Apirl 18th New York Times/Arts & Leisure section
Seeing the '60s Through a '90s Corrective Lense
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
A whiff of incense mixed with marijuana smoke drifts through two recent movies, "Hideous Kinky" and "A Walk on the Moon," both of which conjure an era that Hollywood, in its devotion to snugly happy endings, has largely avoided.
In the countercultural dream that has so intimidated Hollywood, a hippie Pied Piper with stringy shoulder-length hair, a fringed jacket and reeking of patchouli oil is banging a tambourine on his knee with one hand and flashing a peace sign with the other. Beside him are a trio of spaced-out go-go girls shimmying and gazing groggily into the purple haze.
Although that signature scent, blown across three decades of shifting winds, isn't overpowering in these films, it is just pungent enough to suggest that what we think of as "the 60s" -- the years (1964-72) bracketed musically by Beatlemania and "American Pie" -- were not a hallucination but a messy, uncomfortable reality.
In their hesitantly nostalgic ways, both films remind us that in the days of turning on, tuning in and dropping out, people actually followed Timothy Leary's notorious prescription for personal enlightenment.
But in remaining true to Hollywood's tidy, late-'90s formulas, they also suggest that dropping back in was just as easy and that all that dope smoking, acid tripping, searching, protesting and free love was an adolescent prank, a temporary lapse of judgment.
The notion that this heady ethos was really just an episode in a cultural mini-series whose happy ending finds the Dow Jones industrials hovering around 10,000 and garish $1 million houses sprouting all over the American landscape is a quintessential revisionist view of what the 60s were about.
These films insinuate that thousands of ex-hippies, now in their late 40s and 50s and presiding in executive suites, emulated Bill Clinton's experiment with marijuana and never inhaled. And if they did inhale, God forbid their children should follow suit. Both films focus on young, attractive women who break the rules to pursue sexual and spiritual transcendence, then return to the middle-class lives they renounced. In the smart, beautifully acted "Hideous Kinky," set in Morocco in 1972, Kate Winslet is Julia, a young Englishwoman drifting around North Africa with two young daughters in tow and no money.
In Marrakech she meets a Moroccan street acrobat (Said Taghmaoui) who is also penniless. The two make love, smoke hashish and drag the girls along on a risky trek into the Moroccan countryside. Now and then, Julia, who aspires to learn Sufi dancing, makes noises about wanting to experience pure joy by obliterating her ego.
In reimagining an era of hippies, dropouts and seekers after a higher consciousness, "Hideous Kinky" is accurate as far as it goes. But that isn't very far. The movie conveys only the flavor of the time. Julia's quest is portrayed as muddled and vague, and the movie nudges us again and again to recognize what a terrible, irresponsible parent she is.
When one daughter insists she wants to return to England and have a proper education, her mother is dumbfounded. True, Julia radiates a certain defiant charm. But in the film's overall judgment, she is also a silly spaced-out fool who must come to her senses. And in the end she does.
"A Walk on the Moon" follows its protagonist Pearl Kantrowitz (Diane Lane) to a working-class Jewish resort in the Catskills in the summer of 1969. Pearl, who married her husband, Marty (Liev Schreiber), when she became pregnant at 17, is now the mother of a 14-year-old daughter, Alison (Anna Paquin), who is just entering adolescence.
On weekdays, while Marty is back in New York City repairing televisions, Pearl plunges into an affair with Walker (Viggo Mortensen), a smolderingly handsome peddler of blouses that he sells to the summer colony out of his van.
Pearl momentarily loses her head and slips off with Walker to the nearby Woodstock festival, where her daughter accidentally witnesses Pearl, body-painted and ecstatic, being whirled in her lover's arms. Alison is understandably upset. When Pearl finally has to choose between Marty and Walker, the small, finely acted film caves in to 90s movie values.
In the final scene, Pearl and her husband begin a tentative slow dance to music on the radio: a soupy version of Dean Martin singing "When You're Smiling." Marty, realizing that his wife has almost left him behind in the '50s, switches to a station playing Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze." Signaling that he'll try to get with the times, he relaxes and swings out.
"A Walk on the Moon" is a decent little film, but in reducing a wrenching life decision to a matter of switching radio stations, it blithely denies the enormous power of the forces that have tugged Pearl into an affair. An earlier scene in the film juxtaposes images of Pearl and Walker making love at the exact moment Neil Armstrong first sets foot on the moon. The implication is clear. For Pearl, this is not just a dalliance but an earthshaking, life-changing sexual awakening.
Had "A Walk on the Moon" been made in the '70s, there is little doubt that the character would have forsaken her family to go on the road with her sexual savior. Today, that's just not permitted.
In what they show and don't show of the '60s, both films raise disturbing questions: When did it become embarrassing for the mass media to portray the counterculture as a movement driven by passionate idealism and a reckless insistence on crashing through barriers? Could it be that the movies are too scared of the era and the freedoms it represented to confront it head-on?
Every now and then, Hollywood has tried. "Easy Rider," which came out of left field in 1969 and was made for a dime, proved to be a one-of-a-kind, a fluke. While other films of the period, like "Midnight Cowboy" and "Five Easy Pieces," and later, "Shampoo" and "Coming Home," expressed a combative, rebellious spirit, they didn't dive in to the thick of things.
Hollywood was very late in addressing the Vietnam War. It had to be safely behind us before we could begin to watch movies about it. Among Hollywood's leading filmmakers, only Oliver Stone, in films like "Born on the Fourth of July," "Platoon" and "The Doors," has taken the passions of the 60s seriously enough to portray the full impact of the generational and political fissures that ripped open the American psyche. Outside of Stone's films, vintage rock music and rock documentaries, from "Monterey Pop" to "Gimme Shelter," seem to do a much better job than most feature films of capturing the era.
One could list a hundred reasons why Hollywood has never given the 60s their due. High on that list would be the problem of '60s fashions. Even at the time, the hordes who donned the more extravagant hippie regalia often looked ridiculous. How could anyone take such weirdly dressed characters seriously?
Another problem is the stoned-out argot adopted by millions of young people in the late '60s and early '70s (with its "right ons"; "like, mans" and (italics)"heavies"(end italics)). Today it sounds quaint and surprisingly conformist.
Post baby-boomers may find it hard to envision block after city block of shaggy- haired young people clad in exotic robes and finery milling in the streets. But such scenes were commonplace in San Francisco, in college communities and in the East Village of New York City in the late '60s. On Sunday afternoons, the area around the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park became a stoned soul picnic in which hundreds of artists, pot-smoking hippies, drug dealers and musicians congregated for fragrant, dreamy communal love-ins.
As one who embarked on the same pharmaceutical, sexual and political consciousness-raising adventures that millions of others did, I can remember a day when I was so convinced that the world had changed forever that I tossed all my neckties into the trash.
In the antimaterialistic spirit of the times, I gave away treasured possessions, which amounted to almost nothing in those days: a collection of cherished 45 rpm records donated to a friend's jukebox. Determined to "rip off" the system, one day I bravely pilfered a can of tuna fish from a supermarket shelf.
Visiting some friends in Key West, Fla., in the spring of 1969, I descended on a town crawling with drugged-out hippies, including a self-proclaimed white-robed Jesus. During that sojourn, I met a skinny, acid-tripping girl who solemnly informed me that "Any Day Now," the title of Joan Baez's new album of Bob Dylan songs, referred to Dylan's imminent suicide. "He's just going to trip right out," she said with that special hushed "Wow!" in her voice that seriously hip people attached to all things mystical. As much as that counterculture was mobilized by antiwar sentiment, its driving force was really drugs, and not only psychedelics. In the quest to "break on through to the other side," as Jim Morrison bellowed, any and every stimulant was enlisted for the cause. Amphetamines, which were widely available back then and carried little stigma, contributed immeasurably to the collective paranoia that was rapidly building up. And, of course, there was always booze to smooth the transitions.
Two other random flashbacks. In one, I am hounded out of a Chinese restaurant by a radical feminist and her poet husband after I describe my extremely liberal political views. But they and their revolutionary comrades have big plans to sabotage the 1968 presidential elections by, among other tactics, vomiting on the voting machines. Liberals were their worst enemies. "When the revolution comes, you'll be one of the first to go!" they scream, and I'm out of there. Fast.
In the other, I am living in New York and supplying lyrics for a revolutionary rock band no one has ever heard of in another city. Asked to donate $300 -- a third of my life savings at the time -- for sound equipment, I gladly obliged, only to discover that the money has gone up the leader's nose in crystal methedrine. So much for the new Beatles!
Recalling such crazy 60s moments, I wonder if what we call the '60s was a mass psychosis that is either best forgotten or swept under the rug. But I don't think so. For all the smashed lives and insanity that such excesses brought, the root of that frenzied exploration still strikes me as an honest, if naive, effort to improve the human condition by storming the barricades of consciousness. That idealism is distilled in the best music of the era, which combines a majestic rage with an exhilarating eroticism.
Today's social climate is in many ways antithetical to that of 30 years ago when the notion of capitalism itself was under siege. The power of today's American economy combined with the country's conservative, comformist values, make joining the system irresistible to all but a few. Rebellion is reduced to a matter of fashion statement.
If the AIDS epidemic ended the sexual revolution, sexual allure has increasingly become the major marketing tool fueling the economy. Rock may have been superseded by rap, but the history of rock-and-roll is probably the one with which more Americans are familiar than any other. As for drugs, the new miracle elixirs, Prozac and the other serotonin boosters are tools to help people become happier, more efficient producers in the great American money machine.
Movies may never get the 60s right. For one thing, those days are fading fast, and many of the Hollywood studio executives calling the shots are Wunderkinds in their 20s and 30s whose closest contact with the '60s are VH1 flashbacks or their parents' (censored) anecdotes.
In his sweetly prescient '60s ballad, "Younger Generation," John Sebastian, a quintessential Woodstock-era songwriter, contemplated impending fatherhood and the raising of an adolescent son. "And then I'll know that all I've learned my kid assumes/And all my deepest worries must be his cartoons," he mused.
In a way he was right. But the lessons taught by the '60s are not the ones that those who lived through them imagined they would be.