I keep wasting time on Weboggle.
The queer reading of Rebel Without a Cause is almost too easy, especially because of what we know about James Dean and Sal Mineo. I'm more interested in Natalie Wood as Judy. She struggles to express love to her father, but he'll have none of that - he's clearly too paranoid about the roiling sexual miasma under all that cliché Fifties repression, he's too concerned that his daughter has an Electra Complex and wants to get it on. He doesn't know what to do, and is consequently a Bad Father; when the movie opens, Judy's at the police department and describes a scene where her father yells at her for looking like a "tramp" before he tries to rub off her red-red lipstick. She's there in her new dress, bright red with red lipstick and complains that he nearly "rubbed [her] lips away." The struggle between the Fifties nuclear family ideal and the abject fear of sexuality (he's afraid of hers) propels Judy into chaotic behaviour, she runs with the usual fast crowd and generally wanders around being horribly existential. Nothing means anything to her because her feelings (regardless of their sexual content - generally she's never presented as being overtly sexual toward her father) are rejected. I'm not quite sure what to say about that, but I certainly stick on it when I watch the film.
Natalie Wood might look from the vantage point of the present like a conservative paragon, but she spends the film spouting angstful one-liners up until she actually lets herself go with Jim (James Dean) and emotions are encouraged and expressed. Consequently she becomes more maternal (especially toward Sal Mineo's Plato), but I think that's just a product of its time and in this case I'd call it a positive attribute of the character - once she is allowed to actually express something, she begins to find herself; she becomes more equipped to deal with things than Plato, who's struggling with all kinds of anger (and, ahem, sexual desire) but wasn't yet at the point of self-actualization. Or something.
But anyway, I'm going to do some freewriting for a few minutes, see if there are any Chinese food leftovers from last night, and then I'm going to work on that screenplay I need to scrap together for tomorrow. The Fifties pre-liberation "popularity" jingo is at the centre of our film, so I think that's why I ended up watching James Dean act drunk and prone to violent outburts.