Cal Trask (James Dean) squats like an ape on the childhood swing of his backyard, advancing out of the darkness towards his distressed father (Raymond Massey) as he reaches the height of the pendulum’s swing. Caught in that split-second of free fall, Cal’s life threatens to fall into an empty abyss, the brink of which his character has skirted along, not only for the duration of the film, but his entire life. He is ‘bad’ and so was his mother. Because of this, he was destined never to receive his father’s love and in this moment, as the swing rises only to fall back into darkness, Cal realises this simple truth. Caught by the framing of the shot itself, a garish canted angle, Cal finds himself in a carnivalesque funhouse of distorted familial bonds and corrupted blood ties, a subtle echo of his earlier trip to the house of mirrors with his brother’s girlfriend Abra (Julie Harris). But in this instance, the demons within aren’t the result of surreal visual trickery but the grim reality of their own family’s history. His father can only watch on in horror as the truth behind his relationship with Cal, something he probably never realised himself, is brought to the foreground. Cal’s bitter taunting as he swings in and out of the composition’s centre brilliantly captures the brash intrusion into the nuclear family unit now felt by both father and son, as each are forced to confront something that until this moment had been left unsaid.