American Cinema of the 1960s: Themes and Variations

1968: Movies and the Failure of Nostalgia

1968 Movies and the Failure of Nostalgia LESLIE H. ABRAMSON During 1968, the actual assumed the status of the harrowing imaginary as history became an unmitigated American nightmare. This traumatic year proceeded with a series of horrific shocks and tumultuous confrontations as establishment and anti-establishment forces clashed on political, cultural, and geographic fields of engagement. Domestic icons, institutions , and policies were attacked, activism climaxed and was suppressed by extremist measures, Vietnam casualties peaked, and the legacy of Camelot was revived and silenced. In the turbulent wake of the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, wartime mortifications, a bitterly fractious presidential election punctuated by the chaos of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and other eruptions of police brutality, campus takeovers, a spate of hijackings, protest marches, urban riots, strikes, and stalled Vietnam peace talks, figures and forces of arbitration no longer seemed to exist. In their absence, American cinema remained an institution of mediation, one that acknowledged with a new forthrightness the social turmoil and tendencies of the present, yet at the same time grappled with its own contemporaneity, thematizing memory and returning nostalgically to classical generic forms and traditional strategies of self-regulation to contain, commodify, and reinvigorate itself aesthetically, culturally, and economically. Ubiquitously, the bearer of shock, upheaval, and horror was the documentary image. The mainstream visual culture of intensely visceral newspaper daily wire photographs, magazine spreads, primetime documentaries, and nightly network newscasts serializing the first “television war” in juxtaposition with scenes of domestic clashes together transmitted graphic depictions of Vietnam and the United States as physical and rhetorical battlegrounds . Among the year’s inaugural images were those of the astonishing savageries of the Tet Offensive in January, a massive, deadly surprise attack against South Vietnam, which generated with new immediacy explicit footage of carnage in progress and a drastic shift in Americans’ understanding of the status of the war. In the throes of Tet and its wake, two of the 193 decade’s most haunting photographs captured assassinations: South Vietnamese police chief Lieutenant Colonel Loan coldly executing a distraught Vietcong suspect on the streets of Saigon by thrusting a gun against his head (broadcast as video footage as well) and mortally wounded presidential candidate Robert Kennedy lying in a pool of light on the floor of Los Angeles’s Ambassador Hotel. Resonant as these scenes were with regard to the brutality of U.S. foreign policy and the demise of American nostalgic idealism, ultimately the image itself became an object of culpability. The camera shot came under attack as a dangerous apparatus of domestic assault as government commissions, civic agencies, sociologists, and social commentators, casting about for the causes of what was newly perceived as the nation’s pathology of violence, implicated its mechanisms of representation. In particular , cinema’s proliferating war reportage–inspired aesthetic was indicted as, in the words of one Newsweek writer, “the sado-violence that is the new pornography on television and in movies” (“Understanding Violence”). Such intensifying criticism of the industry prompted Variety editor Abel Green to observe, “Bobby Kennedy’s most vivid monument could be a change in the American scheme of entertainment” (Green, “Guns” 60). Concurrently, the film industry was besieged by censorship challenges. As cinema’s new aesthetics of sensation (see Monaco) were enunciated in the display of not only a profusion of violence but growing sexual explicitness , reflecting the surging sexual revolution and the graphic eroticism of the increasing influx of European films, the forces of conservatism that would sweep Richard Nixon into office in November’s election mobilized in a series of nationwide civic and legal efforts to restrict exhibition that reached as high as the Supreme Court. Determined to preserve the industry ’s independence as it battled a near decade-low average weekly attendance of nineteen million by endeavoring to appeal to differentiated adult markets, Motion Picture Association of America president Jack Valenti returned to traditional strategies of protectionism by self-regulation, replacing the Production Code with a rating system on 1 November. Under the new system, studios and distributors of foreign films voluntarily submitted their films for classification in one of four categories: G (general), M (mature), R (restricted to those sixteen and over unless accompanied by a parent or guardian), and X (restricted to those sixteen and over). Meant to appease critics and bolster Hollywood’s image, the ratings system simultaneously enabled the industry to safeguard both its aesthetic autonomy and efforts at commercial...