sensuality that, in turn, erotized the male body on and off the
screen. When Kathie touches the front wheel’s fender on Johnny’s Triumph as if
she were touching him, she admits to a kind of virginity: “I’ve never ridden on a motorcycle
before. It’s fast. It scared me. But I forgot everything. It felt good.” His motorcycle had offered
her rescue, earlier from a symbolic gang rape, but also the possibility of
violence revisited, especially when Johnny resurrects Streetcar’s Stanley Kowalski, a man whom women did fear: “Right now I can slap you around to show you how good you are and [thanks
to his bike] tomorrow I’m someplace else and I don’t even know you or
nothing,” he threatens. Even when words escape him, with every stomp on his
kick start, Johnny asserts a powerful fuck-you attitude, whether or not a
trophy is strapped onto his handlebars or embraces him on the back of his
bike. In this case, it seems his
boyish fetish does not make Brando’s character less of a man, but rather a more
complicated version of one.
Brando’s
motorcycle also took on a life of its own. In the film, its mobility symbolized the uncontainability of
cultures that rural life, emerging suburbs, and lynch mobs were supposed to
keep out. Johnny’s gang defiantly
brought into this small all-white town, everything that urban life had come to
represent in the American imagination. Since the early National Period, distinctly urban, often violent gangs
were associated with an immigrant, not-yet-white, working-class who threatened
and rejected the tenets of middle-class respectability through stance, dress,
speech, and manners. Christine Stansell’s study of antebellum New York’s Irish
working-class Bowery Boys vividly captures their walk, talk, and own sexual
machismo (Stansell 89-101). The Bowery Gal, like Britches, one of Johnny’s former
one-night-stands, was bold not demure, a biker in her own right, one of the Beetles
who claimed her own sensuality, desire, and prowess even though she fell
ultimately into the paternalistic trap of being someone else’s woman, waiting
for his actions and his desire. Throughout the film, then, the bike is what afforded the transgression
of race and respectability.
It
is of course more than the motorcycle that makes Johnny a threat. When Johnny’s club rides into town,
they play havoc with racial accord. Like the Beats, best known for their
rejection of domesticity, bourgeois ambition and an embrace of black culture (Ehrenreich),
Johnny and his motorcycle club blatantly mimic black aesthetics. Following in the footsteps of a slightly
earlier generation of Zoot Suiters, Jonny’s defiance of the status quo must be
understood through the cultural terrain he claimed. “The zoot, the lindy hop,
and the distinct lingo of ‘heb cat,’” Robin Kelley argues, “simultaneously
embodied these class, racial, and cultural tensions” (165). Johnny’s friends accentuate their
otherness especially when they mock the elderly soda jerk who is clueless when
they speak jive or offer to slip him some skin. Against the backdrop of jazz music, they ask “Daddy-o” to
“Gimme some skin and ooze it out just nice . . . Do you pick up on this jive, man? Did you dig the rebop?” Thinking about Malcolm X’s youth,
Kelley unravels the “riddle of the zoot” when he notes how “This unique
subculture enabled him [Malcolm] to negotiate an identity that resisted the
hegemonic culture and its attendant racism and patriotism, the rural folkways
(for many, the ‘parent culture’) that still survived in most black urban
households, and the class conscious, integrationist attitudes of middle-class
blacks” (165). Similarly, Johnny
had no desire to integrate into this town or its old-fashioned mentality. Perhaps this is why Johnny’s biker
fraternity was named the “Black Rebels Motorcycle Club.” The point was not lost. Years later
Bobby Seale, founder of the Black Panthers, would recall the influence Brando
had on his own youthful sense of rebelliousness (Bordo 133).
Like
other imitators of African Americans, Johnny’s club also expresses complete
disdain for wage labor. Zoot Suiters, Beats, and bikers all seemed to construct their
sense of manhood in the realm of leisure and in opposition to work. Malcolm X, Kelley insists, felt “one
should work to live not live to work” (173). Zoot Suiters resisted patriotic service and traditional African-American occupations that
typically featured black men and women serving the needs of white vanity
(Kelley, 168-169). The Beats copied and romanticized this angst. The most
famous were strikingly misogynist and lived off a string of women to avoid work
and insure good times (Ehrenreich). Malcolm, too,
always “seemed to be shedding his work clothes, whether it was the apron of a
soda jerk or the uniformed railroad sandwich peddler, in favor of his zoot
suit” (Kelley 169). And in The Wild One, every weekend, Johnny and
his gang would “go-go-go.” More than temporarily escape work, Johnny’s friends
showed absolute contempt for any semblance of wage labor as well as workers who
seemed to embrace their servitude a bit too much. The Ace filling-station attendant who is all too eager to
please is treated little differently than the towel that’s swiped from his back
pocket and used to start a “drag for beers.” And most poignantly when Johnny
loses his patience with Kathie he snaps, “Who are you? Some girl who makes
sandwiches or somethin’?”
However,
Kathie is the only wageworker Johnny shows any respect for, because he can so
easily re-imagine her in his realm of leisure. When they first meet, he
politely and all-so-deliberately lifts his hands as she
wipes the counter. “Why, thank you,” teases Johnny. When he moves to the bar, he tries desperately to pull her
away from her work-a-day self and into a space that he can perhaps control and
certainly finds more palatable. He
even puts a coin in the jukebox in an attempt to change the mood. Against a backdrop of seductive jazz,
Johnny coaxes Kathie to step beyond the counter and dance. No doubt he wishes
to transform her, as he has presumably done. When she refuses, he complains, “Man, you are too square.”
To be sure, men’s identities can often be understood through labor, their work
culture, their skills, and economic posturing, but Robin Kelley’s Zoot Suiters,
much like Johnny, defy the notion that work is an end-all. Troubled so much with Kathie’s
attachment to her job, Johnny vows “If you’re gonna stay cool, you’ve got to
wail. . . . You got to make some jive,”
Perhaps
what brings Johnny’s racial construct most into question is the fear and
adoration he begets. Bordo notes that
Brando was cast in the contemporary press as “uncivilized” possessing a
“primitivism” on and off the screen (134). In some ways, Kathie is attracted to Johnny’s undomesticated
whiteness and the lure of wild adventure. At the same time, her small town naiveté renders her innocent and
passive in a fictive narrative that drives the town fathers’ imagination and
fear. A misunderstood slap makes
Johnny not just an annoyance to a town but a threat to Kathie, white womanhood,
and the town’s sense of racial purity. To be sure, it is not Johnny’s boyishness that makes
small town vigilantes hunt him down like a southern lynch mob. Even though Johnny rescued rather than
raped Kathie, he is portrayed as the outsider who must pay for the town’s
guilty fear and desire.
George Rawick was a historian of slavery, who understood the
importance of looking at identity and resistance beyond the gaze of labor’s
control and his words from Sundown to
Sunup best capture the town’s response to Brando and his influence in
popular culture. When thinking
about the legacy of slavery and racism, Rawick envisions that “The Englishman
met the West African as a reformed sinner meets a comrade of his previous
debaucheries.” Indeed, “The reformed sinner very often creates a pornography of
his former life.” And tragically, “He must suppress even his knowledge that he
had acted that way or even that he wanted to act that way” (Rawick 132-133). Rawick’s profound
understanding of race and imagination suggests much about the legacy of
Brando’s gender performance, a performance that turns so much on race. Perhaps then it is even possible to
suggest that men who cling desperately to whiteness and masculinity also
transgress these very categorizations.
Acknowledgments
Thanks
so much to my husband and colleague, Randy McBee, and the many Texas Tech
graduate students who recently inspired this discussion of masculinity and its
discontents.
Works
Cited
Bordo, Susan. The
Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and Private. New York: Farrar, Straus and Grioux, 1999.
Butler, Judith. Gender
Trouble: Feminisms and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Ehrenreich, Barbara. The
Hearts of Men: American Dreams and The Flight From Commitment. New York: Anchor Press, 1983.
Kelley, Robin D.G. Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black
Working Class. New York: The Free Press, 1996.
May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American
Families in the Cold War Era. New York: Basic Books, 1988.
Montgomery, David. Workers’ Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology,
and Labor Struggles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Rawick, George. From
Sundown to Sunup: The Making of
the Black Community. Westport: Connecticut, Greenwood Press, 1972.
Stansell, Christine. City of Women: Sex and Class in New York 1789-1860. Urbana and
Chicago: University of Illinois, 1986.
The Wild
One, dir. Laslo Benedek, 1953.
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