No other historical period in the post-war United States is granted such a significance in the collective imagination as the so-called “sixties”, by which one usually understands the period which stretches, approximately, from the beginning of Kennedy’s presidency until Nixon’s resignation[i]. All the periodical revivals of fashion, of music and of the supposed “feeling” of other decades notwithstanding, the sixties still seem to retain the status of having been unique, of having represented a pivotal point with consequences which the United States still have to deal with. In other words, they are remembered as a period which set the cultural coordinates in which US-American history has afterward taken place and which it has been still unable to definitely transcend. Both the liberal and the conservative wings of the country’s political spectrum continue to refer to events, value-systems, and social and political positionings of the sixties, while actually debating about the problems of our times and trying to establish differences in order for the electors to decide themselves for one of them. The 1991 Gulf War was explicitly presented, for instance, as an opportunity for America to finally leave the “Vietnam syndrome” behind. A couple of years later, President Clinton felt impelled to openly express his sorrow for the death of Jerry Garcia, leader of the hippie-band par excellence, the Grateful Dead. The 1992 Los Angeles “race-riots” that followed the absolution of the policemen who had beaten Rodney King down were also decried by some Republicans as being the result of the “failed politics of the 60’s”[ii]. Already in our century, John Kerry tried to profile himself, however unsuccessfully, as both a former Vietnam War hero and a courageous fighter for the end of the Vietnam War in the course of his campaign against President Bush.

However, the sixties have not only been constructed and defined in the most different –but also academic– texts as the post-war era’s key period, but have also considerably often been presented as having been a kind of historical anomaly without paragon in the 20th century and maybe even in modern history. Of course, everyone agrees on the importance of, say, the Second World War or the Great Depression, which both had long-reaching impact on US-American culture and history. Nevertheless, the sixties (this “flowering of participatory social life”[iii]) seem to have an inherent aura of uniqueness, perhaps because the plethora of social and political “movements” that populated the period, and unlike the ones of the Second World War or the Great Depression times, is seemingly more difficult or even impossible to explain in the frame of traditional interpretation models. The “movements” of the sixties seem to be too many, too different, too radical and, alas, also too unclear. To make matters worst, in the sixties they tended to be portrayed, or even they portrayed themselves, as spontaneously originated “movements” with only loose structures or limits. Their intrinsic photogenic characteristics and media-suitability, which came hand in hand with the fact that they originated in a time of explosive expansion of mass media in the world, made their existence only more unique, more mythical, more spectacular.

As so often in history, it is not that important to investigate how far the idealization of an era corresponds to the “truth”, but rather to look at the ways it is perceived and mobilized as “truth”. And it certainly looks as if US-Americans had already believed in the 1960s that they were literally standing shortly before a great historical and cultural divide. Sayre recalls, for example, the way politically or culturally active people in the sixties had the feeling that time passed incredibly fast, because the density of events, of sensations and of hopes was extraordinary high[iv]. Apocalyptic tones were being sent, indeed, from all corners of the radical nebula which was popularly known as “The Movement”: Black Power, Age of Aquarius and Revolution for the Sake of It, three slogans of the Black militants, the hippies and the yippies, respectively, can be mentioned here as catchwords. Mark Rudd, one of the most well known Weathermen, “urged white middle-class revolutionaries to model themselves on Captain Ahab in Moby Dick – ‘with one thought: to bring down the white whale’” – and this, although he certainly knew that in Melville’s novel it is not the whale but the hunters who perish[v]. With less inclination to violence but as much pathos as Rudd, scores of academics acclaimed “the making of a counter-culture” or even hailed the advent of a utopian “Consciousness III”[vi]. On the other side of the political spectrum, Goldwater’s, Wallace’s and Nixon’s –but also Johnson’s and Humphrey’s– followers saw the country literally sink into chaos and hoped for “law and order” to be reestablished[vii].

These examples, as well as loads of others, may today seem to be naive or exaggerated, but they nevertheless indicate how the myth of the sixties as an epoch-making transitional time was already present while the 1960s were taking place, and not only at the margins but as a quite widespread notion in US-American society. In Miller’s retrospective words,

Although most Americans were not ‘cultural players’ in the sixties, the notion of reality that was posited in the sixties –that reality needs to be justified and is only truly authenticated and accommodated by intimations of a visceral super-reality– touched nearly everyone to some degree, if only as a notion that needed to be denounced, repressed, or put out of mind. Traditional scales of measurement were not enough[viii].

The myth of the sixties uniqueness as a revolutionary period, which already existed in the 1960s, is only gradually different to today’s perceptions of the decade. However, significant variations of this canonical historical narration have emerged lately. For instance, in Farber and Roche’s book The Conservative Sixties different academics try to emphasize the point that the 1960s were not only “radical” and that the concept “conservative sixties” is no oxymoron, neither[ix]. Still, they locate the “crucial” moment of the New Right’s emergence in the sixties, thus shifting the understanding of this period’s mythical importance and uniqueness instead of relativizing or challenging it.

On the other hand, the historian Farrell tries to focus on the historical continuities between the fifties, the sixties and the seventies. In order to do that, he introduces the concept of “political personalism”, which encapsulates the characteristic post-war understanding that “the personal is political”. This is surely presented by him as the philosophical cornerstone on which the whole “spirit” of the sixties lays on, but also as a clearly perceptible current of thought in the other decades mentioned[x].

We could also allude here to Schulman’s work, which is another example of a new historical model in which the character of the sixties as the most important pivotal point in post-war United States’ history is called into question. Indeed, basing upon economic, cultural, political, demographic, and other arguments, Schulman develops a narrative in which the decade which first comprehensive academic history was titled It Seemed Like Nothing Happened[xi], the seventies, gets to be the pivotal point or, as he puts it in the subtitle, “the great shift in American culture, society, and politics”[xii].

In other words, the historical distance and the application of newer approaches have led to a light faltering of the notion of the “sixties-as-a-monolith-of-unreachable-importance”. Nevertheless, from the fact that –following Farrell’s emphasis– “at least chronologically, the Fifties and the Sixties were only a day apart”, as well as that the continuities between these both decades and between them and others get “too often obscured by an emphasis on the Sixties as a ‘revolutionary’ decade”[xiii], it does not follow that the sixties did not have their historical ruptures. These ruptures may have not been as unitary and clear-cut, let alone “revolutionary” in the modern sense of the word, as they often have been constructed in the academic, literary and media discussions on the sixties. But we still can recognize clusterings of different movements and phenomena that took place in the 1960s, and which considerably shifted and partially reshaped the discursive coordinates of the United States’ society and culture. The pictures of the sixties as an era of social upheaval, political crisis and cultural transformations in the United States are, indeed, very well known. Thus, they are only going to be slightly delineated here.

At the beginning of the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement arrived to its climax with King’s “I have a dream”-speech and the passing of the Civil Rights Act. This was shortly before both the so-called “race riots” in the North and in the West of the nation and the radicalization of the Black movement’s youth showed the extent of the United States’ “race problem” and made clear that there were aspects of it which were not essentially of a legal sort (and which have largely not been resolved to our day) – and it showed this, most significantly and for the first time in history, with the conscious or unconscious help of the mass media. Meanwhile, the traditional race-, class-, and other ideological separations and schemes, with which supposed social threats were perceived by the state or by state-loyal citizens, were being fundamentally challenged by a student movement and a New Left that mainly recruited their ranks from the white middle class. These movements were explicit in their opposition to “the American century’s” hegemonic values, and over the 1960s they partially developed, in fact, ideas of themselves being a kind of self-proclaimed “revolutionary vanguard” or, at least, a part of the upcoming “revolution”. Suddenly, then, the enemy of the state was the own youth. The emergence of a radical women movement which denounced patriarchal structures also and maybe even especially within the student and militant Black movements, and which at least partially propagated the ideal of a new femininity, further confused the lines and distinctions, because it opened another front on the already almost incognizable field of the sixties’ social struggle. If we add on the increasing visibility of self-defense and freedom movements of historically especially marginalized minorities like Mexican Americans, Native Americans, gays and lesbians, we get an image of the social arena popularly known as The Movement which is extremely complex, multilayered and kaleidoscopic. That is precisely why it is also confusing and incomprehensible, and why it sometimes even seems to lack meaning.

Parallel to all these at least partially new formation and organization of political groups, coalitions, directions and identities, there were discursive shiftings underway in the United States which touched nearly all questions related to morals, aesthetics and lifestyles. Contemporary observers already noticed these shiftings, which were –somehow awkwardly– constructed as a unitary movement called counterculture, which was supposed to be either a synonym for a more expanded concept of “The Movement” or –according to its perceived essence as a novelty– as the truly “revolutionary” wing of The Movement. The inherent problems of the counterculture concept notwithstanding, it established itself and it still designates today a whole array of more or less related cultural Erscheinungen. Some of the most important or influential might be the following: the so-called “sexual revolution”, which means the acceptance and diffusion of traditionally despised sexual customs and notions; the glorification of youth itself as a value für sich, which was both a result and a cause for the so-called generation gap; the loosening of the norms about “acceptable” external appearances and philosophical Weltanschauungen; the emphasis on a non-conformist individualism with significant hedonistic traits; the expansion of the field of socially accepted cultural and artistic expressions, which corresponded to and further undermined the expansion of the market and the diversification of consumer society; and the popularization of an eclectic mysticism that came along with a new ecological consciousness and with a preference for hallucinogens[xiv].

This literally spectacular radicalization of significant segments of the youth and of the whole population of the United States should also be put in the context of the deepest crisis of the country’s political system during the post-war. On the one hand, assassination played an important part in the social texture of the sixties and in the way people thought (and think) about that decade. The feelings of crisis and insecurity could only be reinforced by the fact that the circumstances related to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy (1963), his brother Robert Kennedy (1968), the civil rights icon Martin Luther King (1968), and the Black Muslim Malcolm X (1965), to mention only the more well known ones, were and still are popularly perceived by the US-American people as being mysterious and lastly unexplained. On the other hand, but somehow related to it, the sixties were also a time of intensified state-provocations and state-repression, as shown by the state-measures dealing with the so-called race riots, by the civil-war-like images which remain from the protests against the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago 1968, by the day-to-day harassment of “freaks” of all kinds, and by the enhancement of FBI’s ominous strategy COINTELPRO (counterintelligence programs), which was directed mainly against black dissidents.

The sixties are also, as was mentioned already, the time of the emergence of a New Right leaded by Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan (among others). Furthermore, the end of the decade was clearly marked by the consolidation of a “silent majority” that clearly referred to President Richard Nixon and asked him to bring “law and order” back to the country. This unconditional political support and carte-blanche-mentality was probably one of the factors that led the Nixon administration to the assumption that it had enough legitimation even for unconstitutional or criminal actions, as the Watergate case most clearly shows. Apropos Watergate, the sixties were an age of multilateral distrust, of unclear fronts, of ubiquitous paranoia. As Bloom puts it,

[w]hat is unique about the 1960s is that we are living with a number of competing (and, sometimes, contradictory) popular meanings – not only consensus but several. We have a divided –perhaps schizophrenic– legacy from this era. Like the other generalized views of past eras, each of these contains errors and simplifications. But what is more striking is the way these visions of the 1960s can contradict one another and still coexist in the popular imagination[xv].

Needless to say, the sixties are most usually remembered or thought upon in relation to the Vietnam War, of which it was clear, since at least 1968, that it was a lost war. This never ever officially declared war, which was perceived as being regularly expanded by the executive power (both in the Johnson and in the Nixon years) behind the people’s back, seems to have been the main factor for the clustering, however amorphous, of the already mentioned radical movements and organizations which composed The Movement. Moreover, it also seems to have been, in Miller’s words, “perhaps more than anything else [what] injected the surreal into sixties America. The war seemed outside reality. It appeared unjustifiable […]. Certainly it was not worth the loss of so many lives. Official, government-sanctioned reality seemed a bad dream, an undesired reality”[xvi].

Of course, opposition to war, let alone radical conclusions about the inherent falseness of official truth, were not shared by all layers of US-American society, not even within the country’s youth: “If we focus on the majority of the youth, we find a continuity of nondissidence between the fifties and sixties”, which means that “we need to multiply ‘the national mood’ into two moods or more”[xvii]. However, the heterogeneous minority that fought for peace became, arguably by means of its own bombastic ways and its consequent media-prominence, the central spectacle of the sixties, and as such an instance which could not be seriously ignored. A social and political instance, indeed, that helped to shape the sense of the concepts of reality and truth in the sixties, not lastly because it created, mobilized and represented alternative versions of reality and truth. These versions could either wholly or only partially be accepted by people standing outside the previously mentioned heterogeneous minority – in fact, they even could be totally rejected and be fought against by all possible means by adherents of “the official truth”. Yet the existence of these versions, as well as their apparently sudden closeness to the discursive center, shows pretty clearly that in the 1960s it was not only a kind of “politics” that was challenged, but rather the whole reality or, more precisely, the whole conventional approaches to reality were called into question by different, alternative ones, which were massively put on the markets of truth and knowledge. “The sense of a reality suspended”, thus, led to the creation of new models of and approaches to several realities that were invoked to fill the vacuum[xviii]. The cultural paranoia that became a powerful and distinctive social phenomenon during the 1960s shall be understood as one of these models or as field full of such models, with which help the elusive or even vanished reality was supposed to be found again or to be newly reconstructed.

Miller’s notion of “reality suspended”, however, explicitly does not simply constrict to the discourses of politics or protest in the general senses of those words. It rather includes and applies to the production, reproduction and reception of such cultural artifacts usually conceptualized as belonging to or summing up to be “(mass) art” or “mass culture”. Of course, the analytical distinction between different discursive fields is somehow misleading, given the fact that in this work we are talking about a historical period in which the limits between the personal and the political, the culture and the market, and between all these fields and others, became multilaterally permeable. Still, for the sake of the analysis we can focus on that field usually conceptualized as culture (to do not would be equivalent to paralysis), without leaving its connections, overlappings, and intersections with all other discursive fields completely beside. Moreover, in this work culture or each single cultural artifact shall not be understood as something unambiguous and ready-made, which is either only power-stabilizing or only subversive. In lieu thereof, cultural artifacts are conceived of here as being themselves discursive fields in which social conflicts are carried out and in which different positions are negotiated. Hence, we get to a point in which, in respect of the sixties, the traditional scheme “culture / counterculture” begins to prove itself to be hopelessly sterile. “There was once a really alternative subculture and boom, power came in and this subculture was assimilated and commercialized”: This very well-known plot seems to become quite useless, considering the culture concept afore introduced, because in the 1960s that which came from the mainstream could potentially contain so many (or so few) subversive aspects, and especially arouse subversive responses in its reception, as the darkest sample of underground music. Conversely, that which came from the so-called counterculture had, on principle, as much chances to be exactly or only slightly differently power-stabilizing than, say, some “Reader’s Digest” articles. To quote the historian Steigerwald, for whom the Sixties represent “the end of modern America”, “US culture in the sixties did not mark the conquest over ‘tradition’ but, instead, it constituted the realm where the shift from modern to postmodern society was clearest, save that of work and industry”[xix].

The effects of this understanding of the US-American Sixties as marking the beginning of postmodernity for this work’s main topic, namely the emergence and development of cultural paranoia during exactly that period, will be discussed in the next chapter. It is time, however, to end this outline of the 1960s at this point with a look at Hollywood history, on the one hand because this enables one to comprise all three “realms” mentioned by Steigerwald as being the ones where the rupture towards postmodernity were “clearest” (“culture”, “work”, and “industry”), and on the other hand because the sources on which the insights of the main part of this work finally rest are precisely Hollywood movies[xx].

During the Sixties, the US-American film industry confronted a variety of problems and challenges that actually led to the deepest crisis of its whole history. Competition by television, a relatively new mass medium that conquered the country’s media landscape in the 1950s, was intensified by the displacement of significant portions of the urban population to suburbia and by the demographic development that accompanied that displacement. Those phenomena affected the business of the seven big studios, of which “Hollywood” then arguably consisted, devastatingly[xxi]. The number of movie attenders decreased constantly after the boom years of the immediate post-war, and it arrived 1971 at a low point from which it actually never really recovered. For instance, between 1945 and 1948 there were more than 90 million weekly attenders to movie theatres. By 1950, movie attendance had dropped a whole 30% to only 60 million weekly viewers, and by 1953 it had dropped again to just 46 million moviegoers weekly. For one whole decade, this number remained more or less stable (in 1960, for example, movie theaters were attended by 40 million persons weekly), but between 1965 and 1967 it decreased spectacularly from 44 to almost 18 million movie attenders. In a given week of 1971, only 16 million people went to the movies, and even after the advent of the blockbuster à la Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977) later in that decade, the movie attendance index remained clearly low in comparison to the 1950s (and even to the early sixties, let alone the 1940s) at about 20 million moviegoers weekly[xxii].

Film production had to be restricted in accordance to these ciphers. In fact, it achieved a negative record in 1963, a year in which all seven major studios, all put together, produced modest 142 movies. As a measure of comparison, it must not be forgotten that this number was only insignificantly higher than the usual annual production of one single big studio in classical Hollywood[xxiii]. Albeit this trend did eventually decelerate and could even be almost reversed, the film production numbers of the studio era could never really be met again[xxiv].

The fact that the trend could be stopped and even almost reversed, however, is interesting because it was mainly a result of new work forms and new work relations in Hollywood. The gradual erosion of the classical studio system, an erosion that began in the 1950s, accelerated briskly in the sixties, and led to the introduction of more profitable and more efficient business models in the film industry that were arguably heralds and gravediggers of the old system[xxv].

The studios of Hollywood’s classical era were gigantic companies with real estate on which films were actually produced, and this industrially, as if in an assembly line. These large companies, moreover, controlled nearly all aspects of film business, including the actual filmmaking, the distribution and the exhibition. That meant control, of course, but on the other hand it meant enormous payrolls and operating expenses. In a time of crisis, these fordistic structures could simply not be maintained without them undergoing significant changes. This was particularly true after 1948, the year in which federal courts forced Hollywood to back out from the exhibition business as a means of undermining the industry’s monopolistic stance[xxvi].

As a result of these factors, a more flexible system established itself in Hollywood during the sixties, a system that was organized on a free-lance basis: Even more frequently, independent production firms took care of the prepackaging of a movie, including the configuration of its workforce. The single projects, which were always to be considered as a whole in themselves, were then sold to a major studio. The studio’s role consisted of getting financing from the big banks and guaranteeing the distribution of the produced film. Thus, the major studios of classical Hollywood dropped out, in practice, from the business of actual production, and reinvented themselves as service companies that based on the active marketing of their contacts to the financial world and of the value of their trademark-names.

This process went hand in hand with other developments that contributed to a major aesthetic change in filmmaking and to shifting the limits of the sayable (“l’énonçable”) in major Hollywood movies. For instance, the increasing deplacement of production to foreign countries, which was especially carried on in the early 1960s, resulted in a kind of internationalization or even globalization of that which could be understood as belonging to the category “Hollywood picture”. Besides, it perfectly matched the younger viewers’ generation’s new, more “European” sensibilities and Weltanschauung. Indeed, this younger generation did not only quite obviously reject at least part of the 1950s’ moral and social notions, but by the mid-Sixties it had also become, especially because of the mere demographic development, the film industry’s undisputable main target.

Nevertheless, Hollywood’s future was arguably even more clearly shapen by the the take-over of the major studios by big corporations, a process that started in 1966 with Paramount’s acquisition by Gulf + Western. These take-overs, which affected all major studios in the course of relatively few years, were important because of different reasons: First, they were real financial life-savers for Hollywood. Second, they initiated the film industry’s incorporation into the structure of a more general entertainment industry that was itself barely emerging at that time. Third, the introduction of a new managerial mentality intensified the pursuit of efficiency and profit maximization.

In the sixties, however, and as was already mentioned, the country’s youth constituted the core of mass media’s audience for the first time in the history of the United States, and a visible loosening of traditional values was taking place within a growing youth culture that was photogenic and highly present in mass media. Given these conditions, it goes without saying that, in the 1960s, “efficiency” could at least partially mean, for people related to the film business, the need to tailor Hollywood movies to the supposed tastes of this potential young pool of consumers. It could also mean the need to hire at least relatively young men (at that time, they were always men) to occupy the new managerial positions at the studios, in the hope that they would be more in touch with both youth culture and the younger filmmakers[xxvii].

In the historic context of an industry based on the production by a flexible, free-lance workforce of individual projects that nonetheless were being consumed by steadily decreasing numbers of people (mainly the youth), “efficiency” could finally mean the need for each project to be specially attractive, for each movie to be a blockbuster. Each and every picture had to be spectacular: “The cinema of sensations” that was announced in the early sixties by Psycho (1960), among other films, was now no filmmaker’s aesthetic option anymore but rather a managerial imperative[xxviii]. Movies had to hit the bull’s eye, which in the sixties meant having to appeal more and better to the youth than in the past and, in order to do so, accommodating this youth’s debates, opinions, values and feelings in the industry’s narratives. This was done, of course, mostly in codified form, for the forces of the establishment, to which Hollywood actually still belonged, were all but overcome. Still, the film industry had to be able to integrate, reflect on, and medially disseminate critical thoughts and at least seemingly subversive tensions in some way, if it wanted the people who either belonged to the so-called counterculture or sympathized with it to consume its filmic output.

All that said, it is important to stress that Hollywood was not and is not an island, and that the Zeitgeist of the sixties (“the bull’s eye” that had to be met) was also co-produced by the film medium, not last because the filmmakers themselves were subjects who could not even metaphorically or with the help of their imagination escape the social text within which they were “arrested”. The afore introduced feeling of a suspended reality and the suspicion of the existence of different realities and truths, which were two of the main features of the United States’ social self-conception during the sixties, could not be excluded from Hollywood movies, then, both for the business reasons already mentioned and also because of the personal, social and cultural connections between the filmmaking community and society at large. After all, these uncanny feelings and notions shaped the way people in and outside the film industry thought of their world and tried to comprehend the vanishing reality. A similar thing occurred with the dramatic ebbing of confidence in governmental and, further, traditional institutions, which affected increasingly large sectors of the population during the 1960s and became an immense impetus in the last years of that period, as a result of prominent assassinations, of political plots and scandals, of the war’s (mis)management, and of the shifting of radical thoughts and currents to the field of the “sayable”, as was briefly lined out in the course of this chapter: This ebbing of confidence could simply not be completely excluded from commercial pictures and, in fact, it had to be somehow dealt with.

It was thus possible for a “movement” or a “vogue” like the so-called New Hollywood to gain influence in the second half of the sixties, especially after the spectacular financial and aesthetic success of movies such as Bonnie & Clyde (1967), The Graduate (1967), and Easy Rider (1969). This filmic movement or vogue characterized itself by a significant rejuvenation of Hollywood’s establishment that went hand in hand with the loosening of aesthetic, narrative, and moral conventions that had ruled over (or underneath?) commercial films for a long time, as well as with the creation of new conventions which arguably still partially mold the way movies are produced and received today[xxix].

It is on this social canvas of a multilayered renovation of the film industry and consumer society, and of the traditional authorities’ massive loss of –the redundancy notwithstanding– authority, that a new subgenre could emerge and very quickly gain popularity. Its main topic was conspiracy, and the conspiracies’ and plots’ outlines in this subgenre’s products were almost always perceived by the audience through the eyes of a “paranoid” main character – conventionally, the only character in the narrative, or one of the very few ones, who was able to even begin to notice the mere existence of the plot in the first place. The paranoid gaze, however, was not only prominently featured in explicitly political conspiracy movies à la The Parallax View (1974). Indeed, the conspiracies and plots of the subgenre “paranoia narratives” could either be political, in a narrow sense, or more general, existential, even metaphysical. Thus, the paranoid gaze could quite successfully permeate well-established film-genres like horror and comedy and have an impact on them: In fact, horror became an especially good vehicle for the sensibility and the gaze characteristic of the filmic paranoia narrative. Yet the consolidation of this particular narrative as a legitimate film-narrative in the sixties, as well as its stunning popularity, have to be understood as being part of a much larger phenomenon, namely the one called, in this work, “cultural paranoia” (as opposed to “clinical” or conventional “political paranoia”, as the next chapter will show). This phenomenon or formation arose in its (post)modern form and with seeming ubiquity during the sixties, and it shaped not only US-American cultural artifacts of all kinds but also political, academic and journalistic discourses as well as the way subjects made sense of their own world, the way subjects constructed reality and, consequently, the way we live now.

[i] In the following pages the concept “sixties” is going to be used without emphasis or quotation marks, because it can be considered an established historical concept, similar to, say, Reconstruction or Irangate. Alternatively, and only to the benefit of an easier reading experience, it will be substituted by “he 1960s”. This refers, however, to the same period, which goes until the middle of the chronological 1970s.

[ii] Quote from the introduction to Bloom, Alexander (ed.), Long Time Gone – Sixties America Then and Now. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001, p. 3.

[iii] From James, David E., Allegories of Cinema – American Film in the Sixties. Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press 1989, p. 3. Even if this formulation obviously refers to the liberal or radical sector of the political and cultural spectrum of America, and can be thus considered reductionistic, it is important to remember that the sixties also mark the decisive initial point of the majoritarian conservative sector’s direct participation in American social and political life, which makes James’ expression finally valid. See also Farber, David and Roche, Jeff (eds.), The Conservative Sixties. New York (NY): Peter Lang 2003.

[iv] See Sayre, Nora, Sixties Going On Seventies. New Brunswick (NJ): Rutgers University Press 1996 (Revised Edition – first edition 1973), p. 1: “In the early Seventies many kept remarking that a year seemed like a decade, or a decade like a century”.

[v] Quoted in Sayre, op. cit., p. 304.

[vi] See Roszak, Theodore, The Making of a Counter-Culture – Reflections on a Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition. New York (NY): Doubleday 1969; and Reich, Charles, The Greening of America. New York (NY): Random House 1970.

[vii] A lot of these persons who feared chaos even thought that The Movement was a Communist complot. See Anderson, Terry, The Movement and the Sixties – Protest in America from Greensboro to Wounded Knee. New York (NY): Oxford University Press 1996, p. 324: “The administration was determined to demonstrate that the movement had links with Hanoi or Moscow. As during the Johnson years, the CIA could not find any foreign Communist ties, but Nixon was tenacious and ordered additional covert actions”. In an at the end of the 1960s quite popular text parodized yippie agitator this suspicion. He told the story of himself visiting his “Communist” aunt, who despite her “Communism” found his long hairs disgusting. He answered: “Aunt Sadie, long hair is a commie plot! […] Our strategy is to steal the children of the bourgeoisie right away from their parents. Dig it!” See Rubin, Jerry, Do It! – Scenarios of the Revolution. New York (NY): Simon & Schuster 1970, pp. 93-94.

[viii] See Miller, Stephen Paul, The Seventies Now – Culture as Surveillance. Durham (NC): Duke University Press 1999, p. 14.

[ix] See Farber, David, “Democratic Subjects in the American Sixties: National Politics, Cultural Authenticity and Community Interest”. In: Farber and Roche (eds.), op. cit., pp. 8-20. See the same book’s introduction as well (pp. 1-7).

[x] See Farrell, James J., The Spirit of the Sixties – Making Postwar Radicalism. New York (NY): Routledge 1997.

[xi] The book was written by Peter N. Carroll and was published 1982 in New York with the subtitle The Tragedy and Promise of America in the 1970’s. From Miller, op. cit., p. 50.

[xii] See Schulman, Bruce J., The Seventies – The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics. New York (NY): Free Press 2001.

[xiii] Farrell, op. cit., p. 16.

[xiv] The literature on the movements and organizations mentioned and on the so-called counterculture is simply too comprehensive as to be listed here (the different movements, organizations and aspects of the counterculture have been also necessarily approached in a schematic and superficial way). The sources and works that can be used in further historical or cultural researches depend on the focus and on the specific questions of each future study, and it would make no sense to try to list exhaustively the best ones for each hypothetical topic. The following books, however, provide the researcher with good outlines or introductions which are also, at least partially, quite different from one another. See: Farrell, op. cit.; Anderson, op. cit.; Echols, Alice, Shaky Ground – The Sixties and its Aftershocks. New York (NY): Columbia University Press 2002; Stephens, Julie, Anti-disciplinary Protest – Sixties Radicalism and Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998; Koerselman, Gary H., The Lost Decade – America in the 1960’s. New York (NY): Peter Lang 1987; and Gitlin, Todd, The Sixties – Years of Hope, Days of Rage. New York (NY): Bantam 1987; among lots of others.

[xv] See Bloom (ed.), op. cit., p. 4.

[xvi] See Miller, op. cit., p. 14.

[xvii] From Filene, Peter, “Cold War Culture Doesn’t Say It All”. In Kuznick, Peter J. and Gilbert, James (eds.), Rethinking Cold War Culture. Washington (DC): Smithsonian Institution Press 2001, pp. 156-174 (quotes from p. 168 and p. 160, respectively).

[xviii] See Miller, op. cit., p. 14ff.

[xix] See Steigerwald, David., The Sixties and the End of Modern America. New York (NY): St. Martin’s Press 1995, p. 155. Concerning the aspect of the so-called American counterculture of the 1960s as getting commercialized, which could be only superficially referred to in this work, see Frank, Thomas, The Conquest of Cool – Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago (IL): University of Chicago Press 1997. Before criticizing this myth and the conventional dichotomy “counterculture / culture”, Frank circumscribes the “commercialization plot”, which he calls “the standard version of the countercultural myth”, as follows: “The revolt of the young against [mainstream] was a joyous and even glorious cultural flowering, though […] the story ends with the noble idealism of the New Left in ruins and the counterculture sold out to Hollywood and the television networks” (p. 5).

[xx] To see the reasons for having chosen movies as historical sources, see chapter 4.

[xxi] Classical Hollywood consisted fundamentally of eight major studios: Metro Goldwyn Mayer, Paramount, Warner Bros., United Artists, Universal, Columbia Pictures, 20th Century Fox and RKO-Pathé. Nevertheless, the last one mentioned quit the business of producing and distributing pictures at the end of the 1950s, even though it continued marketing its own film stock. Even Disney cannot, using strict criteria, be considered a major studio of the Studio Era, although it certainly is one of the most important film concerns since approximately 30 years. See Gomery, Douglas, “Toward a New Media Economics”. In: Bordwell, David and Carroll, Noël (eds.), Post-Theory – Reconstructing Film Studies. Madison (WI): University of Wisconsin Press 1996, pp. 407-418 (especially pp. 408-410); and Merrit, Greg, Celluloid Mavericks – A History of the American Independent Film. New York (NY): Thunder’s Mouth Press 2000, especially p. 2ff and pp. 56-58.

[xxii] See for example Belton, John, American Cinema / American Culture. New York (NY): Mc Graw Hill 1994, pp. 257-258.

[xxiii] See Monaco, Paul, The Sixties – 1960-1970 (History of the American Cinema, Volume 8). Berkeley (CA): University of California Press 2001, p. 269.

[xxiv] In the mid-Seventies, Hollywood produced 300 movies yearly. This roughly corresponded to the numbers of the mid-Fifties, in other words to the numbers of precisely the time in which the long, deep Hollywood crisis started. See Monaco, op. cit., p. 39.

[xxv] Concerning the issues related to the Studio System, its emergence, its economic and aesthetic characteristics and its end, there is a comprehensive literature. Good introductions are offered by Gomery, Douglas, The Hollywood Studio System – A History. London: British Film Institute 2005; Cripps, Thomas, Hollywood’s High Noon – Moviemaking & Society before Television. Baltimore (MD): John Hopkins University 1997; Davis, Ronald L., The Glamour Factory – Inside Hollywood’s Big Studio System. Dallas (TX): Southern Methodist University Press 1993; and Bordwell, David; Staiger, Janet and Thompson, Kristin, The Classical Hollywood Cinema – Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. New York (NY): Columbia University Press 1985; among many others.

[xxvi] See Monaco, op. cit., p. 9.

[xxvii] In this regard, Paramount (the first major that was overtaken by a corporation) was pioneer. See Biskind, Peter, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls – How the Sex, Drugs and Rock’n’roll Generation Saved Hollywood. New York (NY): Simon & Schuster 1998, especially pp. 141-148.

[xxviii] See Monaco, op. cit., p. 179ff.

[xxix] See Biskind, op. cit.; Thompson, op. cit.; Gilbey, Ryan, It Don’t Worry Me – The Revolutionary American Films of the Seventies. New York (NY): Faber and Faber 2002; or Lev, Peter, American Films of the Seventies – Conflicting Visions. Austin (TX): University of Texas Press 2000; among many others, for more information and insights on the New Hollywood “movement”.

 

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