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A young man with windswept brown hair wearing a white T-shirt dies a sudden, shocking, and violent death, sparking a national outpouring of mourning almost unprecedented in American history. Fans and followers herald him as the symbol of a generation, a model of American youth, even divinely inspired. Thousands attend his memorial service, where speakers declare that the dead man\u2019s work has only just begun. Meanwhile, his face appears in every magazine and the great capitalist marketing machine begins churning out merchandise bearing his name and likeness. He achieves his greatest fame in death, and across the media, pundits argue about his legacy and whether he was really the good and saintly hero his mourners made him out to be. Angry fans decry what they see as attacks on their hero.<\/p>\n
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 <\/span>Rebel Without a Cause <\/i>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\u2014sudden, unexpected, and, to outsiders, inexplicable\u2014have 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.<\/span><\/p>\n Today, James Dean is best remembered as a rebellious Hollywood outsider in blue jeans from a tiny Indiana town who set the standard for cool. Everyone knows the iconic image of him in a red windbreaker. Dean died when a car turning left on an isolated stretch of California highway crashed into his oncoming Porsche at sunset. At the time, Dean was a minor celebrity who had starred in only one movie, <\/span>East of Eden<\/i>, in which he played a troubled teenager. But that film had given teens something to hold onto, a piece of art they felt depicted them for the first time as they really were. News spread more slowly in those days, but as teenagers and young adults heard what happened, they were overcome with emotion in ways that confounded adults and confused even those convulsing with tears.<\/span><\/p>\n Newspapers reported that teenagers\u2014girls and boys alike\u2014spontaneously wept when they learned of Dean\u2019s 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\u2019s 1956 biography, <\/span>James Dean<\/i>, I found a note from its first owner, letting Dean know that a year after his death, she had finally found \u201ca man who will fill your shoes.\u201d 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\u2019s dollars) of Dean each week, made from a supple plastic called Miracleflesh that <\/span>Life <\/i>magazine reported felt like human skin and filmmaker Kenneth Anger claimed young girls took to bed with them.<\/span><\/p>\n At his funeral, a crowd larger than the population of Dean\u2019s hometown of Fairmount, Indiana, gathered there from all over the country\u2014this was before the age of direct flights and interstate highways\u2014and in his eulogy the Reverend Xen Harvey proclaimed that through his death, Dean\u2019s work finally started. \u201cAnd remember,\u201d he concluded, \u201cGod himself is directing the production.\u201d A year later, the premiere of Dean\u2019s last posthumous film, <\/span>Giant<\/i>, at New York\u2019s Roxy theater became a massive rally for the dead actor. Thousands cheered for him in the streets. Television covered the event live, and within the theater a capacity crowd stomped their feet and shrieked to see their idol\u2019s celluloid ghost.<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2014twice. 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 \u201cmythological hero\u201d who linked the human and the divine. John Steinbeck\u2019s ex-wife, Gwyn Steinbeck, told a magazine that Dean had become \u201ca substitute Christ\u201d for youths unmoored from traditional culture.<\/span><\/p>\n The reason for this outpouring of emotion was never fully clear to those in the midst of it, but the explanations they offered are strikingly familiar in light of today\u2019s concerns. \u201cDean portrayed the kind of young person that many kids in this country think they are. They are confused and mixed up\u2014and with good reason,\u201d a Warner Bros. publicist said. \u201cIn our youth, life was fairly simple; you could look forward to a reasonably certain future. What do the kids of today have to look forward to?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n I sketch the aftermath of Dean\u2019s 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\u2019s death. President Donald Trump announced plans to award Kirk a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom. The Pentagon reportedly <\/span>wanted<\/a> Kirk to be the face of a recruitment campaign (which officials later <\/span>denied<\/a>), and Oklahoma is considering a law to <\/span>mandate<\/a> statues of Kirk be erected at every state college. Cardinal Timothy Dolan <\/span>called<\/a> Kirk \u201ca modern-day St. Paul\u201d and \u201ca hero,\u201d and Kirk\u2019s Turning Point USA organization <\/span>claimed<\/a> that Kirk\u2019s divinely favored bone density attained the strength of steel and stopped the assassin\u2019s bullet from passing through his body and potentially killing a second person. The massive, heavily religious memorial service for Kirk in the Cardinals\u2019 stadium in Arizona attracted an estimated 63,000 mourners, including the president and other high government officials, and NFL games paused to honor Kirk.<\/span><\/p>\n As the House of Representatives put it in a <\/span>resolution<\/a> praising Kirk, his \u201csteadfast dedication to the Constitution, civil discourse, and Biblical truth inspired a generation to cherish and defend the blessings of liberty.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n And yet.<\/span><\/p>\n Something in the state-sanctioned mourning, whose outlines draw so heavily on the model the death of James Dean set, feels hollow. \u201cCharlie had big plans, but God had even bigger plans,\u201d Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said at Kirk\u2019s memorial, in an uncanny echo of Xen Harvey\u2019s eulogy for Dean. \u201cThe outpouring of emotion rivals that of September 11 and President Kennedy\u2019s assassination,\u201d Trump-aligned megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress absurdly <\/span>claimed<\/a>. While I have no doubt that those mourning Kirk do so genuinely, it\u2019s hard to find much evidence of a true youth movement rallying behind Kirk outside of the dedicated conservatives who were already fans.<\/span><\/p>\n Even now, two weeks after Kirk\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 <\/span>political fodder<\/a>. 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 <\/span>Senate version<\/a> was even less descriptive.)<\/span><\/p>\n Instead, we see a top-down effort from powerful people to use a controversial man\u2019s death to create a cult of personality where one did not really exist. In the hours after Kirk was shot, news anchors repeatedly reminded viewers who Kirk was, correctly understanding that outside the conservative media sphere, he was relatively unknown. Only 24 percent of Americans claimed to be \u201cvery familiar\u201d with Kirk in a <\/span>YouGov poll<\/a>, though that number was much higher among young Americans. Two days after his death, GenerationLab <\/span>found<\/a> that <\/span>94 percent of college students<\/a> knew of Kirk. They also found that 70 percent disliked and disagreed with him, despite nearly two-thirds consuming his content. Until the moment he died, he was deeply unpopular among the young adults he sought to influence. By comparison, for two years after his death, Dean topped surveys of young men\u2019s favorite movie stars.<\/span><\/p>\n