Kristen Hoerl
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781496817235
- eISBN:
- 9781496817273
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496817235.003.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter introduces this book’s central contention that Hollywood film and television have taught audiences that capitalism and the traditional family have triumphed over Sixties-era resistance ...
More
This chapter introduces this book’s central contention that Hollywood film and television have taught audiences that capitalism and the traditional family have triumphed over Sixties-era resistance to corporate culture, structural racism, and patriarchy. Hollywood’s fictionalized portrayals of late sixties dissent routinely depicts radical protesters as problems that must be overcome to preserve national unity and the nuclear family. This introduction explains how fictionalized portrayals of Sixties-era dissent are forms of public memory that offer lessons about appropriate models of civic engagement in late-capitalist democracy. These portrayals are forms of selective amnesia, public discourse that routinely omits events and issues that defy seamless narratives of national progress and unity. The last section of the introduction provides an overview of the book’s case study chapters which are organized by recurring narrative patterns and character types across different media products since the early eighties.Less
This chapter introduces this book’s central contention that Hollywood film and television have taught audiences that capitalism and the traditional family have triumphed over Sixties-era resistance to corporate culture, structural racism, and patriarchy. Hollywood’s fictionalized portrayals of late sixties dissent routinely depicts radical protesters as problems that must be overcome to preserve national unity and the nuclear family. This introduction explains how fictionalized portrayals of Sixties-era dissent are forms of public memory that offer lessons about appropriate models of civic engagement in late-capitalist democracy. These portrayals are forms of selective amnesia, public discourse that routinely omits events and issues that defy seamless narratives of national progress and unity. The last section of the introduction provides an overview of the book’s case study chapters which are organized by recurring narrative patterns and character types across different media products since the early eighties.
Kristen Hoerl
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781496817235
- eISBN:
- 9781496817273
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496817235.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Over the past four decades, a wide range of Hollywood films and television programs have referenced events and individuals associated with the 1960s counterculture, anti-war, and Black Power ...
More
Over the past four decades, a wide range of Hollywood films and television programs have referenced events and individuals associated with the 1960s counterculture, anti-war, and Black Power movements. This book analyses narrative patterns and recurring character types across a wide variety of fictionalized film and television portrayals of the late sixties to illustrate how Hollywood has consistently derided and trivialized the period’s protest movements. The Bad Sixties argues that Hollywood has promulgated selective amnesia by decontextualizing spectacular events that have come to define the decade from the motives that drove dissidents. Hollywood’s consistently negative depictions of protest function rhetorically as civics lessons by placing radical dissent, including criticisms of Western imperialism, structural racism, patriarchy, and two-party politics, as outside of the boundaries of legitimate civic engagement in the United States. The book concludes that Hollywood’s vision of the bad sixties has bolstered conservative agendas since the Reagan Era with profound and troubling implications for democracy and social justice movements today.Less
Over the past four decades, a wide range of Hollywood films and television programs have referenced events and individuals associated with the 1960s counterculture, anti-war, and Black Power movements. This book analyses narrative patterns and recurring character types across a wide variety of fictionalized film and television portrayals of the late sixties to illustrate how Hollywood has consistently derided and trivialized the period’s protest movements. The Bad Sixties argues that Hollywood has promulgated selective amnesia by decontextualizing spectacular events that have come to define the decade from the motives that drove dissidents. Hollywood’s consistently negative depictions of protest function rhetorically as civics lessons by placing radical dissent, including criticisms of Western imperialism, structural racism, patriarchy, and two-party politics, as outside of the boundaries of legitimate civic engagement in the United States. The book concludes that Hollywood’s vision of the bad sixties has bolstered conservative agendas since the Reagan Era with profound and troubling implications for democracy and social justice movements today.
