American Films of the 70s: Conflicting Visions

Chapter 4: The End of the Sixties: Nashville, Shampoo, Between the Lines, The Return of the Seacaucus Seven, The Big Chill

Chapter 4 The End of the Sixties Nashville Shampoo Between the Lines The Return of the Secaucus Seven The Big Chill The mixture of political activism and popular culture often labeled ‘‘the sixties’’ in American social history had little impact on the Hollywood film industry during the decade of the 1960s. Bonnie and Clyde (1967) was adopted by young audiences as an allegory of their feelings of alienation, but this film was a heavily disguised version of contemporary tensions. The Graduate (1968) is another example of youthful alienation, but Benjamin Braddock, protagonist of that film, is hardly an example of radical perception or activity. Though The Wild Bunch (1969) is about an outsider group, a film about aging gunslingers cannot be considered allegorical of youth in revolt. The film industry began to explicitly document youth culture and antiwar activism only in 1969–1970, with films such as Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy, Medium Cool, Woodstock, and M.A.S.H. Even with this group of films, however, one gets a sense of isolated changes rather than a broad movement of social change. The various moments of social conflict and change in these movies are transitory or ephemeral . One sees anger against the Establishment, against the way things are, but not a broad movement of social change. Easy Rider does present a set of alternative lifestyles, but none of these appears successful or stable. For example, in the emblematic commune scene, the city kids turned farmers seem to be planting bone-dry fields, even though a canal runs through their property. Wyatt (Peter Fonda) declares of the commune ‘‘They’re going to make it,’’ but for more-or-less objective viewers it’s clear that this experiment is not going to last. In Midnight Cowboy, Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo fail to establish an alternative lifestyle in New York City. Medium Cool and Woodstock are both about transitory events, and in M.A.S.H. the antiestablishment doctors played by Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland leave Korea after one tour of duty.1 In all these cases, the 1960s are presented as a moment of revolt, not as a set of long-lasting changes. Paradoxically, although there is a dearth of high-quality films about the promise of the sixties, many noteworthy films have been made about the death of the sixties. As we have seen, Easy Rider already recounts the failure of an alternative vision (softened by the union with nature implied by the film’s final shot). The ‘‘death of the sixties’’ became a prominent theme in American films in 1974–1976, when the catastrophic events of Watergate and the OPEC oil shock as well as the apparent lack of social change in the United States strongly suggested that the moment of social optimism was over. Numerous films—Chinatown, Nashville, The Parallax View, Night Moves, Shampoo, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—described a loss of idealism and an omnipresent sense of social and political corruption. The sixties were regretted in a series of memorable films. The trend then continued , with films from the late 1970s and into the 1980s documenting and critiqueing the 1960s counterculture. Chapter 3, ‘‘Disaster and Conspiracy,’’ has already dealt with a few of the ‘‘end of the sixties’’ films (notably Chinatown) in sketching out the ‘‘conspiracy /mystery’’ cycle of films as a reaction to disillusion and social crisis. This essay discusses five films dealing in a more direct, less genre-driven way with the end of the sixties. The films to be covered are Nashville, Shampoo, Between the Lines, The Return of the Secaucus Seven, and The Big Chill. Please note that the distinction between ‘‘more direct’’ and ‘‘genre driven’’ is descriptive rather than evaluative. Nashville does not readily fit into any generic category; Chinatown is a detective story and a mystery. This difference does not in itself make one film superior to the other. 61 the end of the sixties The five films under discussion in this chapter can be divided into three groups. Nashville and Shampoo are about failures of vision and community: the inability to translate ‘‘youth culture’’ and related movements into meaningful social change. Between the Lines and The Return of the Secaucus Seven take an opposed position, pointing out a quiet social activism which persists into the seemingly conservative late 1970s. Finally, The Big Chill posits an almost seamless transition from 1960s radical to 1980s yuppie...