Miscommunication
Communication barriers prevent the various characters in Rebel Without A Cause from understanding each other. At first, these barriers are established along generational lines: Judy, Jim, and Plato all engage in acts of juvenile delinquency because they have been either ignored, misunderstood, or belittled by the adults around them. Communication barriers also arise from dysfunctional formations of sex, gender, and parenthood: Jim cannot get close to his father because his father is passive and feminized; Judy's father cannot bear to acknowledge her blossoming femininity; and Jim and Buzz cannot be friends because they must compete to be recognized as manly. Excessive and/or inadequate gender performance is a driving factor that consistently limits the extent to which the characters in the film are able to communicate effectively, until they engage in a self-aware consideration of their own social performances.
Masculinity
Rebel Without A Cause is essentially a sociological case study in American masculinity—its attractions, its limitations, its pathologies, its postures, and its obstacles. The plot of the film essentially traces Jim's desire as a teenage boy to become a respectable man, despite the fact that he seems to lack a suitable role model for doing so. Jim's father falls short of Jim's expectations for masculinity because he defers his authority to Jim's mother and lacks the necessary advice to impart to Jim. Although Ray, the police officer, effectively defuses Jim's temper and successfully elicits his feelings, Ray is absent later in the film when Jim needs him the most. As opposed to Jim's father's overly passive style of masculinity, Buzz and the gang are too aggressive, inciting pointless violence that Jim morally opposes but feels powerless to avoid. Jim himself fails as a figure of paternal masculinity when he abandons Plato near the film's end, which leads to Plato's death.
Rebellion
As the title of the film implies, Rebel Without A Cause is about the tendency of teenagers to rebel against their elders. Staging the opening sequence in a juvenile hall, in which the police interrogate a rogue's gallery of adolescent characters brought in on various charges, establishes the psychologically complex kinds of social delinquency that Ray's film addresses. Rather than dismiss the film's young characters as merely belligerent or self-absorbed, Ray treats their problems seriously, and instead lays the blame squarely on the adult figures around them who have failed to provide guidance. Even the film's most alarming scenes of violence, such as Jim choking his father or Buzz's fiery death, are rendered as complex events with motivating social and emotional factors that could have been prevented with the proper adult intervention. The film gives a sensitive, complex portrait of rebellion by reserving judgment and turning a critical eye toward the world of adults.
Adolescence
Nicholas Ray shows how the peculiar age of Jim, Judy, Plato, Buzz, and the gang leaves them in a hinterland between the world of children and the world of adults. Judy's father clearly treats her differently than her little brother, and Jim winces when his mother packs him peanut butter for lunch, an embarrassing carryover from the world of children. Plato has the sensitivity and innocence of a child (for instance, cowering at the planetarium show), at the same time that he has an appalling, adult-like capacity for violence. Jim, Judy, and Plato strive to assert themselves as independent adults, while facing insurmountable problems that they need guidance and wisdom to navigate. Ray tries to show how the problems of teenagers often reflect the inadequacies of adults, rather than merely stemming from a "transition" or "phase" that they will outgrow.
Danger
Rebel Without A Cause illustrates how teenagers, without the proper guidance or authority, resort to reckless, thrill-seeking behavior. This occurs because the force exerted by peer pressure outweighs the force exerted by the so-called authority figures surrounding the film's adolescent characters. Note, for instance, how the groundskeepers at the planetarium fail to break up Jim and Buzz's knife fight, and become an object of ridicule in the eyes of the teenagers. Given their absenteeism and ineffectiveness, the parental and guardian figures in the film become completely detached from the world of the kids, who engage in dangerous activities like the chickie-run, with no oversight whatsoever. Ironically, Ray's film shows how these dangerous activities only reinforce their need for guidance and attention, such as when Jim beseeches his father for advice immediately after the chickie-run scene.
Family
The film introduces Jim Stark as a man in desperate need of escape from his own family, who in his own words, are "tearing him apart." Judy, too, wishes to flee the confines of her household, and she and Jim use the words "zoo" and "circus" to describe the chaos that exists in their homes, which should be places of comfort and belonging. Jim, Judy, and Plato's time spent in the abandoned mansion toward the end of the film represents an attempt on their part to build a chosen family—a kind of surrogate kinship structure where they can be honest, open, and sincere, rather than guarded, hostile, and belittled. Jim and Judy become a mock couple, and Plato their mock child, with the abandoned mansion becoming their mock house. In this way, the three are able to conceive of the idea of family in a utopian fantasy space, which contrasts with the harsh realities of their home lives.
Homoeroticism
Rebel Without A Cause is one of the earliest postwar films to push the boundaries of the Hays Code in terms of on-screen representations of male-male desire. Nicholas Ray, James Dean, and Sal Mineo were all allegedly bisexual, which in part helps explain the preponderance of homoeroticism in the film, especially given that Ray gave his actors considerable latitude in how they crafted their characters and delivered their performances. Plato's attraction to Jim is made quite plain over the course of the film, as Plato gazes adoringly at Jim, follows him around, and beseeches him to be his "father." Perhaps less apparent, but no less present, is the attraction between Jim and Buzz, which is concealed by their surface-level rivalry. Buzz calls Jim "different" and "abstract" and protects him before the chickie-run by having him practice bailing out of the stolen car, even admitting "I like you, you know that?" and plucking Jim's cigarette from his lips and putting it to his own. Jim and Buzz have a simmering sexual tension that is undercut by their need to prove themselves within the peer group of the gang.
