MovieChat Forums > American Graffiti (1973) Discussion > Never understood this movie's attraction...

Never understood this movie's attraction.


As I get older I look back on the body of work of movies
I have watched and there are so many movies that are
supposedly classics and so great, like American Graffiti,
but I always lost interest in this movie if I watched any
scene for more than a few moments. I never understood
the nostalgia for the 50's because it seemed like such an
ugly time in America.

I compare this with two other movies. Stand By Me, and
Breaking Away. Stand By Me was stupid ... e.g. the pie-
eating contest and full or silly stuff, but it at least had some
humor in it, though stupid.

Breaking Away was a real story. Yes it was a bit simple, but
it was fun and more interesting and true to life.

reply

I think part of it is because it marks the change from the 1950s to the 1960s, especially with the "what happened to them afterwards" text at the end. There's certainly nostalgia for being young & essentially carefree, which all of us feel at some time when we're older & selectively filtering out the bad memories of the past. But it's also a matter of the audience knowing full well what's ahead for these characters & for the country as a whole—massive cultural changes that will render even those selectively chosen "good" memories irrelevant.

Interesting that this film jumpstarted the whole 1950s nostalgia craze a la Happy Days, which IS both selectively chosen & downright fantasy, without any acknowledgement of the ugliness of the 1950s that made the 1960s necessary. The film, if not its characters, is well aware that there's no going back to a carefully curated past—that attempting to do so is an exercise in self-deceiving daydreaming. Not only is there no going back, there shouldn't BE any going back.

At least, that's how it's always struck me.

Completely agree with you about Breaking Away, an absolute little gem of a film!

reply

I think both American Graffiti & Happy Days came about the time when people wanted to forget about the mid 60’s era of the Vietnam War, Civil Rights, riot & the hippie generation, and go back to an supposedly go back to an more happier , gentle time

reply

As someone who was a teenager in the late 60s, I can testify that a terrible weariness & feeling of being burned out filled the national psyche as the 70s began. People were looking for something more peaceful & innocent; that's when the introspective singer-songwriter became a major presence in popular music, and a lot of countercultural people were "getting back to the country" as an escape to a hoped-for Eden.

reply

Why were the 50's an ugly time in America to you (other than black people being treated badly by the DixieCrats)?

reply

Well, there was McCarthyism & the blacklist, massive conformity, anti-intellectualism, the American government overthrowing democratically elected governments in third world countries, and of course the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation that I still remember all too well from my boyhood then—it clung to everything like a grey miasma, heightened by duck-and-cover drills in grade school, which terrified all of us children. And seeing our parents, and all adults, as even more terrified by that threat made it worse.

As for the racism, the Dixiecrats were indeed ugly, the retrograde wing of the Democratic Party; but of course they were soon to switch to the Republican Party after the passage of the Civil Rights Act just a few years later, where they've remained ever since.

The good thing about the late 1950s was that the ferment for the 1960s was already present, from the young playwrights, screenwriters, poets (the Beats in particular), artists, etc., of the era, as well as the emerging civil rights movement, the anti-nuclear movement—even the small beginnings of the women's rights movement & the gay rights movement. Shows like The Twilight Zone & the various live TV drama anthologies explored the soul-devouring emptiness of corporate life, casual & official prejudice, the need to be individuals rather than faceless cogs—it's interesting how often the likes of Thoreau & Emerson were referenced in so many shows back then!

reply

The Democrats never "switched to Republicans" after the Civil Rights Act. That's pure fabrication on your part. The Republicans fought for Civil Rights and the Democrats tried to stop its passage. Other than Strom Thurmond I know of no one else who switched parties.

As for the '50s being great or awful, they were like any era, and had both good and bad elements. I certainly think that overall the 1950s was almost certainly America's peak, and we've been a steady decline since the early '60s.

reply

I'm sorry, but that's revisionist history. LBJ famously said that when he signed the Civil Rights Act, we has handing the South over to the Republicans for at least a generation. It's proven to be more than just one generation. The Dixiecrats went with the Republicans, which over time has become the party that harbors & encourages white racism & white supremacy.

The Republicans used to be the party of civil rights to be sure--Jackie Robinson was one, actively campaigning for Richard Nixon in 1960, until the changes of the early 60s reversed things. From that point onward, the Democrats have been the party for advancing rights for all, including all previously marginalized minorities; the Republicans now boast neo-Nazis & the likes of David Duke among their avid supporters, though certainly not every Republican is that bad.

reply

So your belief is that after the Republicans spent decades fighting for civil rights, battling the Democrats who opposed them, after they won the fight and passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, all the racists decided to switch over and support the Republicans? And you back this up by saying some tiny fringe group of perhaps 1,000 total Americans support of Republicans means Republicans automatically support the fringe, racist cause? I don't see any merit in that thinking at all.

I'd counter by saying that from the fight against slavery to the creation of the KKK to the 1957 filibuster to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and onward to the present day, it has always been Republicans fighting for equality, and Democrats opposing it. The Democrat opposition used to be very direct-- enslave blacks, lynch blacks, segregate blacks, etc.-- but once it became clear that tactic no longer worked, they switched to their present-day, more subtle, but equally damaging, methods of impoverishment and blame-shifting. Democrats have switched from open racism to legislated racism.

reply

I disagree.

reply

ok

reply

[deleted]

"I never understood the nostalgia for the 50's because it seemed like such an ugly time in America."

Like every time period, the 1950s had problems. But it was also a beautiful period of post-war, post-Depression optimism and prosperity. It was not a simple time, or an innocent time, but it was a positive time.

And, "American Graffiti" takes place in 1962.

reply

Maybe a bit simpler is more up your alley?

reply

It’s not necessarily nostalgic for the early 60s, but nostalgic for the time in persons life where they can run around with their friends and be kids, where their biggest worry wasn’t a big worry at all.

reply

I never understood
the nostalgia for the 50's because it seemed like such an
ugly time in America.


LOL! Oh, so ugly! Recreational drug abuse had not spread to the mainstream, most families had 2 parents, a person could own a home and support a family with only a high school education, no crime waves, mass shooting was a once-a-decade rarity, kids could play out alone, people were not addicted to expensive electronics, popular entertainment was not dominated by sex and toilet jokes, etc. etc. etc. How very ugly! The stinking hell-hole we have descended into over the last 60 years is SO much nicer.

reply