1962, Not 1968, Was When Everything Changed
In a fascinating column for the Wall Street Journal, Terry Teachout notes that 1962--not the oft cited annus horribilis of 1968--was when popular culture decisively pivoted into new and uncharted territory:
But it was in 1962, not 1968, that the curtain first started inching up on our age of full-color anxiety. Turn the clock back exactly a half-century and you'll find yourself in a different America—but one fraught with subtle signs and portents of what was to come....
Yet the caldron of change was already bubbling away. Take a second glance at the guest list for Carson's "Tonight Show" debut and you'll note the unexpected presence of Mel Brooks, whose raucously, unabashedly vulgar movies would soon help to undermine Hollywood's long-established sense of the appropriate. Nor was Mr. Brooks the only portent of things to come. Nineteen sixty-two was also the year when Bob Dylan cut his first album. Andy Warhol's first solo show, an exhibition of Campbell's Soup cans, opened in Los Angeles in 1962, and Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" opened on Broadway. As dissimilar as these now-venerable objets d'art may seem to us now, they all had in common the iron determination of their creators to break decisively with the earnest, self-confident tone of postwar culture.
Referring to Albee's haunting and disturbing play, Teachout notes that its debut marked the first time in American culture that a popular playwright captured the public's imagination by "declaring that the values by which it lived were false."
In the second act of the play, George, a bitter college professor, rants drunkenly about the meaninglessness of life:
You endeavor to make communicable sense out of natural order, morality out of the unnatural disorder of man's mind…you make government and art, and realize that they are, must be, both the same…you bring things to the saddest of all points…to the point where there is something to lose…then all at once, through all the music, through all the sensible sounds of men building, attempting, comes the 'Dies Irae.' And what is it? What does the trumpet sound? Up yours.
This monologue just goes to show how far we've come since 1962: George's rant seems almost milquetoast compared to the cultural indiscretions that today entertain the popular public. The question is, are today's improprieties a direct legacy of 1962, the year our culture abandoned "the long-established sense of the appropriate," in Teachout's words--or is their cause found elsewhere?
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Comments:
Aug '10
Re: 1962, Not 1968, Was When Everything Changed
John Grant: Hi James,
MaybeThe Third Manwould fit the bill as an example of nihilistic film noir? (It is British and not American though.)
Would The Spy Who Came In From The Cold count? It's got lots of dimly lit cigarette smoke and a nihilistic ending.
Maybe "British Espionage Noir" is a sub-genre?
Aug '10
Re: 1962, Not 1968, Was When Everything Changed
Mist, Ed ( ipad impaired cant quote)Dont forget the Ford Taurus and its debut in Sleeper.
Mar '12
Re: 1962, Not 1968, Was When Everything Changed
My personal favorite countercultural herald is Norman Mailer's The White Negro (1957), introducing the white hipster as proud psychopath: "the hipster nihilistically seeks meaning in his life through immediate gratification, especially in the realm of sex. In the rejection of the conformism wrought by industrial society, the hipster valorizes individual acts of violence as infinitely preferable to systematic violence." Sound familiar?
Edited on July 21, 2012 at 5:32amRe: 1962, Not 1968, Was When Everything Changed
Misthiocracy: "What about Geek Culture?" I agree with your characterization, but it's not just a subculture, it's an atomized, diffused subculture whose strongest bonds seem to be Meme Familiarity and Novelty Appetite. The former is superficial and the latter constantly destroys any defining cohesive definitions.
I love its creativity; I roll my eyes at its youthful certainties (if there's anything more smug and simplistic than an atheism subreddit, let me know) and I marvel at the speed with which a swarm can elevate a great idea or punish arse-hattery. It's truly international. But I defy anyone to tell me what it believes in.
Re: 1962, Not 1968, Was When Everything Changed
Here's my take on noir: the real noir dilemma is, what can a moral (if flawed) person do in an immoral (amoral, nihilistic, pick one) milieu. I think a failure to grasp this point undermines almost all "neo-noir" movies. They become "Buncha Scumbags Screwing Each Other Over" flicks.One that does get it in a big way is the criminally underrated John Dahl's Red Rock West. The protagonist tells what he thinks is a white lie and ends up in a mortally dangerous spiral which his essential decency keeps pulling him back into.
Mar '11
Re: 1962, Not 1968, Was When Everything Changed
Misthiocracy
That just happens to be exactly 18 years, 1 month, and 20 days after Japan signed the surrender document that ended World War II.
18 years, *2* months, 20 days. The signing ceremony on the Missouri was held on September 2nd.
Nov '10
Re: 1962, Not 1968, Was When Everything Changed
1962 was the last year those buttons on light poles that say “press to cross street” were actually connected to anything.
It was the last year pecan pie was considered good for you.
Apr '11
Re: 1962, Not 1968, Was When Everything Changed
It was a continuum. The beginning was certainly closer to 1962 than 1968.
The Albany Movement formed in Albany, Georgia November 1961. In December, King and the SCLC became involved.
Albert Grossman created Peter, Paul and Mary in 1961
The Newport Folk Festival was founded in 1959 by George Wein, founder of the already-well-established Newport Jazz Festival, backed by its original board: Theodore Bikel, Oscar Brand, Pete Seeger and Albert Grossman.
1953 - Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin found City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco
1957 -" On the Road" published by Viking Press
Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" (1956), William S. Burroughs's "Naked Lunch" (1959)
1953 - "The Adventures of Augie March" by Saul Bellow published
The neo-Marxist Frankfurt School moved to New York City in 1935, where it became affiliated with Columbia University. Its important work (the new-left march through the institutions) began to emerge from 1935-1953, having gained a favorable reception within American and English academia.
Alan Watts, in his autobiography, mentioned that by around 1960 or so "… something else was on the way, in religion, in music, in ethics and sexuality, in our attitudes to nature, and in our whole style of life"
Apr '12
Re: 1962, Not 1968, Was When Everything Changed
Oh, come, come. October, 1952, saw the launching of Mad Magazine, and before that, EC Comics. Lolita, Terry Southern's Candy, Sinclair Lewis, H.L. Mencken, - need I really go on?
May '10
Re: 1962, Not 1968, Was When Everything Changed
I am late to the conversation but here's my date: 1948. That fall, NBC and CBS formally transitioned from radio-centric networks to television. The ability to bring visual entertainment into the home was widely believed as the harbinger of doom for all other forms of entertainment.
How do you get people out of their homes when they're getting the same thing at home for free? The answer, of course, is to give them something they can't get at home. That led to a loosening of the standards in both movies and theater. Playwrights and script writers had written profane materials for eons - it just didn't get produced. The need to stay in business trumped the need for decency.
Cable did the same thing to broadcast TV four decades later.
Words like "hip," and "edgy" sound better than "decadent," "immoral" and "complete tripe." We've reached a point where the envelope has been shredded and there's no longer anything to "push."
Apr '11
Re: 1962, Not 1968, Was When Everything Changed
I was living in an Ivy League college town in 1960-1961. Alan Watts comment that "something else was on the way" is certainly accurate. There was a yeasty boil of all kinds of influences each feeding off the other. It was a conflation of neo-Marxism, sexual liberation, anti-capitalism, human rights, good old fashioned Bolshevism (CPUSA, SWP), new leftism, feminism, beatniks, bohemians, rock and roll, drugs, anti-50s rebellion, populism, JFK and Jackie, and counter-culture occurring simultaneously with a blooming of the arts - music, writing, painting, poetry, film and theater.
Joan Baez had sung at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival and in 1960 "Joan Baez", her first album was produced by Fred Hellerman of The Weavers. The Weavers were Marxists.
"The Weavers were formed in November 1948 by Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, Fred Hellerman, and Ronnie Gilbert of People's Songs. People's Songs, a clearing house for labor movement songs, in 1948 had thrown all its resources to the presidential campaign of Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace. Hays and Seeger had formerly sung together as the politically activist Almanac Singers whose personnel often included Woody Guthrie, Josh White, Lead Belly, Cisco Houston, and Bess Lomax Hawes.
Aug '10
Re: 1962, Not 1968, Was When Everything Changed
Jeff Richter
Misthiocracy
That just happens to be exactly 18 years, 1 month, and 20 days after Japan signed the surrender document that ended World War II.
18 years, *2* months, 20 days. The signing ceremony on the Missouri was held on September 2nd.
Shame. I feel it.
Feb '12
Re: 1962, Not 1968, Was When Everything Changed
The 60's and 70's accelerated trends that all began much earlier. The changes that occurred in those two decades were hardly inevitable, but they should not be terribly surprising, either, for the most part. The academy, for instance, had already fallen into the hands of radicals, which is why the next generation on campus to claim the mantle of radicalism faced so little resistance from their elders (see, e.g., G-d and Man at Yale, published in 1951, or the influence of Charles and Mary Beard on history classes across the country, or educational theories in general in the late-19th and early-20th centuries).
The political cleverness of the radicals was to enshrine their changes in the most immutable law possible - Supreme Court decisions - so that almost all of them would be accepted as normal, ultimately, merely by dint of not being reversed.