Sunday, October 08, 2023
Misfit in his family
1970, The Beginning of the
End
https://jacquescoulardeau.medium.com/1970-the-beginning-of-the-end-b3cc53b8cd7d
1970,
is the date of a great turning point in American history, a great roundabout in
the manifest destiny of the USA.
Music
and cinema are the most active tools and means at the disposal of those who
oppose the war in Vietnam, especially after the Tet Offensive (Jan 20, 1968 –
Sep 23, 1968). Senator Barry Goldwater was defeated in 1964, after the
assassination of John F. Kennedy, but his extreme nuclear-minded war policy
survived his defeat, and subsequently Martin Luther King and then Robert
Kennedy were assassinated in the good old American style on April 4, 1968, and
June 6, 1968. Nixon required all school classes and their teachers in all
American schools to take part in a November 11 remembrance day in 1969. As a
teacher in Dunn High School at the time I invoked my French consulate and their
advice not to meddle with American politics not to take part. It was badly
received.
A
musical on Broadway, in 1968, Hair was one of the first manifesto against the
war and the draft that had been instated. But from the musical in 1968 to the
film in 1979, the list of antiwar films against or around the Vietnam War was
very long, and the film numerous numerous, and the musicians were great
activists. Think of Jimi Hendrix and his version of the Star Spangled Banner at
Woodstock.
The
greatest victim in this period was the American family, and I am afraid it
never was able to pick itself up back on its feet. This film is precisely about
such a family that exploded at the end of the 1960s. It was interesting at the
time but it has aged tremendously and authoritarian parents, fathers or mothers
alike, who try to impose onto their kids their vision of what they are supposed
to do, died little by little under the phenomenal pressure of family planning
that brought the number of children down tremendously fast with abortion added
to it. Having a child was no longer the gift of God it used to be called, but
the decision of the parents, particularly the mother, to have a child or not.
No surprise that the newer generations of Americans consider themselves as not
attached to any religion anymore, and that is even a lot wider among White
Anglo-Saxon Protestant people.
In
1970 no one was able to see the end of the tunnel. I came back from this fiasco
in June 1970, sad and in a way slightly sour. That’s the most frightening part
of this film: the chap leaves his family, girlfriend, and everything behind and
thumbs a lift to anywhere from a truck driver. There is no perspective, no
hope, and no vision in this film, not even real violence, and that makes it
tremendously old, and aging has not been easy on the film, and the main
artists. Nicholson appears as blocked in a permanent, congenital hatred of
himself and the whole world, and yet he escapes into it without having any love
for it.
Édition
La Dondaine, edium.com, 2023
