Camera And Action, page 12
Upon leaving town, Arlo next encounters hostility from blue-collar America. He hitches a ride east with a truck driver whose good-humored manner turns to loathing and anger when Arlo removes his brown leather hat and lets the hidden locks fall to his shoulders. The hefty trucker indignantly lights up a stogey, turns the radio station to a football game, and all but growls at this imposter, clearly drawing lines between his guest and him. The trucker completes the film's expose on the American working-class ideal. Bigotry in the everyday worker contrasts to the open-mindedness of the victimized hippie.
The construction of Arlo as the new folk is clearly demonstrated in a New York hospital where he visits his father, who is dying of Huntington's disease. During the third visit, Arlo joins Pete Seeger and his father in an old Woody song, suggesting a generational tie. This hospital encounter appears to parallel Woody's social activism and his generation's use of folk music for political voice, but although both Guthries turn to music for protest, Arlo has shed the burden of Woody's politics. Arlo simply does not share the pragmatics of the "old movement's" people. Instead, he chooses to turn on, drop out from, and detach from the system" altogether. Where optimism fed his father's movement, derision nourishes Arlo's. Accordingly, the young Guthrie ignores a system Woody sought to change. Woody's objective was to strengthen unions. Arlo's is about raising consciousness. As Penn recognized, "Kids especially - aren't interested in [Woody's] kinds of politics."22
The conditions generating folk songs in Woody's day were the Depression, poor working conditions, and poverty in general. His line of folk singing championed the worker - the people - and the active pursuit of a "worldly utopia."23 Woody's books and songs "reflect[ed] the restless yearnings of Americans during the thirties and forties -'Pastures of Plenty,' This Land is Your Land,' `So Long, It's Been Good to Know Ya,' `Geugen James,' `Roll On, Columbia."' He wrote and sang about "people threatened by fascism, war, and Depression."24 Woody's subject, as Sight and Sound reviewer Philip French noted, was "the unrealised promise of American life" and "the decency of the exploited poor.""
By Alice's release, Woody had been canonized as a "new folk hero of America's alienated young." The dedication occurred at the Newport Festival where Arlo delivered his "Masacree" ballad and ironically reflected Woody's connection as a historical fact.26 If anything, Arlo's generation sang the Woody ballads were sung for posterity. "Many, like the Dust Bowl Ballads," Arlo explained to one critic, "don't have much meaning for a general audience, and you hear `This Land Is My Land' mostly on the radio."27 In the film, Arlo makes Woody's songs seem like nostalgic mementos, reminding viewers to put the past to rest. "Seems like Woody's road might 'a passed through here sometime," Arlo muses in the film upon seeing a gospel revival meeting where the southern folk proclaimed they had found their lost souls.
The hospital scene serves as metaphor for Arlo's generational sensibility and measures how much had changed in the radical hopes of the Old Left compared to the activists in the 1960s. His father's death confirms the dissolved ties and intimates that Arlo is delivered from Woody's shadow. The film, as the junior Guthrie explained, was the "piece that gave me a separate identity from my father." By and large, Arlo's distancing from his father shows the son's refusal to be the mediator between generations, whether on screen or in person. With the film and folk music's focal point, Arlo made it clear that Woody's "today had passed."28
Arlo was part of the folk music trend during the early part of the decade that encouraged folk artists to advise men and women about the evil of violence, the greed inherent in capitalism, the illusory nature of progress, and the importance of resisting the "plastic" society. Folk musicians such as Judy Collins; Joan Baez; the early Bob Dylan; and Peter, Paul, and Mary became American bards, echoing the voice of the new "people." Musicians pined for a purer, simpler time. Peter, Paul, and Mary, for instance, debuted an album with the cover title, "Honesty is Back." The music of folk authenticity encouraged a "solidarity" that would lead believers toward something better." Singers such as Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan, who dropped out of prestigious colleges, took guitars to free speech protests, civil rights demonstrations, and antiwar marches on campuses, in Washington, D.C., and many major cities across the country. By the late 1960s, folk singers were more than just entertainers. They became icons of a special kind of protest.
Baby boomer affluence had helped turn rock music into a thriving industry of big business with concerts, albums, and other promotional enticements. The folk singer, on the other hand, managed to keep an image of purity in contrast to the highly commercialized venues of rock music. When popular folk singer Bob Dylan walked on stage at a folk concert with an electric guitar and was booed off, he symbolized the break between the authenticity of folk music and the commercialization of rock. This incident indicated the contrasting authority of these two types of music, despite similar degrees of venue profitability.30
With middle-class kids dropping out of society by the film's release in August 1969, the sanctity of the folk no longer held together but the idea of "the people" did. The trucker, policeman, judge, and government administrator bowed out to the new "people," the "beautiful people" building the simple life of a commune community. As one reviewer noticed, the film "implicitly contrasts two conflicting responses to the hugeness and complexity of America-the committed, popularist, political approach that seeks to change the system which Woody symbolises [sic]; and the urge to opt out and found an autonomous community."31 Alice's Restaurant exploited this discourse and sold the film as "a Folk Movie - superb, fantastic, touching, wise, wildly funny!"R Arlo's fame as a folk singer by the movie's release made him the 1960s version of the autonomous individualist, the folk-singing, pot-smoking, freedom-seeking counterculture missionary.33 Guthrie, therefore, brought to the screen a collective separation for a younger generation, whose politics centered on showing themselves as the deserving innocents - progressive, tolerant, and free thinking - despite their unique liberation's clash with worker experiences and ideals of progress.
In the film, Arlo opts for autonomy, leaves Woody's legacy at the hospital, and heads to a place that Ray (James Broderick) and Alice (Pat Quinn) Brock built. The Alice of real life was the librarian of the Stockbridge boarding school that Arlo attended and Ray was a New York architect. Both were part of the artists' and literary scene, but dropped out of the professional, urban society to found the commune. At the time of the Thanksgiving Day incident, Ray and Alice lived in the bell tower of an old church where Arlo stayed during his boarding school days. The Brocks opened a restaurant and housed several young travelers.34
In the film, the two middle-aged hippies represent a serious attempt to implant hippie philosophy in the Northeast through the commune. First, they accept the keys from the pastor of the church, who had just completed a de-consecration ritual. This building is now "secular and unconsecrated and no longer under our canonical jurisdiction," he proclaims. Next, Ray and Alice rush inside and, as if in a Charlotte Bronte novel, they twirl around in admiration of the new glass, old wood, and the attractive interior. It is "all ours," Ray declares as he steps to the lectern. With open arms, he confirms that it is "a place to be the way we wanna be." Their band of drop-ins proceeds to remodel the interior, placing signs of communal life inside the body of the church. The commune members rip out pews, rearrange the floor plan to include bedrooms, a bath, and a kitchen, and the commune comes together. There they reorganize traditional society and create a new, benevolent family setting. Like the others, Arlo is both member and guest.
The church renovation recalls similar attempts at the time in the famous hippie enclave, Haight Ashbury, where participants converted the old Victorians into utopian households. Based on assumptions that nonfreedom was "an attitude," one such group, known as the Sutter Street Commune, formed a "free community" in San Francisco. Part of an intercommunal organization called Friends of Perfection, members circulated weekly flyers declaring their revolutionary agenda. One such circular explained that the commune offered, "BOTH AN ALTERNATIVE TO THE VALUES OF decadence/greed, AND A MEANS FOR DESTROYING THE PRESENT SYSTEM OF mind/body slavery."35 In this revolutionary agenda, the goal was "to get out of the economic stereotyped treadmill of capitalism."36 Hippie members reclassified themselves as citizens "of the Good Earth" and turned the San Francisco streets into a contemporary American frontier.37
Proponents of hippie philosophy redefined the relations of power by hoping "to end repressive laws regarding personal behavior." They petitioned for, "open public buildings for development by the PEOPLE of the city." This brand of populism reconstructed America not as "a nation of `plain folk' pitted against a small but powerful bank of elitists," but members in a global - if not universal - society connected in attitude and spirit.38 Of course part of that spiritual connection included dropping out through experimental drugs. Drugs promised heightened perceptions of self and the sensual world. One experimentalist explained that "there is no life for those who try to identify with their job, society or anything outside themselves ... you've got to go inside to find it [identity]."39 A new word, psychedelic, described the essence of revolutionary experience and helped turn a subculture into a cultural phenomenon. To one degree or another, attempts to create a communal lifestyle surfaced across America, from the streets of San Francisco to the parks of Chicago to fields of upstate New York.
More than any other act, dropping out by traveling to one of the many hippie enclaves classified one's legitimacy as a counterculture member. A Haight-Ashbury publication, a Communication Company flyer for associated communes, for example, distributed advice for dropping out. "DON'T DROP HALF OUT," one flyer taught. "Drop out. All the way." That meant one had to "reject the whole system" or "what's making you unfree," for "if you have to be cool, you're not free.... Be free .1140 Arlo's friend Roger said early in the film, when Arlo considered taking a teaching job for Indian children, "Man, you's only be helping them to go where you're already leaving." Rejection of convention through changing appearance and attitudes or fleeing to the free streets of counterculture communities, especially the Haight epicenter, marked the intention to "confront the machinery of power." One flyer announced, "It's great to live in a city with a free street" and offered "hope [that] your street is free soon if it isn't already. 1141 The film highlighted these attempts as "first premise" reality and circulated visually what was being negotiated in the national culture.
At Alice and Ray's commune in the film, Arlo enjoys a blissful setting. Throughout the picture, Alice and Ray welcome wayward travelers hoping to replenish familial stability. Ray, for example, suggests to Alice that "if we had a place like this before," Roger (one of the kids) "might not have drifted off." The commune brings the film to a critical moment in the judgment of traditional America. Juxtaposed with the embracing family is Officer Obenhien (Obie) who keeps an eye on the commune kids. He is friendly with Alice and stops by her place for coffee, dressed in traditional police uniform, blue shirt, tie, badge, and hat. When he and his police officers turn the Thanksgiving garbage into a crime scene, they are described as bumbling fools. As Arlo narrates, they "took twenty-seven 8x10 colored glossy pictures," an aerial photograph, and marked the evidence with circles and Xs. The police chief, his officers, and the blind judge fine the perpetrators and become the enemies. Alice calls Obie a "meathead" and "stupid bastard," and mocks his "play-acting" as cop of the day. Considering the kind of social strife across the country by 1969, especially after the Chicago Democratic National Convention in August 1968 and the clash between hippies, political activists, and police, representing law enforcement officers as simpletons made sense to numerous young viewers.
To offset insinuations of hippie un-Americanness, Penn spends several minutes on the famous Thanksgiving dinner and paints the commune in American tradition. The picture spotlights several churches in the autumnal Massachusetts countryside filled with congregations singing "Amazing Grace" in preparation for the feast day. The sequence ends by bringing the Brock church/commune into full view and the camera takes us inside where the communal family finishes the last few lines of the song, "I once was lost but now am found / Was blind but now I see." Within the converted church and its display of plenty, Ray dons his pilgrim hat and blows the dinner trumpet. "Gather," he says; "praise be to us for coming here to dig it [the dinner] because we're beautiful." The camera pans the long wooden table set with pumpkins, autumn leaves, and a bountiful spread. The commune members have come from far and near by motor bikes, trains, trucks, cars, horses, or "anything that moved," Arlo explains. These wanderers indulge in the dinner and frivolity, the pinnacle of counterculture beauty. The most ritualistic of American commemorations brings the most contemporary family its own share of early folklore and legitimizes its claim to an American past of survivors who met a hazardous and violent world with unique determination.42 These new "pilgrims" manifested the counterculture's essential argument of "Americanness," even as they "did their own thing."
As rightful inheritors of American tradition, this new voice of the folk critiqued the older generation harshly when it came to materialism and the Vietnam War. Counterculture pilgrim and patriot posturing as the liberator of bigotry, discrimination, and other everyday absurdities that challenged American ideology of equality fit well enough within the changing social attitudes, but the most visible component, the lifestyle changes, remained too subversive and unstructured for many to accept as a new, free society of reconstituted humanity. The film tries to comment on the failure of the commune and the problem with the younger generation's entitlement to frivolity through a sequence that ultimately shows the movement's undercurrents. The commune parents sit inside a dark restaurant, exhausted and in self-reflection, after Shelly (Michael McClanathan), a rehabilitated drug addict and adopted son, feels betrayed by Ray and Alice and interrupts the commune's idyllic setting by committing suicide. "I guess our beauty wasn't coming through," Alice infers. "Maybe we haven't been so beautiful lately," Ray returns.
To stave of further destruction, Ray coordinates a wedding, "a real weddin'," "real church weddin'," he says, and the Aquarian parents marry again at a more festive gathering than their drive-in special at the Justice of the Peace. Alice and Ray walk down the isle in their church home. Complete with flowers in her hair, Alice takes Ray for her "lawful lovin' man" and the party begins. Costumed guests engage in chaotic revelry with electric and folk guitars, banjoes, balloons, and festive dancing, but the excessive merriment drains the emotional vitality of the crowd and the commune members depart. Ray begs Mari and Arlo to stay, but they opt for a life on the road, leave the madness behind, and the story shifts back to the commune parents. Ray walks inside the church where he sees disorder. In a point-of-view shot, the camera pans the litter and remaining mess from the merrymaking and shows, sadly, that Ray's dream has reached its logical conclusion. Ray, the commune-maker, hoped for a better society as he imagined the countryside's regenerative strength and insists that if only the kids would stay, "we'd all be some kinda family." Ray and Alice represent the honest but weak who have donned the hip folkishness of the 1960s to offer a solution to the medley of youth congregating around their lifestyle. As Penn remarked, "It was a benign family Alice and Ray and the kids created, a therapeutic family, based on their judgment of what a family should be. Those kids were going back, redoing life from the beginning, working out parent-child relationships that had never been resolved." Alice and Ray offered "different forms of family - a coming together to find love and security."43
A filmmaker as astute as Arthur Penn would have been remiss not to recognize the underbelly of the counterculture and commune phenomenon by the late 1960s when the free communities faced serious problems of sustainability and disenchantment. The darker side of communal journeys seemed to be more than perception when communes became sites of "depression and emptiness" instead of hippie Edens. One New York observer noted, "the East Village, despite its new Bohemian name, is still the Lower East Side. It is not a garden of flowers. A teeming, turbulent neighborhood, it is not quite a slum, but it has slumlike aspects." Those who saw hippieness as a social problem described enclaves as places where one "pedels [sic] the exotica of hippiedom - underground newspapers, incense, bells, cigarette papers for rolling marijuana `joints."' Instead of men in golden robes, "one finds joyless youngsters prowling its incense-heavy strobe lighted interior, aimless and disinterested." One observer recalled the sight of one young boy "stretched out asleep on the floor," sleeping on a "pile of rags."44 As one worker for the sanitation department in San Francisco pointed out, "They just dump their garbage in the street.... I've asked for a transfer," he told one reporter.45 In addition, it was getting more difficult to argue free love when "four girls ha[d] been raped ... in the past few days" as one flier reported.46 Drug experimentation also led some to reconsider the notion of mind expansion as the ultimate form of freedom. One cynic proclaimed in a San Francisco handbill, "EXPANDED CONSCIOUSNESS IS A SELFISH HIPPY [sic] KISSING THE SYSTEM'S ASS FOR THE GREATER GLORY OF THE LONELY DROPOUT, ISN'T THAT RIGHT, UNCLE TIM!"47 Counterculture legitimacy now appeared to be a delusion.
