Rebel Dabble Babble

This richly illustrated publication is a selection of hundreds of still photographs shot during the making of Rebel Dabble Babble, a collaboration between Paul McCarthy and his son Damon McCarthy. Rebel Dabble Babble is a complex installation and video projection work inspired by both Nicholas Ray’s 1955 classic Hollywood film Rebel without a Cause and the rumors that swirled around the off-set relationships between its director and his stars James Dean, Nathalie Wood and Sal Mineo. This densely layered opus confronts definitions of power and role-play, and expands beyond references to the 1955 movie to offer a meditation on the archetypes and Oedipal tensions that define family dynamics. In the film, McCarthy and his actors (including Hollywood star James Franco) play hybrids both of Ray’s cinematic characters and the actors who played them. With this mind-bending series of doubles, binaries and inversions, Rebel Dabble Babble presents perversions of interchangeable roles and fetish relationships.