I just watched the film Zabriskie Point on DVD. I have mixed feelings about it as there were elements (like the cinematography and music) that were great, but it didn’t entirely hold together as a movie. In reading about the film afterward, as I am wont to do, I came across a mention on Wikipedia that part of the reason it was a box office bomb was that:
Or maybe they mean it had shifted since 1966? In either case, I find this puzzling, although I am viewing the era through the retrospective filter of media accounts and history, so I would love to be enlightened by those who experienced it at the time. If they mean the politically radical, confrontational aspect of the counterculture (given the extended opening sequence at a student meeting oriented toward taking on the police and a subsequent clash with same), the film was released a few months before Kent State, so that seems wrong. If it has more to do with the music and sort of “free love” counterculture represented later in the film, that still seems odd as this was only a few months after Woodstock, and these photos (why they are on Business Insider, I have no earthly clue) would seem to indicate that the vibe was still strong in the summer of '70. For that matter the Woodstock documentary film was released in March 1970 and was a massive commercial success.
So is that claim just wrong, or is there some more subtle shift I am not picking up on?
That’s an interesting question and I agree with the premise: things did change around 1970.
One reason, of course, is that the novelty was beginning to wear off.
Two more specific reasons, IMO, are Altamont and Manson, both of which reminded the world that not even the counter-culture ‘peace, love, and groovy’ scene was immune to violence and depravity.
Less shocking but much more pervasive was the realization that the Hippy “movement” had its fair share of assholes and rip-off artists, too. Whether it was the guy who burned you by selling you oregano for pot, or who took off with your record collection, it soon became apparent (at least to young’n’s like me) that the movement was just another in the long line of failed social paradigms. Or something like that.
I’ll add a miscellaneous thought and point out that the shift of drugs from grass/hash to speed and coke seemed to occur more obviously around 1971 or 1972. You don’t need me to remind you that speed and coke give you a very different edge than smoke. They also were much more compelling for the user - in a lotta cases, he/she didn’t give a shit what it took to get them. And, that made the whole scene that much more uncool. Dig it?
^^^that. I was too young to live it, but old enough to remember it. If that makes sense.
66-68 was a lot more flower power, peace and love. By 1970 it was a lot more gritty and real.
The Hippies as we remember them really were a very tiny, very brief phenomenon.
Zabriski Point failed at the box office because it was a bomb of a movie, a fantasy of a weird director’s twisted mind. If it had been released 4 years earlier, I doubt that that would have changed anything.
Though it’s hard to believe today, there was a near total disconnect between movies and the youth audience in the Nixon years. I may be missing one, but I can’t remember a single movie about youth culture that was a hit. None. I was in college in those years and we were completely disdainful of Hollywood attempts to depict the counterculture.
The movies that were youth hits were adult films that happened to capture the spirit of the day, like The Graduate, 2001, or MAS*H, which came out just a month later than Zabriskie Point. Woodstock doesn’t count because it was a documentary. The fictional films seemed to be about a world other than the one we lived in.
It’s been 10,000 years since I saw Zabriskie Point and I remember nothing about it so I can’t comment, although that might itself be a comment. But I doubt the reception would have been different whenever it was released. If it was about the 60s we didn’t want to see it; we were living the 60s. Maybe I should try watching it now. That world is an archaeological relic and can be seen differently.
The acceptance by the young changed at some point, maybe in the late 70s or early 80s, because a sufficient number of younger filmmakers entered the business and could relate to the audience. But that was much later. It wasn’t that the counterculture had changed by 1970; it’s that it hadn’t.
It was a staple of late-night movies on TV in the early 1970’s. There was a British film called Privilege in which the Establishment hijacks the youth culture through use of a Messianic pop star. It also was played a lot on late night TV, but until a few years ago, had actually gotten lost over the decades.
Another favorite was The Love-Ins, starring Richard Todd as a Timothy Leary figure.
The Counter-Culture died when it was co-opted by The Media. Once middle America started to see what was happening, it had moved on and morphed. The straights never know, because they are always three steps behind.
it’s interesting to look at the commercial preparations for Woodstock.( Sure, they never planned for a half million people, but they did plan for a summer festival with a big crowd of thousands).
Yet there was virtually nobody there who set up stands to sell Tshirts or food, and zero presence from name-brand companies (Coca-cola, etc). After Woodstock, businessmen woke up and realized there was a huge market out there.
Hippies became another market to be catered to; the general public realized that too, and joined in, with surprising speed.
When a quarter of all the teens in the country want to buy fringed vests and headbands, the “counter” culture was no longer countering anything…it became mainstream culture.
things happened in big cities years before in small towns. what might be starting to be corrupted in big cities was cutting edge in small towns.
i think 74 might a good cutoff for some cultural aspects; new music artists/style started turning to crap then too. though there was still linkage between politics and culture until the end of the war.
The election of Richard Nixon in late 1968 had to have been an influence. It was a signal that the Establishment wasn’t going to just roll over and die like Blue Meanies faced with music and love. I think what changed was that by 1970 no one believed anymore that a “velvet revolution” was going to overturn the established order, the way that the Soviet bloc eventually fell by 1990. By 1970 the counterculture had split between hardcore revolutionaries willing to use violence and the hippies who just wanted to grow their hair long, make love not war, listen to rock, and smoke dope.
It happened later in 1970, but another big reason things changed then was the bombing of the Army Math Research Center on the University of Wisconsin campus, presumably because it had the word “Army” in it’s title.
Four guys made an Oklahoma City type bomb in a van and parked it next to the building that held the research center. The bomb did tremendous damage, but not to the Army Math Research Center. It blew apart a physics lab and killed a completely innocent grad student. Everything changed after that - while people still had sympathy for the goals of the anti-war movement, they no longer had sympathy for the tactics of the movement or the participants. This one event pretty much ended the anti-war movement on one of the most active campuses in the country. People stopped showing up for demonstrations and sit-ins, not wanting to be associated with killers.
I wasn’t there, I was just a kid at the time, but I went to UW about a dozen years later and that was the accepted history. It is well documented in historie like the movie “The War at Home.”
I’m sure it was, but I’m equally sure that nobody not on the UW campus ever thought this. That bombing took place in August, 1970. But the shootings at Kent State took place on May 4. Kent State was gigantic because the entire country was affected. Well over 400 colleges closed, either ending classes early or scaling back academics to a great extent. Kent State was followed by the shootings at Jackson State. CSNY’s “Ohio” put the anger to music. There were protests, marches, political agitation, end-the-war petition campaigns, and every other action across the violent/peaceful spectrum. None of them made any difference. By August, the world had moved on. UW was not the first radical bombing, nor the last. It made no impression on my campus.
Why do you believe that (i.e. the underlined part above)? I would have thought that the killing of four innocent young people (they weren’t even part of the protestors IIRC) might have elicited sympathy and support for the anti-war platform.
As that article I linked states, the Silent Majority backed the Guard over the students. Obviously, the students must have been doing something wrong - like being anti-war protesters - or they never would have been shot.
We talk a lot today about “blaming the victim.” That’s because for most of the 20th century, we did blame the victim. Mainstream society by definition was always right. If you were outside the mainstream you were by definition wrong. Whatever happened to you was your own fault.
People talk nonsense about that era today. The counterculture was in no way a threat. There were of course violent radicals, but they were a tiny minority shunned by virtually everyone on every side. Nixon was hated, hated, hated then and now because he remains the only president ever to declare war on his own people. It was the only war since WWII that was won. His administration elevated fear of the Other into a political position which was overwhelmingly successful. It took decades to beat down those fears among the majority, even though they are a large piece of right-wing orthodoxy to this day.
Peace and love lost out to hate, hate was that stoked, heightened, and if necessary manufactured for political purposes. Today we can be amazed that the shooting of young protesters could be supported by the majority. Today we can be amazed that the Iraq war was supported by the majority. In both cases, those who believed otherwise were called traitors and marginalized, even though people now prefer to forget those times ever happened. Remember 2003 and multiply by ten. That was 1970.
