Summary
Jim, Judy, and Plato pull up in front of Judy's house and Judy steps out. Jim asks if she will be alright, and produces her compact mirror. Reflecting her face back to her, he jokingly asks, "Do you want to see a monkey?" After Judy leaves, Jim drives home, and Plato asks him if he wants to spend the night and have breakfast at his house. He tells Jim he wishes Jim were his dad. Jim brushes off Plato's requests, and after jotting down Jim's address in his notebook, Plato leaves to go pick up his scooter. As Judy heads to bed, her little brother hugs her in the hallway. Though her father also approaches, Judy rushes into her bedroom and caresses the compact mirror while lying in bed.
At the Stark residence, Jim drinks from a cold jug of milk and presses it to his forehead. As he is dozing off on the couch, his mother rushes downstairs, and his father awakens on an armchair across the room. Jim tells them he has a question to ask, and once again demands a direct answer. He admits he was complicit in the car accident (which his parents have already heard about on the news), and that he was driving a stolen car. Over his mother's fury, he tells his parents it was a "matter of honor" and that he had to participate. He describes how Buzz died, and his own ambivalence about acting tough. When he mentions going to the police, his parents discourage him, not wanting him to take the blame. When his mother announces they're moving, Jim grabs her by the nightgown and becomes enraged, comparing moving neighborhoods to avoiding their problems. He pleads for his father to intervene and stand up for him. When he doesn't, Jim grabs him by the collar and throttles him on the carpet. He kicks a hole in a portrait of his grandmother before driving away.
On his way into the police station, Jim sees various members of the gang on their way out, having already been questioned by authorities. The gang members debate whether Jim is being called in for questioning, or is planning to confess the night's events, given that he was not arrested. They resolve once more to "bring him down." The attending officers brush off Jim's requests to see Ray, the policeman from the opening sequence, and tell him to come back in the morning. From the station, Jim calls Judy's house, and Judy's father hangs up on him.
Jim then drives over to Judy's house and finds her sitting on the front lawn in a robe. She calls him "Jamie" like Plato suggested, but then learns Jim has only known Plato a day. On the car radio, a disc jockey announces a song dedicated from Buzz to Jim. They turn the radio off, and Jim tells Judy that seeing her that morning made him feel optimistic. She apologizes for treating him badly, and for behaving insincerely, and Jim kisses her on the temple. When they both agree they cannot go home, he invites her to the abandoned mansion near the planetarium Plato pointed out earlier, and the two leave in Jim's car together.
As Plato arrives home on his scooter, he is waylaid by the gang members, who search his pockets and steal his notebook containing Jim's address. Plato runs upstairs and grabs a pistol from his parents' nightstands and flees the house to warn Jim, as his caregiver calls after him. Hearing strange noises in the night, Jim's parents walk downstairs and find a chicken hanging upside down outside their front door, and gang members staked out on their front lawn asking where Jim is. After they leave, Plato appears, also asking after Jim, to no avail. Plato rides away on his scooter, and a montage shows Jim's parents, Judy's parents, Plato's caregiver, and Ray the policeman all talking worriedly on the phone.
Plato arrives at the abandoned mansion and finds Jim and Judy already there. Plato lights a candelabra and leads the pair on a mock tour of his "castle." Posing as newlyweds and interested buyers, Jim and Judy follow Plato through the house and across the patio toward a "nursery," which is in fact a drained swimming pool. The gang continues to prowl the streets as Jim, Judy, and Plato joke around in the courtyard of the mansion. Plato tells Judy and Jim that he often ran away, and that his mother discontinued his therapy because it was too expensive and fled to Hawaii. He tells them his father is dead, though Jim catches him in the lie. After Plato falls asleep, Jim and Judy notice he's wearing mismatched socks, and empathize with his disheveled state. Laying inside by the fire, Judy tells Jim that women want men who are "gentle and sweet" and unafraid to buck norms, such as choosing to befriend an outcast like Plato. She tells Jim she loves him, and the two kiss.
Hearing the sound of a swinging chain, Plato awakens on the patio to find Jim and Judy gone, and the gang members surrounding him. He manages to flee inside and hides under a piece of furniture with his gun drawn. Outside, a patrol car pulls up, responding to a report of breaking and entering. Sneaking through the house, Plato presses himself against the door where he knows Jim and Judy to be. Scared and confused, he fires wildly at one of the gang members, injuring him, and then fires at Jim himself when the door opens, but misses him. He tearfully asks Jim why he "ran out" on him, and tells Jim he's not his father, before escaping from the mansion, with the police in tow.
Analysis
Buzz's death represents a turning point in the film, after which Judy, Jim, and Plato must evade not only their parents, but members of the gang out looking for revenge. Jim gives Judy her compact mirror back when he drops her off, signaling a key development in their relationship. The way in which Jim opens the mirror, reflecting Judy's face back to her, symbolizes the way in which Jim has compelled Judy to engage in a serious self-examination, and helped her to drop her facade of coldness and insincerity. Nicholas Ray stresses this transformation by later showing Judy in bed, gazing meaningfully at the compact mirror in her hands.
A trio of scenes once again reasserts the failure and/or absence of fathers: Plato tells Jim he wishes Jim were his father, Judy rushes into her bedroom to avoid talking to her father, and Jim has his fiercest altercation with his father yet. Plato's homoerotic desire for Jim to be his father is set up by his speech in the chickie-run scene in which he describes Jim to Judy as a kind of idealized father figure—the kind of man who could excel at hunting and fishing, while also being a kind and patient teacher. Whether Plato desires Jim as a father or as a lover is one of the more ambiguous and subversive currents running through this film, which is left deliberately ambiguous due to thematic restrictions imposed on Hollywood films by the Hays Code.
After the chickie-run, Ray shows Jim drinking milk in his kitchen once more, only this time Jim presses it to his forehead to cool himself down, suggesting that his need for nurturing and guidance has now reached a fever pitch. Jim's confrontation with his parents in the living room is an emotional tour-de-force that brings the dysfunctional tension of the Stark family to a violent climax. The disorienting camerawork in the scene—such as the upside-down, point-of-view shot from Jim's perspective, or the canted angle when Jim's mother begins to climb the stairs—emphasizes the feelings of chaos and upheaval raised by the ferocious domestic argument. Jim's animosity is no longer verbal, but physical: he yanks his mother's hem, throttles his father, and kicks a hole in a portrait of his grandmother, all of which symbolize his passionate repudiation of his family's values.
Jim and Judy's scene together on her front lawn relies on an ironic gender reversal in which Jim is feminized. Judy calls Jim "Jamie" and notes that his lips are soft, and a love song is dedicated to Jim from Buzz over the car radio, once again putting Jim in the traditionally feminine position of being the object of desire. Jim's vulnerability and tenderness in this scene anticipates Judy's speech later in the film, in which she cites precisely these qualities as her reasons for falling in love him.
The mansion scene represents Judy, Jim, and Plato's attempt to create a surrogate family together in a fantasy space, away from the variously disappointing and toxic family structures and peer groups that have failed them. Judy and Jim enter into a mock marriage by posing as newlyweds, and Plato becomes a kind of child figure to them by facetiously leading them through the house to the nursery. When they mockingly discuss what to do about the nuisance of children, Jim says, "Drown them like puppies," echoing Plato's crime invoked in the opening scene. When Judy and Jim slip away to share a private moment by the fireplace, Plato interprets their abandonment of him as a reenactment of his own father and mother's desertion, triggering him into a panic that sets up the final scene of the film.
