Summary
Back at home, Jim is helping himself to milk in the kitchen when he hears a loud crash upstairs. Climbing the stairs expecting to find his mother, Jim finds his father wearing an apron, hunched over the spilled contents of a silver serving tray. Jim and his father share a laugh over the accident, but when his father moves to hastily clean it up before his mother sees it, Jim sternly intones, "Let her see it." Jim tells his father to stand up, and rips the tablecloth out of his hand before walking away in disgust.
Over at Judy's house, Judy tries to kiss her father, who recoils from her touch and chastises her for behaving like a little girl. Judy's father then embraces Judy's little brother, sweeping him into his arms. When Judy tries to kiss her father again, he slaps her. Judy tearfully clutches her face and asks to be excused. On her way out, she proclaims that her house is no longer her "home." Judy's mother tries reassuring her father by blaming Judy's problems merely on her age, as Judy's little brother fires a toy gun at the dinner table.
In Jim's bedroom, curled up in bed, Jim asks his still-apron-clad father in vague, hypothetical terms about whether he should do something dangerous as a matter of "honor." Jim's father advises him not to make a hasty decision, and upon turning on the lights, finds Jim's wounds from the knife fight. Jim's father suggests that they make a list of pros and cons, but Jim demands a direct answer about how to respond when one's manhood is at stake. When Jim's father emphasizes that Jim's problems will seem silly to him 10 years down the line, Jim once again pleads for a direct answer as he dresses himself in a white t-shirt. When his father continues to hesitate, Jim rushes down the stairs and dons a red windbreaker. As his parents both call after him, Jim grabs a piece of cake off the kitchen table and peels off in his car, heading to the chickie run.
At the bluff, the gang members and various onlookers eat and smoke in front of a line of parked cars. Buzz asks Plato where Jim is, and when Jim pulls up, Plato tells him he hitched to the bluff. Jim and Plato joke about Plato's morbid personality. As Plato and Judy look on, Buzz approaches Jim and invites him to come inspect the car engines. Jim and Buzz trade formal greetings, telling each their full names and shaking hands. Judy asks Plato if he is friends with Plato, and Plato tells her an intricate lie—that Jim is his best friend, quiet but sincere, an avid hunter and fisherman, and a patient mentor who prefers close friends to call him "Jamie." Jim and the gang flip a coin to see who will drive which car, and Jim practices bailing out of the driver's side door at Buzz's insistence.
Jim wanders toward the edge of the bluff and Buzz joins him. Pondering the rocky coastline below, Buzz says, "That's the end," and Jim agrees, lighting a cigarette. Buzz plucks the cigarette from Jim's lips, taking a drag from it himself, and admits sincerely to Jim that he likes him. Jim asks Buzz why they have to participate in rituals like knife fights and chickie runs. Seemingly having no answer, Buzz merely replies that "you gotta do something."
Jim and Buzz get in their vehicles, and the gang members and onlookers take their places to watch the race unfold. Judy orders one member to arrange the cars on either side of the racing circuit, with their headlights facing each other. From the driver's seat, Buzz asks Judy for a clump of dirt, which he rubs between his palms. He tells Jim that on Judy's signal, they will race to the edge—the first man who jumps is "chicken." Judy gives Buzz a parting kiss, and in the other car, Jim caresses his own lips with Judy's compact. Jim calls Judy over and asks for dirt as well. Judy then runs ahead of the cars into the middle of the makeshift racetrack and orders the cars on the sidelines to turn on their headlights. Plato's fingers are crossed as Judy gives the signal. The two cars rush forth on either side of her toward the precipice.
As the vehicles speed up, Buzz realizes the wrist-strap of his jacket is looped around the door handle, preventing him from bailing out of the car. Jim rolls out at the last second as both cars go hurtling over the edge, exploding against the rocky coastline below with Buzz inside. The gang rushes toward the edge of the bluff. Not realizing what has happened, Jim laughs and asks where Buzz is. They tell him solemnly Buzz is "down there," and quickly flee the scene, leaving only Jim, Judy, and Plato. Judy stares down at the wreckage below, seemingly pondering whether to jump. Jim takes her hand and shakes his head, and the three leave the scene together.
Analysis
The scenes before the chickie-run sequence show us how the problems with the film's father figures lead the teenage characters toward reckless and escapist behavior. Before encountering his father, Jim can be seen drinking milk, an image used here and elsewhere to stress his childlike need for nurturing and guidance, as well as perhaps his own potential to be a nurturer for others. Ray portrays Jim's father, clad in an apron and bending down over the contents of a spilled serving tray, as unbecomingly servile and feminized, taking orders from Jim's mother and thus devoid of the kind of paternal authority Jim craves.
Whereas Ray links Jim's father's failure to his feminization in the household, Judy's father fails because he is violently averse to Judy's blossoming femininity. He slaps her face when she tries kissing him, demonstrating a fundamental discomfort with her maturing body already established by Judy's testimony in the opening sequence that her father has rubbed off her lipstick and called her a "dirty tramp." By contrast, Judy's father lavishes physical affection on her little brother, who fires a toy machine gun at the dinner table, offering up another significant symbol of phallic violence in a film rife with them.
Jim's encounter with his father before the chickie-run scene serves to intensify the emotional rift between the two. Still clad in an apron, Jim's father ineffectually struggles to provide the kind of authoritative, directed advice that Jim desires. Jim's dialogue, which frames his dilemma as "a matter of honor," highlights the fact that Jim places a premium on the kind of masculine integrity that his father has continually failed to embody. The rift between Jim and his father is also widened by age: Jim's father fails to understand the visceral immediacy of his problems, heightened by the hormonal extremes of adolescence, by trivializing them and advising him to "make a list." Crucially, this scene shows Jim donning his red windbreaker, perhaps the film's most iconic image, and a symbol of the fact that Jim has finally resolved to participate in the violent and seemingly inescapable rituals of masculinity, regardless of the dangers involved.
The chickie-run itself, in which two drivers must barrel in stolen cars toward the edge of a bluff, is the violent event that brings the metaphor of driving and performative masculinity to its climax. Ray emphasizes the ritualism and spectacle of the scene: for example, Buzz and Jim inspect the car engines, flip a coin, and rub dirt in their palms. The onlookers arrange their cars along the sidelines, shining their lights on the makeshift raceway, turning it into a kind of stage. The ritualistic structure of the event makes it difficult for the men implicated within it to exercise any kind of agency, which Buzz admits when he confesses to Jim, "I like you. You know that?" Their shared moment together on the cliffside indicates the kind of sincere male intimacy and desire that is prohibited by the rules prescribed within adolescent peer groups. Buzz pulling Jim's cigarette from his mouth and taking a drag from it is perhaps the only occasion in the film where a phallic symbol (the cigarette) is used in a context of affection and intimacy, rather than violence and competition.
Significantly, Judy is the character who gives the signal for the chickie-run to begin. The position she literally takes up between the two cars symbolizes her figurative position as the character mediating the competitive relationship between Jim and Buzz. For example, when Buzz asks her to rub dirt in his hands, Jim asks her to do the same. Whereas Buzz kisses Judy before the race, Jim turns her compact mirror over in his hands. Ray includes these visual details in order to convey that these two men are performing in order to win Judy over, despite the fact that they actually like one another. The chickie-run thus dramatizes the competitive impulse organizing male-male relationships, in which one man must emerge as victor, and the other a "chicken." Buzz's death reveals the toxic, self-defeating results of this attitude, which continually promotes empty displays of performative masculinity over genuine expressions of self.
