When holden caulfield, the adolescent narrator of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), searches for a scathing insult, he inevitably comes up with “phony”: this is how the reader knows that Holden thinks the object of his scorn is ethically reprehensible, rather than just “a nasty guy” like his classmate Robert or “a touchy guy” like his cab driver. In a representative instance, Holden identifies his former headmaster at Elkton Hills as “the phoniest bastard I ever met in my life,” who

went around shaking hands with everybody’s parents when they drove up to school. He’d be...

Jim stark from Nicholas Ray’s Rebel without a Cause (1955) is one of mid-century America’s iconic teenagers.¹ Along with Holden Caulfield and Johnny Strabler from Laslo Benedek’s The Wild One (1953), Jim exemplifies the incoherent anguish that was thought to define the adolescent experience and that some feared was disappearing.² Also, like Holden, that anguish is caused in no small part by the pretenses of the adult world he must negotiate. Jim Stark’s sincerity—“he doesn’t say much,” his friend Plato asserts, “but when he does, you know he means it”—is shown in dramatic comparison to his parents’ glad-handing...

Is dr. miles bennell crazy? In the opening scene of Don Siegel’s 1955 movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, he insists that he is not.¹ Trapped in an emergency room and attended by two police officers, a doctor, and a psychiatrist from the state mental hospital, Dr. Bennell insists on his sanity four times in the first minute of the film: “will you tell these fools I’m not crazy? … I’m not insane! … Listen. Doctor. Now you must listen to me. You must understand me. I am a doctor too. I am not insane. I am not insane!” (“Continuity”...

When dr. hannibal lecter, Thomas Harris’s infamous serial-killing psychiatrist, consults with fbi agents Will Graham and Clarice Starling, he provides them with widely disparate advice on how to capture serial murderers. To Graham, the agent pursuing the so-called Tooth Fairy in Red Dragon (1981), Lecter suggests the solution lies in identifying with the killer. He claims that this is how Graham recognized him as the murderer of nine people. “Do you know how you caught me, Will?” he asks: “The reason you caught me is that we’re just alike” (67).¹ Although Graham does not admit it, Lecter is correct; Graham...

Writing in Commentary magazine in 1961, Daniel Bell analyzes the then current “crisis of identity” that defined contemporary Jewish experience. For mid-century Americans in general, he explains, “sensibility and experience rather than revealed utterances, tradition, authority, and even reason, have become the sources of understanding and of identity. One stakes out one’s position and it is confirmed by others who accept the sign” (471). His account of this generation evokes both existentialism and David Riesman’s theories of other-direction to describe a comprehensive break with the past and reorientation toward the immediate community of one’s peers. Members of his generation feel...

At a critical moment in Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), Tom Rath turns down what the novel describes as “a marvelous opportunity” (226). He has been offered a promotion to become the personal assistant for Ralph Hopkins, president of the United Broadcasting Corporation and “one of the few authentic business geniuses in New York” (36). After thinking about it, Tom admits,

I don’t think I’m the kind of guy who should try to be a big executive…. I’m not the kind of person who can get all wrapped up in a job—I can’t get...

In Jerry Maguire, “completion” is imagined to be possible: the self or subject that one struggles to create actually comes into being through a (good) marriage, after which (the movie suggests) one’s proper role is to assist one’s children in their own becoming. As discussed at the end of the last chapter, the epilogue of the movie suggests that the corporate and the domestic spheres might finally merge through four-year-old Ray’s burgeoning athletic ability. As Ray’s father/agent, Jerry need no longer see his professional and his personal lives as distinct. He and Rod can be all “heart” in both realms....