was a dismal failure. This movie makes you wince, just thinking about it.
Kids today ought to see it, though. They have no idea what it was like living in a time when you had a government picking young men at random with a lottery-based draft system to go fight in a war that nobody cared about in a country most Americans had never even heard of, much less cared about.
In some ways a failure ... in others, not so much.
Let's remember that there was no Hippie Central, or any specific program or agenda. It was more about questioning what we had been given to believe in & to live for, whether our own lives were meaningful or not.
The hippies weren't the first generation to ask these questions, and they won't be the last -- go back to the Beats, the Lost Generation, The Surrealists, the Transcendentalists, the English Romantics -- there's always been a certain countercultural strain in Western civilization, questioning the status quo, asking if there isn't a better way.
Just look at America right now, after the collapse of the economy -- turns out that living solely for money & status didn't ensure security & happiness for a lot of people, after all. Maybe endless consumerism isn't the best way of life, after all. Maybe there's more to life than a Hummer & "American Idol" & videogaming, after all.
Not everyone will follow those questions through to create new lives for themselves. But some will. Some always will.
Funny how the hippies fought against an oppressive government only to become an even more oppressive government
shareAnyone with genuinely hippie ideals wouldn't be caught dead in any government.
shareOK--so this bombed and it wasn't a masterpiece--but I sort of liked it. I was one of the very few people who saw it in a theatre way back in 1980. I was just starting college at the time and I found if very interesting to see what it was (purportedly) like for college kids back in the 1960s. Also I was born and raised very near Harvard University so seeing it on the big screen was kind of fun. This is not a great film at all but a "dismal failure"? I don't think so.
shareI also saw it when it came out. It's certainly not a great movie, but I agree it's not as bad as many people assume. I didn't go to Harvard, but I was in college during the period portrayed, and I think the movie does succeed in conveying much of the atmosphere on college campuses of that unique period--kids who go from short hair to long hair; people who go from peaceful to violent; the sexual revolution; the reactions to the draft lottery, etc. (although I think the characters' class year was actually a year BEHIND the one that dealt with the lottery first). The scene involving the banner caper was probably reminiscent of similar capers on other campuses, including mine. And director Cohen SHOULD get some of those aspects right--according to his bio, he was at Harvard, apparently in the same class as his principal characters in this film are.
shareLink to the economy collapsing? GDP is about the same as it was in 2007, and unemployment is only about 5% higher.
Those who actually saved money still have their financial security, as does anyone who owns their home outright. And about 90% of the population, generally.
You also completely misrepresent how people were living before the recession. There's nothing wrong with pursuing a comfortable lifestyle -- it's the dream not just for America, but for people around the world, including the developing world.
There's nothing wrong with questioning excessive materialism. There's obviously more to life. But the hippies could afford to scoff at material comfort b/c they were generally the rich, spoiled offspring of people who had worked hard to create a decent life for themselves and their families.
If anything, the recession is probably making clear (to those seriously affected by it) how important financial security is.
No one's saying you don't need a certain amount of financial security. The question is, how much is enough? How much is too much? Do we really need so much of the mass-marketed crap we've been programmed to buy? Is there more to life than buying & owning things? Will they necessarily make you a whole & happy human being?
That's what the best of the 1960s was about -- asking questions like those, and struggling to answer them. We could use more of that today! How many people are in financial difficulty now precisely because they bought more than they could afford, and thought they deserved to have it all? Maybe a less materialistic worldview could have prevented that.
What's "comfortable," anyway? Someone who's reasonably at peace with himself, who's looked beneath the surface of things & started trying to decide what really matters, is just as likely to be happy as the most ardent consumer. Maybe happier, in fact, because his contentment comes from within, not from endless consumption of things that can never fill the yawning hole within.
Not everyone wants to live the same way, that's all I'm saying. And it doesn't hurt to think about what you want, and understand exactly why you want it. You may even realize that you've been living by someone else's expectations & script, rather than your own. Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." Sooner or later, material things alone just don't cut it.
The revolution might have died, but I thought this movie caught some of the spirit of it, plus some of the zeitgeist of the time - the changes in gender roles, sexual experimentation, drug experimentation, the social upheaval brought on by the Vietnam war.
If there is one big difference, at least as it pertains to the youth of America, it was the draft. Thought the movie handled that well - the women were kind of mocking the whole thing ("Leave it to men to decide it by picking balls") while the men were sweating bullets.