The Devil Is in the Details

A new book claims a vast anti-Christian conspiracy to diabolize "holy" James Dean.

I went back and forth on whether to write something about a new book about James Dean self-published through Simon & Schuster’s Archway vanity press this week. Initially, I did not want to give more publicity to a bad book that will have limited distribution, but when I saw that it is now indexed on Google Books and turns up in searches related to Dean because of its recency, I thought it might be worth saying a few words about Derek Reeves’s The Legend of James Dean: Demonic Heroes Have Villainous Virtues. It is a book so audacious in its bizarre claims that it astonished even me.

Reeves is a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School and wrote his first book about James Dean, American Rebel, in 2007, but I was unable to find any listings for the book, suggesting it, too, was self-published. Legend is a wholesale revision and rewrite of the first book, according to a lengthy digression in Reeves’s new book.

According to Reeves, he first encountered James Dean’s movies while attending the University of Rochester as an undergraduate in 1981, having previously known of Dean only through conspiracy theories his mother told him about Dean living on, disfigured and insane, in an asylum in New York City. Reeves writes about his formative experiences with James Dean stemming from lengthy debates he had with his fellow college students about Dean’s life and career, many revolving around conspiracy theories, and with a prominent racial undertone. (Reeves, according to his book, is Black.) Reeves claims that he spent countless night staying up into the wee hours arguing about details of Dean’s life with his peers.

Even that background won’t prepare you for where Reeves takes his book. After asserting that he spent twenty-five years researching Dean (he “read several books and watched several documentaries,” he says), he launches into his own conspiracy theory. Reeves claims that James Dean was a wholesome, kind, gentle, polite, and religious young man whose “holy” connection to God sparked deep concern in the New York and Los Angeles moneyed elites (read: Jews), who conspired with the U.S. government to take him out and destroy his good name in hope of proving Christianity false and promoting a demonic agenda. According to Reeves, the wealthy movie moguls and bankers worried that Dean would inaugurate a new age of enlightenment and freedom as a holy messenger of God, so they diabolized him as a ruffian and bad boy in order to oppress teenagers and young adults and keep them from embracing the new path to God’s kingdom:

The media industry consciously portrayed James Dean as a wild boy, so that other actors within the Hollywood establishment might look more appealing to the public than James Dean, and the public’s willingness to believe what was being said about James Dean caused the American people to reject his culture. By convincing the public that James Dean was evil, his adversaries managed to seal his world up and to dismantle the Christian culture that was a fundamental part of James Dean's worldview.

However, in reality, James Dean was not evil. In fact, he was so holy that many people believed that he was Christ, and the fact that his world was a real heaven on earth affirmed their belief that James Dean was Jesus.

In real life, Dean began life as a Quaker and considered converting to Catholicism, but frequently told friends that he did not subscribe to conventional Christian dogma. (Jonathan Gilmore wrote that Dean believed that freedom from convention and oppression was itself God.) He told a newspaper that exploring the “satanic” was essential for spiritual growth. Reeves errs in assuming, incorrectly, that the public face Dean displayed as a high school student in a small town he considered oppressive and full of what he called “dangerous bigotry” was the “real” James Dean.

I won’t devote unnecessary space to criticizing a book that is so self-evidently divorced from the historical record, but it is worth pointing out how this book represents a survival of the early James Dean cult from the middle 1950s that saw him as a divine figure. From 1955 to 1957 both the mainstream media and several scholars argued, with apparent seriousness, that Dean had some touch of divinity. Raymond de Becker called Dean the new Antinous, Adonis, and Mithras. Historian Pierre Gaxotte called him a new Tammuz. The philosopher Edgar Morin declared Dean to be the first and most perfect modern embodiment of the mythological hero. John Steinbeck’s ex-wife stated directly that Dean was a “substitute Christ.” Newspapers reported that Dean had appeared as an angel of light to impregnate a virgin teenage girl (Esquire bitterly suggested his ghost was actually an incubus), while one British youth told Variety that to look at James Dean’s face was to gaze upon “the face of God.”

Even decades later, this air of the divine persisted. David Dalton’s influential biography James Dean: The Mutant King (1974) openly flirted with the idea that Dean was divine, and Dalton wrote with apparent sincerity that numerology and other occult means could prove that Dean was an avatar of the Egyptian god Osiris, reborn to save America through a ritual death. The next year, another biographer, Venable Herndon, unable to shake the notion that a young man he sadly concluded was an evil gay sinner had somehow also contained a spark of the divine, commissioned an astrological chart to prove that Dean’s life had been foretold in the stars and had been divinely ordained.

It's all very weird, but it’s interesting to me that this strain of divinization still pops up from time to time, even in our more jaded era when it is very hard to imagine a celebrity ever again being seriously taken for a god.