Ahhh, to be young! Young and full of energy and anger and enough stupidity to imagine that someone cares. The main reason for any young man to be outraged and disaffected is that he's certain there's some beautiful young lady out there who is just waiting to throw herself at the first outraged and disaffected man who comes her way.

The Wild One is a fascinating (and really quite intelligent) examination into the phenomenon of rebellion for its own sake. After Johnny Strabler (Marlon Brando) roars into Wrightsville with his motorcycle gang, a local gal sidles up to him to ask what the letters on his black leather jacket (B.R.M.C.) stand for.

"We're the Black Rebels Motorcycle Club," he tells her.

"Rebels, huh?" she asks. "What are you rebelling against?"

"What have you got?" he replies, sneering.

I say it again: Ahhh, to be young!

The action of The Wild One begins with Johnny's gang at an official motorcycle race, where they disrupt one of the races by strutting leisurely across the track on foot. Then one of Johnny's companions steals a second place trophy because hey man, you know, the race was totally bogus anyway. He couldn't steal the first place trophy because it was too big to fit into his jacket. Considering how much fighting and wrangling and negotiating will be done with regard to the trophy in the course of the film, it is extremely interesting that the award itself is emblazoned with the message that its owner did not come in first.

Looking decidedly Newmanesque, Brando plays Strabler in such a way as to suggest that there is something deeply and darkly meditative about the young man. But the action in the narrative (which is far more interesting in terms of development and balance than any of the characters) suggests otherwise. There is really nothing all that remarkable about Johnny. For all his leather-clad sneering, he is a bit of a dolt.

One of the many traps that writers Frank Rooney and John Paxton set for Johnny is sprung just after a philosophically loaded speech by a septuagenarian dishwasher named Jimmy (William Vedder). When asked what the people of Wrightsville do for kicks by one of Johnny's biker buddies, Jimmy says, "Around here people get married and have children. I listen to music on the radio, just music. News is no good; it excites people. But the music you hear these days doesn't make any sense. People don't even know how to talk anymore."

Jimmy offers us the voice of wisdom. He is a simple man doing a simple job who minds his own business and takes pleasure where he finds it, in music. His reformulation of the cliche that no news is good news demonstrates that he isn't interested in stirring things up for the sake of stirring things up. He isn't angry or overbearing or intolerant, merely sane, affable, and endearing. When a couple of the bikers try to pique him by launching into an impromptu scat number (presumably by way of commenting on his assertion that people don't know how to talk anymore), he just stares at them with polite indifference and seems to be wondering about how he can manage all by himself to serve beer to so many rowdy drinkers.

In the very next scene we see that young Johnny is the polar opposite of old Jimmy. He is trying to impress the local sheriff's daughter, Kathie, by sneering at her idea of a good time. When Kathie (Mary Murphy) asks whether he and his biker buddies ever go on a picnic, he snorts, "You are too square. I have to straighten you out."

Clearly we're supposed to pause and wonder what there is to straighten out in a person who is already square. When Jimmy said that people no longer knew how to talk, he might have sounded like an old sourpuss complaining in typical codgerly fashion. But the scene following his pronouncement proves him right. And it is only one rather compelling instance of structural commentary that we encounter in the story.

Equally interesting is the fact that the bikers' decision to stay in Wrightsville is prompted by an injury to the leg of a gang member nicknamed 'Crazy.' Most of the bikers simply want to leave Crazy behind and move on, but Johnny, having taken an interest in Kathie, uses Crazy's injury as an excuse to stay. "We'll wait for Crazy," he decrees solemnly. On one level that means that they'll wait for their friend to be treated by the local doctor, but what it really seems to mean is that the B.R.M.C. will hang out in the town bar, becoming rowdier and rowdier until something violent happens, which, of course, it does.

The first bit of violence is a fist fight between Johnny and Chino (Lee Marvin) after Chino (the leader of a rival biker gang) tries to steal Johnny's trophy. Chino accuses Johnny of having stolen the trophy, which isn't quite true. Johnny was given the trophy by a biker buddy who stole it. The film really seems to be quite interested in the differences between being given something, earning it, and stealing it. If we go along with Chino's accusation, then it is only because we know that Johnny knew the trophy was stolen when it was presented to him as a gift. Should we accept gifts that we know to be stolen? The question is a little more complicated than it seems, and we have to watch to the end of the film before we can hazzard a response.

After one of Chino's buddies is injured by a local hothead dubbed 'Froggyface' by the bikers, Sheriff Bleeker (Robert Keith) decides that the best way to diffuse the budding tension is to take both Chino and Froggyface down to the stationhouse. But after a few words with selected pillars of the Wrightsville community, Bleeker arrests only Chino, leaving Froggyface unpunished for deliberately (if somewhat justifiably) driving into a biker who refused to move out of his way.

The bikers have more muscle and manpower than there is in the entire town of Wrightsville, so they could very easily break Chino out of the local jail if that were their only concern. But what they appear to be interested in (from their own adolescent perspective at least) is justice. So they abduct Froggyface from his home and break into the jail so that they can lock him up along with Chino. The possibility of breaking Chino out is briefly discussed, but he is sound asleep and seems to think that the bed in the jail cell is plenty comfortable. He stays put. It's extremely important to bear in mind that the bikers are not the ones who bust him out of jail. Rather, the ones who release him are the locals who come to rescue Froggyface and leave the cell door open after they have retrieved their friend. You can laugh at the leather jackets and even some of the dialogue in this film if you like, but I think the incredible symmetry concerning the jailing and releasing of Chino and Froggyface is as clever and sophisticated as screenwriting gets.

Another bit of balance occurs when we watch the local men, led by Froggyface, as they pull Johnny from his motorcycle in an effort to restore order to their town. They look to us (and to him) as if they are going to hurt him. And maybe their course of action is unjustifiable. But it is not without precedent in the film. When Johnny's gang first gets into Wrightsville, they cause a local man to drive his car into a telephone poll because of an idiotic drag race that they decide to have not down, but across the main street in the town. When the driver of the car veers off the road to avoid hitting them, they extract him from his car and form a sort of mosh pit for the terrified old man. They think it's funny; and some people in the audience probably think it's funny too. But the experience is no funnier for the old man than what happens to Johnny at the hands of Froggyface.

That's what makes The Wild One special: It shows us what is shallow and self-serving about formulaic rebellion, but it also shows us that we can see precisely the same shallow and self-serving qualities in people who claim to stand staunchly for law and order. In much the same way that Unforgiven demonstrates how we are all guilty, The Wild One shows us that we are all idiots.

Perhaps the only thing to do in the face of our idiocy is to mind our own business and take our pleasures where we can. But poor Jimmy, who tries to do just that, ends up run over and killed by Johnny's motorcycle after an enraged vigilante knocks Johnny off his bike. What seemed like the sagest approach to life turns out to be the approach that gets us killed. This development is particularly interesting when we return to the film's theme concerning things that are earned, stolen and given.

When Kathie learns that Johnny's trophy is stolen, she is disappointed in him at first. But later, she asks him for it. The primary purpose of her request seems to be a sexual double entendre informed by his decision not to rape her and her decision not to fight back after he drives her into the wilderness outside town. When she asks, "Do you still want to give it to me?", we are likely to roll our eyes at the distinct possibility that the 'it' does not refer to the trophy.

But despite the lame sexual connotation, the question really is quite interesting. To steal is wrong because it is to take what does not belong to us. But what about earning? Why did motorcycle gangs become so popular in the wake of World War II? Did it have something to do with the fact that millions of Americans suddenly had access to an education (through the G.I. Bill) that gave them the skinny on America's bloody imperialist rise to world prominence? When we decide to rebel against whatever a society has to offer, isn't it because we think the entire society is a sham? Not all rebels are idiots. Some of the bikers of the 50s resisted America in the only way they knew how because they understood that our "Land of the Free" is a land established through land-grabbing and genocide. Sometimes the thought makes us mad enough that we want to rebel. But we mind our own business instead.

Unfortunately, it turns out that even our own business is stolen.

Stealing is perhaps closer to earning than we imagine, for whatever we earn is earned from the people who had the goods to begin with. And didn't they get those goods the same way Cornelius Vanderbilt did, the same way Philip of Macedon did, the same way Cecil Rhodes did? To earn from a thief is to sanction theft in the same way that accepting a stolen gift is to sanction theft. Earning and stealing and receiving gifts are all equally suspect activities predicated on property laws that are imposed and upheld by those who can afford to impose and uphold them.

But the act of giving still matters. Even if we can never truly assert ownership of anything (since the history of economics is merely a catalogue of theft), the exchange of items can still be meaningful. It can be meaningful because the act of giving imparts the only kind of value that any of us (including Alan Greenspan) can genuinely claim to understand: personal value. When Johnny gives Kathie the trophy at the end of The Wild One, a film that started with a theft ends with a gift.

I'd like to say it's beautiful, but I can't get Lee Marvin's voice out of my head. "The prize," he yells as part of his challenge to Johnny prior to their fist fight, "is this trophy, signifying absolutely nothing."

Maybe it is meaningless after all. But maybe it's beautiful too.






Recommended: Yes