Hello everyone. As you all know, the famed and beloved comedian/actor Robin Williams tragically passed away in August. He was a fabulous entertainer who touched the hearts of hundreds of millions of people around the world. When I first heard the news, it struck me as deeply unfair that someone who brought so much joy to people would feel so sad as to feel he had no choice but to take his own life. I wrote the following post in the spirit of remembering him and his fantastic career. (Incidentally this is also Hopped on Pop’s 100th post, but I’ll do some sorta special thing in my next post about it.)
Like I’m sure many of you did, after hearing the terrible news this summer, I rewatched some of my favorite performances by him in remembrance, including such classics as Dead Poets Society and Good Will Hunting, and discovered “new” films I hadn’t seen, such as Good Morning, Vietnam and Moscow on the Hudson. And that’s when I noticed something there that I hadn’t given much thought to before. Or, I should say, I became curious about something I’d previously taken for granted. For some reason, I associate each of these movies with comedies and dramas that were all coming out around the same time from about the mid-1980s until 2000, including Forrest Gump, The Shawshank Redemption, As Good As It Gets, and Finding Forrester (and to a lesser extent, L.A. Confidential, but that’s sort of an outlier in this).
What do all of these movies have in common? There doesn’t seem to be a connection that jumps out right away. Only half of them feature Robin Williams, but evidently he tended to take parts in movies like these with some frequency during the peak years of his film career (and although I haven’t seen it, I’ve heard Robin Williams’ Awakenings also fits this category). And yet there’s something about each of these movies – and I’m sure you, the reader, can think of some others – that evoke a feeling of relatedness. And I think it’s because they constitute a class of movies all their own – calling it a genre may be too strong, but perhaps it’s apt to call them a phase in American dramatic cinema. They’re the American reconciliation.
Let me try to explain. As anyone somewhat familiar with 20th century American history – or even world history – is aware, to all contemporary observers it seemed civilization was falling apart near the close of the 1960s. The United States and its coalition were deeply entrenched in Vietnam with no end in sight (and at the cost of many, many lives on both sides); rapid nuclear proliferation caused scientists, politicians, and other commentators to increasingly predict World War III and the end of the world were near; globalization and economic growth led to pollution and environmental degradation; and booming population growth led to food shortages, which were expected to culminate in a Malthusian mother of all messes.
Add to that the deep social and political rift between various factions within American society, who vied with each other for the very soul of the nation itself. It sounds like flowery storytelling, but countless cultural forces all clashed over issues like drug use, free love (or sexual deviancy, depending on who you asked), government control and corruption, race and gender, and the legacy (or aftermath, again depending on who you asked) of the politically charged Summer of Love (see above). All the while – and especially after President Nixon’s resignation – the American government seemed hopelessly incapable of providing the nation with the leadership it needed in such turbulent times.
I’ve mentioned in a previous post that the tumult and hope of the 1960s and the paranoia and pessimism of the 1970s reflected visibly in movies of the time, both big and small. Apocalypse Now probably needs no introduction, but it brought the horrors of Vietnam uncomfortably home. Smaller films like Scarecrow starring Al Pacino and Two-Lane Blacktop starring James Taylor echoed the post-Woodstock sentiment that everything the hippies fought for in preceding years was for nought – the dream had died. Then there were the blaxploitation films, with positive portrayals of black heroes (I once had an American film history textbook describe the motivation behind the genre as being to create the “black John Wayne“), but which also depicted the urban half of the nation as crime-ridden and (especially in the case of Pam Grier) drug-rife.
We somehow got our mojo back in the 1980s – how it happened depends on your historiographer. As early as the mid- to late 1970s, Lucas and Spielberg stepped in with their backwards-looking, campy blockbusters like Star Wars, Jaws, Indiana Jones, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and E.T. The childlike innocence of those movies evoked a lost golden age and lifted America out of its funk; it got people hooked on optimism again. People wanted happy stories and to be winners again (hence why the Miracle on Ice is often considered a turning point). Over the course of the decade, the economy improved and America regained its confidence as “leader of the Free World.” Whatever voodoo it took to make it happen, the divisive counterculture wars of the previous decades (arguably starting as early as the mid-1950s) finally subsided.
But even as President Reagan rallied the American people against the “Evil Empire” and the Soviet Union indeed began to show signs of crumbling, the fact remained that the society that had weathered the Cold War was different. The economy improved, people were starting to finally care about environmentalism, faith in government was restored, and so on and so forth. We survived and in fact overcame our internal cultural struggles of the past decades, but it had changed us, and that tends to put the preceding time period and its underlying struggles into perspective.
Ultimately, the movies I mentioned in the beginning of this post, from Moscow on the Hudson to Finding Forrester, represent an intermediary stage between the 1980s faith-restoring blockbusters and the more ennui-driven culture wars films from the 1990s, both of which I’ve discussed previously. Namely, these movies represent the “reconciliation” stage in Hollywood: Americans are coming to terms with the struggles and societal changes of the Sixties and Seventies through their cinema, sometimes by taking a close look at the cultural roots that set us on that path, and at the end of that road is a serious reflection of how those events have impacted our country since. Whether those impacts were for better or worse Forrest Gump will not say, but we don’t regret American conservatism (Forrest) and American liberalism (Jenny) going their own way and discovering themselves, because eventually they got back together and got married. The nation had its happily ever after.
Indeed, although Forrest Gump gets some flak for disparaging American liberalism through the character of Jenny, I think all of these movies in fact view the cultural revolutions of those decades as having been an indispensable step in getting to where we are today. Dead Poets Society extolled the virtues of self-expression and non-conformity for the role they played in encouraging activist Americans to question authority and the established order. In As Good As It Gets, a friendless, bigoted sufferer of OCD befriends his gay neighbor down the hall and comes to support a single mother with a sick child, a setup that would’ve been unthinkable if the solution in the 1980s to the countercultural upheavals had been to get the nation back to “the way things were.” In Good Will Hunting, it’s completely okay for Will to say “to hell with it” to a promising career with the NSA and the great things he could be for society, in order to follow his own dreams; after all, he had to go see about a girl.
On the other hand, Moscow on the Hudson unites the competing cultural forces from the other direction. The movie acknowledges that life in the U.S. isn’t perfect, and in fact at times can be downright miserable for the very reasons we claimed to be superior to the Soviet bloc. But in the end, no matter how bad things are, at least in this country there exists the freedom to make a change if you’re not happy with the way things are. In Good Morning, Vietnam, Robin Williams’ character didn’t win any points against his superior officers (beyond having the moral high ground, but since he was sent home, it’s a Pyrrhic victory), and his increasingly anti-war broadcasts didn’t appear to plant the seeds for open opposition to the war effort in Vietnam; the troops just wanted some good radio. But that was just the point: since he couldn’t stop the war, he did whatever he could to help others anyway.
These may be separate and unrelated movies, but they seem to evidence a view of the history that apparently emerged towards the end of the last century. The intended message seems to me to be that the struggle meant something, and that it’s meaningful to the story of all of us. Since the end of those cultural conflicts, these movies posit, it’s not that we’ve moved on so much as we’ve grown up. In the end, it doesn’t matter whether the hippies were right and the establishment was wrong, or vice versa; the fact of the matter is we are better off today because our modern society has developed along both lines, and it encompasses the best both have to offer to American culture.
In 1988, the newly elected President George H.W. Bush proclaimed that America’s “Easy Rider era” was over, that “[w]e have turned around the permissive philosophy of the 70’s, which made it too easy for some to slip into a life of drug abuse and crime.” He was half-right: the Easy Rider era was over, but it wasn’t because we set aside everything about us from the counterculture era. Instead, as evidenced by such movies as Forrest Gump and Finding Forrester, we had come to terms with our turbulent past. We changed Pete Fonda’s “We blew it,” to say instead, “We made it.”
Thanks everyone, see you on November 16th for a review of Disney’s Big Hero 6. Rest in peace, Robin Williams. Thank you for a lifetime’s worth of smiles.
Hopped on Pop 
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