The rebellious teen anti-hero is so common in today’s cinema it’s easy to forget that such a kid was not as prominent in American culture before Holden Caulfield.
The protagonist of the J.D. Salinger novel “Catcher in the Rye” shook the literary world when he debuted in 1951, full of angst and railing against the adult world. He also ushered in a disillusioned demographic of movie characters who wear their nonconformity as comfortably as a T-shirt.
“What J.D. Salinger achieved with Holden Caulfield is he really invented a voice that became the voice for a lot of disaffected youth,” said Gregg Kilday, film editor for The Hollywood Reporter. “Slangy, suspicious of adults, looking to call out ‘phonies’ wherever he saw them.”
From James Dean’s Jim Stark in “Rebel Without a Cause” to Matthew Broderick’s character in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” and beyond, Holden’s legacy resonates in Hollywood. There was even a 2001 film titled “Chasing Holden” about a troubled young man who embarks on a journey to find Salinger.
Syracuse pop culture professor Robert Thompson points out that rebellious youth existed in literature before “Catcher” in the works of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and others.
The emergence from the post-war era marked a shift in attitudes, said Thompson, and there was an emerging baby-boom generation ripe for disaffection and protests.
“I think probably Salinger actually caught something that was afoot in the culture anyway with Holden Caulfield,” Thompson said. “He created a character that I think was kind of predictive in ways that all kinds of people were going to feel about in the subsequent generation and generations after that.
“I think he gets credit for beautifully nailing a certain piece of emotional and literary real estate and doing it really early.”
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