Camera And Action, page 11
Before nascent social and political rebellion became more militant in the larger society, The Graduate seemed radical in its endorsement of attitudes and identity. A film that Doris Day refused to sign onto looked tame, however, in comparison to films coming to movie theaters by 1969. Benjamin's tweed-jacket-and-tie image were replaced in the feature film by a new, popular counterculture look of men and women who donned robes and sandals, sat cross legged in Golden Gate Park, and openly recited mantras. Mixing the exotic with the primitive and bringing them both in line with the politics of dropping out, these rebels challenged middle-class dominion in ways that not only separated young from old but also young from young. By the last year of the decade, deep splits within the sixties generation surfaced and bestowed the younger generation with its most famous icons. Political insurgency melded with a counterculture sensibility and created a mode of rebellion through lifestyle.
One filmmaker responded to the rhetoric and actuality of the culture politics and added a guitar player and an eating establishment to American mythology. Arthur Penn's Alice's Restaurant defined the camaraderie in young people eager for revolutionary distinction. The docu-drama/comedy starred a folk-singing hippie, Arlo Guthrie, who identified even sharper lines of generational distinction than did Benjamin. Alice's Restaurant helped legitimize the folk music and counterculture movements. Penn contributed a narrative voice to the radical perspective generated through appearance. Hippies and postgraduates ventured boldly onto the screen, asking the American public once more to adjust its lenses and accept a new vision.
Every Generation Has A Story To Tell.
- Tagline from Alice's Restaurant
At the Newport Folk Music Festival in 1967, when Arlo Guthrie debuted his song "Alice's Restaurant Masacree," little did he know that two years later he would be on location in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, shooting a film with Arthur Penn. "Alice's Masacree" may have indeed died a natural death had Arlo's friend not taken the album to Penn's house one night. A Stockbridge resident, Penn saw the cinematic potential in the twenty-minute song about a littering incident in a neighboring town.' Although countless movies have been inspired by single hits, Penn was the first to "film" an entire album.2 The result was Alice's Restaurant in August 1969.
If audiences were not interested in another epic by the end of the decade, it was because the world had changed. Arthur Penn took on the challenge of making film more relevant to what young people wanted from their world and, unlike The Graduate, his picture not only directly addressed the commotion in the streets, including stirrings about Vietnam, but also highlighted the social divisions over lifestyle and fashionable "dropping out" associated with the hippie counterculture. Penn sensed that the counterculture movement was more than a fad and he resolved to make a statement about it. He offered new ways to negotiate boundaries of acceptable counterculture distinctiveness at the height of contentious activity and general struggle between mainstream America and "the many hippies," as one trade magazine identified them.' Alice's Restaurant asked viewers to accommodate the counterculture and identify with its perspective. This film fabricated a power of desire for a counterculture ethos by circulating its icons - the van, long hair, bizarre clothing, and a noncommittal social position of detachment. In particular, the film identified hippies, long hair, and communal living as central to American freedom of expression and part of a long tradition of American bohemianism. To be sure, those who refused to see the counterculture as an enhancement of American society would now have to respond to a veteran director.
At the same time it legitimized counterculture distinction, Alice's Restaurant was not so kind to the traditionalist. This longstanding symbol of America was shown as a leftover of a bygone era. In attitude and appearance, these everyday citizens, the plain folk, represented bigotry and oppression. Restaurant owners, truck drivers, law enforcement personnel, Montana educators, and Westerners in general appeared suspect. Old Left activists who championed the "people" similarly drew criticism. The picture instead presented the true progenitors of a better America-a hippie couple, Arlo and his girlfriend Mari (Tina Chen). Together they carried counterculture vision away from the commune and into the larger culture.
Yet, even as this film humanized the counterculture and derided convention, it did not ignore the reality of dropping out in 1969. Penn's critical eye caught the irreconcilability between joining communal life on the one hand and scorning middle America on the other while denying that dropping out was a choice, contingent and dependent on having the means to do so.4 In its exuberance for shedding material identity by dropping out and forming free societies of togetherness, the hippie counterculture absorbed chances for further social agency. Based on a belief that reorganizing America could occur through lifestyle, cultural politics came to serve a revolutionary agenda bound by its own obstacles. Alice's Restaurant reflects the same discursive mirror and therefore remains a testimony to what was possible in the new society's most compassionate bid for freedom, love, and peace.
The American movie business reacted to the new artistic taste in young-adult audiences most strongly in 1969. Paramount released Goodbye Columbus and the docu-drama Medium Cool. United Artists backed Alice's Restaurant and Midnight Cowboy. Columbia picked up Easy Rider and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and Fox signed Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. These films were proof that the generational message had reached studio heads. As Axel Madsen of Sight and Sound observed, "youth is openly displaying its strength, appeal and power. Having lost the `other' half- at least in affluent society - movies must now forcefully reflect the hungers, hurts and needs of this junior half of the population."5 The success of these films demonstrated the potential of Hollywood to adjust to a generation's newly-found cultural voice, despite the still favored Paint Your Wagon, MacKenna's Gold, and Hello Dolly big-budget types.
Movies such as The Graduate brought the new Hollywood into view by 1967, but the low-budgets in 1969 took the industry into its era of revolution and experimentation. As film reviewer Stephen Farber contended, these were films "no studio would have dreamed of making even last year - for Alice's Restaurant, a crazy quilt of autobiography, farce blackout sketches, melancholy romantic ballad, melodrama; or for Medium Cool, an angry, passionate indictment of the forces of repression in Contemporary America."6 Films such as Getting Straight, The Strawberry Statement, Move., Joe, Little Fauss and Big Halsey, and Cisco Pike made experimental efforts - once a reserve for the art house, college film festivals, and film societies - into a mainstream commodity. As Film Quarterly editor Ernest Callenbach observed, "The appeal of Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, Medium Cool, and Alice's Restaurant" nearly caused the "art-house films [to be] deserted by their customary young audiences." 7
Experimentation did not enter the American mainstream screen without criticism. Nonlinear technique and inventive story lines had not earned complete respectability in American feature film the way it had in European cinema by Alice's release in August. To some, cinema as a site of dissension seemed like pandering. Hotshot filmmakers were accused of using the medium as an "instrument of rebellion" for "the lunacy fringe of the modern hippie generation of today." It was "insidious propaganda against law, religion, military and patriotism" disguised as "comedy and hilarity."8 But others argued that experimental film made sense. It was part of a new and likely artistic evolution. On "the box-office front," Ernest Callenbach maintained, "these new films constitute some kind of break-through," especially for the filmmaking rebels.' If film were to become an agent in social change as many hoped, then these objections proved that pictures like Alice's Restaurant accomplished their goal.
Penn built on the experimentation market for general release. Where he touched on the artistic in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), he distinctly emphasized innovation in Alice's Restaurant. The former film offered young audiences a chance to identify with angry populists of the 1930s. Faye Dunaway as Bonnie Parker and Warren Beatty as Clyde Barrow sold a mesmerizing glamour in a film that, for the most part, followed a conventional story line, ending in idolizing two renegades. Two years later, artistic innovation fell into place for Penn with the "Masacree" song, since it was already a popular anti-establishment symbol, recalling Arlo's actual run-in with local police when he was arrested for throwing Thanksgiving Day refuse over the side of the road. In Alice's Restaurant, Penn saw an opportunity to experiment with nonlinear technique by not tightening the narrative around a central, epic character. Instead, he fashioned anti-heroic individuals and opted for improvisation. Officer Obie, for example, who actually arrested Guthrie in 1965, played himself as the Chief of Police of Stockbridge. Judge James Hannon, a blind judge symbolizing the American justice system, also played himself. The actual commune parent Alice played Suzy, a commune member. Arlo's former girlfriend Carol and many college students responded to United Artists' advertisements and accepted roles as extras. Geoff Outlaw, Arlo's real-life friend, played an assortment of characters. Arlo played himself, as did Pete Seeger in the hospital scene with Arlo's father, Woody, played by Joseph Boley.10
An improvisational cast mirrored the hippie aura of spontaneity on the screen, authenticating the film's social plea for tolerance and approval of the counterculture endeavor. A meandering story line and relative formlessness as if a jazz number, the portrayal of nonheroic characters, the blurring of fact and fiction, and the use of ambiguous endings captured the context of a 1960s perspective. The sum total of these effects added up to a transformational endorsement of popular antiestablishment, anti-authority, and antiwar sensibility.
To set the story's tone and Arlo's subjugation by the institutional side of America or, in the words of co-screenwriter Venable Herndon, the "increasingly militarized, demagoguecraving and authority-addicted society," the picture opens to a black screen with credits rolling and sounds of young men swapping war lore as they await registration at the Selective Service Center." In voice-over, Arlo begins the theme song, the darkness fades, and the camera focuses on a brash, African-American female administrator sporting a gray flannel suit and wearing her hair tightly back in a bun. Peering through horn-rimmed glasses, she scolds Arlo for putting "Scorpio" instead of his birth date on the Selective Service application. "I want the specific date," she demands. Arlo complies, puts on his floppy brown hat, walks toward the door, wishes the induction worker peace, and the sequence ends.
In later draft-board scenes, Alice's Restaurant brings the counterculture into its larger social role and legitimizes the problem with hierarchical America. At the Whitehall Street Selective Service Center in New York City, Arlo lines up with other young men to get "inspections, injections, infections, neglections, and all kinds of stuff." Inside the white and blue cinder-block building, potential draftees drop off urine samples, receive complete physicals, and parade before the camera in only their jockey shorts. These are not the seasoned, tough marines of old war films but the weak, unsightly, flabby, and skinny young men in everyday life. Arlo attracts the attention of military officials and medical personnel when he goes on a tirade, jumping up and down screaming, "I wanna kill, I mean kill!" When induction personnel ask, "Kid, have you ever been in court?" they direct him to the "W" bench, a holding room for "mother rapers, father stabbers, father rapers," and other criminal stock.
The scene exaggerates Arlo's relatively diminutive body to help raise questions about the power in traditional images of male physical strength. The American man in this film is witty, intelligent, and gentle. Arlo honors the autonomy of this man through his detached stance from traditional society and in his many satirical swipes at the draft board by delivering the film's obvious indictment of the Vietnam War. The World War II model fails if it depends on the traditional authority of the brawny American soldier. This sequence gives voice to pacifists who admonished the American public to make love, not war, and takes satiric swipes at a country that questions young men's worthiness to serve while it engages in acts of war.
It would be difficult to argue against the film's antiwar stance without acknowledging the simple truth of the induction sequence. The impersonal experience of the military centers and the assembly-line process of selection connected viewers to the antiwar perspective by showing that Arlo, like the other dutiful Americans at the center, are simply eighteenyear-old boys, scared, anxious, and fragile. With antiwar activists taking on the appearance of counterculture resistance in the late sixties, anti-Vietnam sentiment, dodging the draft, hippies, patriotism, oppression, and arguments of dropping out became parts of the same trajectory. War protest was not political in this film but ethical. Objecting to the war was the right thing to do and the proper position to hold.
Portraying America as "authority-addicted" appealed to young viewers who found themselves, like Arlo, indifferent to school and the military or passionately spiteful toward authority. Penn described that audience as the "intelligent, confused, middle-class kids - the same kids who troop[ed] to the Woodstock Music Festival by the hundreds of thousands" simultaneously with the film's release.12 As producer Joe Manduke pointed out, the film spoke for those "`subculture kids' who have rejected the system and created a fragment of reality that they can escape to."13 Critic Roland Gelatt identified them as "the under-twenty-fives who wear long hair, groove to rock, and burn draft cards."" In Arlo's words, they were the ones who had little patience for the "plastic education and plastic consumption [that] allow a system like the draft to exist at all.""
It was not mere teenage rebellion that Penn saw as the most valuable characteristic of this part of the sixties generation. It may have been confused but it was not lost. As he described these genuine revolutionaries, one of the things these kids were trying to do was to go back to a first premise. They had been saturated with the well-being of the affluent society and found it very unpleasant. They wanted to get out of the rat race - credentials, grades, upward mobility - the whole thing. They were getting back to the first principles of using their hands. These kids were fighting up from the .16
Discarding the tailored, preppy style of Benjamin Braddock, hippies reorganized their lifestyle and fashioned a new look with folk-like peasant blouses, loosely fitting gowns, leather sandals, and the most enduring symbol of a pre-modern time: long hair. Added to that was an interest in mysticism and prairie primitivism. Folkish attire and free-flowing hair gave counterculture hippies a sense of return and a hope for appropriating American authenticity imagined as a simple life. Thus, young people advanced their sincere enthusiasm for redefining American society.v
Rhetorically, counterculture attitudes fit well with the folk traditions of plainness and anti-elitism. Shaking off the appearance of affluence gave young Americans a way to identify with American distrust of wealth, but appropriating the rhetoric and not the history and place of common folk left the counterculture with little connection to the reality of "the people" or small-town America. Rather than time-honored principles such as work, production, individualism, and a sense of duty grounding everyday life, the counterculture advocated the ideology of peace, love, freedom, and other "first premise" indicators. Counterculturalists did not concern themselves with social dislocation or with protecting traditional institutions from whatever alien force threatened their security. Nor were they vigilant about preserving the bourgeois version of the American dream.
Arlo brings a bit of the counterculture to the Whiteall Street Selective Service Center in Alice's Restaurant (1969); he and the other unseasoned young draftees defy the image of the conventional heroes of Hollywood war films (Photofest).
Typical folk sensibility from popular iconography recalls rural Oklahomans of the Joad family in John Steinbeck's and John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath and the Westerner as Will Kane from High Noon or the urban populist Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront. The villains in this mythology were the social, political, and cultural elites whose greed brought the destruction of the traditional community held together by family, responsibility, and work. Of utmost importance to these American "folk" was the promise of "a fairer, more egalitarian America." Their role was to preserve the American dream. The intent was "not to destroy the institutions but to unmask the power of elites" and make their institutions "serve the people." Such images went hand in hand with the vow "to uphold Americanism as the promise of individual mobility and the antithesis of plutocracy and greed." This "noble assemblage" of American folk, the everyday and ordinary, reflected not rhetorical distinctiveness but a hard-earned legacy."
Thus, the folk that viewers saw in August 1969 on Penn's screen was not the "little" guy so long distinguished in popular culture, literature, and film as the protector of patriotism. Self-reliance and heartland individualism were flattened and the sanctity of work caricatured. Instead, marketers positioned a folk music hero with a counterculture sensibility. Early advertising, for example, showed Arlo in long hair in the center of a United States postage stamp and Liberty coin with the words "e pluribus Arlo."I9 Here, the controversial aura of long hair both signified revolutionary identity and functioned as a site for claiming individual rights and freedom of expression.
Legitimizing the counterculture by devaluing traditional society comes early in the film when Arlo drifts around the country until he heads for college. As he explains, "With the draft breathing in my face, I'd figured I'd get some education." He enrolls at a Montana school because he "liked the country there" but once in Big Sky territory realizes he is too different to fit in with the local community. His music teacher scolds him for improvising instead of playing Brahms. The young Guthrie irritates his gray-haired landlady with noisy guitar playing, and the Montana police sneer at him because he smokes marijuana. Most egregious, however, is that he dares look like a girl in Marlboro land. Arlo waits to order at a town restaurant when three locals (two sporting cowboy hats, jeans, and denim jackets, the other dungarees) chide him about his hair and ridicule his feminine demeanor. "Doesn't she look pretty," one of them remarks. Arlo defends himself by rubbing a slice of pizza in the joker's face. Subsequently, the men throw him through the restaurant's plate glass window, and he lands alone on the street. Arlo is cited for the cost of the window and put on conduct probation. He then concludes that the academic world of Montana does not permit "freedom of thought" and, as in real life, he leaves after three weeks for the East, disappointed in the educational system and Montana's prison-like atmosphere.20 In his own words, "Montana was weird.... Everybody seemed uptight about long hair and me .1121 The film garners sympathy for Arlo by caricaturing Montanans as bigots, tyrants, and otherwise contemptuous Americans. Even the college professor is an antiquated, rural fool.
