It’s an interesting question. Which films have caught, if not the essential nature of America, at least the zeitgeist of America at a particular time.
There are some odd selections among these ten, including some mediocre-to-poor films, and films that say absolutely nothing accurate about America.
I’ve always argued that Casablanca is the film that best reflects what we want to be, and Idiocracy is the one that portrays what we really are.
I would include, as a joint entry of films that accurately portray America as I knew it in the time of my youth and childhood, two comedies by Bob Clark: Porky’s and A Christmas Story.
Idiocracy
Dave.
What is your reasoning?
To me, it’s about how the U.S. government has lost its way. A simple citizen with a big heart was able to make a big impact as the most powerful man in the world. He really wanted to do what was right and what was best for the country, unlike the career politicians who craved money and position (and extramarital sex). And of course, he brought in his accountant to help balance the budget because everything was a mess.
I’d like to think that America can go back to do what’s more or less right, rather than trying to defeat the other political party at all costs.
I want to believe you are right, that somehow we can set aside all the lies and partisan quibbling.
But I fear that the lies and partisanship actually exemplify who we truly are.
I always viewed America as the Rick Blaine model – free of treachery and bragging, reluctant to expose our emotions, but actually good-hearted beneath the surface, always willing to roll up our sleeves when it was needed, even to sacrifice when the rest of the world needed us. When I worked overseas, I still felt that those characteristics distinguished my American colleagues from my foreign colleagues …
But then again, I never dreamed that a scheming braggart could win the Presidency, that the President would call our veterans “suckers,” or that a redneck mob would storm the Capitol, so I guess I had America all wrong.
I have noticed that Americans in general are bi-polar, in the sense that there are only extreme points and nothing in the middle. Either it’s white or black, male or female, good or evil, hot or cold, north or south, democrat or republican, Christian or non-Christian. Nothing in between. This can be further observed in professional wrestling, where a character is either a face or a heel with no middle ground (with very few exceptions, such as The Rock and Stone Cold; those characters did not act like your typical “face” but they were still considered good guys for the most part). And there must be an enemy… in ANY group. For example, there could be a small church congregation… eventually, someone’s going to have a problem with Karen, and the entire congregation takes sides. So while we once had multiple political parties, it comes down to democrat vs republican (Libertarians are pretty much Republicans for all intents and purposes). People will support either side for family or traditional/ancestral reasons, and defend their side to the death with the sole purpose of defeating the other party. And it has only gotten worse with the current administration, that vows to defeat the Democratic party at all costs. When 9/11 happened, the whole country united for one moment because there was an external threat; the enemy was Osama bin Laden. We had an enemy to fight. But once that ended, it went back to Democrat vs. Republican and at this point I think if another 9/11 level event happened, the parties would blame each other instead of turning against the external enemy. If extraterrestrial aliens attacked us, each party would probably try to join the aliens to defeat the other party.
No, we are not ready for warp drive. We are not ready to join the Federation. We’d probably turn the warp drive into a weapon just to kill the other party.
Bill Maher sums this up with a simple phrase, “The pendulum never stops in the middle.”
Does the two-party system, combined with the vast wealth the parties can assemble when they gain power, doom America to forever watch each side attacking the other? Lord Acton noted that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and that corruption is multiplied exponentially when the grand prize for earning that power is the biggest treasury and the greatest military might in the world.
What’s the solution?
Should we have a bazillion political parties like some countries? It’s not enough for some countries to have have a Silly Party. It has to splinter off into a Slightly Silly Party, a Very Silly Party and an Extremely Silly Party.
Or should we have “here today, gone tomorrow” parties like Italy?
Or to paraphrase Churchill, do we have the worst form of government – except for the others?
At times like these, you can at least look towards the shining beacon of light of the Great American State Fair!
Wait for the end, its worth it. No better symbolism for the current state of the country and its leader – just hope you don’t get it.
I mean, one side elected and fully supports a child rapist president; and supports a secret police that kidnaps and murders people, including citizens and children, and has let those children die in internment camps. While also supporting an actual literal genocide overseas. So it’s really hard to find middle ground.
As a Canadian, am I allowed to comment? It is hard for one movie to sum up the complexity and diversity of the USA (which I have visited often and lived in for 3 years). My first thought, however, is Stand By Me. A lot of good, common purpose (even if somewhat muddled), and positive human spirit, but with some bad and an undercurrent of violence.
As a Canadian I am going to comment anyways.
The definite American movie is Observe and Report.
I would also like to note that Idiocracy is NOT representative of America. I still haven’t seen this silly thing and I am still aware of how wrong people are about this movie. In Idiocracy the idiots look for someone smart to fix their problems. In America they elected Reagan, Dubya and Trump. That’s not looking for someone smart to fix their problems.
PS To be completely fair the best movie ever made (Army of Darkness) is an American production.
I see your point, but to be fair, all three of those guys probably had higher IQs than Biden. Dubya, for example, was actually pretty damn smart, hard though it is to believe. His pre-1973 SAT scores were just below the level accepted by MENSA.
To continue your point, when we did turn to smart guys, it didn’t always work out that well. Ivy League university president Woodrow Wilson was a virulent racist; Rhodes Scholar Bill Clinton lacked a moral compass; Jimmy Carter, schooled in nuclear physics, was utterly feckless; gifted student Richard Nixon was everything bad about the American character.
(I guess it’s not fair to link Clinton with those guys. Although amoral, he had a pretty solid run in the Oval.)
Biden’s just smart enough to know how dumb he is. I’d put Dubya in the same category. Reagan and Trump not so much.
America votes for comfortable lies. That’s still not Idiocracy.
I don’t even know what these defined standards of intelligence are supposed to be. Wisdom is a continuum, and an IQ test recognizing patterns (or SAT/ACT/etc) are just one off tests. Everyone has genetic limitations on what they can accomplish, but most people can learn anything given a proper framework and structure. Not only that, but acquiring credentials doesn’t necessarily mean someone is objectively more intelligent.
Then there’s concepts like Nobel syndrome, Dunning-Kruger effect, and the Peter principal that in different ways show that individuals go outside their expertise to make claims and over-exaggerate what they know outside of their specialized field. There was a pretty notorious early cancer PhD researcher who flat out became an AIDS denier.
I don’t know what defines general intelligence, but results of a single test are most certainly not it. I would say building fundamentals over a wide variety of areas and recognizing you can’t know everything, and the ability to either research credible information to fill gaps or delegating to actual established experts is probably the biggest sign of intelligence. There’s a lot of PhD’s out there who end up becoming grifters or making credulous claims in areas they have no expertise in.
@Indy I endorse this product / service / recipe. Except that I disbelieve that intelligence is a thing at all. It’s certainly not a one-dimensional object. But, regardless of how we try to define or measure it, we run into unavoidable circularities in our rationale.
For the reasons you’ve given already, “biggest sign of intelligence” is a category error.
Biden just got old and confused; dumbth isn’t something I associate with him. Nobody thought much about him while he competently did his job for decades. His presidency came at a point when he was no longer able to tell his ass from a hole in the ground, or shit from Shinola.
Trump trumps them all in stupidity by so far a margin that he makes Nicki Minaj look like a genius. The man goes from capitalizing random letters in his sentences and holding Bibles upside down, to fomenting deadly insurrections because his ego gets bruised when he loses. Any conversation with him comes down to flattering him, or he loses focus and becomes angry. Idiots on that scale are hard to find. One-celled amoeba.
That’s not accurate. People always thought Biden was dumb. He was always just gool ol’ Joe, saying clueless things, but meaning well. While many respected Biden’s political experience, work ethic as a senator, and willingness to cross the aisle, most viewed him as a an intellectual lightweight prone to wacky verbal gaffes, wild exaggeration, and plagiarism. While he did earn some university degrees, it was just barely. He was at the bottom of his classes, despite his work ethic.
There’s an anecdote about Biden and his academics. He finished near the bottom of his class but in spite of that one of his prof’s said he’d go far in life.
He appears to be an excellent glad handler. I know one person who actually met him and thought he was very personable even though she was aware and disapproves of his past positions,
Most people who meet Trump in social situations say the same thing, or at least they did until recently. He may have deteriorated in the past couple of years, but he still managed to charm Bill Maher face-to-face, even though Maher basically disagrees with every action Trump has ever taken. Glad-handing is perhaps the most important part of the politician’s skill set.
I have a feeling that I could have enjoyed a beer with ol’ Joe, or a round of golf with The Donald, but that doesn’t give me any confidence in their abilities.
As one commenter pointed out, however, there is a big difference between Biden and Trump. Biden knows his limitations and knows he has to surround himself with smarter people. Trump seems to have, by his nature, a need to surround himself with incompetents. I presume that is so he feels superior to them. And of course, they must not only be incompetent, but must be obeisant as well. The only job of a Trump employee is to agree with whatever he says.
I’m not a psychologist, so you can ignore this diagnosis, but I don’t think Trump is dumb. He is, I believe, a pathological narcissist. People with that condition are often indistinguishable from people with learning disabilities. Neither group learns efficiently. People with learning disabilities don’t learn because they can’t. Pathological narcissists don’t learn because they won’t. They believe they already know more than other people, even when the others are learned in their fields.
For the record, Trump was a C+ to B student at Fordham. That’s not bad, because it was in the days before grade inflation. I suppose he was approximately in the middle of his class. That’s a fact established by his fellow commuters when they all shared their report cards. Going beyond the facts, the rumor is that he did very poorly on examinations, but pulled up his grades with excellent home assignments. Was somebody doing his papers for him? That has been alleged, by his niece for example, and it seems like a reasonable possibility, but I’m not inclined to trust her because some of her other claims are obviously incorrect, and all of her info is second- or third-hand.
That seems like a good choice to me!
Jaws
It even takes place during the Fourth of July
Explain your case.
One: It takes place on a beach during the Fourth of July
Two: The mayor refuses to close the beach, despite the danger, a scenario we saw play out during COVID
Three: Look at Hooper, Brady, and Quint… Can you get much more American than those three?
The other genius of JAWS is it does a temporal time loop, goes back to WW2 and does a great reference to the sinking of the Indianapolis.
Stephen King can do this as well. It’s hard in th US to hear echos of the past, but once you do you can’t forgot the sound.
So Quint represents the older, “Greatest Generation,” that survived WWII but thinks the current generation is a bunch of pussies.
Hooper is the younger generation, eager to embrace technology and frequently at odds with the senior generation.
Then there’s Brody, caught between the two of them, trying to use the wisdom of the past and the science of tomorrow to defeat the problems of today.
I’m still trying to figure out what their common enemy, the shark, represents.
As with everything the NYT does, that list is complete and utter pretentious trash.
The answer to this question is Forrest Gump. It spans some of the most important events that shaped America in the 1950s – 1980s. It’s about hope for a better future. It’s about a common man who rises above challenges to do great things. It shows that through hard work and a little luck, anyone can become successful here. It has war, love, music, protesting, and Bubba. It’s a perfect microcosm of life in America, and what we hope to be.
Other non-pretentious answers could’ve included Back to the Future (1 or 3), American Pie, Indiana Jones (Raiders or Last Crusade), Shawshank, Stand By Me, Apollo 13, National Lampoon’s Vacation, Top Gun, Rocky (I or IV), Magnificent Seven, Independence Day……… I mean, it’s almost as if all of the writers they spoke to didn’t understand the assignment.
I think Forest Gump is an excellent answer, and you made a good case.
I’d say this is very good, but it shows the limits of the media — movies are a lot more limited in temporal space than in geographic space. Everything is — nobody reads Jakob Burkhardt anymore, or Henry James. But movies have about a 30 year window before they start looking very quaint.
Female beauty isn’t that different. Barnum’s Circassian beauties don’t have the same appeal as say, Rachel Cook. Gibson Girls doesn’t translate well. Lets’ not go into Reuben.
Movies being a new medium, only about 120 years old, so it’s hard to say if any of them can last centuries. But we are always stealing from the old ones, and making old scenes look new.
It’s great boomer propaganda, even though I like the movie for its silliness and pop culture references, it’s unrealistic bullshit about how having a good heart and trying hard just makes everything magically work out. Just keep your head down, don’t question anything, and you’ll lie the American dream! Meanwhile, if you become rebellious like Jenny, you’ll get abused by your father, end up with HIV, and die a painful death.
Pretty much frames everything in the most unrealistic way possible to be used as any sort of framework of reality. Gump was pretty damn functional to be disabled, lucky not to be blown up in war and a hundred other things in the movie, fell ass backwards into an ‘investment’ he didn’t realize, etc, etc. Your “a little luck” equivalence is about the same chance of going to the Blackjack table and bankrupting MGM Grand. People work their asses off for peanuts so people like Bezos or the Walton family can have infinite resources in this country, and that’s those without a disability, and absolutely no health or other emergency issues popping up.
It’s a nice fantasy with some funny moments, and in an era of the 90s with the economy booming with the internet and personal computing before it was all controlled and manipulated by whatever this era is.
True enough, Forrest Gump reflects us as we hope to be, ala Casablanca, but the nation’s hopes are part of what we are.
Or WERE.
As much as I hate the haves & have nots of our way of life, income & wealth inequality isn’t the half of our sickness. For one thing, many Boomers (as I consider myself) experienced that “everything just magically works out” in their lives. America has enjoyed an extra-ordinary golden age since WW2. I’m biased, but I’d say, like no one else, ever. Like all children who can tolerate bad parents until they realize there are other parents who are just incomparably better. But at a young enough age, they just don’t have good data to work from. IOW, we take things for granted that are really magnificent gifts. I myself succeeded on the strength of many opportunities arriving in my lap. I’d have had a much harder life in another country. But it’s not just that I lived here, rather, I lived here & now. And by now, I don’t mean literally now. Because we took away many of the ways that ordinary folks could bootstrap themselves up & realize “the American dream”. Ideologues who think what makes America great is individual excellence are, well, dipshits, basically. They don’t see the big picture. Greatness comes from being able to achieve both low poverty & a stable middle class. And I don’t think a country can be great if its populace doesn’t understand the importance of sticking together.
I love it when people use the word “pretentious”.
They think they’re using a big important word to make them appear smart. Meanwhile they likely displayed a lack of understanding about what they’ve watched and in this particular case the poster is attacking one of his conservative allies because he doesn’t like them.
Seriously, Dazed and Confused is pretentious?
There are pretentious movies on the list. Dazed and Confused is not one of them.
To be fair, sometimes it can seem that the creator is being pretentious when he is actually just being clueless.
As Scoop pointed out, I obviously wasn’t talking about Dazed & Confused (or Dirty Dancing, btw), but you knew that already. The people who made this list are the same people who, when asked to name the greatest rock n roll album of all-time, chose some super obscure indie label electronica album that only sold 9 copies just so their friends will know how smart and interesting they are. And that (like this list) is the literal definition of pretentious.
And annoyance about such people led you to vote for the Orange Turd. I have heard that sort of logic before.
To be honest, I personally like your list better than the one in the NYT (with the exception of Forrest Gump). But NYT’s list, though I disagree with it, does not cause me to lose my marbles.
I’ve yet to see a list of greatest rock albums from the NYT so I will be requiring a citation.
You picked some easy crowd pleasers that you like and needed a convenient insult because someone dared to have a different opinion than you.
I think it’s possible to argue that a film that reflects America’s values would almost have to be a crowd-pleaser, since by definition, its success means that a great many Americans respond to it.
In contrast, Zabriskie Point? As Ebert so eloquently put it, “The director is incapable, in Zabriskie Point, of making his young characters seem even slightly together. Their voices are empty; they have no resonance as human beings. They don’t play to each other, but to vague narcissistic conceptions of themselves. They wouldn’t even meet were it not for a preposterous Hollywood coincidence. This is such a silly and stupid movie, all burdened down with ideological luggage it clearly doesn’t understand, that our immediate reaction is pity. His earlier films have made us think of Antonioni as vulnerable; he shouldn’t have exposed himself like this. … The movie is not this uncomplicated, but it is certainly this simple. Antonioni attempts to flesh it out with thousands of yards of outdoor billboards, which are supposed to show America being corrupted by advertising and capitalism, I guess. The fact is, Antonioni has no feeling for young people. He has tried to make a serious movie and hasn’t even achieved a beach-party level of insight.”
And Ebert liked Antonioni in general, so that was one of the more tolerant comments from the contemporary reviewers.
To be fair, some present-day reviewers, usually those too young to understand how poorly Antonioni understood America at the time, now think the movie is a misunderstood classic that somehow shows “the way we were” or sums up the American character or somehow caught the zeitgeist of the counter-culture.
You would be hard-pressed to find a film less appropriate for subject of that article. Placing Zabriskie Point on that list is like placing me on a list of Trump’s biggest fans.
I’m not going to prejudge a movie I haven’t seen just because it happens to be published on a list by the NYT.
Furthermore I don’t think popularity is an appropriate metric. Hard truths aren’t going to be popular.
However as the opening preamble for the list states:
“Their choices ranged from blockbusters to indies, homegrown comedies to enigmatic Italian drama, a recent best-picture Oscar nominee to a little-known debut — in short, movies as varied as the country itself.”
America IS an eclectic nation. To not have an eclectic list including the obscure would be a disservice.
Unlikely.
If only an insignificant number of people in the nation can recognize something essential and true about the film, then BY DEFINITION, it doesn’t get to the heart of the nation. It just gets to the heart of a tiny, critical minority, basically just one crank writing a letter to the editor about the things he doesn’t like about America, or telling the kids to get off his lawn.
A lack of popularity doesn’t mean a film is bad. It may be brilliant. But if it doesn’t resonate with the masses, it isn’t catching the truth about the nature of the country. On the other hand, the very fact that Americans do or don’t respond to a movie, even a movie that has nothing to do with America, can tell you something, even if the film does not. For example, Dirty Dancing is not an especially good film, and doesn’t seem to me to be an accurate representation of anything in the American character. In fact it doesn’t even seem consistent about exactly when it takes place. But the fact that so many American women love Dirty Dancing must tell you something. I’m just not sure exactly what.
My original question is difficult to answer because we didn’t start with a definition of what the essence of America actually is. It’s like coming up with an answer when we don’t know the question. We could go around the room – any room – and say , “write the three words that best describe America,” and there would be very little overlap in the responses.
And if we ask foreigners to do the exercise, the answers would be still different. If I had asked my Norwegian friends to do that exercise in the 90s, the three most common answers would have been “cars, hamburgers, Baywatch.”
To lead me closer toward toward the movie that defines America, my answer to the three-word question would have been more like “pragmatism, violence, immigration.” It’s the melting pot “young society” made great by its waves of immigrants and their desire to create a new life. It’s the practical “how-to” mentality rather than the theoretical “why” – no time for philosophy when there’s work to do. It’s a country that worships guns and glorifies their use. Other words to consider would be “slavery,” America’s original sin, and “youth,” America’s obsession.
So which film or films embody all of that: the impact of constant immigration and the hope of the immigrants for a new life, racism as the residual of slavery, no-nonsense pragmatism, the obsession with youth and the love of guns. As I wrote that all out, I realized that a lot of that is in The Godfather and Godfather II. Perhaps that tells us just why those films are so popular and enduring for generation after generation. They tick off more of the boxes than other films I can name.
You might try the same exercise. Come up with the 3-5 words that best describe America, then try to come up with the films that tick off the most boxes.
Let’s see here:
White America’s interaction with immigration. Immigration can be used as a substitute for slavery.
Prejudice defined on how positive or negative those interactions are.
No-nonsense pragmatism or the deluded belief in it.
Belief in one’s youth and the pursuit of youth in others.
FUCKING BIG FUCKING GUNS!
This sounds suspiciously like Observe and Report. Which I suggested upthread.
Using your definitions that sounds a lot like Scarface. Killer of Sheep and Nothing but a Man to a lesser extent. I haven’t seen any of these but the descriptions mostly fit.
There is probably a case to be made for those. Scarface seems to tick most of the boxes, for example.
Scoop, your approach to this question is brimming with insight. I mean, it’s ingenious. And your example of how to use it shows us how very effective it is. These two things are separate skills. You excel in both. They make you an exceptionally capable person.
Well, Maga characterizes pretention pretty nicely. And, while I agree with Chinney & psychotic’s objections, I also agree that crowd-pleasers is a possible, & arguably more relevant, way to go about this question, as Scoop frames so eloquently. I did, & do, like those crowd-pleasers that Maga presented to us as an alternative. I think the two approaches are irreconcilable & as both capture something important that the other misses, it seems to me that neither is the completely right way. Which, it seems to me, supports my conclusion that there probably isn’t really a right way.
I am apparently one of the few people in the world – my wife is another – who did not find Forrest Gump to be interesting or enjoyable. We both actually fell asleep about 2/3 of the way through, and based on what we had seen up to that point, we were not tempted to see it again to catch the last part. I found it to be facile and dull. It certainly would not be my pick as the film that best represents the USA.
I vote for Noah Ward.
Meaning?
Aside: You launched a productive exchange between Adam & Scoop.
As to Noah Ward, it’s a pun on “No Award.” As in, Forrest Gump is not the right answer, as your reaction points out. And my own take boils down to, this probably turns out to be a question that there’s really no right answer to.
Oh, & BTW, I was thinking this question was a waste of time. But the discussion has proven to me that it gets at something; it paves the way to some fruitful thinking about both our past & our present predicament. I still think arriving at a single best answer isn’t terribly significant, but maybe the question was worth asking anyway.
Thanks for the clarification. Hilariously, I did do a Google search regarding Mr. Ward, with little to show for it. Now I understand.
Am I right in my suspicions that you’ve paid attention to the Hugo Awards?
Heh. Once upon a time, I had read all the Hugo winners (the novels, anyway). I attended many WorldCons, which did of course entail voting in the Hugos. I was for a time temporary moderator & originating sender of the SF-Lovers Digest (originating but not limited to ARPANET). The most recent WorldCon I attended was Seattle. Eh, last year. It’s fair to say you’ve stumbled one of my embarrassing personal truths. 🙂
I saw Forrest Gump when it came out, so it’s been over 30 years. From what I recall, the author of the book it was based on didn’t even regard his book as anything more than a silly comedy not meant to have any deep meanings.
The most I remember about the film other than a couple of the specific scenes and its overall sweep, is the music.
That said, I think The Big Chill had at least as good music and was the more intelligent of the two. I can’t say The Big Chill was the more significant because it seems to be largely forgotten while Forrest Gump is still regarded as cultural important.
The most interesting thing I think in hindsight about The Big Chill is that while it was baby boomers commenting on the 1960s in the 1980s, the film was shot in 1982 and came out in 1983 when Satan Ronnie was deeply unpopuar and before the ‘greed is good’ conspicuous consumption ethos took hold. I recommend the film so I don’t want to give away any spoilers, but it basically takes a middle view of the 1960s.
I’ve always felt that there was something special about that period from 1978 or so until the mid 80s. It seems that era did a good job at defining youth culture – it’s the golden age of youthploitation comedies: Animal House, the Nerds, Porky’s, Risky Business, Ferris Bueller, Better Off Dead. I love so many films from that time. I can’t really tell you why I love 1982 and 1983 movies so much. Those years had no special significance in my life – just stable years when I was working hard. But The Big Chill, Blade Runner, Body Heat, Fast Times and The Right Stuff all hit at about the same time, and I love them all. The more serious films from that era, like The Big Chill, really resonated with me.
Not that all of those movies I just mentioned were great films, or even good films, but they were films I loved.
I guess my love for The Big Chill might just be another case of a boomer looking back and trying to figure out what the cultural revolution of 1967-74 really meant when all was said and done. Forty plus years have passed since The Big Chill, and I still have no idea. Maybe it didn’t happen at all. Maybe Elvis went into the army, and then Nixon resigned, and we just dreamt all that hippie shit in between.
People largely did. Polling at the time showed that about 90% of young Americans didn’t like the hippies either (they mainly thought the hippies gave all young people a bad image), until the Tet Offensive, about 85% of Americans supported the Vietnam War, and polls, i believe in the 1980s, showed that millions of Americans claimed to have gone to Woodstock.
One person who was alive in the 1960s told me that ‘older people thought then that every young person with long hair was a hippie, but every young person had long hair.’
Even though I think The Big Chill overstates the popularity of the hippies in the 1960s, I like it partly because it wasn’t one of the ‘1960s vs 1980s culture’ movies that were popular in the 1980s and 1990s.
I like American Beauty though most people argue it’s about the suburbs and not the 1960s vs the 1980s, but I’m thinking of what I regard as dreck like Flashback the movie with Kiefer Sutherland and Dennis Hopper. In that film, it’s the 1960s that wins out, but I don’t like it either way.
I think those millions who claim to have gone to Woodstock don’t have any idea how unlikely their story is. I can speak to that because I actually tried to go to Woodstock and failed! I was driving down with my friend The Duck, and the NY Thruway was jammed, bumper to bumper from the time we got on in Victor, 300 miles away! That was mid-August, so we foresaw a day of overheated radiators and short tempers. We pulled off the third exit at Geneva and headed down to Keuka Lake, where my future wife had a cottage, and had invited me. I feel secure in saying that we enjoyed that weekend more than the people who were at the event. We had two days of drinking, laughing, swimming and boating, with a modern toilet at our disposal, instead of being in Bethel in the mud, a gazillion miles from the stage. And we eventually watched the show in comfort in an air-conditioned theater. I do not regret skipping it, not even one little bit.
Just because I’m still kind of obsessed with Charles Manson, the actual unpopularity of the hippies in the late 1960s even with young people is still sort of important.
One of the claims is that Manson was some kind of CIA operative (either agreed to by Manson or he was drugged up or mind controlled or something) whose purposes was to make the hippies unpopular in American culture, especially with young people.
While I appreciate the government policing agencies can be out of touch regarding public opinion, the hippies already were unpopular with young people before Manson and it’s hard to believe the government policing authorities wouldn’t have been aware of that.
So, for those still interested in Manson, it would be nice if the actual views of the hippies amongst young people in the 1960s was known just so we could get this claim out of the way. There are still actually interesting questions regarding Manson that haven’t been answered. (Not to try to change the topic here, but it’s hard to believe Manson didn’t have a person outside the ranch who said that it was okay to send just three young women and one young man to a ‘mansion’ on a saturday night where there might have been a large party with 20+ people there.) Obviously no outside person has ever been charged for assisting Manson.
I have to admit that I never considered Forrest Gump as much more than a piece of fluff. I like the movie a lot. It’s engaging and entertaining, but it just never seemed like more than that.
(It seems to be that the best comparison might be Zelig rather than The Big Chill.)
Excellent tangent, Adam. And Scoop, your replies were great, really struck a chord. Thanks!
In regards to my tangent on Manson. The answer to those of us obsessed with Manson regard as the answer to my question of who provided outside assistance to Manson is a man named Reeve Whitson.
Ironically enough, the Los Angeles Review of Books even refers to Whitson as ‘the Zelig of the Manson saga.’
If a movie was made about Whitson is should be as fascinating as the movie ‘Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, the movie about Chuck Barris based on his book (which Barris later admitted was partly fictional.)
Again, I don’t want to derail this thread, but if anybody wants to know more about Reeve Whitson especially in regards to his involvement (proven and otherwise) with Charles Manson and the Manson case, I can give a lot more detail, but it would be a lengthy post.
I meant the Big Chill branch. The sub-branch on Manson, well, it didn’t really lead to a continuation. In that sense, not so much. Sorry.
But keep on keeping on. I like your posts, a lot.
Not a movie, but Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Its not an accurate example of America, but its what it should stand for. And what I though of as a child in the greater Pittsburgh area.
Good idea. An idea that captures more of the aspects of liberal beliefs that most Americans rightly approve of than the chaotic obsessions of the modern liberal movement do.
The Original Bad News Bears. It’s about baseball, lawfare, different people from different places figuring it out, and in the end second place sucks but hey whaddya gonna do?
Shooting from the hip – Blazing Saddles and Patton.
What we think we are: Mr Smith Goes to Washington
What we actually are: Network
Currently we are All the President’s Men. But with a huge difference. Nixon tried to hide all the criminal acts of his administration, while Trump perpetrates them openly and even brags.
Remember the Titans
You’ve got the racism, the underdog story, family, small town America. etc
A good selection, and a good movie.
In serious discussions, we tend to cast aside sports movies, but America’s obsession with sports is an important part of our definition. True stories about sports, like Remember the Titans and Hoosiers, really reveal a great deal about who we are. And the fact that so many people relate to those movies tells us even more. It means that the films are connecting to something within us.
I’m writing a story about a family move. The youngest daughter notices only the Picasso’s are packed. She shouts, “Remember the Titians!”
Oof. Remember: erasers exist.
Better finish packing the Titians before the van goes,
OK, now you’ve got something.
Good one.
“Barbie”, the 2012 Korean film by Lee Sang Woo. The American father in the film being perhaps the worst actor of all time really solidifies the movie capturing the essence of the United States.
“The Birth of a Nation” is the quintessential American film. The scourge of white supremacy is central to the American story.
Racists love that movie because it shows the Klu Klux Klan as the hero. I have read that it caused a major revival of the Klan. Pick something that doesn’t glorify the racists. Like maybe “Places in the Hearth”, with Sally Field and Danny Glover.
HEART, dammit.
Why? Racism and White Supremacy are the consistent threads that run through American history. The assignment was to suggest the quintessential American film. It need not be a positive (and largely mythical) portrayal of the country. A film as successful as “The Birth of a Nation,” screened at the White House and responsible for the revival of the KKK and the Lost Cause narrative is the perfect choice in my opinion.
Why? Why not? Let me suggest the question itself is ridiculous. Scoop respecifies the question as captures the zeitgeist of its time. Is that more precise, even? I can’t say. Was the zeitgeist of the film’s time a heroic KKK? Says who? I guess it depends on location, I mean your precise GPS coordinate, not your approximate one.
Anyway, the answer also depends on the goal behind the question. Do we want to celebrate the depiction, or denounce it? Accuracy? How is that even possible? Doesn’t that vary from person to person? How would I answer it? I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be doing to engage in the discussion.
Obviously it’s impossible for one film to capture all the aspects of America. I suppose Nightcrawler in some ways as it comments on the violence, nihilsm and pure capitalist greed as well as its exploitation of the violence, sensationalism and poverty that makes up much of America, but the greedy nihilist/psychopathic capitalist is ultimately just a relatively minor small businessman and not a titan of industry.
Good point. And the morality play you identify reminds me of Death of a Salesman. To me the latter’s a play, not so much the movies based on it (loosely, sometimes), but it does represent something important in America’s personality.
They gave you the Congressional Medal of Honor
now, that’s Lt. Dan
Lt. Dan!
They gave you the Congressional Medal of Honor
yes sir, they surely did
they gave you, an imbecile, a moron who goes on television and makes a fool out of himself in front of the whole damn country, the Congressional Medal of Honor
yes sir
Yeah well, I just got one thing to say to that: God damn, bless America