The 60s ... what a movie

So, how come all the movies about the 1960s fall short? Some failures are more interesting than some successes.

Fact is, the 60s have been filmed to death and nobody got the 60s on film -- at least the warm, chewy center of the 60s. It's sorta like the Zapruder clip. You see JFK's head explode, but where's the shootists? The killer concept in Piers Anthony's Macroscope also comes to mind. Once you figure it out it fries your head...

Documentary films are documentary films -- the surveillance camera in the convenience store of life. And we've all seen the goddamn images too many times for them to mean anything...raise your hand if you've just visualized that Vietnamese guy getting his head blown off.

Ken Kesey never got his goddamn Movie together, now did he?

Easy Rider, strangely, seems like a premonition -- as if somebody in the old South had written Gone with the Wind before the South had even lost the war...

Somehow, it just doesn't feel like a movie made in the 60s. It's more like a movie somebody made in the 80s or 90s as a painstakingly accurate historical recreation of the period to see what went wrong. But it's all looking back at what's not there anymore. The commune ain't it. The road ain't it. America ain't it. What they're looking for is gone...

Medium Cool is a film about how it's impossible to get the truth on film -- even when you're there when it's happening...

Joe was excellent -- but, like a lot of 60's films, it's a chalk outline of a dead body on the sidewalk...

Movies like Little Murders, The Graduate, Getting Straight, the Marriage of a Young Stockbroker, etc. are less about the 60s and more about the death of attitudes and power structures left over from the 50s -- either in the sense of a world going to hell (as in Little Murders) or raising hell (as in most of the rest of 'em). These were sometimes (but not always) an excuse for middle-aged male fantasies about groping young chicks and taking drugs...

Just like the kids.

Paul Mazursky's stuff (Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice...I Love You Alice B. Toklas, etc.) has flashes of insight and intelligence -- but is too obviously about something ripped out of the newspaper to be real. What real experience he shows is more beat than anything else. A beat in freak's clothing...

Much of the people making experimental movies were too ripped to make good movies...sorta like an acidhead putting his thumb on the camera. Hold your eyes open, kids! It's the Magical Mystery Tour!

Roger Corman's the exception here.

God bless Roger Corman, all praise to his name.

You got a few flashes. The Trip comes to mind. Supposedly supportive but just the least little bit hostile acid guide Bruce Dern holding out a chair in front of acid-bummed Peter Fonda. It's just a chair. What're you scared of the chair for?

Gahhhhhhhh.....

But Roger Corman movies are Roger Corman movies period.

Forget every earnest political tract -- like the Billy Jack movies, which are sorta like the leftwing antimatter equivalent of The Green Beret -- hold a reel of Green Beret in one hand, Billy Jack in the other, put them together and the universe explodes.

Ohmygod, they killed the rabbit! Ohmygod, they killed the kid!

Now I must kill for peace!

What's left is one-size-fits-all Hollywood bullshit and the cynical reality of various independent visions...

The bullshit: exploitation flicks for the youth market.

The individual reality...

Lots of films about squarepegroundhole loners like Five Easy Pieces. Lots of films made by smart aliened individuals about smart alienated individuals...

And Altman films. These are more (in an almost wierdly Japanese way) about individuals as they function in groups. Self and false self, status games, man/woman sex power games, the universal field theory of lying, the pecking order and pecking parties, insiders, outsiders, crossed messages and the shifting goalposts of us and them...

Altman knew how to present the fractured, surrealistic bullshit of American life -- smart, hip, cynical people walking through the broken glass doing their best not to stand on anything like the doctors in M*A*S*H. The people who do stand on anything get cut to pieces: like Shelley Duvall in Three Women or Brewster McCloud in the same-named film. Enthusiasm and commitment ends badly -- always. Detachment is a survival trait.

Believe the wrong speech and you'll bleed to death in the snow like McCabe...

Animal House is strangely accurate. But it's about the attitude before the storm hit...

Vietnam being, pretty much, the storm -- or the outward and visible sign of the storm. Every movie I've ever seen about it seems fake...movies that scream "I'm a movie."

Except for Full Metal Jacket. There's a cold, real ugliness about it...

But we're talking the woodsman who takes his kid out in the woods and leaves him there. It's not about the kid -- it's about the death-system Daddy throws the kid into...

What the storm wrecked was the center of it all -- the communal peace/love thing of the counterculture. Yes, I know it seems like bullshit now. But, apparently, at a specific place and time -- say Haight Ashbury in '67 -- there was something like a spontaneous youth movement...

If you believe the urban legends, those who weren't cynical, independent, grounded, and skeptical got sucked into a rush of tribal enthusiasm -- and got deeply fucked over. Nobody's ever captured what that felt like on film. Woodstock is on the outside looking in (and feels like a fucking commercial) -- but nobody's ever convincingly filmed what it's like on the inside being caught up in it all...and what it was like when it all went wrong.

Say a decent treatment of We're the People Your Parents Warned You Against...

Nobody convincingly caught the left-wing anger either -- as, in print, Turgenev and Dostoevsky once got inside the heads of their country's revolutionaries -- because, in this country, the non leftists didn't get it or want to and the leftists were so goddamn serious all they could do was make documentaries (or films that wanted to be documentaries -- or PRC type revolutionary opera). What they couldn't do is see themselves objectively as characters...their own contradictions, weakness and bullshit...

But nobody convincingly caught that sense of "Fuck! Daddy's going to take us out in the woods and leave us there!"

Nobody made a good movie about the demonstrations in Chicago in '68. What it was like to go there. What it was like to be there. (Medium Cool being about what it was like to be there and not be there...)

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is more like the comedown after the high -- that bad, bad burned out feeling. Thompson's book was enough, of course. The film is as ugly and unneccesary as the vomit splattered all around your toilet from whatever it was you don't remember doing the night before...

That vomit is now the only record you've got that anything happened at all. And by the looks of it...

It must've really been something.