Introduction: Political Memory and Popular Mediaxroads.virginia.edu/~ug02/fox/work/whole.doc · Web viewDuring a visit just prior to his release Murtha tells George that she wants

Levi Fox Page 1 9/14/2023

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 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.


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

3 Bruce Chadwick. The Reel Civil War: Mythmaking in American Film (Alfred A. Knopf, New York 2001), 5.


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

4 Roland Marchand. Selling the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940 (University of California Berkeley Press, Los Angelos 1985), xix5 Garth Jowett and James M. Linton. Movies as Mass Communication (Sage Publications, London 1980), 74.6 Oliver Stone’s Born on the 4 th of July, which was a simultaneous critical success and comparative commercial failure, is just such a film7 Forrest Gump is an ideal example given its incredible popularity and the attention paid to it by the media and many politicians8 Marchand, xviii


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

9 Or, perhaps, an identifiable political message, another reason why public rhetoric surrounding the Sixties tends to collapse all cultural distinctions


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

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.


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 4 th 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 argument11 that a single dark day in Dallas helped

enable a chain of events which would significantly and perhaps permanently alter

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)


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.

12 Terry H. Anderson. The Movement and the Sixties (New York, Oxford University Press 1999), 24-26


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

13 Todd Gitlin. The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York, Bantam Books 1993), 14David 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


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-

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


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 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), 121-2417 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), 15319 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


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

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


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

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


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

22 George F. Will. “Foreward” to Reassessing the Sixties: Debating the Political and Cultural Legacy (New York, Norton and Co. 1997), 3


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

23 Dominick Cavallo. A Fiction of the Past: The Sixties in American History (New York, St. Martin’s Press 1999), 90-9124 Ibid, 9125? Richard Nixon’s acceptance speech at the 1968 Republican Nation convention, available via the World Wide Web at http://www.watergate.info/nixon/speeches.shtml


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

26 Cavallo, 10


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

27 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), 23928 Cavallo, 10


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,”

29 Quoted in Meta Mendel Reyes. Reclaiming Democracy: The Sixties in Politics and Memory (New York, Routledge 1995), xiv, 1130 Ibid, xiv31 Stephen Macado. “Introduction to Reassessing the Sixties” in Reassessing the Sixties: Debating the Political and Cultural Legacy (New York, Norton and Co. 1997), 932 Quoted in Mendel-Reyes, xiii-iv


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.

33 Quoted in Macado, 129, 283


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 34 Jack Stevenson. Addicted: The Myth and Menace of Drugs in Film (London: Creation Books 2000), 44


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 35 Aniko Bodroghkozy. Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the Youth Rebellion (London: Duke University Press 2000), 76-8036 Dan Baum. Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co. 1996), xi


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’

37 Ibid, 21, 3338 Ibid, 32.39 Ibid, 31.


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,

40 Peter Lev. American Films of the 1970’s: Conflicting Visions (Austin: University of Texas Press 2000), 5


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

41 Baum, 8842 Ibid, 90.


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’s43 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

43 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


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

44 Baum, 136.45 Ibid, 144.


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

46 Stevenson, 60.


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

47 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, 198448 Ibid, 249 Ibid, 1950 Ibid, 44.


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

51 Baum, 234, 4352 Quoted in Baum, 262


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

53 “Monitoring the Future Study: Overview of Key Findings 2001” University of Michigan Institute for Social Research. available online at http://www.publicagenda.org/issues/factfiles_detail.cfm?issue_type=illegal_drugs&list=5


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.

54 Baum, 334.55 Quoted in the Des Moines Register, February 15, 1998


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 reviews56 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.

56 From sources as diverse as Roger Ebert, The New York Times, and The USA Today in critical reviews of the film.


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

57 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. 58 Quotations here and for the rest of this section are taken directly from the films under examination unless otherwise noted.


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

59 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


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.

60 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


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

61 Byers, 42662 Ibid, 427


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

63 Joseph Natoli. Speeding to the Millenium: Film & Culture 1993-1995 (New York, State University of New York Press 1998), 26-27


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 4 th 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

64 Robert Burgoyne. Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press 1997), 114-1565 Byers, 432-3366 Ibid, 432


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 4 th , 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 4 th 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

67 Winston Groom. Forrest Gump (Garden City, NY, Doubleday and Company 1986), 2-568 Ibid, 141-42


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 69 Ibid, 10070 Ibid71 Ibid, 17472 Ibid


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.

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