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’s 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.
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.
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, East of Eden, 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.
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.
At his funeral, a crowd larger than the population of Dean’s hometown of Fairmount, Indiana, gathered there from all over the country—this was before the age of direct flights and interstate highways—and in his eulogy the Reverend Xen Harvey proclaimed that through his death, Dean’s work finally started. “And remember,” he concluded, “God himself is directing the production.” A year later, the premiere of Dean’s last posthumous film, Giant, at New York’s 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’s celluloid ghost.
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.
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’s concerns. “Dean portrayed the kind of young person that many kids in this country think they are. They are confused and mixed up—and with good reason,” a Warner Bros. publicist said. “In 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?”
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.
As the House of Representatives put it in a resolution praising Kirk, his “steadfast dedication to the Constitution, civil discourse, and Biblical truth inspired a generation to cherish and defend the blessings of liberty.”
And yet.
Something in the state-sanctioned mourning, whose outlines draw so heavily on the model the death of James Dean set, feels hollow. “Charlie had big plans, but God had even bigger plans,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said at Kirk’s memorial, in an uncanny echo of Xen Harvey’s eulogy for Dean. “The outpouring of emotion rivals that of September 11 and President Kennedy’s assassination,” Trump-aligned megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress absurdly claimed. While I have no doubt that those mourning Kirk do so genuinely, it’s hard to find much evidence of a true youth movement rallying behind Kirk outside of the dedicated conservatives who were already fans.
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.)
Instead, we see a top-down effort from powerful people to use a controversial man’s 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 “very familiar” with Kirk in a YouGov poll, though that number was much higher among young Americans. Two days after his death, GenerationLab found that 94 percent of college students 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’s favorite movie stars.
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.
The efforts to deify Kirk have many parallels to some of the more controversial aspects of Dean’s apotheosis, as well as the seeds of their failure. The popular reaction to Dean’s death took his studio, Warner Bros., by surprise. Inside Story magazine and other publications later accused Warner of orchestrating a morbid campaign to encourage Dean-worship. It didn’t create it, but it did sustain it. The studio rode a wave that had emerged organically and used its power and influence over the media to build a cult around Dean—at least until it made back its investment in Rebel Without a Cause and Giant.
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.
Warner also sought to sanitize James Dean for public consumption, to help make him more acceptable to a larger audience. The real James Dean was a bundle of contradictions, not always very pleasant to be around, and either bisexual or gay—at a time when being queer was both illegal and a scandal that ended careers. Studio publicists replaced this with a new narrative about a youthful rebel consumed by longing for his one true love, the starlet Pier Angeli. The circumstances are entirely different, but the effort to remake James Dean into someone more broadly palatable echoes the much cruder effort to push Charlie Kirk’s actual and often quite noxious political views out of our collective memory and remake him as a pure and noble warrior for free speech.
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.
I could list many more uncanny parallels in the way the two cults formed seven decades apart and how they mythologized the dead, but more important are the differences. Warner Bros. was a powerful and wealthy studio in the 1950s, but it did not have the state’s power to compel. It could not intimidate the national media the way the Trump administration can, and it could not punish the growing chorus of journalists, pundits, and writers who denounced the Dean cult and complained about its effects on teenagers. Nor did the James Dean fan clubs that formed in his memory have anything like the reach and penetration of Kirk’s organization to deliver the good news of his life. Xen Harvey’s effusive eulogy aside, Dean did not have a network of churches declaring him the favored of God.
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.
From James Dean, we can see that to sustain the modern worship of a dead star requires three elements: a genuine emotional bond between the deceased and the public, sustained media coverage over time, and institutional support to organize and coordinate pubic reaction. The Dean cult collapsed in 1957 when Giant finished its run, Warner Bros. withdrew its institutional support, and the media coverage faded. It only returned decades later when a new generation of marketers repackaged Dean as an icon of nostalgia. The incipient Kirk cult, which lacks the same widespread emotional bond across demographics, seems likely to suffer a faster fading as soon as this inconsistent administration’s mercurial attentions flit elsewhere.
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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