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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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)
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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,
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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
Levi Fox Page 21 9/14/2023
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
Levi Fox Page 22 9/14/2023
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
Levi Fox Page 23 9/14/2023
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
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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
Levi Fox Page 25 9/14/2023
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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
Levi Fox Page 32 9/14/2023
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
Levi Fox Page 33 9/14/2023
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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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,
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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.
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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
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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
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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
Levi Fox Page 49 9/14/2023
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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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.