This might be a description of the mourning over conservative activist Charlie Kirk, 31, who was assassinated during a campus event in Utah on September 10, but it is also a description of the convulsion of grief that followed the death of iconic Rebel Without a Cause actor James Dean, exactly 70 years ago next week, following his September 30, 1955 death at age 24. As a James Dean biographer, I could not help but notice that these two moments of national lamentation—sudden, unexpected, and, to outsiders, inexplicable—have uncanny echoes that help us to understand not only how the right is turning Charlie Kirk into a MAGA martyr and saint but also why this effort is hollow and likely to fail.
Newspapers reported that teenagers—girls and boys alike—spontaneously wept when they learned of Dean’s death. Tens of thousands sent letters to the dead Dean. Young men especially had an outsize reaction: They built statues of Dean, dressed like him, and imitated everything from his hairstyle to his mumbling diction and loose gait. Young women pasted his picture on their walls and measured potential boyfriends against him. Inside my copy of William Bast’s 1956 biography, James Dean, I found a note from its first owner, letting Dean know that a year after his death, she had finally found “a man who will fill your shoes.” A North Carolina teen caused a sensation by claiming to have become pregnant by Dean when his angel visited her after his death. Hollywood Art Studios sold 300 life-size $10 masks ($120 in today’s dollars) of Dean each week, made from a supple plastic called Miracleflesh that Life magazine reported felt like human skin and filmmaker Kenneth Anger claimed young girls took to bed with them.
The adulation, which had become a kind of madness, spread upward to the highest levels of society. Both CBS and NBC aired prime-time tributes to Dean on the same night. The Motion Picture Academy nominated Dean for an Oscar posthumously—twice. France awarded him its highest cinematic honor. European intellectuals compared him to a bewildering array of deities, including Adonis and Tammuz, and the philosopher Edgar Morin proclaimed Dean a “mythological hero” who linked the human and the divine. John Steinbeck’s ex-wife, Gwyn Steinbeck, told a magazine that Dean had become “a substitute Christ” for youths unmoored from traditional culture.
I sketch the aftermath of Dean’s death in some detail because we have seen so much of it repeated over the last few weeks as the Trump administration and its supporters on the right have tried to manufacture the same kind of national reaction for Charlie Kirk’s death. President Donald Trump announced plans to award Kirk a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom. The Pentagon reportedly wanted Kirk to be the face of a recruitment campaign (which officials later denied), and Oklahoma is considering a law to mandate statues of Kirk be erected at every state college. Cardinal Timothy Dolan called Kirk “a modern-day St. Paul” and “a hero,” and Kirk’s Turning Point USA organization claimed that Kirk’s divinely favored bone density attained the strength of steel and stopped the assassin’s bullet from passing through his body and potentially killing a second person. The massive, heavily religious memorial service for Kirk in the Cardinals’ stadium in Arizona attracted an estimated 63,000 mourners, including the president and other high government officials, and NFL games paused to honor Kirk.
And yet.
Even now, two weeks after Kirk’s death, the actual person has largely vanished beneath a constructed character. What have we heard about Charlie Kirk beyond a (heavily bowdlerized) version of his political activism? James Dean’s fans demanded every scrap of information available, making his hometown, his friends, his family, his cars, his homes, his clothes, even his favorite foods almost as well known as he was. I struggled to find comparable interest in Kirk’s life beyond politics. Perhaps he never had much of one. The closest I could come was some talk about his favorite Starbucks drink, and even then only because an Ohio woman turned it into political fodder. Even the House resolution eulogizing Kirk had nothing to say about him beyond his political activism, except for pro forma mentions of faith and family, which were cast as accessories to his patriotism. (The Senate version was even less descriptive.)
To compensate, Kirk’s proselytizers have stripped from his memory nearly all of his actual words, political beliefs, and actions, rebuilding a man who in life advocated for reactionary views on women and minorities that were at odds with young voters’ positions. Fewer than one in three Americans under 30 identify as conservative, while half identify as liberal, according to a recent Yale survey.
Warner Bros. planted stories in the press, arranging interviews with those close to Dean and writing sample articles journalists could adapt for their publications. The media, one secret Warner memo stated, were “to be kept provided with all possible material on James Dean.” They distributed photos of Dean everywhere and sponsored a documentary about Dean’s life and legacy.
If you worked for a movie magazine and wanted to write about James Dean in 1956, you needed to toe the Warner party line or lose access to Warner Bros.’ movies and stable of stars, the lifeblood of any entertainment publication. It was very much akin to the media campaign we see Turning Point USA and the administration undertaking on behalf of Kirk. If you want to talk about Kirk, you toe the line or risk losing access to government officials, approval for business deals, or even your broadcasting license.
And, of course, the biggest divergence lies in the fundamental difference between the two men, and between art and politics. James Dean and Charlie Kirk both carefully stage-managed their images to appeal to a young demographic, but they did so in mirror-image ways. Dean, personally liberal on many social issues, followed Hollywood convention by almost never mentioning politics and letting the emotion of his acting speak for him. Kirk, as a political activist, had an opinion on everything. Dean said very little in public, and his air of mystery and ambiguity allowed his fans to project themselves onto him and his movie characters and to imagine a deep emotional bond, no matter who they were—male, female, straight, gay, young, old, etc. Kirk never stopped talking—his whole organization was literally rooted in staging public debates—and there is much less room to grow his base of support beyond those 30 percent who already agree with him.
Ultimately, government support can only take a dead man’s memory so far. The state may enforce the trappings of mourning and create an official cult of personality. It can lower flags and build statues and even compel ritualized praise. But it cannot create a real human connection and cannot compel love. Next week, James Dean fans from around the world will trek to Dean’s hometown, as they do every year, to hold the annual memorial service in which they testify to the power Dean’s art held to change their lives. They come because they love James Dean, they feel his art and his life within them. His movies remain staples on TCM, and thanks to merchandising, Dean remains one of the highest-earning dead celebrities. Who will be watching Charlie Kirk’s old debates a year, a decade, a century from now? What substance remains when the spotlight fades?
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