What I tried to do in the first half of my column series was to point out how much of our techno-cultural present is rooted in the countercultural decade of 1965-75. And while the foundational moment of our times was a heady expansion of the possibilities of human life, things went pear-shaped very soon. To put it simply, the global institutional order that played midwife to birthing the new failed to meet the challenges of democratisation of experience of the following decades.
This was mostly due to an unwillingness to transform to the scale and frames the challenge required. A seismic shift in perspective was required and that did not come by.
Instead, after a huge wobble between 1975 and 1995, the order chose to retail out the goodies of the counterculture as techno-media commodities that we all play with in our daily lives today. Of course, that was not what was meant to be.
In hindsight, beyond pragmatic historical reasons put forward for the transformation of the counterculture in our times, a more fundamental, historical event happened. This was the demise of the institutional patronage order that had laid the foundations of the New Age. This order, which had its roots in the European Enlightenment and the political revolutions that followed, finally ground to a halt in the 70s.
Upheaval of history
A number of films made by the masters of New Wave Hollywood cinema chart out a sense of what exactly made up this end of the bourgeois revolution. At the top is Hal Ashby’s Being There (1979), featuring the inimitable Peter Sellers in his last role playing Chance the Gardener who by a quirk of fate finds himself top adviser to the American President.
In sequences that are both hilarious and chillingly surreal, Chance’s Alzheimer’s-driven homilies about gardening and television are taken as profound policy guidance for a crisis-ridden state. And all because Chance looks like a gent in a bowler hat and is therefore mistaken to be a sage bourgeois man. But also because, in its paranoid conservatism in the face of historical change, the order would rather have liveried staff as technocrats than new creative forces.
If Ashby’s masterpiece was a dig at the highest echelons of the ruling class, then Bob Rafelson’s sadly under-seen The King of Marvin Gardens (1972), featuring Jack Nicholson in a magnificent turn, is the story of two unlikely brothers. Scions of the respectable, well-heeled middle-class, one boy is a depressed intellectual, the other a hustler on the fringes of the shadow economy. As Atlantic City, America’s entertainment and mafia capital, is dismantled and sold piece by piece to the new carpetbaggers of American de-industrialisation, the brothers’ lives unravel.
The film ends with the hustler brother shot dead by his older, psychotic girlfriend at odds with her ageing. The liberal, bourgeois middle-class of the Great American Century ends, mindless and childless.
Crash and burn
If a child is around, they die like the techno-geek Brewster McCloud, the main protagonist of the eponymous film of 1970 directed by Robert Altman. The film is a mesmerising tale set in the early days of the geodesic Houston Astrodome, a symbol of the space-age world to come. It tracks young Brewster’s assembling a pair of Da Vinci-esque mechanised wings that will allow him to fly. When the day comes to test them out, they fail and our hero comes crashing down and dies. Atlantic City might have been giving way to the Astrodome for a new version of liberal historical might, but in Altman, we get a prescient vision of technological heroism falling to the infantilism of emotionally crippled techno-geeks.
Beyond these, worth mentioning are films that document in epic fashion the demise of communities through the 1970s—Old Dixie in Altman’s classic Nashville (1975) and the working class in Michael Cimino’s Deer Hunter (1979). If the country south goes berserk globalising and creating libertarian political revolts against the established order, then the working class dies in the Vietnam War. Arching over the fall of classes, communities and generations are memorable studies of media worlds to come.
Apocalyptic media
There was Norman Jewison’s Rollerball (1975) which might be considered the first film to catch the sense of gaming before its time. And there was Sidney Lumet’s gorgeous Network (1976) that announces that media would, in its new conservative corporatism, become Apocalyptic political terrorism televised.
Thus, just as a brave new world was being invented by cutting-edge innovators, the system that was sustaining it was coming to an irreversible end. For a long time, this order had been innovating but within its own charmed circles, which kept expanding in recognising bourgeois values in the ‘meritorious’. Yet, the very creative energies the class unleashed would in the end cannibalise it.
Much of the new was uncontainable within bourgeois gentility. Cultural decay by imbecilic repression would finish off most of the order and what was left would be mopped up by death. But nestled in the midst of scenes of decline were hints of things to come—the techno-geek to turn hacker, the religious Right to turn terrorist, the intellectual and the hustler fusing to create the feckless corporate man, the rise to political power of media eccentrics and the clinically insane, and neo-bourgeois bots to make up for falling productive populations.
The author is Associate Professor in cinema studies at JNU. When not ordering food on various apps, he is writing about cinema and art.
