Austin Powers Golden age or the end of civilization as we knew it? Memories of the ’60s frequently tend to fall into one of those two camps. Even those who didn’t live through the decade can think of words to describe it: peace and love, civil-rights awareness, protests and liberation. It was a decade of change, an era of tumult as well as hope.
How Hollywood has remembered the ’60s says a lot about how much things have changed.
One entertaining aspect of visiting the past is poking fun at fashions that seemed oh-so-hip at the time. In 1997’s Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery , a moptopped spy of the original Casino Royale vintage is resurrected from a “cryofrozen” state. The 30-year disconnect is where the bulk of the jokes come from. Powers makes no effort to suit his sartorial style to the present day, retaining his trademark velvet suits, ruffled collars and Beatle boots. He is also infected with the free love ethic of the ’60s, which has him eternally at odds with the more sober mores of the AIDS era.
On the social front, ’70s TV shows like The Brady Bunch reflected the reality of less-traditional family units with a humorously gentle touch. If small-screen parents tended to be widowed rather than divorced, an increasing number of viewers could relate to the challenges of combining two households.
Tie-dye, peace signs and love-ins aside, the ’60s weren’t always groovy. A few episodes of Mad Men will make most modern career women realize how far they’ve come. Copywriter Peggy and secretary Joan, as resourceful and intelligent as they are attractive, are challenged by discrimination and harassment in scripts that critics and viewers alike have called painfully authentic.
The struggles behind segregation and uneasy Southern race relations are portrayed with gritty reality in Mississippi Burning, a patina of upper-middle-class respectability in the white employer households of The Help, and upbeat parody in the segregated Baltimore of Hairspray.
Then there was the backdrop of the Vietnam War. The Deer Hunter, following three Pennsylvania steelworker buddies both preand post-Vietnam, pulled no punches in its depiction of the horrors of combat (including a prison guard-enforced game of Russian roulette). Television’s China Beach took a more mainstream, humanizing approach, garnering letters from veterans who told them how the series “helped them make sense” of their experiences.
But why do so many of us have a nostalgic fondness for that counterculture decade? Were clothes really more colorful and music more soulful? Did people really care more for activism than materialism? Perhaps it’s because of our natural tendency to view the past through the rose-colored glasses of hindsight … until we consider the extraordinary advances we’re privileged to enjoy today. Perhaps it is as one writer put it: “History is best reserved for the learning and not the returning” —especially through the ease and fun of our contemporary lens.