POPULAR CULTURE IN THE SEVENTIES
Summary: Today we will examine developments in popular culture in the 1970s, focusing on film, music, television, and literature. We will consider writer Tom Wolfe's characterization of the 1970s as the "Me Decade" -- a time when Americans withdrew from public commitments and pursued personal fulfillment through self-realization techniques, physical fitness, religion, and popular culture. Drawing on Bruce J. Schulman's The Seventies (2001), we will look beyond the apparent fakery and narcissism of 1970s America to consider its more complex cultural preoccupations such as the impacts of Vietnam and Watergate, economic anxieties, and changing gender and sexual roles.
"The '70s was the decade in which put emphasis on the skin, on the surface, rather than on the root of things. It was the decade in which images became preeminent because nothing deeper was going on."
-Norman Mailer, 1979
"To live for the moment in the prevailing passion -- to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity."
-Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism(1979)
I. Themes of 1970s American culture
A. Impact of Vietnam and Watergate
B. Distrust of constituted authority
C. Focus on the private
D. Focus on self-expression
E. Apparent abandonment of 1960s social and political engagement in favor of personal fulfillment
F. Disillusionment
II. Film
A. 1970s as the decade of the blockbuster: Jaws, Towering Inferno
B. Also decade of creative ferment among independent filmmakers like Brian De Palma, Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman
C. Saturday Night Fever (1977)
1. on one hand, a testament to fakery and corporate character of 1970s popular culture
a. Tony Manero, played by John Travolta, speaks for many Americans in his insistence on living in the here and now, rather than planning for the future
b. represented the corporate marriage of film industry and music companies: BeeGees album became bestseller
2. on the other hand, a film about the complexities of '70s American life
a. contemplation of the family
b. travails of wokring-class, ethnic youth in an era of economic stagnation and civic pessimism: Stayin' Alive [lyrics]
III. Music
A. Decade of corporate domination of American musical taste: Frampton Comes Alive (1976)
B. Bruce Springsteen an apparent exception
1. social conscience
2. but resolutions rely not on meaningful social change, but on "the magic of love"
C. Real exceptions: Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones represent authentic protest
1. question consituted authority
2. celebrate skepticism
IV. Television: Saturday Night Live and The Mary Tyler Moore Show
A. The Waltons and the escapist impulse in 1970s popular culture
B. Mary Tyler Moore
1. about a young woman who is interested in men but not particularly eager to get married
2. Critical of marriage at a time when marriage rates dropping, divorce rates increasing
3. Reflects another change taking place in American cultural life: continuing impact of feminism
V. Gender
A. Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, The Battle of the Sexes, 1973
1. popular media event with vast repercussions for women in sport
2. Title IX
B. Women's increasing workforce participation, even in the midst of marriage and motherhood
C. Challenges to marriage
D. Reproductive rights, the Equal Rights Amendement, and the antifeminist backlash
VI. Cultural Emphasis on Self-Realization
A. Television talk shows, confessional encounter groups, and the new confessional culture of the 1970s
B. Erhard Seminar Training (EST) and other self-realization fads
C. Religious revivalism, televangelism, and born-again Christianity
D. Physical fitness crazes
VII. Were the 1970s, as Christopher Lasch has suggested, a decade characterized by "a culture of narcissism"?
A. Short stories by Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Adams, Tim O'Brien, and John Updike would seem to belie this
B. Tim O'Brien's "Night March" is a complex literary reflection on the consequences of war
1. focuses on the psychic consequences of warfare
2. reflects the disillusionment and distrust of constituted authority, among other things, that resulted from the conflict in Vietnam
3. The war and other cataclysmic political events surface in Joyce Carol Oates' "The Dead"
4. Adams' "Alternatives" and Updike's "Separating," reflect the turning inward, the emphasis on the private, that characterized the culture as a whole
a. but they are by no means celebrations of private life
b. rather, like Saturday Night Fever, bleak portrayals of the family
c. mistrustful of the self -- of its motives and consciousness
d. offers no easy escape for the alienated individual
VIII. Conclusion: Notwithstanding their corporate and apparently narcissistic accents, the 1970s were a period of considerable cultural angst and resulting creativity