James Dean [antikvár]

'My life stuiy seems so dull to me that I can V really tell it right without the Funeral March or "Hearts And Flowers "providing a mournful background ' H asn't everything been said about James Dean? With Marilyn Monroe he is the premier prematurely-dead icon of the moving picture industry, the object, 34 years after his death, of a devotion bordering on the necrophiliac. Countless books, fihns, documentaries and special issues of magazines have been produced to explain why this legend endures and what exactly it is that he represents for a global popular culture. All of them tell roughly die same story of his brief, brilliant ascension and his sudden destruction, so why plod over the same trajectory? Because I think none of these attempts has prodded sufficiently into what really makes this confused, narcissistic, violently ambitious, thoroughly inadequate boy so fascinating. Far more than being The First Teenager, as has so often been said, he is actually the first true pop star — the first performing artist to turn his life into an ongoing media pose. He lived life at one remove, die remove of a fame which couldn't have existed without celluloid and mass media. A sub-beatnik, would-be intellectual, pre-brat pack primadonna, he was the first truly 'pop' victim of the American Dream's star machine. There was also something rivetingly touching about him, about his earnest re-invention and monomaniacal nurturing of himself as prototype pop original. He was King Baby in denim but he thirsted for something true and beautiful that only ever came in glimpses. As his Method-acting colleague Mildred