Camera And Action Page 2
On one level, cinema transmits and secures meaning. On another level, once viewers pronounce a popular film a phenomenon, they identify with it socially, emotionally, and intellectually. Films on this plane become part of a collective cultural exchange" and facilitate what one film critic calls the "constitutive condition for national or even personal identity" to emerge. Features in that sense enjoy an educational function but if, as theorists claim today, people's "relationship to meaning is never entirely fixed and predetermined but can be open, unpredictable, and changeable [over time and circumstances] and is a matter of struggle and contention," then film's fate after its initial release is part of the contentious process of meaning, of assessing the veracity of events." Asking cinema to provide evidence for social and cultural processes is not a simple question of sorting out the truth or fiction of any picture but recognizing how representations render ideas "intelligible." As one critic puts it, cinema is about "the allowable limits of difference."" These ten films were part of cultural passages by virtue of the historical situation and edifying context at the time of the films' release."
As Hollywood transitioned into experiment, it also paralleled larger patterns of change in American beliefs, attitudes, and values. Pairing the decades by splitting them in the middle shows the relationship between a volatile restructuring of convention and a hopeful remaking of meaning. Where popular notions of reform guided civil rights and politics in the early part of the decade, calls for revolution within middle-class America preoccupied cultural and political protestors by the end. Before mid-decade, social roles did not deviate much from men as breadwinners and women as housewives. Policemen, teachers, managers, doctors, and other figures of authority could still expect a measure of deference. The national government was still portrayed as an instrument of defense and the provider of security. Protesting war was still unpopular. Male students wore shirts and ties on college campuses and women wore dresses or skirts.15
The 1965 escalation of troops in Vietnam increased draftee numbers, which resulted in heightened antiwar protests. A counterculture developed in San Francisco and spread in sensibility throughout American cities. Racial tension turned into riots and American youth rebelled differently than their predecessors. Casual and immodest dress, demands for sexual freedom, and a more violent form of dissent than previous years characterized youthful disapproval of American society. By fall 1965, reformers became revolutionaries; by the March on the Pentagon in 1967, anyone over thirty was suspect; and by the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention, police were pigs. College campus protests inundated campus buildings, and the National Guard entered state colleges to control antiwar demonstrators by the 1970s. Youth organizations such as Students for Non-violence Coordinating Committee and Students for a Democratic Society split internally and dispersed into scattered coalitions.
History still debates what exactly changed during this time. Some, for example, credit political radicals and the counterculture for being the primary agents of social and political change and challengers of status quo. Historian Douglas T. Miller summarizes the argument:
Movement members ... transformed society and politics. They helped to liberalize racial and sexual attitudes, hastened the demise of the liberal consensus, and inadvertently fostered a conservative revival. Thus the New Left and the counterculture, though transitory and directly involving only a fraction of the population, shook the very foundations of American life.16
William O'Neill describes the 1960s as a period of America's "coming apart" in his book by the same title (1971). Others such as Godfrey Hodgson built on O'Neill's premise. Hodgson's America in Our Time begins the period with President Kennedy's promise of Camelot in 1960 and Nixon's resignation in 1974. The presidencies, as Hodgson writes, became "the master symbol of the public mood and national aspirations." Within that frame, Dallas and Watergate bookended the changes in American society during the two decades.17 Alan Matusow concluded in The Unraveling ofAmerica (1984) that "optimism vanished" by 1968 when "fundamental differences in values emerged to divide the country.""
In the "unraveling" model, the seventies are highlighted as a loss of hope. Looking back in 1970, for example, David Halberstam wrote in McCall's magazine, "Good-by to the Sixties, to all that hope and expectation. It started so well." Like him, many believed "that ... all the pieces would come together for a golden era of American social and cultural progress, victory over the darker side of our nature, victory over injustice."19
The ongoing narrative about the sixties as a golden moment set the seventies up as a loss of "hope and expectation," as Halberstam claimed. Yet, the women's movement began its most hopeful and progressive period in the early 1970s. Rejuvenation of women's rights met with reconstruction of gender roles and social relationships between men and women. At the same time, new questions were asked of everyone. Who or what is American? Multicultural, ethnic, and diverse, many answered. The golden moment of hope for a social and political revolution that gave the sixties an iconic life of its own resulted in none other than a complete cultural revolution. By 1970, the American film industry was fully immersed in the accommodation of change and the negotiation of new possibilities.
Key issues of political and social rights traditionally negotiated in the home or in the local church or school were fought in popular culture. Men's and women's social roles, young people's social behavior, interracial relationships, drug habits, speech, and other aspects of values and beliefs became part of a national project reshaping America. These new notions of identity, mixed with calls for legitimacy and political authority, changed American culture in permanent ways. Film popularized the ideals of autonomy, the pursuit of pleasure, the myth of personal freedom, and then returned to the value of heritage, family, and group identity. Middle-class youth imprinted their historical significance and their "predicative utterances," giving the sixties a value, a discourse, and a lasting power into the 1970s. The body of films in this study shows how filmmakers used the far-reaching opportunities of the sixties and seventies in the remaking of their art.20 Through those lenses, the sixties were both golden and chaotic, the seventies disappointing and rejuvenating.
Lamenting the loss of the golden moment is typical of sixties narratives, which measured victory as a political revolution, but what followed was a liberation on the popular front. It was culture more than class that defined the most pronounced sites of debate during these years. Filmmakers brought cultural disputes such as changing attitudes toward authority, new expressions of sexual roles, and changing American identity to the screen by popularizing the generation gap, women's liberation, and multiculturalism, making it possible to imagine a new society behaving differently than their parents. Seeing social change as a matter of culture measures the weight of the paradigm shift in beliefs about American ideals through film. If cinema is both reflective and affective, the films in this study glow with historical moments of new conflicts arising out of changing attitudes toward sex, workplace protocol, individual rights, and identity. How people worked through new ideas of generation, gender, and ethnicity in the larger society are both mirrored and constructed in these films.
The battleground of age identifies a general split between the younger and older generation. Three films in this category - The Graduate, Alice's Restaurant, and Easy Rider- became cultural icons speaking for a sixties generation gap. These films, released in the last few years of the 1960s, attempted to sort out the chaos of political and cultural rebellion as youth indulged in generational politics of age and the hippie counterculture. Popular dissent also turned into a commodity. RCA Victor ran an ad in the Village Voice for their record album Hair. "Bridge the generation gap," the ad read. "Buy this album and explain it to your folks. They'll be surprised how much they can learn," the ad continued.21 In the "gap" discourse, the young were imagined as a group with privileged knowledge and new power in shaping American society. RCA's adult generation appeared naive and uneducated, but both generations profited. A
notion of the generation gap helped galvanize a new national sense of the cultural revolution and adversarial sentiment toward America to show that speaking out against conventional ideals by purchasing representative products was not only acceptable but obligatory.
The sixties idea of the generation gap defining hip youth filtered through the streets and onto college campuses and set the stage for deeper, longer lasting issues than age. Filmmakers had at hand different subject matter based more specifically on power relations. Anti-Vietnam demonstrations brought the most enduring sixties icons and images to life and opened avenues for deeper divides over men's identity and women's social roles. Women became more visible by publicly declaring equal opportunity rights, indelibly marking the 1970s as the gender years. The gender debates during the first part of the decade eclipsed the attention on the generation gap and the counterculture. Calls for equality from women forged divisions along different lines. Ranging from radical politics of feminism to a nationwide struggle over women's liberation, women's call to action reshaped social authority and personalized female legitimacy.
Men in popular film joined women in the conversation about the meaning of gender roles and integrated sixties rebellion into new narratives about identity and relationships. Films recorded the challenges to traditional male and female identities in a lasting way. In a cultural environment where advocates valued multiculturalism more than assimilation, American filmmakers tapped in and brought "ethnic activism" in line with changes in the value of heritage. Sharing previous civil rights' models, multiculturalism became a national project and viewers engaged in the importance of revising American history and popular culture narratives.
In an attempt to address the one-sided history of the West known to most Americans through Westerns, filmmakers revised the historical record and added another dimension to the debate about Americanness and activism. Many ethnics during the early 1970s asked if they were victims of the American melting pot. Americans called for consciousness raising and the pursuit of new forms of "group solidarity." Ethnics actively turned the new decade's rights agenda into a form of self-assertion and a way to "restructure America's public and political culture," as some historians explained.22
To set the context of film's discursive practices from 1965 to 1975, chapters I and II focus on the American film industry and audiences in transition. With production codes essentially dissolved and censorship bans lifted by the mid-1960s, Hollywood entered an era of experimentation and general restructuring. Directors replaced studio heads as the leading figures in the industry, and filmmakers experimented with new narratives, characterizations, and ways to symbolize America. Demographics affected the exhibition arm of the film industry and forced theaters to reconfigure their interior space and regional locations.
Since transformation in the production end of the industry is limited without a willing audience, Chapter II shows how the changing composition of viewer expectations is a vital part of the story of American cinema. If this was indeed a time of rising generational authority, then the college campus as a space where attitudes and power were debated and reconfigured cannot be ignored. Universities instituted film education programs and production centers, graduating a new kind of film consumer and producer. Education programs added to the cultivation of new patterns of reception.
Chapter III begins the discussion on discourse. More than any other film of its time, The Graduate (1967) struck a chord with a broad middle-class audience because the film reflected baby boomers, grown up. Voyeurs imagined themselves exposing the older generation's material success as idle luxury and pretense. A box-office magnet, The Graduate helped pull independents into mainstream cinema and circulate generational authority.
Chapter IV focuses on intragenerational splits. Arthur Penn's Alice's Restaurant (1969) provides one example of the way feature films defined a new everyman - the folk singer and hippie commune member, the youthful free spirit who would not live by example but by doing his own thing. The counterculture highlighted both a subterranean reality and an impossible idea. The general message that identified hippies' good works was needless persecution of those who were different. Being different was suddenly hip, and all restraints against excess - excessive sex, excessive leisure, excessive language, excessive color, and excessive displays of love - were ignored. Exaggeration defined what hippies were and ultimately could never be. Alice's Restaurant advocated counterculture intervention through love, friendship, and an exemplary reconsideration of the material world. In Alice, the new "folk" of the counterculture displaced "the people" of the 1930s and 1940s. The hippie commune served as a measure of the changing regard for middle-class ideals and the stake young people had in counterculture sensibility. Arlo Guthrie played himself and helped iconize the most ubiquitous image of liberation, if not revolution - long hair.
Chapter V explores the meaning of the counterculture as a general forum for change in Easy Rider (1969). The film updated the autonomous individual and reemphasized appearance as liberation. Chapter V compares the American ritual of freedom on the road to American values of responsibility, patriotism, and individualism. Easy Rider debates the role of material success and luxury in the face of the older generation's failing social reform. This film's popularity among young audiences stemmed from its perception of antiestablishment discourse and as an active response to the discriminatory practices in America, particularly imagined as in the South. Still one of the most popular icons from that era in popular culture, the image of Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper riding across America on their Harley- Davidsons represents sixties nostalgia for a time when sensitivity to social problems lay in these specific antiestablishment attitudes. A new ride for the new man, Easy Rider set masculinity, formerly the territory of the Western, in the contemporary landscape.
Chapter VI introduces the complex nature of gender debates with John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy (1969). Schlesinger brought Dustin Hoffman back as Forty-Second Street hustler Ratso Rizzo and introduced Jon Voight to American audiences as the Texan who goes to Manhattan to make money off rich women. This film asked serious questions about the production of male identity through traditional Westerns. Similarly, it was time to question the traditional construction of masculinity in other areas. Chapter VII extends the discussion about the discourse of antiestablishment in Robert Altman's M*A*S*H (1970). The film mocks just about every traditional, iconic institution in America and rebuffs the conventional war film. The chapter points out the limitations to the new realism of "telling it like it is" in a film about men gone wild with antiestablishment rebellion.
Along with the sexual revolution, women's call for equality provided compelling opportunity to create roles for women as active agents in traditional genres. For its attempt to rewrite the Western from a woman's perspective, McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), discussed in Chapter VIII, showed the parameters and criteria in the assessment of the women's movement. It was one of the few films that self-consciously placed women squarely in the center of traditional narratives about men but did not depend on making her a sex object to do so. It is worth looking at for the method and technique of imagining women as resourceful and independent. While McCabe did not develop into a legend and icon like the other nine films, it is notable for its critical achievements and continued life in academic debates about gender and the Western during the 1970s. This film measures the extent to which American movies could embed gender issues and the experimental trend in mainstream film. This film's relative box office failure invites assumptions about the possibilities of altering time-honored genres from a feminist perspective.
Chapter IX returns to Mike Nichols to address the "battle of the sexes" and ask men and women the raw truth about their relationships. Nichols' Carnal Knowledge (1971) critiqued the women's movement during a relaxed censorship period with new visualizations of men's and women's relations. Jack Nicholson returns as the picture's male chauvinist to whom the rise of feminism, with its challenges to traditional noti
ons of sexual identity, presented a threat and also a predicament for his self-image. Like Altman, Nichols reveals more contradictions than conclusions.
In the spirit of diversity, Chapter X addresses the move toward multiculturalism as a model for contemporary America. Arthur Penn's Little Big Man takes Dustin Hoffman back to the year 1876 where his character was the only white witness to the Battle of Little Big Horn. This film frames the debate about the production of Americanness and its many contradictions. Penn places "telling it like it is" at the center of his project to revise the ubiquitous image of the Indian as vicious savage in American cinema. As it newly represents Native Americans with focus on multicultural identity during the seventies, the film provides a chance to question the repercussions of the multicultural paradigm.
The last chapter shows American cinema's return to genre. Coppola's The Godfather (1972) incorporates the experimental trend into classical cinema and the antiestablishment sentiment with the need for heritage. The heart of the chapter rests on the construction of ethnicity as a way to broaden Americanness and include the European ethnic in the multicultural debates of the 1970s. The Godfather: Part 11(1974) both questions and exploits romantic representation of ethnic identity during this time. These films comment on the exploitation of Italians in Hollywood tradition and gives voice to ethnic resurgence in the larger society. Paying attention to the popularity of film in any era means recognizing what is being exchanged through images. It also means being aware of social codes, legalities, and the general historical context in which those visuals form.