Free Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen Page A

at the event that remains a defining peak moment of a revolutionary new age that had only just gotten started—the phrase Woodstock Generation actually preceded baby boomers —Americans began turning backward for the reassuring, unchallenging gaze back at a past that wouldn’t change or surprise or shock.
    Nostalgia was the charming sanctuary to which people retreated to feel better during their post-1960s hangover—and then never really left. They were encouraged by a culture industry that immediately created a wide-ranging nostalgia division of a kind that hadn’t existed before.
    The Last Picture Show, set in 1951, came out in 1971, made tons of money, and won Oscars. The musical Grease, set in 1959, appeared in 1971, became the most popular movie of 1978 (featuring Sha Na Na, who by then had their own popular TV variety show), and ran on Broadway for the whole decade. The Way We Were, the fifth most popular movie of 1973, was set mainly in the 1950s. George Lucas’s American Graffiti, set in 1962, was the third most popular movie of 1973 and softened the ground for the premiere a few months later of its TV doppelgänger Happy Days, which in 1976 spun off Laverne & Shirley, set in the late 1950s and early ’60s. Animal House, also set in 1962, came out in the late 1970s and was one of the most successful movies of the decade.
    “I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen,” an influential young rock critic wrote in a review of a live performance in 1974, then helped make it so by becoming his producer for two decades. Hearing the seventy-year-old Springsteen singing his songs today, rhapsodizing about characters and tales of his youth, the nostalgia seems earned and real. But back in the early 1970s, as a twenty-four-year-old, he came across as a superior nostalgia act, an earnest higher-IQ Fonzie . He “seems somewhat anachronistic to many—black leather jacket, street-poet, kids-on-the-run, guitar as switchblade,” another influential young rock critic wrote in his positive review of Born to Run in 1975. “Springsteen is not an innovator—his outlook is rooted in the Fifties; his music comes out of early rock ’n’ roll, his lyrics from 1950s teenage rebellion movies and beat poetry.”
    It wasn’t just the American 1950s on which American pop culture suddenly, lovingly gorged in the 1970s. Every era became a nostalgic fetish object. During the 1970s, fans of the Grateful Dead began bathing in nostalgia for the late 1960s, “obsessively stockpiling audio documentation of the live Dead,” as the cultural historian Simon Reynolds explains, indulging their “deepest impulse: to freeze-frame History and artificially keep alive an entire era.” And that has continued into the twenty-first century—“the gentle frenzy of Deadheads is a ghost dance: an endangered, out-of-time people willing a lost world back into existence.”
    “Everything Old Is New Again” became a pop hit in 1974 for a reason. The Godfather (1972) fetishized the look and feel of the 1940s, The Great Gatsby (1974) of the 1920s—and at the heart of both were notions central to the emerging American economic zeitgeist: “It’s not personal, it’s strictly business,” as Michael Corleone said, and greed and ostentatious wealth and gangsterism were all hereby cool. Most of the earnest bits in Woody Allen’s work consist of nostalgia, starting in 1972 with Play It Again Sam. Most of the most popular movies released in 1973 trafficked in twentieth-century nostalgia, including the gorgeous Depression of The Sting and Paper Moon. The Waltons, a sentimental TV drama set during the Depression and World War II in a small Virginia town, premiered in 1972 and ran until 1981. Even the one enduring new Hollywood genre that arose in the mid-1970s and early ’80s, what Lucas and Steven Spielberg created with Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, was actually just a big-budget revival of an old genre, forgettable