I, like a lot of people my age, don’t have a very high opinion of baby boomers right now. It’s not really fair I realize, but it’s much less fair of them to continually and consistently undermine and screw over my generation. And more than about any other living generation, baby boomers (mostly the white ones) are nostalgic for their youth and what the world was like in the 1950s and 60s. This isn’t merely a by-product of people in their twilight years traditionally resenting the younger generation, baby boomers have always had rose-tinted glasses for that time period they came of age in.
The 30-Year cycle of pop culture often comes up in discussions of media trends and nostalgic culture. Just as the 1950s endured a cultural renaissance in the 80s, so too are the 80s glorified and homaged in the 2010s. It’s an interesting pattern but by no means a rule; and in fact the earliest piece of nostalgia celebration that kick-started cinema’s fascination with the 1950s during the formative years of the New Hollywood era was a little film about “cruising” from an unusual young California director made in 1973.
George Lucas’ American Graffiti was a much bigger movie than it’s often remembered as in the shadow of Lucas’ subsequent behemoth of Star Wars. Even I remember first hearing about it as little more than a piece of trivia about his career pre-space opera. Often it’s remembered in relation to Lucas’ later projects, such as the beginning of his relationship with Ron Howard, the presence of Harrison Ford in a supporting role, and the allowance its earnings gave him to begin developing Star Wars. But American Graffiti was an important movie in its own right -there’s a reason it almost overnight made Lucas one of the most promising young directors in Hollywood. It became one of the highest grossing movies of all time up to that point and was even nominated for a number of Oscars including Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Supporting Actress for Candy Clark, and even Best Picture (losing most of these to The Sting). And arguably it was the springboard for Hollywood’s obsession with the 1950s, even though the films’ set in 1962. Certainly the creation of Happy Days two years later with Ron Howards’ involvement (and later Laverne & Shirley with Cindy Williams) is almost directly attributable to American Graffiti. So it’s definitely worth looking at for what it says about Hollywood at the time, and both the industry and Lucas’ relationship to nostalgia. Also, just to see what a non-Star Wars movie directed by Lucas looks like.
The story takes the form of a series of vignettes over the course of one night in Modesto, California, following a group of recently graduated friends on the verge of adulthood. Curt Henderson (Richard Dreyfus) spends the evening trying to find a mysterious girl he’s captivated by; Steve Bolander (Ron Howard), determined to leave town for university, has a series of arguments, break-ups, and make-ups with his girlfriend Laurie (Cindy Williams); inheriting Steve’s car, the socially awkward Terry “the Toad” Fields (Charles Martin Smith) attempts to “cruise” for girls, picking up and actually having a rather pleasant evening with Debbie (Candy Clark); while in the same enterprise, John Milner (Paul Le Mat) becomes saddled with a young girl called Carol (Mackenzie Phillips) while the stetson-wearing Bob Falfa (Harrison Ford) tries to challenge him to a drag race.
The movie reminds me a lot of and was no doubt an influence on Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused. Of course the idea of a story about young people at a turning point in their lives presented in this style wasn’t original to American Graffiti either, as Lucas was heavily inspired by Fellini’s I Vitelloni. It was however, fairly new to American cinema, Lucas and the rest of the New Hollywood crew being among the first to transpose methods from acclaimed international auteurs into their own films. The structure of American Graffiti works incredibly well, bouncing from story to story at a pretty good pace and tying them together quite nicely by the end. It really feels like a genuine taste of what life was like for these youths at this particular moment in history in their particular cultural and socio-economic state. Lucas’ choice to dispense with a standard movie score in favour of pop songs a la Easy Rider is also a mark in the films’ favour in relating its atmosphere. Music has a very transcendent power, so hearing staples like “That’ll Be the Day”, “Surfin Safari”, “Runaway”, “Johnny B. Goode”, “Barbara Ann”, “I Only Have Eyes for You”, “All Summer Long”, and of course “Rock Around the Clock” quite successfully plants the audience in southern California at the turn of the 1960’s. The casual flow and nighttime setting contribute to the movies’ feeling of youthful euphoria as well, and Lucas’ technical skill in shooting and editing is quite remarkable in a filmmaker whose last films haven’t demonstrated much craft.
The periods of when the movie was set and when it was made alike are demonstrated in the actions and motivations of the main characters. Each of them is chasing girls. The concept of “cruising for chicks” is of course a relic of the mid-twentieth century, and the attitudes of the male characters towards females, though not as locked in that era as we’ve come to realize, has generally fallen by the wayside as socially acceptable. Some of the Toad’s behaviour is a little too close to the awful nerd stereotypes that would come to characterize youth-oriented films of the 1980s, and it’s certainly uncomfortable that John inadvertently picks up a sixteen year old girl played very clearly by a much younger actress (Phillips was only twelve during filming) -this subplot never quite recovers from that. Even Curt’s romantic search for the girl he believes blew him a kiss is unseemly in retrospect, especially given the lengths he goes to. The movie, though it didn’t know it at the time, was presenting a critique of the lifestyle it purported to be celebrating. In Lucas’ reliving of the past, the movie successfully showed why it should stay past, while at the same time being an expression of youthful liberation that more or less holds up. And American Graffiti is not bereft of additional meaning or merit in its text at all. The film explores growing up and transitioning -it’s no surprise that the somewhat reluctant to leave Curt eventually realized it was time to move on, while the overly eager Steve ultimately decided to stay in Modesto with Laurie. The tone, general aesthetic, and performances hold up well, with Dreyfus, Howard, Williams, and Clark being my favourites (though one can’t deny Ford’s instant ability to steal a scene) -there’s a good reason it launched a number of careers. But to most of the baby boomers watching it in 1973, American Graffiti struck a chord for being a validation of their youth. American Graffiti essentially said; ‘Remember those times when you were a teenager and everything was great? When you could go cruising all night, listen to rock n’ roll, and go dancing with your favourite girl? When the economy was booming and there wasn’t a war on (or at least it hadn’t escalated to the degree of the mid-60’s) and little noticeable civil unrest? Well you were right, those were great times, those were happy days in fact, and this movie proves it!” Of course, that’s not the only reason it was a big hit, but the fact it was proved that there was a lucrative market for this kind of nostalgia.
In fact, George Lucas’ whole career has kind of been based on nostalgia. Without detracting from its originality, it’s no secret that Star Wars was inspired by Flash Gordon serials (the movie Lucas initially wanted to make), Akira Kurosawa films -most notably The Hidden Fortress, a series of both classical myths and pulp science-fiction stories, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and of course the Second World War. He’s explicitly used classic cinema as a model through such examples as the pod-race sequence in Phantom Menace being the chariot race of Ben-Hur, the slaughter of the Jedi in Revenge of the Sith being the hits on the Five Families in The Godfather, and as noted previously, Shia LaBeouf’s entrance in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull being Marlon Brando in The Wild One. American Graffiti is more personal nostalgia though. In addition to having grown up in Modesto himself, Lucas has acknowledged that three of the primary characters are based on him at various stages in his young life: the Toad represents his awkward early teenage years, John his later teenage years, and Curt his intelligent yet idealistic college years. And this says a lot about how Lucas perceived himself and his coming of age. Curt is most recognizable as Lucas’ alter ego (curious that two and six years later Dreyfus would also play Spielberg’s alter ego), being visibly older than the rest of the cast and with a fashion sense that mirrors Lucas’. Knowing this, it’s interesting to chart the trajectory of Lucas as an insecure nerd to an overconfident punk to a mature yet still imaginative and rebellious young adult. And though Lucas has the rose-tinted glasses for the period as much as any of his contemporaries, he nevertheless acknowledges the transience of this idealized time. The film ends with a precursor of sorts to Stand By Me (though with Richard Dreyfus on the other end), with its’ somewhat downer revelation that John and Toad are dead, the former killed by a drunk driver and the latter in Vietnam (Steve is an insurance agent and Curt a writer). Now the latter you could argue only solidifies the romance of the era; that significant casualties in Vietnam from the mid-60s on is what destroyed the tranquillity of the ‘50s and thus makes it all the more special. But the former may in fact be condemning the recklessness of that exercise that’s such a staple of this movie and by proxy the time it represents; a critique Lucas is imparting against the youth of the era, himself included, -and suggesting where such activities as drag racing and cruising could lead. And that theme of change that recurs through the movie has a definite necessity to its connotation -that moving on is good. There’s no lamenting the end of an era. Curt realizes it’s better for him to go while Steve realizes its better for him to stay -though for Steve this doesn’t stagnate him at all. There’s an inevitability to the coming changes for both the characters and the world, and it’s not presented as a bad thing or much of a loss at all. This reading may not have been apparent to audiences of Lucas’ age in 1973, but it is tangible to me.
Am I giving Lucas too much credit? Perhaps. And am I not giving enough to screenwriters Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck? Probably. But I think this film does at least in a small way punctuate its nostalgia celebration with some humility, and a concession that the “good old days” weren’t any better or worse than other subsequent periods (for the record, they were in fact worse).
This movie also proved Lucas’ abilities as a filmmaker after the flop of his debut feature THX 1138 (it partly got made in the first place because of Lucas’ friendship with Francis Ford Coppola). And it makes me wish Lucas hadn’t been consumed with Star Wars afterwards, because it indicates he could’ve directed some really good movies. It is a time capsule not just of 1962 youth culture, but of 1973 Hollywood, of boomer nostalgia, of George Lucas, and of American pop culture’s relationship with a certain past. It’s a mosaic of all these things stylishly overlaying each other in a format lovingly borrowed from an acclaimed Italian artist. That’s why it’s called American Graffiti.
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jordan_D_Bosch
Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/jbosch/
Comments
Post a Comment