Introduction: Political Memory and Popular Media
Introduction: Political Memory and Popular Media
Rebellious long haired youths decked out in psychedelic blouses and bell bottoms smoking pot, dropping acid, and plotting to overthrow the government (or even American society itself) through whatever means necessary in the name of power to the people. A dangerous, uncertain time when tried and true national values were challenged by emergent groups who consciously perceived themselves as operating counter to the dominant culture. Long hot summers populated by enraged urban rioters, bourgeoisie babies who unexplainedly rejected daddy’s law firm for the streets of San Francisco, and idealistic hipsters out to save the world through free love and rock music.
Such are the popular images of the people and period of the 1960’s which are most quickly and vividly conceived of by the contemporary American mind as representative of that generation. Moreover, as is the case with all memories, these public and contested recollections of times just recently past cannot be remembered in a moral vacuum. Instead they are shaded by contemporary if persistent socio-political concerns over issues ranging from illicit drug use to ‘overly’ liberal social policies and cultural mores to the goodness and righteousness of the American nation-state. Our perceived memories of this politically usable past can often have very real consequences for the present day, especially in cases where the era of the 1960’s has been portrayed as equal parts destructive and anomalous in direct opposition to more pleasantly remembered times of peace, prosperity, and ‘traditional’ values viewed as bookending this memorially problematic period. In the years since Vietnam, racial strife, and fundamental value contestation polarized the nation, culturally attuned politicians ranging from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan to Newt Gingrich have made careers, captured national attention, and garnered high office by rhetorically constructing this period (and the myriad of different protest strands which engaged in such conflict with the mainstream) as wholly negative, unredeemable, and above all not to be repeated. These politicians often play upon popular nostalgic notions of a happier, safer, friendlier, and generally better prior period of American history, contrasting the perceived social ills of the Sixties (and especially those of today which are painted as dire legacies of that dark era) with this idealistically imagined past in order to condemn the counterculture.
For much of the twentieth century Americans have had a kind of love affair with the notion of cultural decline, even in the midst of unprecedented material advancements, persistently providing savvy politicians with exploitable images of the past. While the experience and recognition of feelings of nostalgia “had been commonplace among soldiers who served in the Revolution and the Civil War,” according to Michael Kammen, it was the drive for “normalcy” in the 1920’s which “marked the genesis of nostalgia” as popularly understood today, as a yearning “for some earlier time sentimentalized as a golden age.”[1] For the late 20th century American mainstream that perceived golden age is the period of the 1950’s, remembered as a time of social cohesion and fulfilling family life in contrast to an ongoing degeneration of culture and home that began in the Sixties. Often phrased in the politically potent terminology of a “decline of the family,” this line of argument suggests that very real current social problems such as poverty, drug addiction, and teen pregnancy are fundamentally the result of a breakdown of ‘traditional’ nuclear family structures prompted, in large part, by the women’s movement and the Sixties counterculture generally. As Stephanie Coontz points out, this nostalgic model of traditional families is in reality “an ahistorical amalgam of structures, values, and behaviors that never coexisted,” and thus the purported movement downward from this high ideal little more than a politically useful memorial construction.[2] Yet if American families, culture, and life of the pre-Sixties era never truly approximated the idealized state in which they have been remembered, the question remains as to why this image of a Paradise Lost remains so powerful within the contemporary culture.
In a media saturated society in which the collective culture most shared and most public is that which appears on screen, one answer lies in cinematic and televised representations of this idealized time which function largely as a mythology of the recent American past. Whereas Fifties era self-representations, especially television programs such as “Father Knows Best” and “Leave It To Beaver,” helped to first establish this vision, it has mostly been through continuing contemporary representations of just such a past (in which, by way of the narrative, an idealized Fifties era often can be easily and immediately contrasted to the subsequent turmoil of the 1960’s) that the modern mainstream garners its mental framework concerning these issues. This should come as little surprise if, as Bruce Chadwick suggests, within modern American society it is film which holds “the power to generate myths that will affect the collective memory”[3] of the general public. Indeed, while personal memories of real lived experiences during the 1960’s doubtless continue to inform popular perceptions of that era, for those born after this period (as well as many who lived through it themselves) the central repository of public memory regarding the Sixties era is that ever enlarging body of historical film depicting, interpreting, and critiquing this period. Moreover, aside from OAH forums, graduate seminars, and History Channel exposes, the question of ‘accuracy’ concerning the portrayal of the past in these films is generally ignored, let alone the complex, reciprocal relationship between modern day socio-political concerns and popular on-screen historical representations of the post-war period. Starting from the premise that Hollywood filmmakers’ primary concern is always with constructing a popular and thus profitable picture of the past, regardless of how this portrayal may distort historical reality in the interests of contemporary sensibilities, one can begin to discern how so many Americans retain such an idealized image of their recent history.
Films get made for all sorts of reasons, and succeed or fail for just as many. Sometimes money making potential but slightly affects an artistic director out to tell a good story well, regardless of the economic opinions of his corporate studio higher-ups. More often then not, though, compromises are made between storytellers and cinema backers that result in the crafting of tales at least hoped to be both stylish and successful. Much like Roland Marchand demonstrated for advertisers who must meld “their selling messages with the values and attitudes already held by their audiences,”[4] in order to be economically successful a Hollywood historical film must craft visions of American history in line with the predominant memorial desires of the consuming culture. They must “provide a level of content which will guarantee the widest possible acceptance by the largest possible audience” who “will simply not go to see a movie that it has heard is ‘difficult’ or that deals with unpopular themes.”[5] Moreover, and perhaps most importantly in the specific case of mass media reconstructions of the 1960’s era, movie going audiences tend to shun films that portray familiar themes or events from this period in potentially problematic ways.[6] By this logic, those films that are most successful at the box office should be those whose historical imagination of recent America most closely matches that of the mainstream public.[7] Yet the specific messages being taken away by movie going audiences can never be known for certain,[8] nor whether there exists any correlation between public approval and ideological internalization. All that can be reasonably stated is that films both shape and are shaped by popular opinion, and that the more successful the film the more likely it in some way mirrors the public mind.
A similar reciprocal relationship between politicians and the public has long been recognized by historians, political scientists, and other scholars of society, though the degree to which powerfully placed individuals shape rather than merely tap into the public mind remains open to debate. What can be perhaps said for certain is that politicians often pay close attention to public opinion, casting votes, crafting messages, and generally operating as a representative of their constituencies, if sometimes only to ensure re-election. At the same time, by ‘making an issue’ out of what are sometimes deep underlying social concerns (some of which, like persistent apprehensions regarding race, can be fruitfully cultivated only if done so with great rhetorical care) politicians can often direct public focus and, through the use of ever more mass media, articulate these shared concerns, and their conceived solutions, in particular and often consequential ways. This is especially true in the case of certain rhetorical representations of the Sixties era by conservative politicians which single out selected strands of the counterculture, most especially illicit drug use, for outright condemnation on contemporary cultural grounds.
In addition to firmly placing the blame for current social problems (including but not limited to AIDS, crack and other drug pandemics, persistent inner city poverty, teenage pregnancy, and the ‘breakdown of the family’) on these collective past transgressions, such modes of political argument also function to discredit the radical political and cultural messages of the movement by collapsing distinctions between multi-varied aspects of a complicated counterculture. This uniformly drugged-out counterculture also tends to corrupt ‘The Sixties’ as whole as well as the Great Society programs of the Johnson administration, which are tied together under the banner of the misguided liberalism with whose dire legacy we are still collectively dealing. Indeed, as Republican rhetoricians have made careful note and political use of, though mainstream late 20th century Americans may not be wholly willing to discount appealing ideas about individual identity, social responsibility, and power to the people, they will work and vote to overthrow policies of a liberal past that can be effectively blamed for the problems of the present. Yet this collapsing of distinctions between counterculture elements enabling the condemnation of an entire body of alternative socio-political thought and action through consensus contemporary disapproval of certain specific, ‘immoral’ actions does not take place only during campaign seasons or on Sunday morning political roundtables. It occurs just as often, with perhaps more significant consequences for mainstream public memory, in the medium of historical cinema.
Leaving aside, for the moment, the issue of what relationship and influences might exist between these publicly expressed contemporary political concerns and historical cinematic remembrances of the Sixties era, let us briefly examine those aspects of popular cinematic convention which might work to encourage such a politically consequential representation of the past. The fact that the form, perhaps even more than the content, of these constructions is predicated on the consuming tastes of a mass public seeking primarily to be entertained dictates that on screen remembrances of the past be presented in the form of a coherent narrative. It is precisely this need for narrative coherence as a general prerequisite for commercial cinematic success that prompts the collapsing of countercultural distinctions in these films, since the sort of subtle sub-cultural analysis of the Sixties era one might expect to find in scholarly monographs just doesn’t make good viewing.[9] The image of one coherent counterculture, whose members uniformly called for social revolt, burned their draft cards or bras, and enjoyed innumerable consequence-free sexual encounters while stoned out of their minds is simply easier to present on screen, and, perhaps, easier for a memorially politicized public to accept. This collective vision also allows for blanket if often implicit condemnation of the entire counterculture through representations of personal ruin and cultural collapse caused by illicit drug use cum, inevitably, abuse.
This proposed link between political concerns about and media representations of drugs serves as the final leg of a “Silver Triangle” of historical memory outlining the process of interaction among current political concerns and conceptions regarding drugs and the counterculture, historical media representations of the 1960’s, and mainstream public opinion about that much debated decade which underlies and generates this form of politicized mass memory in contemporary American culture.[10] While few films ever achieve the degree of political recognition necessary to fully complete the triangle, those that do may be taken as uniquely reflective of the underlying culture. The majority Sixties depicting historical films, which succeed or fail to varying degrees in part because of their drug content, need not be ignored though neither their impact nor their cultural resonance should be overstated. Yet regardless of their overall popularity nearly all films which portray the Sixties era itself, or simply begin in a counterculturally marked setting to contemplate its legacy, tend to present subtle variations on certain specific drug messages reflecting the views of the contemporary culture. Moreover, there exists at least one precise means by which political media messages regarding drugs can infiltrate popular cinematic historical remembrances of the counterculture.
While no secret cabal of anti-drug propagandists forces Hollywood directors at gunpoint to represent the past in politically consequential ways, there remain very good reasons why popular historical cinemas should ‘choose’ to do so. In the first place, any depiction of drug use in contemporary cinema (even those set in an historical past which shared very different views on such matters) must not overtly challenge the contemporary socio-political consensus on this hot-button issue. From the mid 1970’s onward this mainstream conception prefigured drugs as a uniquely dire threat to the next generation and, most importantly, in the wake of the “Just Say No” campaign of the 1980’s, an issue on which only one viewpoint could be considered legitimate. To produce any alternative depiction was to risk public condemnation for presenting ‘mixed messages’ to children.
Positive economic motivations also encourages such politicized popular portrayals of the past. While the degree of success of the Reagan-Bush anti-drug media campaign in keeping youngsters off illicit substances remains open to debate, it seems likely that the parents of those children at whom the blitz was aimed (who themselves comprised the cultural consensus of concerned citizens pushing for such preventative measures) took to heart the distinctly unmixed media messages being presented on video screens in arcades, stadiums, and living rooms across America. Through its role as mass consumer demanding images in line with its own preconceived notions concerning drugs, this politicized public in turn encouraged Hollywood to create similar such representations on the silver screen. These cinematic representations of contemporary society themselves served to further reinforce the extent mainstream message about drugs while simultaneously establishing the precise contemporary terms and categories in which the drug-filled countercultural past would soon be cinematically represented.
Chapters One and Two of this thesis will lay the historical, political, and cinematic groundwork for the specific case studies of politicized Hollywood portrayals of the past that follow. Chapter One briefly surveys the cultural conflict of the Sixties era, paying careful attention to those distinctions among different elements of the counterculture which would become so consequentially collapsed in later political rhetoric and media representations regarding that period. Then, starting with Richard Nixon’s effective mobilization of the “silent majority” at the very height of the movement in 1968, it explores how the counterculture and the Sixties era generally have been politically remembered in the years since. Focusing especially on the rhetorical reconstructions of Ronald Reagan and the 1994 “Contract with America” Republicans, this section examines how the perceived sins of the countercultural past could come to be so effectively blamed by contemporary conservatives for precipitating the problems of the present. Temporarily turning away from the politics of memory surrounding the Sixties, Chapter Two traces changing Hollywood cinematic depictions of drugs from that period to the present, with an eye towards establishing competing thematic paradigms (of the 1960’s and 1990’s eras) to which the Hollywood historical films can be constructively compared. Interspersed with this narrative is another that examines governmental policies concerning drugs during the same period with special emphasis on the anti-drug political media messages of the Reagan-Bush era. In so doing this chapter suggests a process by which consciously political and publicly paid-for anti-drug messages of the 1980’s could come to permeate market driven media representations of contemporary society (and then of recent history) in the 1990’s.
Having laid out the necessary media and memorial backgrounds, Chapters Three and Four focus on specific cases of drug-related cinematic historical revisionism in an effort to understand the thematic trends, underlying cultural messages, and possible consequences of these representations. Chapter Three examines three major thematic sub-genre types prevalent among 1990’s era historical representations of the Sixties, Utilizing close textual analysis of one representative cinematic myth from each category. In general these films either romanticize the past itself while downplaying and explicitly condemning drug use (as in Almost Famous), create a clear distinction between the users and consequences of marijuana and other drugs (as in Dazed and Confused), or tell tales of inevitable personal ruin (as in Blow) precipitated by, at first always more or less innocent and usually counterculturally motivated, experimentation with drugs.
Chapter 4 examines the cultural meaning of Forrest Gump, analyzing the historical cinematic phenomena that swept America by storm in the summer of 1994, garnering multiple Academy Awards and cashing in to become the third highest grossing film of all time. Following a race and gender focused survey of the extent literature on this film, I contrast it to two alternative pictures of the past; the book of the same name on which it is ostensibly based and the structurally similar but politically antithetical Oliver Stone film Born on the 4th of July. This chapter concludes with an in depth exploration into the thematic treatment of drugs and the counterculture in a film whose incredible box office success and appearance amidst a heated campaign season that often centered around politicized memories of the counterculture suggest it as a uniquely useful and insightful reflection of contemporary American mainstream cultural attitudes toward, and understandings, of the recent past. It concludes with a short epilogue similarly examining the political messages, cultural meanings, and possible policy consequences of the most recent spate of televised anti-drug propaganda that has appeared in the months since the 2002 Super Bowl.
What follows should properly be read as a collection of essays intended to build upon one another in multiple ways while suggesting several arguments concerning the relationships between politics, media, and public memory. These essays are also meant to be reflective of different avenues of cultural inquiry and disciplinary techniques, including history, anthropology, media and literary scholarship, and all falling under the overall rubric of American Studies. The first two chapters serve as comparisons of differing techniques of historical storytelling, a critical review of existing arguments on the one hand and a straightforward narrative on the other. This second history is also meant to suggest some of consequences, including the streamlining of cultural complication, of the kind of narrative presentation utilized in the films analyzed in the last two chapters. The final two chapters each build upon the ‘Histories’ in different ways, and are meant to compliment rather than compete with one another in advancing their own argumentative agendas. In examining individual texts whose varying popularity of these films problematizes the degree to which they may be read as indicative of broader public memory, Chapter Three attempts to show some of the ways in which drugs and the legacy of the counterculture have been dealt with in post-Reagan era historical cinema. It is only in Chapter Four, which serves as the culmination of my overall argument, that I attempt to read broader cultural attitudes towards drugs and the Sixties back from the textual evidence. This chapter also attempts to move beyond drugs to the larger legacy of the counterculture as it has been recently remembered on-screen.
Histories I: The Sixties, Then and Now
“Our long national nightmare is over,” the words spoken by Gerald Ford in reference to the Watergate scandal which paralyzed and polarized the nation for more than two years could, in 1974 following a dozen years of increasingly violent challenges to what had long been considered fundamental social, political, and moral tenets of the great American nation, just as easily have been understood to refer to “The Sixties.” For those Americans who came of age after Nixon’s fateful final helicopter ride, this image of the Sixties as a frightful dream thankfully passed and better left forgotten, whether presented in political rhetoric, on screen, or by parents hoping their own children won’t have to make the same ‘mistakes’ they did, is often times the only available interpretation of that much-disputed decade. Thus it should come as little surprise that many young Americans with no first hand experiences with or remembrances of the Sixties should still maintain a negative opinion of the decade, as well as of a counterculture which invariable plays the villain in this memorial melodrama.
From parent or television to child, mainstream memories of an homogenous counterculture continually circulate and reinforce the idea of a corrupted youthful elite simultaneously preaching radicalism and practicing excess as a means of disrupting the dominant culture. Yet in reality this opposition to the mainstream, which defined the multi-pronged movement as counter, was the only truly uniting factor among protesters with starkly diverging goals, and often very different ideas about how to arrive at them. This chapter provides a brief sketch of the cultural conflict of the Sixties with an eye towards delineating the distinctions and disputes within the counterculture. Then, beginning with Nixon’s successful attacks upon the perceived lawlessness and disorder which accompanied the movement, it traces the ways in which the Sixties have been politically remembered, especially by conservative rhetoricians seeking to blanketly condemn the radical political and cultural aspects of the movement, in the decades since.
Before we proceed it is necessary to deal directly with a matter of analytic definition. The terms “the Sixties” and “Sixties Era” are used throughout to signify a ‘cultural decade’ ranging roughly from John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 to Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974. Though this periodization varies somewhat from the oft expressed idea of a ‘long 1960’s’ (stretching from 1960 sometimes as far up as 1976), it shares with it a concern with ascertaining and outlining those shared cultural characteristics which make such a convenient temporal construction useful. While undercurrents of protest were present even before the thousand days of JFK, this periodization contains an implicit argument[11] that a single dark day in Dallas helped enable a chain of events which would significantly and perhaps permanently alter America’s relations with, and conception of, itself. Convenient bookmarking of an end date is less precise, the resignation of Richard Nixon works effectively in large part because the period of his Presidency (which began amidst the highest tide of Sixties protest) coincided with and even fostered the gradual dissolution of those cultural traits, practices, and beliefs which had marked the Sixties.
This distinct definition of the Sixties is not one shared by conservative rhetoricians who often purposely confuse or conflate the period, the protest movements within it, and even the ‘liberal’ Lyndon Johnson administration in their memorial attacks. Much as drugs can function as a stand in for the counterculture, the counterculture is often conceptualized as paradigmatically representative of the Sixties. This enables whole new routes of memorial condemnation, is it allows Johnson’s entire policy program to be placed under the banner of undifferentiated ‘Sixties liberalism,’ despite the enormous divergence between the beliefs of those ‘leftists’ inside and those outside the political mainstream of the time. It also suggests that many conservative rhetorical attacks upon the policies and period of the Sixties should be read as condemnations of the counterculture and concerns about its legacy. In the eyes of many Republicans, had the Sixties never taken place, modern America would never have suffered so many serious social and economic problems for so many years.
---Sixties Countercultures and Social Conflict---
In express contrast to the Sixties, the decade of the 1950’s has been popularly remembered as a time of peace, prosperity, and widespread social consensus in favor of ‘traditional’ values. In this narrative the cultural conflict of the Sixties emerges almost out of nowhere, in direct response to events like the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War rather than from longstanding if formerly underlying societal divisions. Such a conception of this conflict has twofold consequences for contemporary communal memory of the Sixties. In the first place, by placing the ‘blame’ for Sixties social conflict on specific events which are now long past, it becomes considerably easier to assert that the conflict itself and the social divisions underlying it are themselves dead and buried. Yet, perhaps more significantly, such a straightforward story functions to downplay the distinctions within the counterculture by extinguishing the important roles played by precursor protests in the years before Kennedy’s election. In reality, many aspects of 1960’s countercultural revolt grew out of earlier questionings of the status quo that then evolved separately into the myriad of movements united in opposition to a mainstream they had long viewed as corrupt. It is only through the recognition of a complex progression from Beat to Hippie, from Southern Christian marcher to Black Panther, from malaise stricken housewife to bra burning crusader against patriarchy, that an understanding of the Sixties counterculture in all its richness and complication can begin.
Social unrest in the 1950’s, long ignored because of a strong mainstream drive for conformity during the period which pushed dissent outside the newspapers, public reports, and media representations that serve as the basis of much contemporary cultural and historical understanding, took a number of forms. The presence of an urban and more militant arm of a Civil Rights movement generally conceived of as peaceful, Southern, and Christian during the 1950’s, only to become violent later, can be seen in the literary accounts of post-war Harlem of Ralph Ellison and Claude Brown. Both Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land (1965 but chronicling the Fifties era) present images of a structurally and economically disenfranchised African-American underclass in search of identity and always just short of boiling over with frustration at white society, deep seated emotions on which 1960’s militant movements like the Black Panthers would be built. The “Hippie” culture of Grenwich Village and San Francisco, which exploded on the media scene and American historical consciousness in 1965, owed a great deal to the Beatniks who had squatted in their lofts and raised similar questions about America and the status quo ten years before. Indeed, the progression from Beat to Hippie may have been almost as much a shift in drug of choice from dexedrine and pot to peyote and LSD as it was an overall movement in social and interpersonal philosophy, from fifties public intellectuals like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg to Sixties counterculture pundits like Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary. The ultimate roots of radical second wave feminism can also be found in the 1950’s, even before Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique publicly raised the issue of strict gender roles and unforthcoming if ideologically expected personal fulfillment. Legal and cultural double standards, both of the straightforward gendered variety and between the ideology and actuality of women’s lives, prompted many women to question whether the problem wasn’t with themselves so much as a system that constrained their lives through Biblical notions of ‘morality’ and contemporarily constructed ideas about nature and femininity promulgated by a powerful patriarchy.[12] These streams of 1960’s protest had firms roots in the previous decade, exploding on the public consciousness perhaps only in the wake of divisive issues and events like Vietnam, but present and working silently counter to the cultural mainstream long before.
What they bumped up against, what can be called the American “mainstream” of the 1960’s had really forged its cultural identity in the years before and after WWII. For the generation that fought the war, and had grown up through the Depression years before it, ‘America’ was unquestionably the greatest nation in the world, able to do no wrong domestically, and blessed with a divine historical mission to spread democracy, prosperity, and modernity throughout the world. Having raised their children in a peaceful and prosperous world diametrically opposed to the relative poverty and widespread conflict most Americans had known in their youth, they worked to pass on their values, and their unerring faith, to the next generation. Indeed, contrary to popular conceptions both then and now, a majority of Sixties youth did in fact largely adopt their parents worldviews and core values, insuring that while the cultural battles of the decade would be fought partly along generational lines, the cultural mainstream would always encompass an absolute majority of all generations of that era.[13]
This Silent Majority, which would catapult Nixon to electoral victory in 1968 was built upon a quiet resentment of guiding government elites, unappreciative civil disobeyers, and challenges to traditional values, all of which supported a burgeoning New Right whose legacy may be that of the most powerful and permanent, if long unrecognized, of all Sixties social movements.[14] The ire of these individuals, who also tended to uphold dominant religious and economic ideologies of God and capitalism especially against perceived threats from communists and other ‘freedom hating’ subversives at home and abroad, was especially aroused by actions of protest like flag burning, which to them represented a malicious and ungrateful attack on America by those very individuals who ostensibly enjoyed its benefits. Yet it was precisely because they were acutely aware of the power of the symbol, having emerged from the same post-war cultural roots as the Sixties mainstream, that protesters burned flags. Indeed, much of social conflict of the 1960’s, and especially its ferocity, was precipitated by disputes over the precise meaning and appropriate contemporary embodiment of these shared deep cultural values, as different factions accused their opponents of hypocrisy, treachery, and the corruption of ideologically powerful if much disputed terms and concepts like ‘freedom’, ’democracy’, and even ‘America’ itself.
Many of the sharpest and most heated arguments during the Sixties over whether the dominant power structure was fostering or impeding the attainment of the high American ideals of individual freedom and responsive self government, in which both the mainstream and much of the counterculture continued to believe, centered around those twin events often seen as precipitating the decade’s societal splintering, the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. Indeed, many students of the New Left learned to see the laws and legal instruments of the state as standing in the way of, rather than aiding, the quest for true personal freedom and political power not in their Ivory tower classrooms but during summer vacation on the muddy dirt roads and church basement floors of Dixie. Returning to their classrooms, however, this Northern youthful outrage over the legal and supra-legal treatment of Southern blacks turned to socio-political critiques of cultural systems that marginalized and disempowered young people, women, and minority groups, helping to spur along disparate and formerly disorganized strands of protest. Yet even if Southern schoolroom experiences may have precipitated active critiques of extent power relations by the educated elite of various Sixties era movements, it was over the Vietnam War that Americans most neatly divided themselves into competing mainstream and countercultural camps.
While the explicit split between Hawks and Doves provides the most clear cut Vietnam related ideological division of the period, it is the harsh attacks on the intelligence and integrity of government officials by protesters which illuminate the deeper division between those who believed, often passionately, in the system and whose who had long since lost faith. So long as the war dragged on and the highest levels of American government faced accusations of lying outrightly to both their constituents and the world about what they knew and had ordered done, the strong consensus and sense of collectivity which had permeated Fifties culture would be irrecoverable. Indeed, while there is much truth to this narrative of Vietnam and Civil Rights as the central loci of conflict in Sixties America, the fact remains that while the cultural politics surrounding these events surely fostered the growth of and prompted shared foci among some Sixties protest groups, internal conflictions and divergent conceptions of these very events in many cases encouraged even further segmentation of an already complicated counterculture.
It also heightened existing tensions between the counterculture and the ostensibly liberal administration of Lyndon Johnson. While Johnson’s early Sixties backing of strong federal civil rights legislation had garnered him some sympathy from student radicals, his persistent support for an escalating Vietnam War had, by 1968, transformed him into a symbol of the establishment against which many were rebelling. Chants of “hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today” were commonplace at anti-war rallies of the late Johnson administration, while opposition from within the youthful demographic of his own party’s supporters help force him of the ticket in 1968. Yet Johnson’s War on Poverty, and his experimentation with localist policy implementation strategies in line with radical notions of grassroots planning, were more than enough evidence for conservatives then and since to condemn his policies as foolish liberal gestures working counter to the health, welfare, and moral compass of the culture. Indeed, no member of the movement at the time could have taking seriously the suggestion of a firm connection between LBJ, who rarely took radical concerns seriously and was never an ally of protesters, and the counterculture.
Encompassing movements as diverse as radical theatre and film making, Black power, and California countryside communes, the term counterculture itself is inherently problematic in that it “falsely reifies what should never properly be construed” as a unified front composed of individuals “who defined themselves first by what they were not,” namely an accepted member of a mainstream culture they too accepted.[15] While the shared opposition to mainstream culture, especially highlighted during culturally divisive events like those in 1964 Mississippi, 1967 Vietnam, or 1968 Chicago, did encourage exchanges of ideas and experiences between differing groups of counterculturalists, these very experiential and ideological differences, among those who might logically expect themselves to largely agree on many matters, prompted some to abandon all notions of power through coalition in favor of the emotional and intellectual authenticity of a small committed cadre. Even if, for example, Northern white liberal students may have learned to distrust authority during Southern summers, the fact that they could escape back to learn amidst pampered dorm rooms in the fall fostered ill feelings among the African-Americans with whom they’d protested side by side and especially among those urban blacks in the North and West who saw nothing being done to combat the social and economic disenfranchisement they experienced everyday.[16] While more mainstream leaders such as Martin Luther King called for peaceful attempts at change, appearing on Meet the Press in the wake of the 1965 Watts riots, lest the violence of a few discredit the aspirations of many with similar goals, his calls fell on the deaf ears of those who’d already abandoned his integrationist thinking for a more radical separation from the systems of their oppression.[17] The emergence of a strong women’s movement too owed much to internal conflict among young protesters in the early 1960’s, where women working side by side with their male counterparts on projects of personal liberation and political empowerment began to notice, reflect upon, and then actively critique the fact that it was only these men who enjoyed positions of power within the movement while they themselves were often relegated to pseudo-secretarial duties.[18] Yet it was the divergent responses by individuals and groups united in opposition to Vietnam, a war for ‘freedom’ that they saw as actually encouraging violent abridgments of this key concept both at home and abroad, which ultimately prevented counter cultural cohesion and prompted its eventual fragmentation “into a number of cultural liberation movements during the 1970’s that were different in tone and constituency,” motivations, methods, and aims.[19]
A loose coalition of protest groups who came together in the late 1960’s in opposition who shared differing conceptions of what was being protested, the war itself, the political powers guiding it, or the cultural systems which underpin the entire venture, the anti-Vietnam movement was able to gain a mass following only at the expense of a unified program. While a great many individuals responded to war by participating in mass demonstrations and other avenues of traditional political action, others choose to drop out of a society they saw as unsalvageable, while still others responded with acts of sabotage and calls for revolution. Those who advocated peaceful protest, by far the largest segment and the ‘most reasonable’ by mainstream standards, worried about being discredited by actions of both groups with whom they were popularly associated. Just as advocates of marijuana and LSD use for cultural, political, and spiritual purposes had worried about being classed with those in search of a simple high, many protesters feared that individuals who dropped back into society for anti-war marches dressed in tattered rags and long unshaven would discredit those with a more expressly political bent who organized and oversaw the movement and conceived of themselves as struggling for a noble if perhaps lost cause.[20]
Alternatively, and an increasing concern as the geopolitical actions of Richard Nixon encouraged more and more ideologically committed young people to carry out ostensibly criminal acts, this ‘mainstream’ of the movement worried about the violent actions and revolutionary rhetoric of small groups, (for example in this case, the Weathermen, an offshoot of the Students for a Democratic Society, famous for bomb throwing and calls for the destruction of Western imperialism) working to sully their cause in the eyes of a mainstream public who might be sympathetic to bringing back American boys, but would shy away from the associates and views of those who would commit illegal actions at home to bring about this admittedly desirable international goal. Indeed, “Richard Nixon preyed upon the sixties protesters who talked about a revolution that offered most Americans nothing but heartache,” successfully calling upon that majority of the populace who worked hard, loved their family, and took to the streets only for shopping during that tumultuous decade.[21] In so doing he would set a pattern later conservative candidates would follow, placing the blame for the social conflicts of the Sixties squarely on those who challenged the legitimacy and propriety of the extent system, while promising a return to law and order, peace and prosperity, in exchange for political power.
---Political Symbols and Rhetorical Memory---
Mediated remembrances of the 1960’s have been with us since the beginning of the end of that turbulent decade, with news stories, magazine articles, novels, films, and television shows from various political perspectives recalling and ‘coming to terms with’ the social conflict of the era. A film like 1983’s The Big Chill, where aged and deradicalized former student protesters reunite for the funeral of the only member of their group who’d retained their youthful idealism, in the process coming to terms with the progression and present direction of their lives, paints a picture of the past as a spectre which will haunt us forever unless we can create closure and move on. In contrast, a novel like Thomas Pyncheon’s Vineland (1990 but set in 1984), where federal agents play upon the complicated countercultural pasts of individuals trying to move on with their lives, using drug charges, sexual desire, and police power to discredit, detain, and ultimately ‘reeducate’ old radicals, suggests that the past is home to important lessons for and connections to the present which are often consciously obscured for contemporary political purposes. Yet on screen, in paperback, or elsewhere it does seem largely the case that, in the words of George F. Will, “Since the sixties our national life has been a running argument about, and with, the sixties.”[22] Even America’s longest running and most culturally critical comedy, The Simpsons, has dealt with the Sixties, through the character of Homer’s long absentee mother who was forced to flee her husband and child lest she be prosecuted for her involvement in the sabotage of Mr. Burn’s germ warfare laboratory. In a follow-up episode in which Homer journeys to his mother’s old Hippie compound he ponders what his life might have been like had he accompanied her and adopted their lifestyle, mentally imaging a world in which beautiful women ask him how he manages to take such good care of his “long luxurious Hippie hair.” Yet while a balding Homer might see these locks as symbols of youthful vitality and freedom, for conservative rhetoricians from Nixon to Gingrich, and the voters who elevate them to office, long hair, unkempt beards, unshaven legs, and all they represent, have held a far different meaning.
Long hair was a political symbol for both the counterculture and its mainstream opposition during the late 1960’s, with the major divide being whether one favored or opposed the individualist rebellion which it was popularly understood to represent. This coif concern translated to actions like the forced barberism of Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Tom Hayden following their ‘Chicago Seven’ conspiracy conviction, and the subsequent press conference at which “the radicals’ shorn locks” were “triumphantly displayed,” as a symbol of political victory and the restoration of law and social order.[23] Such actions by the legal establishment played into existing “Middle American” socio-political conceptions and opinions of the counterculture, that “focused on long hair and hippie garb as symbols of moral breakdown and potential social disorder,” criticized the “antiwar activists as unpatriotic,” and in general viewed the movement as composed exclusively of the offspring “of ‘liberal’ and ‘influential parents” who’d “passed to their children a legacy of grasping aggressive ill-mannered egoism.”[24] This mainstream conception of precisely who a protester was, namely someone with long hair and no respect for legality or traditional values advocating violent revolution and the destruction or confiscation of the scant hard-earned property of long governmentally forgotten Americans, was turned to political advantage by Richard Nixon.
Asserting that “the first civil right of every American is to be free from domestic violence” Nixon decried the billions in federal dollars expended on Great Society programs, in an effort to end the kinds of structural inequalities precipitating many protests, for yielding nothing but “an ugly harvest of frustrations, violence and failure across the land.”[25] Inherent in these lines, and indeed in the viewpoints of Nixon supporters, are the germs of the two most commonly used rhetorical strategies for condemning the counterculture and the liberal political environment of the Sixties in which it prospered, namely the highlighting of violent social unrest as the paradigmatic action of all counterculturalists and the creation of a linkage between the socio-political polices of Lyndon Johnson and the moral collapse of society. Both of these strategies would be utilized with considerable degrees of success by later conservative candidates, most especially Ronald Reagan in the 1980’s and Newt Gingrich a decade later.
While Ronald Reagan had won the governorship in California in 1966 partly by “incessantly warning voters that the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964 and the hippies of San Francisco were harbingers of anarchy and moral degeneration,” he rarely spoke explicitly about the counterculture in the years after the Sixties.[26] Yet the subtext of many of Reagan’s later speeches, dealing with welfare, the size and spending of the federal government, crime, and contemporary American morality, is that the extent problems of the Eighties were the result of the ‘mistakes’ made by the nation and its government during the era of the 1960’s. Adopting a party line created by conservative intellectuals and popularized during his presidency, Reagan argued “that feminist overkill,” meaning the rise of the women’s movement ‘out of’ the counterculture in the late 1960s was “the principal cause of family instability,” in a nation experiencing a rising divorce rate, and of the sustained slaughter of countless unborn lives as a result of Roe v. Wade. Yet even more than decrying the counterculture through its apparent connection to the problems of the present, Reagan cited the social policies of the Sixties as responsible for the urban and economic issues facing his administration. “For Reagan in the 1980’s the problem was not poverty at all, but wasteful and counterproductive poverty policy” which had been around since the Great Society and that robbed the middle class of their hard earned money and the poor of their desire to find a job, work hard, and achieve personal fulfillment through providing for their families.[27] The use of politically potent concepts like the “welfare queen” and the “culture of poverty,” presented Reagan supporters with a dual motivation for revamping the system by suggesting that both the recipients and providers of government aid would benefit from a reversal of the legacy of Sixties social policy. Yet for many conservatives Reagan’s attacks on the counterculture did not go far enough, as that group, and the moral degeneration it was viewed as having prompted, often escaped explicit rhetorical condemnation. This would not be the case for long, as Newt Gingrich and a new generation of Republicans, who had grown up amidst and often opposed to the counterculture, came of age and made their political memories heard.
Reagan’s immediate successor, the first President Bush, was more eager to paint his opponents as “remnants of the 1960’s, the New Left, campus radicals grown old,” and as such unable to lead the nation out of the troubled cultural times in which it was presently mired. Moreover, since the late 1980’s when books like Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) placed the blame for “an ongoing drug problem, moral relativism, political correctness, multiculturalism, sexual promiscuity” and host of other contemporary “social pathologies” on the counterculture, these problems increasingly became seen as ethical, rather than economic.[28] This turn toward viewing the “central myth” and most negative lasting legacy of the Sixties as the idea “that the wretched excess was actually a quest for new values,” rather than simply a destruction of existing and proper ones, inspired increasing calls for a fundamental reversal of history and return to the an America which “before the mid 1960’s” had maintained “an explicit long term commitment to character” which included a strong “work ethic,” a notion of “honesty, right and wrong,” and a commitment to “not harming others.”[29] And though “he predicted a ten- to twelve- year battle against ‘liberal elites’ to put the country back on the right track,” Newt Gingrich promised that he and his conservative Congressional cohorts could accomplish this task provided the necessary electoral mandate.[30] Indeed, Gingrich went to great lengths to portray the 1994 midterm elections “as a referendum on the ‘Great Society, Counterculture, McGovernik’ legacy of the sixties,” a strategy which ultimately proved successful in elevating him to the first Republican House Speakership in decades.[31]
The presence in the White House of William Clinton, an admitted draft dodger widely suspected of using drugs in his 1960’s youth, allowed Congressional campaigners to attack the man himself as a symbol of his generation as well as the policies, views, and actions of the counterculture in the abstract. While campaigning against a sitting president in mid-term elections is an age old American political strategy, the labeling of both Clinton and his first lady Hillary as “counterculture McGoverniks,” standing in the way of and indeed opposed to the needed return to ante-Sixties normalcy, was only part of a grander strategy of victory through politicized remembrances. Gingrich argued that there were “profound things that went wrong with the Great Society and the Counterculture, and until we address them head on we’re going to have these problems” of poverty, drug abuse, and familial discord, to name but a few.[32] On the upside Gingrich asserted that we as American’s “simply need to erase the slate and start over,” communally agreeing that “the counterculture is a momentary aberration in American history that will be looked back upon as a quaint period of Bohemianism” luckily long past.[33] For Gingrich, the Congressional followers who swarmed into office on his coattails in 1994, and likely many of those Americans who put them there, our long national nightmare had not yet ended, as many of the demons who’d inhabited it all along had yet to be slain.
Histories II: Of Local Wars and Lysergic Acid
Everyone always points to Easy Rider (1969) as the cause of or solution to some cinematic historical problem or other. Its significant mainstream appeal is thought to have encouraged further economic exploitation of the counterculture by corporate America, a cardinal sin among those who viewed the capitalist ethic as one of the greatest extent problems in post-war America. Moreover, as the most popular of the so-called ‘acid flicks,’ prevalent during the period and often centering around motorcycles and sex with titles like The Trip and Alice in Acid Land (both 1967), it was often cited as encouraging experimentation with a drug that had become illegal in 1966.[34] Though the political ‘meaning’ of the film has been long debated, the explicit portrayal of frequent marijuana use expressly declared to be intellectually and emotionally stimulating suggest it as a primarily pro-drug film. But as influential as the film might have been, and as thought provoking as it might be regarding the persistent if often problematic question of ‘what is America,’ its appearance in mid-1969 was a comparatively minor blow for the counterculture in the wake of Nixon’s electoral victory. Indeed, Nixon’s silent majority had already expressed its opinions about drugs through mass media representations which portrayed the dire social, familial, and personal effects toward which experimentation with drugs might lead.
Images appearing in prime time in 1967, of a tripping teen on Dragnet first found with his head in the ground a la an ostrich for example, played into and upon news coverage of Haight-Ashbury, often editorially expounding upon the dangers inherent in such a free wheeling lifestyle.[35] Mass media coverage of the budding counterculture helped to spread it to the youth of the nation while simultaneously inspiring fears among many parents about the negative narcotic influences of the counterculture. While these press reports brought the existence of the counterculture to light for many, music was the mass medium which most worked to spread the critiques and values of the movement to a broader audiences. The ‘corrupting’ influence of psychedelic songs like Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’ (1967) also convinced many parents that in the war for their children’s futures the mass media would be a major adversary. These parental fears about the destructive influence of the drugs and the counterculture drugs upon their children and society would help fuel the ‘War on Drugs,’ which began “in name and spirit” during Richard Nixon’s 1968 quest for the white house, and would be the driving force behind drug policy in America in the succeeding decades.[36]
Having campaigned and won on a platform of ‘law and order’ which included prosecuting drug offenders be they heroin addicts on the streets of Harlem or hippies on the beaches of Malibu, Nixon now had to create and implement policies in line with his anti-narcotic rhetoric. Just as the media were overstating the nations collective drug problem by “melding the tiny ‘hard drug’ heroin threat with the widespread ‘soft drug’ marijuana craze,” these new policies, in addition to making it easier to arrest and detain drug suspects, called for swift prosecution regardless of the substance, rationalizing this approach with the new notion of marijuana as a gateway toward harder drugs.[37] While drug arrests climbed dramatically and government researchers expanded their efforts to catalogue the links between narcotics and crime, other approaches to the dealing with the drug problem were also attempted. Nixon aid John Ehrlichman called together a group of high level network executives, appealing to them to make use of their medium for the public good, which they did by placing “villainous pushers and drug-abusing teens” at the center of some of America’s most popular shows, including General Hospital and The Mod Squad, starting in the summer of 1970.[38] That was also the year the United States government made its first attempt at drug maintenance, creating a pilot program of methadone clinics in 20 cities nationwide.[39] Yet the idea of making a functional citizen out of an addict, which presupposed a certain societal acceptance of this addiction, would become largely untenable in the face of increasing drives to prevent drug experimentation before it ever started.
Even as policymakers were moving toward creating a consensus on the negative effects and appropriate societal responses to the drug problem, Hollywood media in the early 1970’s continued to construct complicated portrayals of an issue still thought to have multiple sides and a larger political relevance. Descendents of Easy Rider, despite decreasing box office intakes, continued to present the supposed ‘benefits’ of consciousness expansion, good tidings, and inner peace which users of drugs like LSD, by far the drug most associated with the counterculture at the time, and marijuana might enjoy.[40] So-called Blaxploitation cinema, generally set in the inner city, expressed a morally ambivalent relationship to harder drugs, often locating the blame for urban problems in an outside, white power structure that imports narcotics then monetarily feeds off the human misery and crime so effectively used by politicians like Nixon. In addition, films like Superfly (1972), whose hero is a black cocaine dealer who ultimately bests crooked Caucasian cops to escape the ghetto, unapologetically represent cocaine use as enjoyable and life enhancing while suggesting that the problems associated with hard drugs can be avoided provided that experimentation doesn’t become abuse. In contrast are movies such as Joe (1970), which demonstrates the dire effects of heroin addiction while also seeming to celebrate the possibilities of mind expansion for the middle aged conservatives whose blind hatred of the counterculture is at the center of the film’s cultural critique. Here drugs can be a problem, but need not necessarily be one, either for the individual or society at large. Yet for every problematic presentation of drugs produced in the early 1970’s, there exists an even more successful film like the French Connection, (1972) which clearly paints drugs as a problem and drug dealers as criminals on a grand international scale.
While the early 1970’s had witnessed growing concerns about babies being born and soldiers returning from Vietnam already addicted to drugs, the Watergate scandal and outraged national reaction had moved the drug issue off center stage by the middle the decade. Yet while Congress challenged the DEA to justify its huge annual budgets, questioning the utility of the domestic drug war while pointing toward newly begun Coast Guard interdiction of illicit supplies as a superior alternative, another previously unheard voice began calling for more action against drugs in defense of the next generation.[41] Suburban parents cum drug warriors, alarmed at the marijuana usage among ever younger groups of pre-teens that they saw around them, began to organize locally and implement ‘preventive’ measures (including instituting a curfew, conducting room searches, and even tapping phones) aimed at guarding their children against initial exposure to drugs.[42] These grass roots organizations were further outraged by the newly elected President Carter’s drive to decriminalize marijuana possession, which they saw as a form of de facto acceptance of the drug that was precisely a step in the wrong policy direction. These parents also sought to expand their appeal to liberal former counterculturalists, whom they perceived as likely having little problem with their own children smoking marijuana, by highlighting the paraphernalia, magazines, and other drug centered consumables on which corporations were beginning to make considerable profits. These local drives to keep kids off drugs and the tools of drug delivery off store shelves also caught the attention of drug policy experts, who began to see that parents, as “the only ones with a real stake in” the matter, would be the future drivers of drug policy.
One of the major trends against which these parents were reacting was increase an in apparently marijuana friendly films like those of Cheech and Chong, which gathered a cult following in the late 1970’s while portraying marijuana as a harmless and its users as non-threatening if often nonsensical boobs out only for a good time. While parents complained that this image downplayed the negative effects of marijuana, such an inherently apolitical representation of comic amusement also obscures the mind expanding potential which films appearing 10 years earlier had celebrated. In these films, even if there was little to be lost from using marijuana there was also nothing to gained by it, and thus no good reason why any rational actor would choose to do so. Alongside these representations of the extent late 1970’s ‘drug culture’ were images of another growing subset of society where drugs were becoming ever more common. Yet in early mass media depictions of the disco culture of the late 1970’s such as 1977’s Saturday Night Fever, one of the decade’s most popular films, cocaine was largely absent despite its ongoing real world assault on the nightclub scene. Even while cocaine use (the negative effects of which would only become manifest in the early 1980’s) gained widespread acceptance among a new upwardly mobile young generation, cinematic success still depended upon playing to a public which largely refused to recognize a drug problem among one of its wealthiest demographics. Yet as cocaine use spread to the inner cities and Ronald Reagan entered office with considerable support from grass roots parents organizations interested in again getting tough on drug criminals, it would soon become the nation’s number one concern.
On the heals of Jimmy Carter’s Drug Czar’s[43] resignation over allegations he illegally prescribed prescription narcotics, the drug issue again seemed the Republican Party’s to be had. Despite Carter’s last minute attempts to reverse his earlier policies and appear to ‘get tough’ on drugs in preparation for an electoral battle in 1980, local parents groups were being listened to by, and in turn lining up to support, concerned conservative candidates. Ronald Reagan’s sweeping elector victory insured that these groups would thereafter occupy the highest levels of drug policy formulation, an area formerly controlled by scientists of all political stripes.[44] Alongside this new development, which closed forever the debate over the uses or harms of illegal drugs ultimately culminating in the adoption of “Just Say No” as the nation’s official message, police and prosecutorial forces were expanded and given increased legal leeway to stop murders, robberies, and the drugs which were seen as precipitating these more costly criminal activities. These increased concerns with urban law enforcement and suburban children’s health prompted an even more significant shift in drug policy, away from costly treatment for hard drug addiction and toward preventing youthful experimentation with marijuana, increasingly pointed to as a gateway to harsher substances.[45] This principle of prevention, directed at pre-teens from South Central Los Angeles to rural Iowa, would become the fundamental tenet of American drug policy during the Reagan era, as parents and policy makers alike searched for novel ways to pass on their hegemonic message regarding drugs to the nation’s children.
Even while successive Cheech and Chong films continued to emerge periodically, albeit playing to smaller audiences each time, the 1980’s experienced a return to the types of explicit anti-narcotic legal dramas like The French Connection which had helped solidify an earlier mainstream’s opinions concerning drugs as crime. 1983’s gangster blockbuster Scarface, in which a Cuban immigrant rises to incredible heights through the cocaine trade only to suffer a climactic bullet ridden death at the heels of his inevitable collapse, highlights the underworld aspect of the drug, which can get one rich, high, or both depending upon what use is made of it. Yet it is this film’s subtle social awareness of the influx of cocaine into early 1980’s America and its cultural effects which mark it as representative of cinematic drug depictions of the period. This increased awareness of drug consumption abounding among all levels of society, even as crack among the inner cities was singled out as a powerful political symbol, is evident in movies throughout the decade. In films like 1989’s Drugstore Cowboy, in which modern highwaymen steal to fulfill their prescriptive habits, “drugs are no longer portrayed as evil, leering devils, nor is drug use automatically considered a sign of counter-culture rebellion.”[46] Instead the negative societal effects now politically associated with drugs, especially violent crime in pursuit one’s next high, are focused upon as the underlying reasons for mass condemnation. Yet films like Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) and The Breakfast Club (1985) which unapologetically showed teenagers drinking, having sex, and smoking marijuana, suggested to local parents groups that the media was working against their anti-drug children’s crusade, prompting calls for increased proactive on-screen involvement in shaping youthful opinions about drugs.
Even an as enforcement policies became increasingly focused upon cocaine and especially crack as the locus of the nation’s drug problem, Congressional subcommittees and executive agencies started looking to America’s media moguls for help in waging the preventative war, soon adopted by Nancy Reagan as her personal crusade, aimed at halting the youthful experimentation that was viewed as leading to later addiction. An April 1984 Congressional hearing before the Subcommittee on Drug and Alcohol Abuse on “examining the role which the media could play in helping to put an end to the ravaging effects which drugs have come to have on the young people of this nation” brought together network executives and interested experts to discuss how exactly to accomplish this task.[47] Interestingly, nowhere in the hearing is the effectiveness of preventative media questioned. Indeed, it is cited as “the most potent weapon available in the fight to stop drug use” given our living in “the media age” where “parents and teachers need help” and “kids need constant reinforcement to correct behavior.”[48] This mediated assault on popular opinion would have two prongs. First, as had already been enacted by the governing boards of certain networks, a set of standard practices requiring that “narcotic addiction be presented only as a destructive habit” and “the use of illegal drugs may not be encouraged nor shown as socially acceptable” was suggested to insure children do not receive mixed messages concerning drugs.[49] Second, as had recently been done in a Hong Kong program oft cited during this hearing as successful and worthy of emulation, explicitly anti-drug commercial advertisements depicting youths reacting harshly to and expressly rejecting drugs and their users were commissioned. In an attempt to counter the supposed powerful peer pressures prompting narcotic experimentation despite parental warnings, these ads were designed to present children with the idea “that not everybody does drugs, and not everybody has to do them” simply to fit in.[50] Moreover, the drug using youths depicted in these spots were uniformly rejected by their peers and presented as having severe personal problems as a result of their addictions. These advertisements would increase as the decade wore on, presenting an unmistakable media message to an entire generation of young Americans.
Successive pieces of anti-drug legislation passed during the decade vastly increased the size and budget of the DEA and related drug control agencies, instituted mandatory minimum sentences for many first time drug offenders, and encouraged police raids and prosecutorial use of RICO (the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) and other forms of civil seizure as a means of acquiring funds to defer the enormous costs of these efforts. Increased news media coverage of inner city crack houses, drug related crime statistics, and the unexpected deaths of famous individuals like Len Bias, all helped to fuel a consensus conception of drugs and drug crime as the single greatest threat facing a nation whose Cold War victory seemed increasingly certain as the decade wore on. In the midst of this national crisis, and scandal over the suggestion that many among the Reagan white house were themselves users of illicit substances, previously unused practices, including wide spread urine testing and the creation of ‘drug courier’ profiles, came to be increasingly relied upon as effective weapons of drug war.[51] Most significantly, with the ascension of William Bennett from Education Secretary under Reagan to Drug Czar under the newly elected George Bush, the conception of the relationship between drugs, society, and morality shifted among the highest levels of government policy making. Arguing in his first National Drug Control Strategy platform that “we must avoid the easy temptation to blame our troubles first on those current problems of social environment--- like poverty and racism,” Bennett instead highlighted what he saw as the personal immorality of the individual who chooses of his own free will to experiment with substances known to be both illegal and dangerous.[52] Arguing that existing policy perceptions of drugs as a health problem encouraged sympathy for the user, Bennett emphasized “the simple fact that drug use is wrong,” thus seeking to end forever the already constrained debate on this issue and achieve permanent consensus on the necessity of an all out war to rid drugs from the streets, backyards, and private homes of America forever.
The media campaign directed at preventing American youths from ever smoking that forbidden first joint took a number of forms, from anti-drug peer pressuring on popular teen dramas and in Ad Council sponsored spots running in prime after school viewing time to arcade video delivered messages that “winners don’t use drugs” and themed games like “Narc” in which the drug war is fought on the streets by a machine gun armed government agent named Max Force. From the late 1980’s through the mid 1990’s American youth were treated to an array of media made situations in which sympathetic teens were presented with tough choices about drugs. Some of these ad messages presented teens with a myriad of ways to say no while saving face, including the plausible excuses of being allergic or having a track meet the next day, while others offered kids encouragement from friends or popular television characters such as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, who suggested the powerful peer pressure response of “I’m not a chicken, you’re a turkey,” punctuated with a resonant locker slam. Alongside these government sponsored spots were ‘very special’ episodes of popular teen weeklies funded by networks eager to assist in the campaign. In one such early 1990’s episode of the long running High School dramedy “Saved by the Bell,” the gang is faced with the narcotic hypocrisy of a famous rocker in town to film an anti-drug ad with the local high schoolers. Despite his excuses and the incredible social prestige to be achieved by appearing on television, the group ultimately decides it cannot participate in the propagation of such a dire lie that might compromise the integrity of the anti-drug effort. The increasing popularity of video arcades over the 1980’s gave children’s crusaders another media weapon to utilize in their effort. Adopting the view that mass exposure leads to (perhaps semi-conscious) ideological acceptance nearly all video games produced from the late 1980’s through the mid-1990’s contained regularly rotating screens informing youths that “winners don’t use drugs.”
As the Bush and (to a somewhat lesser degree) Clinton years rolled on American teens were treated to fried egg representations of their brain on drugs while their parents were warned that the bad habits they maintained from their youthful Sixties exploits could be learned by their children. Though the number pot smoking parents who feared the drugs effect upon their own children was likely never very large, these spots played into persistent mainstream concerns about the children of ex-counterculturalists succumbing, perhaps with their parents knowledge and consent, to the dangers of drugs. Public worries over what types of messages individual parents were actually passing to their kids helped to spur Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) programs in schools across America. This explicit anti-narcotic education by law enforcement officers worked alongside tactically shocking television spots portraying strung out twenty-somethings eager to warn youngsters that “no one ever says ‘I wanna be a junkie when I grow up.” Overall these commercials cautioned children never to try that first marijuana cigarette, lest they fall hopelessly into the spiral of hard drug addiction. This barrage of anti-drug ideology likely contributed to a decrease in drug use by high school seniors, down to 30% from a late 1970’s high of almost 55%.[53] Though the frequency of television advertisements and specials condemning drugs decreased over the course of the 1990’s, as youthful use of marijuana increased again, they remained a persistent media presence throughout the decade shaping (the policy makers who pushed them hoped) popular opinion among youths about drugs, their peers, and their future.
During the decade of the 1990’s drug policy was as much a political football as it was an effective means of reducing crime and personal harm in America, as Congressional Republicans under the leadership of Newt Gingrich and his American contracted electoral mandate of 1994 challenged Clinton to get tough on drugs. Clinton’s generational position and countercultural markings as a ‘draft dodger’ made him an ideal target for accusations of youthful indiscretions involving illicit drugs, even more so after his admission that he smoked marijuana but “did not inhale.” Amidst these pressures, both drug policy and rhetoric under the Gingrich House and Clinton White House looked remarkably like it had during the Reagan-Bush years. The president pushed through legislation permitting the death penalty for drug kingpins (a policy long advocated by Gingrich), while vastly increasing the size and funding of the DEA and America’s prison system, and establishing night courts and three-strikes systems to bureaucratically handle the rising number of drug offenders.[54] Clinton also carried on the same notions of moral clarity regarding drugs that William Bennett had advocated as essential, stating that “all of us [need to] pass on the same clear and simple message to our children: Drugs are wrong, drugs are dangerous, and drugs can kill you.”[55] The later Clinton years also saw a revival in anti-drug media bombardment, with a new National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign following its target demographic to the Internet while continuing to create advertisements and promote television shows with preventative themes.
While little changed in the realm of drug policy and related political rhetoric, some Hollywood films were cutting against the mainstream narcotic grain, while others worked within and reshaped existing representational forms and messages. Drugs in contemporary society became an increasingly popular subject of American cinema during the decade of the 1990’s and into the next millenium, with storylines ranging from inner city crack warfare to personal struggles of abuse usually, but not always, leading to physical and psychological ruin. Films like New Jack City (1991), which ‘chronicled’ the entry and spread of crack into Gotham, and Boyz in the Hood (also 1991), which examined the culture surrounding and partly created by the drug, presented suburban audiences with tales of urban strife that reinforced existing politically potent images of drugs, race, crime, and city life. Films like 1995’s British produced but still widely viewed Trainspotting, which documents both the highs and lows of addict life, suggested that addiction was beatable if not easily in direct contrast the extent mainstream consensus and media portrayals, drawing ire from some circles for including such a mixed message regarding the dangers, and delights, of drugs. Another film cited as a 5th column in the drug war is 1998’s Half Baked, the most popular member of the small class of 1990’s pro-marijuana culture films which expressly depict illegal activities while straightforwardly stating that they “don’t do drugs” but “only smoke weed,” which is strictly separated from other illicit substances. Given the limits of discourse established during the 1980’s it should come as little surprise that even a film directly marketed at a marginalized sub-culture should still be unwilling to endorse the use of ‘actual’ drugs of any kind. And while some films like Traffic (2001) attempted to deal comprehensively and constructively with the complications of waging a drug war against our own children, they often resorted to old representational patterns of experimentation with soft drugs leading to life destroying addiction to harder ones echoing mainstream sentiments even as they subtly challenged existing policy. Yet other films did not suggest much of a way out from drugs, depicting a cycle of ever increasing abuse ultimately culminating in personal destruction. Requiem for a Dream (2000), classed by Entertainment Weekly as the best drug film in history, tells the interlocking stories of spiraling abuse by a mother (of prescription diet pills and her television) and her son (from booze, pot, and pills to desperately needed heroin), depicting familial, psychological, and physical ruin as the necessary consequences of involvement with drugs. Indeed, in many of these films, and likely in the mainstream public mind of the period, happy go lucky and seemingly harmless experimentation can quickly, unnoticeably, and irrevocably place one on the path toward personal ruin, the only definite protection from which is never to become initially involved.
Memories I: Thematic Case Studies in Historical Cinema
Claude Levi-Strauss, a founding father of structural anthropology, saw myths as the main avenue by which cultures seek to replicate themselves, passing essential values and cautionary tales to the next generation through frequent retelling of meaningful tales. Levi-Strauss argued that, in many instances, seemingly separate stories are in fact little more than variations on a certain significant cultural theme, working to drive home those lessons deemed most valuable through continued exposure. A universalist who believed that his analytic techniques could be applied equally validly across the globe, Levi-Strauss saw little structural difference between the fireside oral traditions of Native Americans, Teutonic folk tales, and Biblical stories, at least in the cultural functions which each practice served for its constituents. In modern American culture, where an ‘historical’ past has replaced a ‘mythic’ one as the locus most readily explored in search of guidance both moral and practical, and where television and popular cinema have come to serve as the primary vehicles of entertainment cum cultural storytelling, films about the American past are often those texts mostly deeply imbued with weighty cultural meaning. Indeed, the same sort of thematic repetition Levi-Strauss saw as functioning to reinforce the dominant values of a given culture is evident in 1990’s era historical cinematic representations of drugs and the Sixties counterculture, where clusters of similar stories uphold dominant messages concerning drug use and the American past.
As argued in the last chapter, 1990’s era cinematic tales about drug use within the contemporary culture tend to uphold extent mainstream conceptions concerning drugs. In a prime example of contemporary societal views strongly influencing mass public understandings of the past, 1990’s era historical cinematic representations of the Sixties often contain precisely these kinds of messages, simply shifting the temporal plane in which the happy go lucky potheads or increasingly desperate junkies exist back a generation. In many cases this leads to cinematic depictions of all experimentation leading inevitably down a long road of personal ruin, often from the highs of late Sixties marijuana smoking to the lows of early Eighties cocaine addiction. Moreover, those historical films which portray drugs as precipitating personal decay also function to condemn the counterculture and its values, which are cited as permitting and even promoting such consequentially dire decisions. Conversely, films which articulate the decidedly less popular notion that marijuana is not really a drug tend to portray the counterculture and the worldviews it encompassed in a much more positive light. These types of historical tales which closely correspond to contemporary on-screen constructions concerning narcotics form two of the three major thematic groups of 1990’s era historical cinematic representations of drugs and the counterculture. There also exists a third representational subtype which makes unique use of the historical character of the subject matter to present a powerful if sometimes subtle political message about drugs.
This final category of historical cinematic representation of drugs and the Sixties presents its message through two main means. Firstly, in these films drugs are largely written out of the history in which they would likely have appeared. Images and situations which were often directly connected to drug use in the Sixties era itself, be they rock and roll concert tours or psychedelic hotspots, are often depicted as ‘sober’ scenes in these cinema. These exclusions and separations make possible a romanticization of certain (generally ‘entertaining’ rather than politically or culturally oppositional) aspects of the countercultural past without encouraging the sorts of narcotic behavior which occurred, and were accepted by many at the time, but that have come to be condemned by the contemporary cultural mainstream. Additionally, when drugs do appear or are mentioned in these films they are quickly and often explicitly condemned by the ‘heroic’ characters, with whose views the audience is intended to identify and sympathize. Together these representational strategies function to create a past in which few individuals used drugs, those who did generally suffered for it, and society as a whole always knew better than the misguided few choosing to use and condemned them accordingly.
The outright depiction of drug use in these films might at first suggest that the consuming culture is not nearly so anti-narcotic as has been suggested. Indeed, countless Americans use illegal drugs while many others have experimented over the course of their lives. To them these drug depictions may bring back pleasant memories, while for non-users it can have an equally enthralling if perverse appeal. Yet in nearly all Hollywood historical representations of the recent past, enjoyable experiences on drugs are, by the end of the film, fundamentally recontextualized within a moral framework demonstrating the high price of these high times. This layering of possible interpretations also enables many of these films to be successfully sold to multiple segments of a heterogeneous consuming public. While some may be pulled in by the simple portrayal of drug use, those initially put off by such a display can find an ultimate moral more in line with their anti-narcotic expectations. Yet filmmakers seeking a diverse audience need always remain cautious in their representations of past good times on drugs, as the overwhelming majority of mainstream America, a slumbering giant of profound potential cinematic success, will not choose to view an apparently ‘pro-drug’ film.
The remainder of this chapter further explores these thematic types through close readings of individual case studies of representational texts from each category. The films being examined are not meant to be taken as an exhaustive sample of the myriad of 1990’s era historical cinematic representations of the recent past, one of the more popular genres of contemporary Hollywood cinema. Indeed, it is precisely because a full and complete synthesis cannot be contained within the scope of this inquiry that the case study method is here employed. At the same time the choice of specific mythic texts to be examined is in no way arbitrary, but based upon a careful cross examination of the illustrative character of each for its thematic type and the larger cultural position and comparative popularity of each film. These texts and thematic categories they represent, which will be examined beginning with thick descriptions followed by analytic conclusions, are Blow, representing stories of moral decay brought about by dealings with drugs, Dazed and Confused, indicative of those tales which demarcate marijuana as separate and socially acceptable, and Almost Famous, reflective of remembrances of the past which write out most drug use while carefully condemning that which remains.
---Blow: Bricks of Cocaine and Good Intentions---
Appearing nationwide in the spring of 2001, Blow directed by Ted Demme and based upon the true life story of George Jung, the American connection to the Medellin cocaine cartel, played by Johnny Depp, grossed over fifty million dollars domestically (albeit during an era when 100 million dollar plus intakes are not uncommon) while creating a mild media stir through its sometimes seemingly sympathetic portrayal of Jung and drugs in general. The critical reviews themselves indicate certain underlying contemporary cultural reasons why this film probably ought not have been too successful. Two overriding critiques appearing in these reviews[56] centered around the notions that Jung was ultimately portrayed as a sympathetic or tragic character, despite his repeated illegal actions, and that drugs and their effects were shown in a generally positive light. Indeed, the very fact that the films subject matter dealt so extensively and explicitly with drugs doubtless turned off innumerable potential viewers whose perceptions of the film were predicated on previews laden with drug imagery, while word of mouth suggesting that the film’s anti-hero was sympathetically treated as more than a justly caught and convicted drug kingpin likely kept others out of theatres. Yet while this film explicitly condemn drug use at every turn it is fundamentally a narrative of personal degeneration which ultimately recontextualizes all at-first apparently positive depictions of drugs as negative and indeed precipitating the collapse chronicled on-screen.
The tale begins in 1950’s Boston, where we are introduced to young George and the difficult family life that lies at the root of much of Jung’s lifelong and ultimately self-destructive motivations. Young George idolizes his father, who is portrayed as a hard worker whose first thoughts are always of the wife and son he loves desperately. Indeed, Jung’s father’s love persists in spite of repeated abandonments by his wife, who cares only about herself and the material possessions her husband’s shrinking income is unable to provide.[57] Despite his father’s attempts to instill in him the idea that “money isn’t real, it doesn’t matter,”[58] young George places the blame for his rocky home life squarely on the family’s financial straits, telling his father that “I don’t ever want to be poor.” The response he receives, “then you never will” succinctly foreshadows the profitable if problematic career he will eventually undertake. This career begins on the beaches of Southern California in 1968, where a twenty-year old Jung and his best friend Tuna have moved in search of greener pastures. In order to finance a life of luxury in this land portrayed, and unambiguously described by Jung himself, as a paradise populated by beautiful women (all stewardesses) where “everyone was getting stoned,” George and Tuna get connected into the proper channels and begin selling marijuana.
Immersed in a counterculture where recreational drugs were rampant, accepted, and potentially quite lucrative, Jung is unaware that he will never again be living a legal lifestyle. Indeed, they quickly become “kings of the beach” living “perfect” lives in George’s words and making money hand over fist, especially after using the baggage privileges of Jung’s stewardess girlfriend Barbara to smuggle high quality marijuana to the pot deprived college campuses of the Boston area. Despite their successes Jung is driven to seek ever greater profits, soon importing large quantities by plane directly from Mexico (while always staying loyal to his partners, a value instilled by his father) which results in his first arrest and conviction. In one of the few explicit condemnations of drugs in the film, the female sentencing judge responds to George’s questioning of what he really did wrong by stating that “the line you crossed was real and the plants you brought were illegal” and giving him five years, which he cannot serve because of Barbara’s imminent death due to cancer. Following her death, Jung returns home to see his family only to be arrested following his mother’s calling the authorities to arrest the son whose actions had shamed her. George’s experiences in prison, where he “went in with a bachelors of marijuana” only to room with a Columbian named Diego and come “out with a doctorate in cocaine” set the stage for the rest of his rise and fall.
Following his release in 1976 George journeys to Columbia to meet his new connections and begin business. Forced to smuggle and then sell cocaine himself, George reestablishes his Southern California connections and proceeds to move 15 kilos of cocaine in 36 hours, gaining him fame and respect among the cartel and especially its leader the infamous Pablo Escobar. The cartel is portrayed as brutal and amoral if businesslike and family-oriented, but George is eager to increase importation schedules and solidify his position within the organization. The first goal is quickly accomplished, as the audience is informed that 85% of the cocaine consumed in the United States during the late 1970’s and early 1980’s was smuggled in under George’s watch. The second is fulfilled when George meets and marries a Columbian named Murtha, mediating his status as a gringo outsider and becoming a part of the family. Despite George’s idyllic description of this period as “perfect” one during which “we were young, rich, in love and nothing could stop us,” the similarities between Murtha and Jung’s mother (brought out during a meeting between them in which both focus on the material splendor of the young couple’s new home) as well as her and her husband’s increasing cocaine consumption suggests clouds on the horizon.
Following a heated confrontation with Diego over his continued refusal to reveal his SoCal connection, which ultimately results in Jung’s being shot by drug buyers, George discloses the name and finally introduces his longtime partners. This act of trust soon results in Jung being cut out of the deal entirely by Diego, who informs him that “its just business, its not personal” before having him beaten and thrown out of his new island compound. With 60 million in the bank, however, George feels financially secure as he does a line of cocaine before taking his wife to have her baby. The dual experiences of his daughters birth and his cocaine fueled fainting (after which a doctor informs him that, while he has no moral stake in the matter, he doesn’t want to see Jung die of an overdose with a baby just arrived) George changes his life, deciding to “go home and clean up my act and become “sober as a judge” in order to “be a good father, like my old man was to me.” It is against this goal of a new and totally clean life devoted to fatherhood that Jung’s subsequent downfall must be read, as his personal failings can now negatively impact something he prizes even above his own successes.
While George manages to stay clean both personally and professionally, his wife still likes to party, and plans a huge reunion bash complete with a cocaine buffet for his 38th birthday. An FBI raid there results in his arrest and initial separation from his daughter, who cries as she is taken away by an officer. After getting his daughter out of protective custody, George skips bail and becomes a fugitive, visiting home only to be told by his mother that “I don’t have a son,” and discovering that his immense assets have been seized by the Panamanian government leaving him with nothing. This lack of material wealth is the basis for increasingly irrational acts and outbursts on the part of Murtha which mirror scenes from Jung’s youth and soon directly cause his arrest and incarceration for three years. During a visit just prior to his release Murtha tells George that she wants a divorce, while his daughter issues the particularly biting remark that “I thought you couldn’t live without your heart” (a statement Jung had made just prior to his arrest) before hanging up and symbolically breaking her connection with him. Yet following his release and in spite of her initial rejections of him George works tirelessly to reconstitute the relationship with his daughter, a goal he’d focused upon “every single day in the joint.” Yet despite his daughter’s acceptance of Jung’s return to her life, Murtha threatens to curtail these interactions unless he can offer them monetary support. With the goal of finally becoming a full fledged father again, George makes some calls and sets up a one time drug deal meant to clear enough cash to allow them to start life anew once again. Promising his daughter to meet her two days later to travel to California (where she’d always wanted to go), Jung need only complete the deal which appears at first to proceed without a hitch. Yet just at this moment of apparent success, the audience (and soon after George himself) discovers that his old friends have betrayed him and set him up for a drug bust that will send him to prison for decades. This betrayal doesn’t bother him, a Jung voiceover informs us, nor does the prison term he is facing. Instead, a repentant George bemoans the broken promise that will leave his daughter waiting for a father firmly locked away. Trapped in prison he also misses his own father’s dying days, able only to record a message telling the old man that he finally understood what he’d tried to teach him years before about the meaninglessness of money. The film concludes which an imagined visit between decaying father and now grown daughter, during which he apologizes and his forgiven. Yet, as the afterthoughts appearing textually on screen inform the audience, his daughter has in fact never come to visit him since his latest incarceration, cementing his suffering as all the more tragic even as it remains the result of his own conscious choices.
While the underlying motivations behind George’s illegal actions may lie in a ‘greed’ that is itself based upon complicated familial problems in his youth, it is his involvement with drugs, both as a trafficker and consumer, which lead to his personal downfall represented by his broken promise to a, consequentially, embittered daughter. This film contains many implicit messages regarding the ‘process’ of drug related decline that reflect the dominant mainstream conceptions and legitimated messages of the period of its production. The function of marijuana as a gateway drug leading more or less inevitably to harder habits, both on an individual and a societal level, is suggested by George’s own personal history of prison post-graduate education and the American cultural ‘historical’ progression from pot smoking 1960’s beach bums to ruthless work hard play hard 1980’s cokehead capitalists here depicted. Yet as much money as George made, and as many times as he comments forebodingly that life is perfect, his addictions to money, drugs, and fun can have only one ultimate conclusion, the loss of everything he holds dear. Having at one time maintained an entire apartment overfilled with American currency, George cannot retain even enough money to keep hold of the daughter that he, far too late in the game, now prizes above all else. Indeed, in another example of 1990’s era societal messages about drugs, George’s final defeat was brought about by the very fact that, once involved on such a deep level, it proved impossible for him to ever escape the drugs by which he’d made his name, fortune, and mark upon society. Once he’d smoked that first joint, and realized the easy money to be had by helping others do so, George stepped onto a path of spiraling addiction, to money and power if not cocaine itself, that could never really be escaped, regardless of the wife and children who would inevitably suffer from his criminal pursuits. All the good times in George’s life made possible, in one way or another, by drugs are really just examples of ‘evil fun’ that seems pleasant and consequence free but itself leads to the loss of those things in life which really matter, family, health, and freedom.
---Dazed and Confused: ‘Cult’ Status and the Limits of Discourse---
Grossing less than 8 million dollars domestically during its theatrical run in the fall of 1993, and niche marketed with the expressly drug culture friendly lines of "See it with a Bud" and (in the wake of the Clinton 'inhaling' scandal) "finally, a movie for everyone who DID inhale," Dazed and Confused, directed by Richard Linklater and starring an ensemble cast of young actors, exemplifies the thematic category of 1990’s historical cinema which accept and even promote marijuana usage and countercultural critiques and values, while demarcating that substance as a harmless faux-narcotic. Even more than Blow, low box office numbers for this film would seem to be expected, given its positive portrayal of actions, viewpoints, and consequences out of line with mainstream contemporary conceptions of drugs. Yet it’s ‘cult’ status among the youth culture of the 1990’s (at whom it was originally directed and among whom views concerning drugs and especially marijuana are often decidedly more liberal) as well as its considerable popularity and staying power among home video viewers make it by far the most popular of this most marginal of the three representational categories. Moreover, as is the case with many historical cinematic depictions of the recent past, this film can best be understood as a coming of age story in which the characters struggle to balance the concerns of society and self, in the process playing out larger cultural conflicts concerning conformity and individualism. Decidedly unpopular among many, this film nonetheless remains a strong cross current cutting against the contemporary mainstream while simultaneously demonstrating some of the limits of legitimate discourse on the subjects of drugs and the counterculture in post-Reagan America.
From the opening shot, which shows a joint being rolled in a high school parking lot, Dazed and Confused tells its coming of age tale in a haze of marijuana smoke. Set on “the last day of school” in 1976, this film consciously plays into a number of late 20th century American cultural meta-narratives while tracing the day and long night of several different ‘types’ of high school seniors and two entering freshman. Everything revolves around the rising senior starting quarterback Randall “Pink” Floyd, who is shown planning with his stoner friends and then discussing with his nerd friends the huge party scheduled for that night. These nerds watch as other students discuss “pointless nostalgia,” from their mediated youth, such as Gilligan’s Island, which subsequently prompts one female student to advance a biting feminist critique of the show as male fantasy. Meanwhile Randall is handed a form that he is expected to sign pledging not to engage in any alcohol or drug consumption or other questionable behavior “which might jeopardize everything we’ve worked for as a team.” One of his nerd friends calls this “Neo-McCarthyite,” while another asks (in only the first example of the use of clever cinematic historical hindsight) whether “drug tests will be next.” These dual critiques of popular media and societal expectation first point to the ‘countercultural sensibilities’ of Randall and his diverse crowd, suggesting a particular political lens through which to read the central narrative conflict of Randall’s decision whether or not to sign his pledge form. Alongside the coming of age rituals and subtle critiques of recent American culture, this story of struggle between society and the individual, over the very political question of whether one “voluntarily promises” not to drink or smoke marijuana, occupies much of the rest of the film’s attention.
Next we see the rising Seniors preparing their initiation paddles for use on the rears of rising frosh, then their explicit threat to one named Mitch and his friends. Unable to get out of class because their teacher Mr. Payne is unsympathetic, recalling his being told in Vietnam that only half his platoon would make it back alive, the freshman wait until the last bell. Meanwhile Randall is confronted by his coaches with the pledge sheet, an experience which makes him decide to throw it away, he thinks for good, only to have it picked up by one of his football friends. Returning to his last class, his teacher regales them with tales of “the 1968 Democratic convention” as “probably the most bitchin time I ever had,” while extorting them over the final bell to remember that the coming “bicentennial bruhaha” is really a celebration of “slaveowning aristocratic white males who didn’t want to pay their taxes.” Escaping to the tune of “school’s out for the summer,” the male seniors chase down several freshmen (while missing out on those they most sought) while the females collect willing followers to be put through the ritualistic wringer. The senior girls wear sweatshirts indicating their superior social position while subjecting the freshman to verbal abuse and food coverage, while the nerds watch and discuss “the utter stupidity of these initiation rituals.” Yet thus initiated and taken through the car wash, one of these female freshman is invited out that night to engage in other coming of age processes. Following the parental busting of the first party plans, Mitch and his friends go to the local ball field to catch and paddle Mitch, who strikes out the last batter despite the ordeal he must subsequently undergo. Reminded of the high expectations of the community by an old man who is “depending on you boys,” Randall is sympathetic to the paddled Mitch, offering him a ride home, remembrances of his own past experiences, advice on how to handle the situation, and invitation out later that night.
Seemingly everyone is preparing to go out as sundown comes, as shots of classic fifties cars cruising the streets and settling into drive in diners call to mind images American Graffiti¸ the 1973 memorial of Kennedy California which had in fact inspired much of the very nostalgia for fifties culture that this 1993 remembrance of the mid-1970’s here depicts. In one car, one of the nerds tells how he is no longer certain of his earlier plans to be “an ACLU lawyer and help people,” in another of the films subtle suggestions of the coming cultural changes of the Eighties. In another, Mitch is picked up by Randall and one of his older friends (who will later pick up the female nerd as part of her own coming of age), who introduce him to the sophomore girl he will later make out with and then get him high for the first time, inducting him into their high school crowd and lifestyle. Meanwhile, Mitch’s friends are caught and paddled by several seniors upon leaving their “last junior high party,” despite being symbolically told they cannot return, prompting Mitch to plan revenge even as he goes prank pulling with those seniors he’d now befriended. This, to them, innocent if destructive fun results in their being chased down and held at gunpoint by a man who tells them “that tampering with mailboxes is a federal offense,” a dire situation from which they barely escape. Back at the local hangout a relieved Mitch is further ingratiated into the older crowd, buying beer successfully for, and receiving advice on women, from Randall’s football friends, before winning even more credibility by pranking the hated senior who’d beaten him and his friends. The film then moves to its final major locale, as a new “beer bust at the Moontower” is planned, funded, publicized to all the relevant parties, and begun.
Upon arriving at the party, one of the nerds backs down from a fight prompted by his joking observation that “somebody is toking some reefer,” something he quickly and believably claims to “of course not” care about. Meanwhile Randall is again encouraged by his teammates to sign the pledge form while being reminded that his “other crowd” of stoner friends who are encouraging his rebellion doesn’t care about football or the team. This prompts Randall himself to question whether he still cares about these things, concluding that if he does choose “to play ball next season it’ll be on my terms.” His stoner friends, currently engaging in their most favored activity, begin to spin a web of countercultural history cum paranoia centering around the involvements and actions of the founding generation two centuries earlier. Stating that not only was George Washington “in a cult, and the cult was into aliens” but that he grew fields of marijuana, one stoner goes so far as to suggest that “the whole country was getting high back then” and that Washington himself liked to partake daily. This example of radical revisionism gone to far from plausibly credible beginnings concludes with a meditation on the dollar bill not dissimilar from one that would later appear in the similarly cult classical Half Baked. Meanwhile the nerd girl advances her “every other decade theory” hoping that since “the fifties were boring, the sixties rocked” and “the seventies obviously suck” that “the eighties will be radical” and “it can’t get any worse.” Yet for this group of liberal wannabe Sixties idealists, the onslaught of Eighties conservatism cannot but be viewed as worse, an interesting cinematic look back on the fate of this generation from two decades in the future. Another nerd worries about the future psychological damage he might suffer from backing down and decides to instigate a fight with his earlier adversary, an act which results in his total defeat and severe bruising. Yet with the keg kicked and the long night almost over, worries about the future take a back seat to the final playing out of Randall’s internal conflict over societal expectations.
Surrounded by his best friends composing a “joint subcommittee on the fifty yard line” of his High School field, Randall mocks the football culture which he has been taught for so many years, passing the keys to get more wrapping papers with the call of “marijuana on one, reefer on two.” His friend returns with another paper, the pledge form which Randall says he’s now been handed three times in one day and cannot seem to escape. He states that he’ll probably end up signing it but simply doesn’t want to give in so easily, but is advised by his older friend that he should stand his ground since there will always be “some choice their gonna try to make for you,” especially as he gets older. His girlfriend points out that his football fame has made him a “king of the school” and that he shouldn’t “act all oppressed” simply because he is forced to sign one form. These ideas suggest, in the vein of other opinions on the origins of Sixties youth protest, that it is in fact those comparatively spoiled youths who are disenchanted and unfulfilled by the material plenty around them that become the most rebellious. Indeed, Randall’s rebellion comes to fruition after they are caught for trespassing by the police and his head coach arrives and challenges him to sign the form and reestablish his “priorities.” Angered by his coaches verbal condemnations of his friends, Randall protests that he “doesn’t even know them” and can’t begin to comment on their behavior, which draws the angered response that “no one is paying you to think” and that he should “just sign” the form. Presented with a clear picture of his options Randall cements his countercultural allegiances and chooses his personal authenticity over the demands of society by responding that he “may play ball next year” but that he “will never sign” the pledge.
With the ultimate conclusion of the main narrative conflict being that the integrity of the individual outweighs the needs of society, alongside frequent depictions of positive consequence free marijuana use and biting critiques of the dominant culture, this film may at first seem to be an almost total affirmation of countercultural values. And it is indeed just that. Yet its place within the larger consumptive cultural context and its treatment of drugs in general suggest that it is in many ways expressly non-representative of much of the contemporary cultural mainstream. Firstly, the film’s place as a “cult classic” by definition suggests that its textual content appeals to but a small segment of the population. While this cult status is largely a result of the film’s drug friendly niche marketing orientation, the radical political and cultural critiques contained within it are necessarily also pushed outside the mainstream by their placement alongside and often direct connection with these illicit drug depictions. Yet despite its marginalization, the film is largely constrained in the way it represents drug use, depicting heroic amounts of marijuana consumption while never even mentioning other drugs, especially LSD, associated with the Sixties counterculture. Indeed, on this issue the film conforms to the extent if marginalized cultural viewpoint that marijuana is not a drug, thus enabling the depiction of its frequent and consequence free usage without adopting a “pro-drug” position which by the early 1990’s was wholly outside the realm of legitimate political discourse. As such it is an interesting commentary on the cultural changes undergone in America since the mid-1970’s, when society at large viewed marijuana as largely harmless in explicit contrast to heroin and other hard drugs, in a film created as a conscious critique of growing up amidst the legacy of the Sixties.
---Almost Famous: Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll as Metaphor---
A box office flop unable to recoup but half of its estimated 60 million dollar shooting budget, Almost Famous (2000) still managed to win numerous awards including a Golden Globe for Best Picture, and an Oscar for writer/director Cameron Crowe’s autobiographic screenplay about his youthful stint on tour with ‘Sweetwater’ as a rock and roll writer. This critical buzz encouraged considerable video viewing, however, as the film remained within the top ten rental receipts for months, again suggesting that theatrical receipts cannot always tell the full story of a film’s cultural impact. A look back at the very heart of early 1970’s soon to be ‘classic’ rock and roll culture, a central constituent of the Sixties counterculture especially from the perspective of the mainstream, this film deals metaphorically with the legacy of the Sixties while weaving a narrative in which drug use is downplayed and drugs in general are explicitly condemned by the films leading positive role models and shown as having severely negative consequences. Throughout Almost Famous rock and roll as a concept, called dead and accused of selling out by Lester Bangs the critic who serves as mentor for the films main character, William Miller, stands in for a counterculture that was similarly seen as but a shell of its former self by the late Nixon years. In the same early meeting Bangs tells William that he is a “smart kid” for staying drug free, commenting that in the days (of the mid 1960’s?) when rock was still alive and kicking he used to take speed “just to write” about it, and put out his ideas to the world. But the death of the movement’s pure drive for new knowledge also killed the only legitimate reason to experiment with illicit drugs, leaving only a legacy of blind and destructive hedonism which threatens to engulf even those youths who have been previously warned that they can (as the film’s tagline suggests) “experience it” and “enjoy it” so long as they “just don’t fall for it.” What is left is a film that writes out a good bit of narcotic history while overtly showing the negative consequences and often extreme if underlying psychological causes of their use.
Following a familiar pattern of historic cinematic countercultural depictions, the narrative begins in San Diego in 1969 with a peek at the home life of the young William Miller. His mother, initially painted as wise if a bit overbearing, comes into immediate conflict with his older sister when the latter returns from home after having been out drinking, “kissing boys,” and generally resisting her mother’s strict personal regulations. Moreover, she makes her views on drugs explicitly known when she confiscates the Simon and Garfunkel album her daughter was trying to smuggle home and responds to protestations of it being art with the statement that “it’s the poetry of drugs and promiscuous sex.” She is also unconcerned that Williams peers refer to him as a narc, asking “what’s wrong with that” when informed by her daughter that he was being mocked due to his age and small stature. Indeed, at this point both he and the audience learn that he is but eleven years old, having been accelerated by his well meaning mother, a fact which she says will enable him to “follow his dreams” before pursuing a profession. These dreams are directed and encouraged by his sister, who at eighteen chooses to leave her mother’s restrictive roof with an airing of ‘America” as explanation and become a stewardess in San Francisco, leaving her forbidden record collection to her brother with instructions for optimum enlightenment. Over a montage of foreshadowed tidbits set to “The Who’s” Tommy, to which William was listening “with a candle lit” in order to see his “entire future” as per her suggestion, the film next flashes forward four years to 1973 and a now 15 year old William about to graduate high school.
It is his initial meeting with his critical idol Lester Bangs, who assigns him his first paying piece despite his earlier suggestion that real rock was already over, that sets him on the road for a very different and from his perspective far more interesting senior spring. He warns his young devotee, however, that “these people are not your friends” despite the fact that they would offer him money, drugs, women, and fun, but instead only care about being positively represented and recouping the monetary benefits of critical praise and popular fame. Arriving at the rock concert where he will research this first story, his mother comments on the seemingly directionless mass of youth in attendance as “an entire generation of Cinderellas” for which “no slipper is coming,” while loudly extolling him to “don’t take drugs,” prompting mockery from the crowd alongside his willing assent. Unable to gain backstage admittance despite his journalistic credentials William meets several “groupies” led by Penny Lane, who informs him that they are in fact “Band Aids” there “to inspire the music.” Yet William is only able to gain entry after ingratiating himself to ‘Stillwater,’ who call him “the enemy, a rock journalist” but respond well to his positive evaluation of their own progression as artists. Once inside William bonds further with the band and their muses, while the seeds are sown for a cinema-long love triangle among William, Penny, and Russell, the bands lead guitarist and most talented member who further cements the film’s central metaphor when he tells the young reporter that “rock and roll is a lifestyle and a way of thinking.” He offers to further introduce William to that way of life at an LA party the next week.
On the way to the party Penny tells him of her plan to go to live in Morrocco for a year as soon as she’s finished with Russell, her “last project” which she refuses to take too seriously lest she get hurt, and invites William along. Yet once he arrives at the party this brief glimpse of future possibility is destroyed when Penny devotes her full attention to Russell while one of her friends tells William that he was only her “excuse for coming here” rather than her real reason. He plans to more or less forget about Penny and the band until the editor of Rolling Stone Magazine calls and offers him 1000 dollars for a 3000 word story on Stillwater, mistaking him for a college journalism student and telling him to join the band on the road. With his mother’s reluctant assent and Lester Bangs’ reminder not to sell out his integrity, William joins the tour and immediately attempts to interview Russell but is literally shut out of his room because of Penny. Checking into his hotel room, William receives a message from his mother who had “freaked out” the desk clerk stating simply “don’t take drugs,” an opportunity he will in fact never avail himself of during the entire tour despite, one must assume, numerous though not depicted chances. Soon after, Russell finally begins talking to William, asking initially to “just make us look cool” but then taking a liking to the kid and starting “to tell secrets to the one guy you don’t tell secrets to,” most especially that he has now passed the rest of the group musically, a source of tension throughout the remainder of the film. This tension soon arises again when a batch of t-shirts with only his face highlighted create cause for suspicion, prompting Russell to ask if they “didn’t all get into this to avoid responsibility.” Indeed, while Russell would prefer to stay true to his music rather than worry about the demands of society, his band mates crave the fame and ever-larger piles of money associated with it. Frustrated, Russell storms out in search of “real things,” taking William along with him to a party of “regular people,” in his quest for authenticity.
While at the party, after having deep interpersonal moments with the party thrower in which he waxes poetic on the fact that he and his stuff are “real,” Russell takes several cups of acid laced OJ to escape from his problems. The effects are made readily apparent as the next scene finds Russell screaming “I am a Golden God” from the rooftop, threatening to jump, and asking to be remembered for the last words “I’m on drugs.” Russell jumps into the pool but lives, only to awake the next morning in a state of mental and physical shock and wanting to remain there with his new friends. His manager manages to persuade the reluctant guitarist to rejoin the band for the remainder of the tour, promising they can leave after, just as Russell suffers an attack of paranoia and assaults William. Finally recovering from his bad trip and once again on the tour bus, Russell joins the band, and their aids and entourage for a rendition of “Tiny Dancer” which symbolically reconnects him into the group he’d used powerful drugs in order to escape only to be driven even further away (if but temporarily) from them through his illicit experiences. In the midst of this communal celebration William tells Penny that he must return home, only to be told “you are home.” Yet as William becomes more a part of the party and emotionally closer to Russell and his bandmates, it becomes increasingly hard for him to be professionally productive and to figure out the nature of his relationship with Penny.
While he attempts to work on the story, fearful of the oversight which will come the next morning in the form of an editorial phone call, Penny comes into William’s bathroom study which unnerves him because he’d assumed “we’d hang out first, and then I’d see you pee.” But before they can discuss their relationship, three other band aids burst in with plans of deflowering the young William, a process he cannot seem to resist but which Penny plaintively declines to participate in. While he manages to reassure Rolling Stone that the story is coming along progressively by repeating his mentor’s advice, William is frustrated by his continued inability to interview Russell alone and the low place he envisions occupying in the hearts and minds of the girls, most especially Penny. In one of the films more interesting metaphoric sequences, a phone call from William’s increasingly concerned mother to Russell, in which she claims to know about the “Valhalla of decadence” occurring on tour and questions whether Russell values law only to conclude that he could still “become a person of substance,” serves as a stand in for mainstream parental concerns about the negative influences of the counterculture which might corrupt their children. This conversation unnerves Russell, but the band has bigger problems as a new manager takes over, adding more dates and a new mode of (air) travel in order to recoup some of the money spent while on tour. As the plane moves over and away from the friendly confines of the tour bus, the film shifts to show the dark denouement of their hard lifestyle.
While searching for Russell, William walks in unexpectedly on the “managers poker game,” where Stillwater’s representatives are in the process of making a side bet in which the winner will receive “the famous Band Aids” in return for “Fifty bucks and a case of Heineken.” Right after the completion of this sale, they pass around a bong and comment on how they “know its good stuff” because “its from [David] Crosby,” long notorious for his drug habits. The juxtaposition of this action, understood and condemned as wrong immediately by William even as Russell attempts to explain it away as necessary and unproblematic, with the most explicit depiction of drug consumption in the film again suggests that use may have only harmful repercussions. This moral message is strongly reconfirmed by the reaction of Penny upon ultimately realizing her rejection. Even after William had told her of what had happened, Penny still choose to follow the band to New York, where Russell was to meet his girlfriend, in the naïve romantic hope that “he wants me there.” Asked to stay away from Russell by his manager once in the city, Penny flees back to her hotel, where William, close on her heels, finds her overdosed on the qualudes left by the last “of her old good time friends,” now all departed. Before the doctor arrives to pump her stomach in one of the most gruesome and drug deterrent scenes in the film, William declares his feelings for her knowing that she won’t remember, while she ponders why Russell “doesn’t love me.” Surviving this ordeal, Penny decides to return to San Diego and make plans for a Morroccan identity reinvention, but not before disclosing the real name (Lady Goodman) she’d earlier sworn never to reveal to William. Angered at Russell and the band for prompting Penny’s near fatal actions, and facing a deadline close at hand, William boards the tour plane for one final wild ride.
The ride becomes bumpy almost immediately, which frightens several passengers even as Russell attempts to joke about the prospect of a fiery death by singing “Peggy Sue.” Yet as it becomes patently obvious that they might indeed crash, the band members make various declarations to each other about long unspoken feelings, former romantic affairs, and past indiscrepencies, with William finally divulging how “Penny almost died last night while you were out partying with Bob Dylan” in celebration of their being on the cover of Rolling Stone. Accusing them all of having “used her and then [thrown] her away,” William makes known his disgust at their actions and aspects of their lifestyle, just as the plane manages to right itself for a field landing. Emerging symbolically from a white tunnel, his long turbulent journey at an end, William vomits before being told by Russell to “write what you want” and parting ways. He does indeed write his own story of events, beginning with final plane ride with the group thinking they were “all about to die” and highlighting questionable (and often forgotten) activities like Russell’s LSD fueled self aggrandizement, only to have the band deny most of it and the magazine consequentially refuse to publish the story, downgrading him as “just some fan.” This total defeat sends William back home and directly to his bed, his preferred destination despite his sister’s offer to take him “any where in the world.” He is awoken by a repentent Russell, sent to William’s home by Penny whom he’d phoned in order to come visit and “say all the things” they “never got to say,” who tells William to call this girl “who really cares about you.” He also informs the young writer that he called Rolling Stone, admitting the truth of everything, and guaranteeing William will receive the credit and respect he deserved for his hard work. The film concludes with William finally able to carry out his key interview, long after it might have mattered, while Penny boards a plane for Morrocco and a chance to forget herself and her past and start over.
Both the film’s complicated treatment of the legacy of the counterculture and its often overt messages concerning drugs operate within dominant memorial trends among the contemporary American mainstream. Set mostly in 1973, during the waning days of the counterculture, the repeated references to rock and roll being dead and having sold out to the mainstream suggest larger critiques of the lingering movement from both political sides. The notion that the counterculture had somehow sold out its ideals by becoming too commercial, focusing as many in the band did on money and fame rather then authenticity and ‘the music’ as pure art, was advanced by many sympathetic souls at the time, and has since been pointed to as a possible factor contributing to its eventual decline. Alternatively the idea that the movement is dead has been advanced by conservative critics from the early 1970’s onward, who without exception view this obituary, whenever it was thought to have occurred, as good news for the larger culture. In addition, the film’s depiction of drug use, its causes, and effects often conforms closely to contemporary cultural categories. The three most explicit scenes of drug use (Russell’s bad trip, the stoned sale of the girls, and Penny’s depressive overdose) are shown to have dire and direct consequences, while most often being prompted by personal psychological problems. The coupling of explicitly negative depictions of narcotic consequences with overt and repeated warnings from positive role models (in this case William’s mother and his mentor Lester Bangs) to avoid drugs at all costs create an unmistakable overall anti-drug message. Yet the aspect of the film’s treatment of narcotics which may be most interesting is its downplaying of drugs, which would likely have been used recreationally and without immediate, explicit consequences by many members of the tour. This writing out of drugs from the countercultural past is even more evident in the popular Austin Powers films, in which swinging Sixties London is portrayed as chock full of psychedelic imagery. Yet the only mention of drugs comes in connection to Austin’s sad realization that one can no longer “take mind altering drugs and have unprotected sex with multiple partners in a consequence free environment,” since in the world of Reagan-Bush it was precisely those actions that could get one killed.
Memories II: The Cultural Meaning of Forrest Gump
With the 25th anniversary of Woodstock fast approaching and a new generation of American kids seeking the same sort of wild time they imagine their parents had enjoyed in upstate New York farm country despite dire warnings from Newt Gingrich and his congressional cohorts already on the campaign trail, the long hot summer of 1994 was already ripe with contested memorial fervor for the counterculture when Forrest Gump exploded onto the scene over independence day weekend, taking in over thirty million dollars in just four days. One of the few true cinematic phenomena of the last twenty years, this film would ultimately garner over three hundred million dollars in domestic box office receipts, sweep the next years academy awards extravaganza, and quickly find its way into the personal video libraries of countless American families. It also quickly garnered political notice, as soon-to-be-Speaker Gingrich worked to claim it as “a conservative film” which movie going audiences flocked to see “as a reaffirmation that the counterculture destroys human beings and basic values.”[59] This explicit claim for partisan ‘ownership’ of the film also leads to its being a near ideal example of the “Silver Triangle” theory in action, as all three poles can be scene interacting with one another to encourage cinematic success. Already determined to create the fall elections as a referendum on the recent past, Gingrich’s assertion that Gumpian history is both ‘true’ and morally instructive poses it as a text uniquely representative of contemporary American culture. This notion is supported by the incredible box office popularity of a film which quickly became the third highest grosser in Hollywood history, suggesting that a vast majority of Americans at least did not find fault in the films depiction of the recent past. Yet, perhaps more than anything else, the electoral success enjoyed by Gingrich and his Republican fellows suggests the film as truly indicative of the underlying culture, as the same consuming public that had given Forrest Gump a theatrical mandate over the summer provided congressional conservatives a powerful political one that fall.
The confluence of popular and political support for a film quickly hailed as a cultural icon has not gone wholly unnoticed among scholars with an interest in the intersections of media and society. These critiques have generally centered around the film’s representational choices regarding race and gender, especially as those concerns impact the larger cultural narrative and ultimate historic ‘judgments’ of the legacy of the Sixties. Citing the film as a response to the project, begun by Ralph Ellison in the early 1950’s, “to call attention to ways in which everything recognizably American had its visual form because of the unacknowledged presence and contribution of black Americans,” Alan Nadel argues that “Gump attempts systematically to erase that presence, to deny it every existed.”[60] While Nadel points to the film’s crediting of a young, leg braced Forrest with the dance moves that made Elvis Presley famous as one such significant example of the writing out of black cultural influence, it is in the choices of which, when, and how African-Americans are represented, as well as mainstream white responses to them, that the film’s depictions of race become most problematic. As we learn early in the film, Forrest is actually the namesake of Ku Klux Klan founder and distant relative, Nathan Bedford Forrest, whose creation of an organization dedicated to terrorizing ‘uppity’ Southern blacks is presented by Forrest’s mother as an example of the fact that “sometime people do things that just don’t make no sense.” In removing the historical motivations behind the Klan’s formation, the film sets up the mainstream white Southern society of the Fifties into which Forrest was born (complete with pre-pilgrim pedigree and old plantation style mansion) as without specific ill intents toward the black population, a notion reconfirmed by the peaceful crowd out on a sunny day to see George Wallace’s impassioned libertarian (rather than racist, both of which he was) appeal to keep the federal government out of Alabama, and black students out of the university whose door he was steadfastly occupying. Yet this underlying argument that Southern segregationists were at worst ignorant of the problems inherent in the sacred system that a peaceful Civil Rights movement, conveniently absent from the film’s narrative, would properly and easily bring to an end, is far from the only sweeping historical generalization regarding black protest culture to be taken from the film.
In a film which makes considerable uses of stock footage and explicitly referenced historical characters and events as a means of contextualizing Forrest’s memorial journey, one oft-utilized trope focuses on the future assassinations of individuals ranging from George Wallace to the Kennedys to John Lennon. Moreover, as Thomas Byers points out, it is “in connection with the assassinations” that the most “egregious emptying out” of a black historical past occurs, “in the form of a blatant omission” of the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.[61] Whereas the omission of Malcolm’s murder can perhaps be understood as a result of his “having been too radical and threatening” to mainstream culture both then and now to warrant “inclusion as a victim, “ “the exclusion of Dr. King’s murder… is simply astonishing” and “doesn’t even make sense in terms of the way Forrest is drawn” as a character largely sympathetic to Southern blacks.[62] Yet in a film ostensibly portraying our collective national journey from the 1950’s to the 1980’s which makes no mention whatever of Selma, Montgomery, or the March of Washington, it would have perhaps raised too many questions regarding the film’s overall narrative selections. Apart from the close personal if Vietnam prompted friendship constructed between Forrest and Bubba there is no mention nor depiction whatever of blacks between Wallace’s schoolhouse stand and his exposure to a Black Panther rally in the nation’s capital following his return from combat. This scene, the last actively focusing on African-Americans as a group, thus serves as a stand-in for what the Civil Rights movement had become (or, given the film’s failure to show a peaceful predecessor, perhaps always had been), a violent, gun-toting, anti-nationalist movement threatening the safety, personal property, and very lives of a mainstream who they viewed as eagerly sending them off to die in defense of democracy on the front lines while refusing to guarantee equal treatment at home. While revolutionary rhetoric and a willingness to use force surely were marks of certain late Sixties black protest groups, the film’s exclusion of events like the dual assassinations of the African-American leaders removes any semblance of the context of economic deprivation and social frustration which precipitated such calls to violence, thus creating them as unsympathetic criminals with ignoble intents. Never overtly racist, the film ultimately leaves out tangible gains of the movement such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, while highlighting the types of rhetorical and physical violence which Martin Luther King had as early as the Watts riots of 1965 assumed would spell the death of Civil Rights as a mainstream movement.
The film’s use of gender and the family can be read through a similarly political lens, with the characters of Forrest’s mother and especially Jenny serving as the main foci of such critiques. The divergent upbringings of Forrest and Jenny, in single parent homes headed by each child’s gender opposite, are often cited as underlying causes of the starkly different paths through life in Sixties America which they each take. Forrest’s mother is portrayed as unswervingly devoted to her son’s future, to the point where this upright Southern belle gladly trades sexual favors to gain him entry into public school despite his sub-standard IQ. Her reluctant sacrifice of her own body on behalf of her son comes in stark contrast to the actions of Jenny’s father, who looked to his own daughters to fulfill the physical void left by the loss of his wife, a situation which scars Jenny for life despite her youthful removal to her grandmother’s home. While Jenny’s family life is cheerfully forgotten even as the baggage of those years continues to weight her down, Forrest remains hopelessly devoted to the woman who’d raised, cared for, and unconditionally loved him despite his faults, taking pains to explain things to her son in metaphoric ways (life as a box of chocolates) that he might understand. While the portrayal of a successful single parent household might at first appear to contradict the ‘conservative’ message of the film, it is in the comparison between the two homes that its larger political statement concerning the family becomes clear. Indeed, Forrest’s idealized home life and personal success despite his natural handicaps demonstrate that single mothers can survive and even thrive in America, suggesting that individual familial difficulties are the fault of precisely those individuals rather than the structure of society at large. On at least this point the film leans toward a more Reaganite brand of conservatism, where individual commitment and tireless effort (absent personal immorality) can transcend even the most unfavorable initial conditions.
Yet it is through the character of Jenny that the film makes its most interesting gendered statements, as well as its most complete condemnation of the counterculture. While in many ways Jenny displays the most agency of any character in the film, her choices uniformly result in negative consequences. In many cases Forrest is present and able to resolve these situations, generally through the use of force as when her gig as a topless folk singer results in drunken club goers attempting to grope her only to be stopped by an opportunely arrived Gump. Even after her death Forrest still attempts to solve Jenny’s problems, personally going out to her father’s old farmstead “with a bulldozer” to destroy all remnants of her abused youth.[63] The most explicit example of Forrest saving Jenny from herself is also metaphorically suggestive of the film’s overall take on the counterculture. Recently returned from war and reunited with Jenny in the late 1960’s, Forrest reacts quickly and violently when her Berkeley SDS president boyfriend slaps her amidst the “Black Panther party” earlier described. This scene suggests, according to Robert Burgoyne, that violence is “the province of the counterculture, whose representatives wield, at various points, guns, billyclubs, and fists” rather than of the dominant mainstream as Sixties protesters asserted at the time.[64] Yet while the anti-war movement is here portrayed as vicious, the feminist movement is “not merely written over but written out” of the historical narrative, an occurrence Thomas Byers points to as “repression” of “the history that is most dangerous to the myth” of triumphant masculinity “that is Forrest Gump.”[65] Byers is particularly struck by Jenny’s lack of personal involvement or even awareness of the feminist movement, especially given her role as the film’s preeminent representative of “everything the New Right means by the counterculture.”[66] But we are getting ahead of ourselves, and a full discussion of Jenny’s role as countercultural personification par excellence and the film’s ultimate meaning for an exploration of whether her, and the nation’s, historical journey could have taken a different path.
---Alternative Visions and Versions: Oliver Stone and Winston Groom--- Born on the 4th of July, in 1946 (and likely conceived shortly after VJ day the year before) Ron Kovic seems the perfect candidate to serve as a representative of post-war America and the nations experiences in the decades following the end of WWII. The public reaction to the film, its modest box office success, and the Academy Award which Oliver Stone garnered for his 1989 film version of Kovic’s autobiography all indicate the cultural resonance which its representation of the period held for at least some part of a modern American populace still divided over the events chronicled in the film. As Ron Kovic, standing in throughout the film for the vision of American life crystallized in the post-war moment of his birth, experiences the realities of a nation and world torn by social and political strife and upheld by apparent self-contradiction, lies, and hypocrisy, and moves from a virile young nationalistic and Catholic teenage marine to an embittered and crippled veteran, who ultimately rediscovers a role for himself more in line with the "true" values of America, we are offered a vision of a nation going through a difficult but needed process of self discovery.
The vision of 1950's America as seen through the eyes of the young Ron Kovic is one of boyhood military games and 4th of July "Birthday" celebrations. Living in suburban Long Island in the prosperous post-war period, baby boomer Ron seems set along a predestined path of American stereotype, from his childhood sweetheart to his plan to serve his country even (perhaps especially) if it meant martyrdom. The intersection of religious, political, and cultural ideology in the mind of the young Ron reinforce each other to create a "faithful" post-war consensus child who believes in God, country, family, and economy against the Communist scourge which seemingly sought to destroy those treasured truths. Moreover, this view of 1950's America as an idyllic period of prosperity, hope, faith, and happiness is not initially problematized in the film, as the rose colored glasses of Kovic's childhood come to represent the American self-congratulatory self conception of the time. Yet the very faith in God and government that so mark this period of the film and of history is what eventually destroys the innocence of Kovic, leading him willingly into the Vietnam War.
It is Kovic's wartime experience that forever changes his conception of the world around him, as one day during his second tour everything seems to go wrong at once. In a scene displaying the political bias of the filmmaker, the worst horrors of the Vietnam War, the killing of innocent woman and children and of one's own brothers in arms, are explicitly shown. Yet the worst blow to the 1950's American vision which Kovic embodies comes when he is shot and paralyzed. It is Kovic's slow coming to terms with his own actions during the war as well as with his permanent paralysis from the chest down that provide the baseline for the rest of the film, as he comes to question everything he had been taught about God, country, and truth in an attempt to understand his own place within a world that doesn't seem to want him. In this way Kovic's story serves as a prototype for countless other wartime vets, while working on a representational level with America's own rediscovery (partly along generational lines) of itself in the wake of Vietnam. Despite his injuries, Kovic initially retains faith in the American ideals of his youth, serving as a war hero in a local parade. Yet his treatment by a society which placatingly tell him that he "looks good" as well as the influences of his counterculturally inclined and expressly anti-war brother and his best friend soon lead him to question these articles of faith.
Kovic's drunken encounter with his mother following another bar room night of social pressure demonstrates the extent to which his value system had changed following his return. Accusing his mother of being responsible for his injuries by forcing him into the military through lies about God and country, Kovic undertakes a metaphorical critique of the post-war American dream ideology, calling his mother and the nation hypocritical for holding "thou shalt not kill" as a commandment while waging war in Vietnam. Attacking (and profaning through his yelling of "penis" at his mother) religion, government, and even family, Kovic brings the attention of the whole neighborhood (and the nation) to the domestic problems promulgated by wartime tragedies. Indeed, the shame and embarrassment displayed by Kovic's mother at what he has become, and her desire to hold on to the ideology she had taught her son, display the desire of much of the 1960's American conservative mainstream (and indeed of contemporary society) to deal with the war by ignoring it. Kovic's subsequent expatriation to Mexico, where he undergoes his personal trough struggling with his equally paralyzed veteran counterpart in the desert, encourages his final transformation into a firm anti-war activist. Kovic's conflict with the authorities at the 1972 Republican convention serves as a show-battle for the larger social conflict of the period between a newly self-discovered anti-war liberal young America and the older traditionalists who advocated war. Flashing ahead to the 1976 Democratic convention, the film concludes with the war over and Kovic finally gaining acceptance and learning to accept himself, while metaphorically reaffirming the traditional American values by stating that he loves America and by the films replaying of his mother's earlier words indicating her pride in him. Thus ultimately the film creates the heated cultural war of the Sixties as a painful but necessary step in exposing the corrupt values and hypocrisy of 1950's society.
In contrast to the experiences of Ron Kovic as personification of post-war America, the people who personify America in Forrest Gump suffer fates which ultimately reinforce the dominant 1950's American ideology. Indeed it would seem that the majority of contemporary American society prefers such a view of the past, as Forrest Gump far surpassed its counterpart in both critical and box office success. Though we do not meet Lieutenant Dan until the Vietnam war itself, the past and Fifties era worldview of the character who will share much of Kovic's fate is clearly laid out in the film. Dan is portrayed as having descended from a military family who had offered up a martyr for the nation in "each and every American war." This explicit desire for martyrdom is even more pronounced than Kovic's in that Dan laments not having died after being injured, while Kovic quickly becomes thankful for his life. Indeed, as in Born on the 4th, it is the Vietnam war and the related experiences of Sixties protest movements which cracks the veneer of idealistic Fifties society creating a clear break between optimistic pre-Kennedy society and the chaos that was to follow through Forrest and Dan's experience in the war.
The war itself is portrayed fairly innocently for the majority of Forrest's presence there, however, once it finally stops raining once day a hail of bullets falls on the soldiers. As Forrest becomes a war hero saving a number of his fellow soldiers (including a soon to be lower legless Lieutenant Dan), he is slightly wounded but is forced to suffer through the death of his friend Bubba, who asks the only ostensibly political question in the film: "why did this happen," only to be given the tautological response of because “you got shot.” Lieutenant Dan, on the other hand, loses his legs and his entire sense of self as his desired martyrdom never materializes and he is forced to endure as a broken man. Indeed, it is only after the social strife of the 1960's, in a seventies era portrayal emphasizing the national malaise that followed such heated cultural contention, that Dan and the nation, through Forrest’s guidance, can be redeemed. Dan's storm provoked battle with God, and his ultimate discovery of an inner peace that prompts him to finally feel thankful that he hadn't died in the war, while his new "magic legs" make possible a kind of national healing (and forgetting, never quite possible for Kovic) that culminates in his engagement to an Asian woman.
The differences between the views of the Sixties which Forrest Gump and Born on the 4th of July present is not so much the difference between two competing sides in that decade, as between two conceptions of the propriety 1950's values. Born on the 4th of July firmly indicts those values, labeling them as corrupt and hypocritical and blaming them for the national and personal loss suffered during the Vietnam war and the entire generational conflict of the Sixties. In contrast, Forrest Gump ultimately reaffirms the values of the 1950's by portraying the Sixties as a period of social collapse during which the values of the nation eroded, yet which is luckily behind a contemporary American society that has already experienced the national rebirth of the 1980's. While both films represent the post-war American dream through individual characters, the fact that Forrest Gump shares the representation among multiple characters permits the film to come to an ultimately different conclusion about the fate of modern America. Whereas Kovic's nation must, through his disabled body, constantly be reminded of the war and what caused it, the death of Jenny and the reconstruction of Dan permit the war and the Sixties generation itself to be forever put behind the nation. In the end one film is a story of the difficult but necessary role which the Sixties played in exposing the corruption of post-war American values, the other a picture of that decade as an ugly and best-forgotten roadblock on the triumphant march forward of those reaffirmed Fifties era values.
Unless one is reading Winston Groom’s 1986 novel, in which case the experiences of Forrest Gump, and especially his relations to sex, drugs, and Jenny, would be starkly different, as would the story’s ultimate message concerning the legacy the Sixties. While both versions are similarly structured in their movement through historical time and their ‘first hand account’ representations of major events, the character sketches and experiences of both Forrest and Jenny differ markedly from the very beginning, where the Ku Klux Klan are demarcated as “a bunch of no goods,” Forrest is a mountain of a man despite his low intelligence, and Jenny suffers no hauntingly traumatic abuses.[67] In addition to consequential character differences the novel also suggests a stark political divergence, most evident in the competing conceptions of Forrest’s engagements with President Richard Nixon. In the film Nixon is portrayed as kind hearted if foolish, setting Forrest up at the newly built Watergate Hotel where he will see and report the break in that would ultimately lead to Nixon’s resignation. In contrast the novel paints Nixon as a mentally unstable petty crook, who calls his underlings communists, attempts to fire the Vice President, and tries to sell Forrest one of “the twenty or thirty wristwatches around his arm” under his suit sleeve.[68] Forrest’s own actions and relations to Jenny also suggest that this seemingly more liberal political slant extends beyond one scene to metaphorically construct a much more sympathetic image of the counterculture and its fate than appears in the film.
While Jenny still takes an active role in the peace movement even as Forrest fights in Vietnam, the interpersonal relations between them that occur after his return differ significantly from those depicted in the film. Whereas the consummation of their relationship and their life together as a couple occur only late and for a short troubled time towards the end of the film, in the novel Jenny quickly comes around to seeing Forrest as a potential boyfriend, asking “where you been all my life” after their first sexual encounter which leads directly to a lasting romantic relationship. Describing himself as “the happiest feller in the world” during their time together on the rock and roll road, Forrest is made even happier by his discovery of marijuana, which he soon “used some of [his] own money to buy” and began using “day in and day out” from the time he’d wake up in the morning.[69] A committed consumer of all flavors of narcotics in the film, it is Jenny who objects to Forrest’s increasing drug usage, telling him that “as much as you are doin now is too much” despite the fact that he “didn’t want to stop.”[70] Indeed, it is Forrest’s continued refusal to abate his drug use, as well his apparent indiscretions with groupies which she blamed largely on his habit, that prompt her to leave him for the first time. Yet their saga is far from over, as he tracks her down at an anti-war demonstration only to be thrown into an asylum for hurling his medals and then again after several years separation as they repeatedly attempt to get it together.
Yet even after reuniting and reviving their romance it is again Forrest’s inability to live a normal settled life (this time due to his involvement with a professional wrestling circuit) which prompts Jenny to reluctantly abandon their relationship. In a Dear John letter to her lover Jenny suggest that she has “gotten to an age where I need to settle down” and “think about having a house and a family and goin to church and things like that.”[71] Commenting on her movement away from the movement she states that she is “not as hopeful as I used to be, and I think that I would be satisfied with just a simple life somewhere” which she now hopes to find.[72] This desire on Jenny’s part to settle down and start a family contrasts sharply with the film, where it is Forrest who perpetually fails to domesticate his long-term love interest. Moreover, in depicting a child of the counterculture coming back to ‘traditional’ values of home, family, religion, peace, and quiet, the novel suggests that it is indeed possible to move past the Sixties without becoming hopelessly mired in their memory. This is precisely what Jenny does, as the reader learns during a final scene in which she finds Forrest playing his harmonica in her Savannah locale, where she lives with her husband, attends church, and saves for the college education of her son, little Forrest. Just as in the film this Forrest is the long unknown child of the main character, yet his ultimate fate and that of his mother differ greatly from their cinematic counterparts. In the movie an AIDS stricken Jenny seeks out Forrest to care for her and their child, marrying him in order to establish a firm legal lineage between father and son and ensure that the family will continue on even after her death. In the novel Jenny neither dies nor marries Forrest, instead receiving his blessing and unsolicited financial support for the raising of his child in her happy home. This most significant difference results in a novel where the counterculture can be reformed and come to reaffirm traditional values and a film where the Sixties must ultimately die at its own immoral hands before the nation can move on.
---The Moral of the Story---
It is Jenny’s life and death which remain the most interesting aspects of a fascinating film, especially when compared to the parallel historical journey which Forrest undertakes, albeit with considerable less agency or awareness. If Jenny is the counterculture, and Dan is that segment of mainstream American society disillusioned for a time by the war, Forrest is that silent majority who never lost faith and stood to gain the most from the cessation of Sixties cultural conflict. While he laments the loss of life in Vietnam, where “some of America’s finest young men” fought and died for geopolitical reasons nowhere dealt with in the film, Forrest never questions the values or societal structure of his youth, carrying on as best he can despite the tragedies around him. It is also mostly through his character that the national ‘rebirth’ of the 1980’s is metaphorically mapped. Following his honorable discharge and receipt of a large check for a popular ping-pong paddle endorsement, Forrest, soon joined by first mate Dan, purchases a shrimping boat to fulfill his dead friend Bubba’s dream. Despite all their hard work the pair suffer through initial hardships, as Dan simultaneously struggles with his war related disability. Both character’s interpret these difficulties through the lens of religion, as Forrest takes to prayer for assistance, while during one stormy scene, Dan curses and challenges God to go ahead and kill him. Yet instead theirs is the only local boat to survive the hurricane, as Dan makes “his peace with God,” and the shrimp start rolling in. Expanding their fleet and wisely investing in Apple computer stock, Forrest and Dan move into the nouveau riche of the of the 1980’s through hard work, smart money management, and newly resurgent religious faith. Yet even more than taking Dan and himself out of the national malaise of the Seventies, Forrest serves as an inspiration to a exhausted nation in need of a renewed raison d’etre.
It is his run across America, from sea to shining sea with countless shots of purple mountains and fruited plains in between, which provides this needed spark to countless Americans. Many begin to follow him on this journey, “because it gave them hope” according to Gump, despite his protestations that his run has no larger political motivations, be they “for world peace” or “to save the whales.” Forrest himself becomes a kind of Christ-like figure for his followers, complete with long unkempt hair and beard and the carrying out of various small ‘miracles’ along the way, including inspiring the “smiley face” T-shirt and “shit happens” bumper sticker. Yet while his role in leading the nation out of the lingering legacy of the Sixties into the great wide-open future of the Eighties is symbolically important for the film’s larger cultural message, it is the events which prompt his quest that help confirm the fundamental unredeemability of the counterculture.
At home in Alabama following his mother’s death, Forrest is pleasantly shocked to find Jenny walking to his door. “She must have been real tired, because all she did was sleep” for weeks, according to Forrest. Yet rather than a national malaise, the reason for Jenny’s exhaustion is understood to be the hard drug using, free love lifestyle she’d long enjoyed but which had ultimately caught up to her. “Just like peas and carrots again” with his life long love, this is the time of his life during which Forrest claims to be happiest and most at peace. But it unfortunately cannot last, even after Forrest asks Jenny to be his wife, put her turbulent past forever behind her, and continue on in their near idyllic existence. Instead she crawls into bed with him that night, in the one-time consummation of their relationship which would produce his namesake heir, before abruptly departing the next morning, the shock of which initially sends Forrest into his cross country marathon. Unable to escape her countercultural tendencies and past indiscretions, Jenny abandons her last hope of true fulfillment within the confines of traditional ideas about the American Dream, a constrained choice which will ultimately lead to her death and the symbolic destruction of the Sixties counterculture.
Whereas much of the film is a memorial narration on Forrest’s part from an Atlanta park bench while waiting for a bus, following his run’s end the film reverts to straightforward storytelling for the duration, with Forrest discovering he can easily walk to his destination. Which is of course the home of Jenny, who has at long last sent him a letter telling her location and asking him to come. It is there that he discovers the existence of his son, whom he is thankful to learn had inherited only his father’s name and is “one of the smartest kids in his class.” Yet the real reason behind her invitation is to inform Forrest that she is dying of some unknown disease (understood to be AIDS in the early Eighties). He immediately suggests that she and little Forest come to live with him in Alabama where he can closely care for her while cementing their relationship as a family. Jenny responds by asking Forrest to marry her, in a small ceremony where Dan and Jenny finally meet and the audience learns of his new “magic legs,” made “from the same material as the space shuttle,” and his symbolically significant betrothal to an Asian woman. Yet this is not so happy a time in the lives of the Gump family, as Jenny deteriorates and eventually dies, leaving Forrest alone to raise their child albeit in a home filled with fatherly affection.
It is the way Jenny dies, of a disease spread mainly through hard drug use or unprotected impersonal sex, that is most important for the film’s message concerning the counterculture. Indeed, even after largely leaving that life behind, it is an illness spread by those most ‘immoral’ of Sixties actions that kills her. Just as many among the Christian right saw AIDS related deaths in the gay community as a sort of divine justice, in this film it is the bad choices concerning sex and drugs which Jenny makes during the 1960’s and 1970’s for which she must pay, with her life, in order for the nation to move on into the 1980’s. Moreover, given her role as embodiment of the counterculture, progressing from folk singer to acid dropping Californian to strung out disco queen with various political stops along the way, this ‘necessary’ death takes on a much larger cultural meaning.
In portraying the entire spectrum of the counterculture through the life experiences of one character the film carries out the most complete collapsing of inter-movement distinctions of any cinematic remembrance of the Sixties. Yet it also implies that all members of the counterculture shared similar experiences, made comparable choices, and suffered the same consequences. They were all uniformly, in Gingrich’s words, “destroyed” by their involvement in the counterculture. Moreover, even after the period of protest had past, they remained forever tainted by previous associations, unable to retake their rightful place within a consensus culture that consequently could only be reformed by the disappearance of all remnants of this problematic past. As 1990’s era cinematic representation, Forrest Gump combines elements found in Blow and Almost Famous, juxtaposing a narrative of Jenny’s narcotic progression and moral degeneration (from high Sixties experimentation with LSD and marijuana to late Seventies addictions to heroin and cocaine) with one of an innocent Forrest uncorrupted (in contrast to the book) by any exposure whatever to drugs or free love. As a consciously claimed political statement, the film presents a clear message about the period and legacy of the Sixties, which were (in this view) unquestionably a troubled time in American history but which are thankfully now long past if not yet forgotten. But above all else it is an example of the ability of historical memory to serve the needs of the contemporary community, to pass along a specific and meaningful message through the best available medium that serves to reconfirm the righteousness and propriety of the extent contemporary culture.
Epilogue: Financing Terrorism, Costing Credibility?
Viewers of the New England Patriots 2001 Super Bowl victory over the St. Louis Rams, 130 million strong in the United States alone, dutifully watching the million dollar half minute advertisements for which the annual event is renowned, were unexpectedly treated to an unpleasant reminder of the tragic terror events that had occurred but four months prior. An at first seemingly innocuous ad, a take off of the popular Mastercard spots of the period which list the prices for several things before saying another is priceless, the viewer is quickly absorbed by depictions of ‘threatening’ Middle Eastern men and the listing of high pricetags for objects like machine guns, fake passports, and plastic explosives. Now drawn in, if still unsure of the exact purpose of the advertisement, these Super Bowl viewers are next asked the question of where these terrorists acquire all the funds needed to purchase these pricy tools of terror. They are quickly informed, in the official kick off of the latest and still ongoing spate of government funded preventative political media, that, in fact, if they buy drugs they may be supporting terrorism.
The bold claim that domestic drug buyers were financing the very international terrorists who attacked the nation on September 11 was based upon the connections between Afghanistan’s opium poppy fields and Al Queda, (as well as that between Columbian cocaine and that countries rebel opposition, classified as a terrorist organization by the state department due to its bombing and kidnapping practices), yet received quick and considerable critique from multiple circles. Survivors and victims’ families objected to the ad, asserting that the government was making use of their suffering for its own political gain. From the political spectrum’s opposite side came attacks from NORML and other pro-legalization organizations, arguing that while cocaine or heroin dollars could trickle back into threatening hands nearly all domestically consumed marijuana is grown in continental North America itself and for this reason the purchasers of that substance, by far the most popular among the available illicit options, could not legitimately be considered terror supporters. These criticisms resulted in the next series of ads redefining ‘terrorism’ to include violent crimes on the streets of both the United States and the foreign lands where narcotics are grown and processed.
In several of these ads a typical American drug consumer (“This is Dan, this is the joint that Dan bought”) is connected through several degrees of separation to an horrific occurrence perpetrated by high level drug profiteers (following a description of ‘Dan’s cartel,’ “and this is the family, who was lined up and shot for getting in the way,”) whose murderous actions would never have occurred without the complicity of American drug buyers. Succeeding ads show businessmen and women being haunted by the ghosts of those whose deaths they helped make possible, who respond to pleas of innocence or ignorance by saying that “its all about the money.” Other advertisements address the terrorism criticisms directly, portraying conversations between individuals on this topic that respond to the suggestion that only a tiny fraction of drug money actually reaches threatening hands by rhetorically asking if that means “its ok to support terrorism, a little.” Yet these ads which call upon patriotic Americans to abandon their drug habits lest they support terrorism, either on the streets or in the skies above, were far from the only anti-drug spots financed by the Ad Council in the year following that first post-attack celebration of beer, football, and Americanism.
A variety of youth directed preventative advertisements for the post-9/11 generation of American teenagers appeared over the course of 2002, presenting situational possibilities in which the real life, dire, and wholly unexpected effects of drug are shown. In one of these spots a group of African-American teenagers passing around a joint in their minivan while waiting in a drive through suddenly realizes they are without sufficient cash and speed away only to hit an innocent child riding her bike past the exit at just this moment. In another, a white girl is shown passing a metal pipe to an Hispanic boy at a party several times, only to pass out on the couch after her third go round permitting the boy to unbutton her shirt and kiss her in spite of her meek and unenforceable protestations. Though ostensibly directed at youngsters, both of these advertisements display characteristics suggesting that the public opinion attempting to be swayed here is that of their parents, a notion further supported by the adult friendly times in which many of these spots ran. Moreover, with the health and well being of innocent little white girls threatened by black or Hispanic men under (and even making use of) the influence of marijuana gives these spots a troubling racial tinge. Another spot with a problematic political dimension shows two white male teens are passing a bong between one another in one of their parent’s lavish studies, joking about who would get the stuffed moosehead on the wall should a divorce ever take place. Suddenly one pulls a gun out of the top desk drawer, telling his friend that “its ok, it isn’t loaded” only to have the spot end with a blacked out screen and single gunshot. The cause of this tragedy is of course the fact that “marijuana smoking can impair your judgment,” rather than the presence of a loaded firearm in the unlocked top desk drawer of a room readily accessible to teenagers. This idea that one will inevitably regret irrevocable actions engaged in while on drugs is taken even further in another ostensibly youth directed anti-drug ad appearing during the Super Bowl of 2003.
Perhaps the logical extension of the party, date rape spot described above, and in the tradition of the previous year’s banner ad in that it engrossed viewers through a compelling storyline and easy to recognize references to extent corporate commercials, the 2003 Super Bowl anti-drug ad (one of two actually, the other a subway ‘haunting’ of a well dressed drug buyer) gives no initial indication of its message at all. The ad begins with a woman examining a pregnancy test, soon joined by her husband, as the audience is treated to text at the bottom of the screen saying that the family “is about to go through some big changes.” Suddenly the angle shifts dramatically to display a young brunette, seated in the bathroom head in hands crying, as the text informs the viewers that the adults “are about to become the youngest grandparents in town.” Playing upon socio-political concerns about teen pregnancy, especially the notion that it could happen even in one’s own otherwise ‘perfect’ home, the audience is by this point drawn in and wondering what and who precisely the message and sponsors of the spot are. With the appearance again of the prominent textual message that “marijuana can impair your judgment,” the true preventative purpose of the ad is at last presented to the viewer, a powerful floating signifier applied to a tragic real world occurrence. Indeed, while the rhetorical power of this advertisement cannot be ignored, its appearance amidst innumerable advertisements depicting the joys associated with alcohol consumption, a far more usual cause of teen impairment and pregnancy, doubtless undermined the credibility of a campaign already widely ridiculed and ignored by American youth.
Presented with outlandish (if parentally plausible) situations in which the effects of marijuana and usual actions of its users are grossly misrepresented, and accused of precipitating the deaths of countless individuals through their selfish, self destructive habits, many Americans who recreationally use drugs or associate with those who do were hard pressed to take seriously these messages, or those who propagate them. At a time of international crisis when the investigatory and police powers of the federal government have been expanded in the name of anti-terrorism to a point where civil libertarians and political cartoonists regularly invoke Orwellian imagery, the suggestion that high level government officials would present the public with propagandistic misrepresentations as a means of shaping public opinion cannot help to but further weaken a generation’s faith in the good intentions and sound judgments of its government. Despite the attempt to reestablish collectivity and consensus of opinion evident in the concluding line “marijuana, its more dangerous than we all thought,” present in the most recent spate of anti-drug ads, the widening divide between real life experiences and media imaginations of drugs prompts more and more Americans to question whether, when, and why their government could lie to them.
-----------------------
[1] Michael Kammen. Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (Vintage Books, New York 1991), 533.
[2] Stephanie Coontz. The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (Basic Books, New York 1992), 9.
[3] Bruce Chadwick. The Reel Civil War: Mythmaking in American Film (Alfred A. Knopf, New York 2001), 5.
[4] Roland Marchand. Selling the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940 (University of California Berkeley Press, Los Angelos 1985), xix
[5] Garth Jowett and James M. Linton. Movies as Mass Communication (Sage Publications, London 1980), 74.
[6] Oliver Stone’s Born on the 4th of July, which was a simultaneous critical success and comparative commercial failure, is just such a film
[7] Forrest Gump is an ideal example given its incredible popularity and the attention paid to it by the media and many politicians
[8] Marchand, xviii
[9] Or, perhaps, an identifiable political message, another reason why public rhetoric surrounding the Sixties tends to collapse all cultural distinctions
[10] Arguments concerning the reciprocal if asymmetrical relations comprising the first two legs (those existing between historical media and the mainstream cultural conception of the past on one hand, and this public mental image and present day political rhetoric about social issues prefigured as legacies of the counterculture on the other) of this triangle are extent in the social science literature and have already briefly summarized earlier in this section.
[11] Derived from, among others, that offered by Jon Margolis in The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964: The Beginning of the “Sixties” (New York, William Morrow and Co. 1999)
[12] Terry H. Anderson. The Movement and the Sixties (New York, Oxford University Press 1999), 24-26
[13] Todd Gitlin. The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York, Bantam Books 1993),
[14]David Farber. “The Silent Majority and Talk about Revolution” in The Sixties: From Memory to History ed. David Farber (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press 1994), 299-301
[15] Peter Braunstein and Joseph Paul Doyle. “Historicizing the American Counterculture of the 1960’s and 70’s” in Imagine Nation: The American CounterCulture of the 1960’s and 70’s edited by Peter Braunstein and Joseph Paul Doyle (New York, Routledge 2002), 10
[16] David R. Colburn and George E. Pozzetta. “Race, Ethnicity, and the Evolution of Political Legitimacy” in The Sixties: From Memory to History edited by David Farber (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press 1994), 121-24
[17] Rick Ball and NBC News. Meet the Press: Fifty Years of History in the Making (McGraw-Hill, New York 1998)
[18] Alice Echols. “Nothing Distant about It: Women’s Liberation and Sixties Radicalism” in The Sixties: From Memory to History edited by David Farber (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press 1994), 153
[19] Doug Rossinow. “The Revolution is About Our Lives: The New Left’s Counterculture” in The Sixties: From Memory to History edited by David Farber (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press 1994), 100-01
[20] David Farber. “Intoxicated State: Illegal Nation” in The Sixties: From Memory to History edited by David Farber (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press 1994), 18-20
[21] David Farber. “The Silent Majority and Talk about Revolution” in The Sixties: From Memory to History ed. David Farber (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press 1994), 299-301
[22] George F. Will. “Foreward” to Reassessing the Sixties: Debating the Political and Cultural Legacy (New York, Norton and Co. 1997), 3
[23] Dominick Cavallo. A Fiction of the Past: The Sixties in American History (New York, St. Martin’s Press 1999), 90-91
[24] Ibid, 91
[25][26] Richard Nixon’s acceptance speech at the 1968 Republican Nation convention, available via the World Wide Web at
[27] Cavallo, 10
[28] Michael Weiler. “The Reagan Attack on Welfare” in Reagan and Public Discourse in America edited by Michael Weiler and W. Barnett Pearce (Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press 1992), 239
[29] Cavallo, 10
[30] Quoted in Meta Mendel Reyes. Reclaiming Democracy: The Sixties in Politics and Memory (New York, Routledge 1995), xiv, 11
[31] Ibid, xiv
[32] Stephen Macado. “Introduction to Reassessing the Sixties” in Reassessing the Sixties: Debating the Political and Cultural Legacy (New York, Norton and Co. 1997), 9
[33] Quoted in Mendel-Reyes, xiii-iv
[34] Quoted in Macado, 129, 283
[35] Jack Stevenson. Addicted: The Myth and Menace of Drugs in Film (London: Creation Books 2000), 44
[36] Aniko Bodroghkozy. Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the Youth Rebellion (London: Duke University Press 2000), 76-80
[37] Dan Baum. Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co. 1996), xi
[38] Ibid, 21, 33
[39] Ibid, 32.
[40] Ibid, 31.
[41] Peter Lev. American Films of the 1970’s: Conflicting Visions (Austin: University of Texas Press 2000), 5
[42] Baum, 88
[43] Ibid, 90.
[44] The term “Drug Czar” and the present office occupied by that individual did not come into existence until 1988. However, for descriptive consistency the term will be here employed throughout to indicate the individual heading the nation’s leading anti-drug agency
[45] Baum, 136.
[46] Ibid, 144.
[47] Stevenson, 60.
[48] Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Alcohol and Drug Abuse (98th Cong.) on examining the role which the media could play in helping to put an end to the ravaging effects which drugs have come to have on the young people of this nation, April 6, 1984
[49] Ibid, 2
[50] Ibid, 19
[51] Ibid, 44.
[52] Baum, 234, 43
[53] Quoted in Baum, 262
[54] “Monitoring the Future Study: Overview of Key Findings 2001” University of Michigan Institute for Social Research. available online at
[55] Baum, 334.
[56] Quoted in the Des Moines Register, February 15, 1998
[57] From sources as diverse as Roger Ebert, The New York Times, and The USA Today in critical reviews of the film.
[58] The portrayal of women in this film as, alternatively, shallow irrational creatures destroying their husband’s lives through selfishness and malice or innocent and tragically lost “Barbies” in the ‘Hippie chick’ tradition, could easily constitute the focus of its own academic inquiry. Indeed, such ostensibly negative gendered character constructions are present in other historical depictions of the period (most notably Jenny in Forrest Gump), raising further questions especially in light of the oft-argued link between the feminist movement and social decline since the Sixties. However, for reasons of space and analytic focus this problematic treatment shall be examined only in so far as it impacts these films’ overall messages about drugs and the counterculture.
[59] Quotations here and for the rest of this section are taken directly from the films under examination unless otherwise noted.
[60] Quoted in Thomas B. Byers. “History Re-Membered: Forrest Gump, Postfeminist Masculinity, and the Burial of the Counterculture,” Modern Fiction Studies 42.2 (1996), 419
[61] Alan Nadel. Flatlining on the Field of Dreams: Cultural Narratives in the Films of President Reagan’s America (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press 1997), 206
[62] Byers, 426
[63] Ibid, 427
[64] Joseph Natoli. Speeding to the Millenium: Film & Culture 1993-1995 (New York, State University of New York Press 1998), 26-27
[65] Robert Burgoyne. Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press 1997), 114-15
[66] Byers, 432-33
[67] Ibid, 432
[68] Winston Groom. Forrest Gump (Garden City, NY, Doubleday and Company 1986), 2-5
[69] Ibid, 141-42
[70] Ibid, 100
[71] Ibid
[72] Ibid, 174
[73] Ibid
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