Camera And Action, page 13
Whether in utopian moments or the practice of everyday life, the failure of the commune to prevent its descent further shows up in the narrative's resolution. The pastoral setting of the church commune disappears when the wedding guests leave a once-liberated Alice vulnerable and alone. With a slightly bitter face, she stands outside the church/commune as if in a portrait framed against a discolored background and milieu. The camera pans from right to left in a slow, long shot, revealing glimpses of the free society's matron through autumn tree branches. The scrutinizing lens moves around a knotty tree trunk and closes in on an anxious Alice, who clasps her hands and stands in a tattered peasant-style wedding dress against faded, weather-beaten, gray wood. Her veil blows in the wind, and the camera freezes the somber Alice in a bleak still-life. The mythic sixties hope, the first premise of building a better world complete with free love, fades out. The final scene lets go of the enthusiasm for the communal project and leaves viewers with a haunting image of Alice's isolation.
One of the marks of cinematic newness at the time was the merciless use of ambiguous resolution. Those "now" movies such as The Graduate and Alice's Restaurant ended with vague conclusions as a way to solve narrative tension. On the one hand, ambiguity enticed debate and serious thought about meaning, but the unresolved, open endings on the other hand avoided addressing outcomes. In this film, ambiguity glibly paints Alice as the tragic figure. She single-handedly carries the film's burden of failure and faces a life rife with profound loneliness. Certainly, the over-spirited Ray fails to create the extended family when his "kids" drift away, but he walks inside the commune as if proceeding to the next event. He disappears and leaves Alice with the burden of unreconciled relationships and lost dreams.48
The weight of reconciliation rests on Alice's shoulders and, through her, the film ultimately exposes the counterculture impasse. The polemic of free love advanced the notion that passion would be freely given and gotten. "IF THE WAY IS OPENED THROUGH LOVE," one circular argued, "THEN LOVE OPENS TO US."49 Free love posed the contingency of counterculture liberation with new standards of mainstreaming female bodies. In the film, free love is a method of staging visual liberation. Concurrent with new standards for film, Alice's Restaurant shows women's bodies in new ways and the story's rendition of a new sexuality reveals the counterculture's hardest truth. Early in the narrative, Arlo sings at a Greenwich Village coffeehouse where a fourteen-year-old groupie takes him to a psychedelic hippie crash pad following his gig. "Got a handkerchief?" she asks and proceeds nonchalantly to unbutton her oversized denim shirt (a souvenir from a rock star). As she exposes her young, fourteen-year-old body, she justifies her exploit. "I wanna make it with you 'cause you'll probably get to be an album." Her long hair drapes over her shoulders and in only her bikini underwear, she recaps the list of rock stars and other celebrities with whom she has slept. Arlo is neither shocked nor aroused as he stares at her aggressive demonstration of emancipation. Instead, he hands her his neck scarf and coolly tells her to keep it as a souvenir. "Same as if we made it," he explains and leaves.
The groupie scene offers the possibility of seeing teenage sex as normal by making the girl the aggressor, not vulnerable but available. Arlo's refusal defines the film's stance on underage sex and makes sex between singers and groupies suspicious. The refusal, however, occurs after the camera makes her unclothed body available to the viewer. Engaging in teen sex may have pushed the film over the line of acceptability, but representing a young girl's body on screen also gave the film a certain social authority in the post-Code days. The scene obliquely displaces prudish notions of age barriers in sex by presenting the option but at the same time objectifies a teen body through Arlo's (and thus the audience's) voyeurism. This scene contradicts its critique of the establishment by producing teenage fantasy (sex with music stars) as an object of desire through Arlo's authority as final judge. By contrast, later in the film, a commune woman (older but closer in age) seduces Arlo. "Are you going to make your move or not?" she asks and, upon his approval, they engage in their moments of free love.
In Alice's Restaurant, a fourteen-year-old's advances and a commune member's subscription to free love signify the counterculture's power to subvert convention. Saturday Review critic Roland Gelatt applauded the film's "casual, no-hangups attitude toward sex that is currently fashionable." He admired the way "girls here get down to business without so much as a tentative paw from the young man who catches their fancy."50 Both scenes promote free love as a female desire and represent that as a sign of female empowerment. Ultimately, however, the film's women discover it is neither as free nor as legitimate as these scenes and reviewers claim.
Arlo's booking agent and father's peer, Ruth, offers herself to Arlo, but he refuses. "Girdles feel funny," he tells her and severs both his personal and business relationship with her. Arlo's next cross-generational sexual affiliation involves Alice, the earth mother of the contemporary culture. In her quest for the 1960s liberated experience and its promise of a free society, Alice performs as the sexually liberated woman who breaks taboos against adultery, incest, and age. The counterculture sensibility of free love offers her a way to come to terms with a less than satisfying marriage to Ray. She and Ray snuggle and make love in the barn and the loft and show affection in front of their family, but crossing conventional lines is more flattering than her stale relationship. Alice engages in sexual exploits with Shelly and travels to New York City where she finds Arlo and wants to share his bed. Alice's infidelity in a world of free love must be allowed, but she also must face the ultimate truth of communal sensibility -how to reconcile personal authority and sexual liberation with lasting social relationships. She breaks down halfway through the story when Ray bursts into her restaurant to take her swimming during the restaurant's busy lunch hour. "Ah, hell! Let them all go in the kitchen and help themselves," Ray tells her. "Hey, you're lettin' this place eat you up, baby," he scolds and takes a car-load of kids swimming, leaving her behind to run the business. Later, Alice throws a tantrum when Ray horses around in her kitchen. She screams, "I've had it," and leaves.
The real Alice explained to Newsweek that that scene opened a dialogue about her role in the commune and the problems of Ray's youthful fantasy. Because of the film, "We found ourselves talking about things we should have talked about three years ago," she explained. "They shot that scene" and "during that time, I was working seventeen hours a day in the restaurant and making sandwiches for them while they were singing and going to the beach. Following the take, some of the kids said, `Gee, Alice, was it really that hard for you? Were you that unhappy?"' As in the film, Alice found the weight of work unevenly distributed in the communal arrangements of freedom. "And, man, during that time," she recalled, "I was dying. But nobody really related to one another. We thought we were on just one big happy trip."s'
The film invites the viewer to identify with Alice's sadness but is unresolved about what it means. At the same time, the story releases the hippie couple Arlo and Mari-Chan from implication when they climb aboard their Volkswagen bus. Their departure obliquely suggests that the hippie culture works best when participants are free to wander and those at the helm stay behind. The tragedy therefore rests with Alice and not with the 1960s myth of dropping out, despite Penn's allowance for critique and choice of ambiguity as a narrative resolution. Alice mirrors the popular image of the counterculture but does not account for reality beyond the van. The film's sadness is not Arlo's.
Alice's collapse into ambiguity avoids solving the same problem the counterculture left as its legacy. As a film of its time, it best captures the spirit of the communal hope to establish new models for family living. Ray's church, as Stephen Farber suggested in 1970, "revitalizes the frontier dream of freedom and makes it relevant for" its youthful audience.52 The film, for all of its critical leanings, leaves whole Arlo's identity as countercultural representative. But Penn's rendering of the pastoral life for the Vietnam generation solves neither the problem of detachment and commitment nor the importance of ties that bind and sustain. The criticism boils down to a problem of failed relationships, not failed ideas. Redirecting the conclusion as a personal situation rather than a larger social issue merely continues the good hippies/bad establishment dichotomy and shifts the politics of Woody's generation from a revolutionary argument of class equity to a focus on new cultural codes of behavior and appearance.
Hippie folk spoke for the critical view of American involvement in war and did not need a class argument to make the critique work. In this film, the personal is not political. Ray, for example, is a member of the older generation but is portrayed as a good-hearted hippie whose sympathy the film encourages. Urban professionals such as Ray and middle-class kids such as Arlo can still negotiate a counterculture identity and therefore escape the film's critique and hippiedom's irreconcilability. The film validates commune identity and counterculture idealism from a male point of view while the narrative shows the nature of free societies in relation to the female. At the same time, the film leaves intact a critical judgment of the working class and its established authority. If Alice at least provided the practical means to make the communal idea work but could not sustain the family nor meet the impossible demands of free love, then the question of who is the victim remains.
It was not a one-way process. Changed affirmations had their limits, as Alice's tragedy demonstrated. Communes were fated from the beginning. By 1969, the contradictions of the movement were too visible to ignore. Where "dropping out" seemed noble and productive to those who indulged, hippie lifestyle ultimately contained its own demise. Censuring everyday America for its relative affluence seemed disingenuous to many when, as one tax consultant commented, "A lot of these people get money from trust funds. Or parents send them regular checks." The irony in this common practice was lost on those who demanded their subsidy. "One young fellow came in here," the accountant mused, "very angry that he had to fill out a tax form. He was getting money both from his mother in Miami and his father in Manhattan."53
Walking off the treadmill was certainly contingent on other inequities. As one observer asked, "How can a Negro drop out?" To be sure, "He's there, at bedrock all the time."54 If hippie freedom was racially and class encoded, the politics of hippie lifestyle emerged yet again. One observer noticed that "they can stand there and smoke pot [marijuana] and no one says a word. But a black cat [man] standing on a corner not only gets busted, but gets the full penalty."55 Hippie rejection of establishment lifestyle also provoked resentment from those who had invested a great deal in endowing their young with promises of success. As one argument went, the counterculture is made up of children whose parents "make all kinds of money by climbing over other people until they get to the top."56 Unlike Penn's rendition of the Barrows in Bonnie and Clyde, valorized for their heroic efforts to break the banks, Arlo can speak only for the counterculture whose discontent was less a problem of class than identity and attitude. Arlo's character invited the viewer to question the face-value prestige of American institutions, but bashing the heart and soul of America had its own consequences. As one angry viewer asked, what justified the film's "mockery of sacred and respected precepts of society?"57
It was easy to see the irony in the claim to oppression when the safety net of home lay close by. For many who came from upper-middle-class, professional lifestyles to join the counterculture, theirs was a dominant class position. The younger generation molded hippieness as a return to a first premise, but as Newsweek showed, "Arlo and his friends are the children of the McLuhan age" who may prefer "a wood fire to central heating" but whose "exuberance for simplicity did not expunge a television set on the list of things to buy."58 The 1960s counterculture likely manifested the class privilege it tried to rebel against. Often, as one observer noticed, "Law school followed a quick shave and haircut for many former hip- pies."59 The alleged role as deliverers of peace, love, and freedom alienated those who identified with a traditional past, a conventional lifestyle steeped in day-to-day work and ideas of American liberty. Dropping out through "hippie clothes and ... swinging locks of hair" would not garner the same results. As one pundit put it, "When [Arlo] says no, he has other options. He has the money to take himself off to his institution of higher learning, and he leaves it again in the full knowledge of what will happen next. He comes not from a ghetto full of rats but from a middling-well-off family with its own private troubles .1161 In the words of one reviewer, most young viewers will not have "the more than $100,000 pouring in from the album alone of 'Alice's Restaurant."' Of course, "Arlo will be able to realize his pastoral dream of independence in a green place, an American dream rooted in Thoreau, Emerson, and Whit- man."61
The two commune parents, Alice and Ray, the thirty-something, ex-professional dropouts from New York City, substantiated the underlying truth of counterculture philosophy - that constructing oneself as counterculture proves one's resistance to middle-class values. Liberation of attitude and belief, however, re-confirmed rather than deconstructed the freedom of choice and therefore exaggerated rather than reduced the problem of social standing. Ray and Alice represent urban desires for the country, imagined as the life of ordinary folk. By 1969, for example, the real Alice lived on five hundred acres outside of Stockbridge. Salvation in wide, open spaces popularized during the 1960s by urbanites gone rural seemed a proper stay against material-driven America, but the draw of the country allowed the urban professional to remain relatively safe from critique, escaping any derision aimed at others, such as the truck driver. Finally, Alice channels her energy into the commune project, only to be dismissed at the end, left alone to deal with her own tragic situation. By contrast, Ray sees no reason why the experiment cannot continue and, in some ways, he was right. It did.
This film crossed almost all levels of cultural, social, and economic borders and in one way or another was obliged to pay attention to the discursive impact and fantasy fulfillment of the counterculture phenomenon.62 The hippie form of "folkism" gave American cinema a way to speak to changes in attitudes regarding American society at the end of the decade. Viewers could engage vicariously in the natural, simple, and authentic, helping to dislocate representations of the traditional "folk" and hero of the parent generation's era. Arlo Guthrie's travels west and east accomplished the construction of counterculture folk heroics undergird with simplicity through a new kind of people - young, whimsical, good-hearted hippie folk. The film underscored the counterculture sensibility and helped answer the question about what "role ... the 1960s play[ed] in the ongoing public discourse regarding American values and policies." Alice's Restaurant showed how the counterculture phenomenon was a site of struggle for meaning and power in the 1960s. It showed that the counterculture was neither an "annoying interruption" nor the essential, golden moment of hope,63 but what one pundit labeled "the leading social phenomenon of [that] time."64 Like intellectuals in Woody's era, counterculturalists spoke for and became the voice of the people. Underneath that claim lay their break by virtue of economic contentment and therefore their burden.65 Alice's Restaurant remains a testimony to the revolutionary role of the counterculture in the generation known for its Woodstock distinctiveness, even in its contingency.
If experimental film indeed broke ground in American culture, one of the effects of Alice's Restaurant was popularizing counterculture ethos. In its positive rendition, the film helped define the meaning and value of the hippie phenomenon. Certainly, counterculture kitsch blended well with popular consumerism. Bangles, bold colors, rock music and tie-dyed clothing became fashionable along with beards and beads. By the end of the 1960s, these simple accessories carried substantial messages of intervention into everyday life. The material for the narrative was supplied and self-proclaimed in the message of free love and in the Haight itself, but the synthesis for generating cultural meaning was constructed by the film. Penn had heard the counterculture's voice and forwarded its message. To him, "The most important function of movies, their very essence, is the number of bells of recognition they ring in their audiences' conscience."66 Alice's Restaurant became a visual intercession, for the counterculture ethos came clearly into view. A new reality remained. American society had, indeed, changed "through lifestyle rather than politics," in attitudes, values, and beliefs. Thus did the counterculture's pleasure policies indisputably subvert "straight" society.67 Penn's praise was no simplistic exposition. He put these kids squarely in America and indicted those resisting their message.
While the narrative stabs at exposing counterculture contingency, Arlo, garbage, and the draft produced a popular ethos, fostering a long-lasting commodification of dropping out. True to consumer formula, commodities in one form or another served as a means of communication, a language of sorts for the film's message, and thus helped place counterculture discourse into the practice of everyday life, preserved yet consumed.68 Marketing executives negotiated opening several restaurant franchises across the country during the release of the film. A deal to publish a cookbook containing a record and spices and authored by Alice followed. Next, the plan was to develop a line of frozen foods with Alice's Restaurant as the label. These opportunities made possible the strong identification with the counterculture perspective and completed the recipe for the successful integration of its perspective in the world of popular culture.69 To spread it even further, Arlo engaged in marketing T-shirts, records, incense, candies, books, and videos.70
