Hollywood hysteria: the films of the 60s that showed an era of madness | Movies

IWhen putting together a list of films, a programming team or other curatorial organization will often be asked to answer the question of why now, what relevance ancient art has for the present moment. In the case of the new Criterion Channels series Crack-Up in Hollywood: the decade of American cinema has lost its mind, a sample of 60s arthouse hysteria, the argument is almost valid. These bursts of celluloid madness come from a not-so-distant time when government credibility had reached an all-time low and the divide between the culture war was wider than ever; when the disillusionment of mistreated youth transformed into student protests against a war abroad tinged with unsavory political imperatives; when ascendant minority groups demanded rights and dignity in the face of stubborn prejudice; when a terrified old guard felt that everything they could once take for granted had been upended and replaced by a new normal that was unfamiliar, strange and anti-authoritarian. Calamity was in the air. Surely, in one way or another, we can find within ourselves the ability to communicate.

The 16 fever dreams of delusion, brainwashing, public violence and other forms of deviant psychology, all matched with an expressionist and delusional aesthetic, offer variations on the theme of anxiety, a quagmire of unease multi-faceted oriented more centrally around the shifting balance of power. John Frankenheimer's science fiction classic Seconds (a crucial influence on Mad Men, which presents itself as a post-facto parallel program to it) views the conflict as age-based, through the parable of a worker who reinvents himself with a complete strapping. – body transplant and insinuates himself among the countercultural enclave of the west. But like so many white-collar malcontents who embark on a new life with a new house and a younger wife, the suburban puncher torpedoing his marriage in Faces being another, he discovers that the same existential dissatisfactions follow him, few no matter where he goes. Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? traces an equally dark path that starts from the malaise of middle age, the choice not to divorce transforming into a shattering enmity between a couple that gives human form to the deterioration of family values.

After every peak comes a proportionate crash; Just as the 1960s were marked by a hangover from Obama's vows of hope and change, the 1960s can be understood as an equal and opposite reaction to the empty and broken promises of post-war prosperity. war. The image of the smiling-faced nuclear unit, with a white picket fence and a barking Fido, had lost all credibility with a movement that considered this composed normality to be a big lie. Cult favorite Pretty Poison turns this myth-making trend into a twisted parody, while ex-con Anthony Perkins drags 17-year-old sexpot Tuesday Weld into a wild romance-turned-party that rejects all the niceties of a petty placid city living under a hail of gunfire. . If the hippie hot spot of Bonnie and Clyde poked a hole in the healthy trope of young lovers pitted against a society that doesn't accept their love, black comic Pretty Poison gutted the clip with bursts of maniacal laughter, the Bloodthirsty teenybopper Welds saving a few tricks for his own. mother.

This sense of resentment was even more burning and righteous among black progressives, faced with a choice between conscription and certain catastrophe abroad in Vietnam, or racism and systemic discrimination at home. Jules Dassins Uptight seeks another path via revolution, but finds himself in a dead end; a cadre of radical activists is destroyed by the betrayal of a Judas, the precariousness of their cause reflected in the fallout from Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination spilling in the background. A scene flanked by funhouse mirrors (a recurring visual motif in the Criterions series, the simplest way to visually represent a distorted inner state) confronts a handful of poor white tourists, a position Dassin hoped to avoid by giving due consideration to politicians which many considered extreme. at the time. Collecting these films puts this school of thought in conversation with the softened humanism of Pressure Point, in which prison psychiatrist Sidney Poitier must master his personal objections to treating Nazi sympathizer Bobby Darin. Hubert Cornfield's elegant but narrow-minded morality play calls us to eschew absolutism for crossing aisles and loses a degree of perspective in the noble quest for unity.

The general atmosphere of cataclysm channeled by Hollywood also infiltrated this sector in the midst of an identity crisis as it twisted between the classical era and the new order driven by the authors. Targets and what happened to Baby Jane? deliver competing eulogies for Tinseltown's climax; the first stages a movie theater shootout to symbolize the hokey artifice of old giving way to the horrific new realities of mass gun ownership, while the second locks two moldy former stars in the tomb of a Los Angeles mansion to continue Sunset Boulevards' mutation of the silent film style into a harsh grotesque. Just as age-old narratives of the American dream had begun to ring false as societal bad checks bounced everywhere, so too have our most cherished fictions become harder to believe.

The activated sleeper conceit of The Manchurian Candidate (a film which, for all its many merits, mostly features Frank Sinatra doing kung fu) posits that psychosis lies dormant within all of us, waiting to be stirred up by actions bad faith of the world. State. The quintessential B-picture Shock Corridor agrees that the average mind is much closer to the edge of madness than we think, always ready to retreat into a cocoon of confused detachment when pushed to a breaking point . During the 1960s, global upheavals destabilized every facet of daily life, a development that freed masterpieces from formal guardrails and paved the way for the most successful decade of the history of cinema. Whether the industrial conditions enabling such a boom exist today is another conversation that will tell us, although these days the Internet provides an easier valve to release pent-up collective animosity, but as part integral to America's national character, madness is eternal.