Perhaps the revolution was the pair of running shoes all along

September 16, 2023 12:27 AM

Yet if the generational pop sociology of The Big Chill has enduringly shaped both cultural constructions of American generations and our political understanding of the baby boomers, it obscures as much as it reveals. from You Can Always Get What You Want: On “The Big Chill” and American Politics [LARB]
posted by chavenet (38 comments total)

What if this neoliberal era was less a reaction against certain sixties impulses than the fullest possible realization of them?

I tell my kids all the time, "Never trust a 'hippy'" (but the punk rockers are all alright)
posted by From Bklyn at 12:46 AM on September 16, 2023 [11 favorites]

Forty years? Argh.

I have loved this movie since I first saw it in college. I spent one February in the '90s watching it daily. It may help that I look at the characters as characters, not generational representatives.
posted by bryon at 2:11 AM on September 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

(but the punk rockers are all alright)

Well, the ones who didn't age into right-wing chuds, at least.
posted by star gentle uterus at 4:09 AM on September 16, 2023 [27 favorites]

I actually tried watching The Big Chill last week. I didn’t make it to the end. Everyone was just so unlikable.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 4:39 AM on September 16, 2023 [9 favorites]

The movie wants you to think thatradicalism was a specifically generational, baby boomer phenomenon, when in fact it was shaped more along class than generational lines.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Taking "the man" out of the administrative state and making him CEO of a multinational corporation was never a radical idea
posted by eustatic at 4:51 AM on September 16, 2023 [5 favorites]

What would be the modern equivalent of this? Friends who were student anti-Iraq War protestors in the Bush era gathering for a funeral of one of the group who dies from an opioid overdose? The main rift in the group is the few Never Trumpers vs MAGA true believers. Soundtrack is early 2000s emo.
posted by star gentle uterus at 5:05 AM on September 16, 2023 [5 favorites]

This movie, like a lot of eighties boomer-y movies, wants you to believe that the people who were sincere radical activists in the sixties were the specific people who turned into yuppies in the eighties. Now, it so happens that I know a lot of boomers, and in general the people who were radical in the sixties stayed radical, the people who didn't care much or were conservative stayed indifferent or conservative, etc. As we are constantly reminded in re the civil rights movement, most people in the sixties were not in fact radicals; most people were indifferent or actively hostile to the left. It's true that there were large protests against the Vietnam War, but going to a protest about how you personally would prefer not to be sent off to die isn't the same as being a radical, understandable though it is.

The narratives about revolutions eating their own, the radicals of the early days becoming the tyrants of the later days or the yuppie wall streeters of the later days - those are American narratives that are meant to make us feel that social change is impossible and that radicals are stupid or hypocritical. Who does that serve?

(Actually what you see with sixties people is that a lot of them dropped out or dialed back because they had kids and once the kids were grown and especially once they retired, they came right back. You know what the movement runs on? Platformist communists, middle aged anarchists and retirees. If you want a march on city hall or a public meeting, the platformists do it; if you want the grittiest form of mutual aid and media, the anarchists do it; and if you want people who will attend every public meeting, sit in at City Hall and pick up everyone else's slack on meetings and mututal aid, it's the retirees.)
posted by Frowner at 6:18 AM on September 16, 2023 [80 favorites]

This movie, like a lot of eighties boomer-y movies, wants you to believe that the people who were sincere radical activists in the sixties were the specific people who turned into yuppies in the eighties.

I think the reason for this is that the hippie movement was equal parts progressive activism and popular culture. There were plenty of people who didn’t protest a thing but still considered themselves in “solidarity” in their youth. There were a lot more of those folks than people who actually contributed to a social cause, and they are the ones who grew up to be yuppies. This film is specifically flattering to that cohort. I don’t think that particular dynamic is unique to the 60’s.
posted by q*ben at 6:54 AM on September 16, 2023 [11 favorites]

I thought this had an interesting premise: that the Big Chill demonstrates that "60s values" that shaped the New Left were the same values that shaped the Reagan era. I agree with aspects of that thesis although I don't think this piece presents much evidence. I appreciate that the author unpacked some myths about "the 60s" and points out that the Big Chill crew are a very specific subset of that age cohort (middle class [also, white] anti- war student activists) that in subsequent generations has been mythologized into representing the whole generation. I also like that the author appreciates the performances and recognizes what works about the film.

Anyway, if you like more realism and can tolerate more boring than Big Chill, The Return of the Secaucus 7 is the way to go!
posted by latkes at 7:05 AM on September 16, 2023 [7 favorites]

I've always seen Chicago's musical output through the years, from radical rock n roll led by Terry Kath's incendiary guitar attack to the smooth sentimental crooning of Peter Cetera, as the soundtrack of hippies fighting in the streets to yuppiedom. Also, Chicago was a ska band.
posted by NoMich at 7:10 AM on September 16, 2023 [13 favorites]

Also, Chicago was a ska band.

That just made my day, possibly the whole week. Thank you.
posted by chavenet at 8:02 AM on September 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

I think the reason for this is that the hippie movement was equal parts progressive activism and popular culture. There were plenty of people who didn’t protest a thing but still considered themselves in “solidarity” in their youth. There were a lot more of those folks than people who actually contributed to a social cause, and they are the ones who grew up to be yuppies.

I've occasionally thought about revisiting The Big Chill, not because I particularly liked the movie--I didn't--but because I'm curious as to whether, and to what extent, it really acknowledges the seventies, and what they went through during that. I sort of remember at least some of them acknowledging some specific events that they went through, but I'm more interested in the intervening decade as a process of change, and how the culture facilitated that, even if it wasn't so much change as simply swapping fashions and lifestyles. Probably there were a bunch of people who were into the counterculture mostly for the sex, weed, and occasional concert, and decided that it was OK to put on a suit or dress if it was less square looking than what their parents wore (and then found out that their parents were dressing less square as well). I think that I started thinking about this sort of thing when I was considering the rise and fall of National Lampoon, which made gestures at rebellion but it was a kind of rebellion that was extremely friendly toward straight white young men who went to college.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:20 AM on September 16, 2023 [8 favorites]

The Big Chill came out when I was a freshman in college. It looked different years later when I realized i was older than all of the characters in the movie.
posted by kirkaracha at 8:21 AM on September 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

It always felt like "the Big Chill" was the moment the Boomer generation started to revise their narrative and dip their toes into white washing the never ending crass cultural nostalgia that we all have to endure (in the US anyway)

They forgave themselves for being assholes (aka voting Reagan) and we got "Uptown Girl" by Billy Joel in response.
posted by djseafood at 8:43 AM on September 16, 2023 [12 favorites]

I have never seen The Big Chill and I have not RTFA but I think Halloween Jack has a really important point re these sorts of cultural/historical analyses: the 70s is the Generation X of decades. Move along, nothing to see here!
posted by supermedusa at 8:54 AM on September 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

(this didn't start as a rant but it seems to have turned into one)

... so I'm young enough to not be considered part of the Big Chill generation, yet old enough to have seen it all go down from the sidelines (turned eleven in 1970, would've been twenty-four when this movie came out -- ie: twenty something when the culture was getting serious about thirty-somethings). As I recall, I was at best bemused by The Big Chill when I first saw it. Couldn't argue with the quality of the performances etc ... but as with so many aspects of the rising Yuppiedom, it mostly just left me cold.

I didn't care about these people. I didn't like these people. Both the characters in the movie and their counterparts in my real life. Because as a seven-eight-nine-ten year old, those final years of the 1960s were a palpably dynamic time, the culture (western, middle class etc) was tearing through changes (assassinations, the Vietnam War and the growing opposition to it, the rise and rise and rise of the stuff of hippie culture and its unstoppable psychedelicization of everyday life ... even if you never tripped the lysergic). One just had to look at his dad and his dad's friends, watch their hair slowly grow, moustaches and sideburns, straight suits and ties giving way to more casual and comfortable stuff. Even they knew Bing Crosby wasn't cool anymore.

Mix it up with the music that actually was cool (and so much of it still kind of is) and movies like Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy, Little Big Man, Five Easy Pieces, Clockwork Orange, 2001 that evidenced genuine CHANGE. Not something that was coming. It was now. It was here. Even a pre-teen could see that that Something Was Happening.

And then ... whatever. I guess, like Hunter Thompson so eloquently put it, the wave broke somewhere in the vicinity of Las Vegas, 1971 sometime.

I actually think the article in question is pretty lame. It's hard to find Henry M.J. Tonks' age but a quick look at his photo reveals a guy who clearly was not around while any of this went down, was probably born around the time Nirvana hit (or later). Fair enough. He's a historian not a reporter. But the impression I get is that he's coming at his history from a far too rigid and political perspective ...

What if this neoliberal era was less a reaction against certain sixties impulses than the fullest possible realization of them?

It's not that he doesn't get some things right, it's just that well, he so clearly wasn't there and it's not as if (as evidenced in this thread) there aren't very many still alive and kicking who clearly were. Either right smack in the middle of it (seventy-somethings now) or, similar to me, hanging out on the sidelines, keeping a keen eye on what the big kids were doing. And yeah, I'm always going to find it annoying when somebody a generation behind me tries to revise some history I actually experienced, effectively argues that evidence of my senses was somehow wrong ...

Anyway, this is one of those topics one could write a book about so I'll just wrap up with one concern which is, to it bluntly, you can't begin to know what the hell went down in the whitebread, middle class, suburban 1960s (and 70s to some degree) if you don't track the rise and rise of psychedelic drugs and their myriad impacts -- how they kiboshed the revolutionary dreams of the activist left as surely as they did the Leave It To Beaver mirage of the conservative right. They blew everything up. They turned black and white to colour. And I'm pretty sure some of the shrapnel and debris from those explosions is still ricocheting around out there, still wreaking havoc and/or epiphany and/or all matter of complexity betwixt and between.

All revolutions are delusions. But evolution -- that's inevitable. We're in it. We always have been. We always will be.
posted by philip-random at 10:11 AM on September 16, 2023 [14 favorites]

And then ... whatever. I guess, like Hunter Thompson so eloquently put it, the wave broke somewhere in the vicinity of Las Vegas, 1971 sometime.

I think that it's worth quoting at length because, not only is it the best thing that HST ever wrote, but also it has a clue as to what really happened:

Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder‘s jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

"Our energy would simply prevail." The generation that had had the stupid good luck to be born during the postwar expansion of the American economy not only didn't think that they could lose, but that they didn't even have to particularly exert themselves to win.
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:27 AM on September 16, 2023 [26 favorites]

At the end of the '60s it was clear to me that overpopulation and rampant overconsumption would destroy the world unless they were constrained, and I did not see anything emerging which could constrain those primal forces.

Nothing that’s happened since has been very surprising — except how fast the whirlwind we are now reaping has spun itself up.

That’s been a big surprise.
posted by jamjam at 11:35 AM on September 16, 2023 [6 favorites]

hippybear don't forget all of that beautiful brown corduroy. and the velour!! the velour!!!!!
posted by supermedusa at 12:02 PM on September 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

you had feathered hair?! bowl cuts or go home
posted by kokaku at 1:04 PM on September 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

This movie, untethered from all its cultural baggage carries a certain personal weight for my family. My boomer dad's last conversation with his best friend on the other side of the country was about this movie, which my dad had not yet seen. Said friend had a heart attack that night, and my father flew back across the country to live this movie rather than see it. My mother was abroad at the time and us kids got farmed out to various families for the week around Halloween that year.
The soundtrack lived permanently in the tape deck of our Vanagon (well occasionally swapped out for "Red-Headed Stranger") but I think it took my dad a decade to actually see the movie.
posted by St. Oops at 1:29 PM on September 16, 2023 [4 favorites]

The best thing about The Big Chill was definitely the soundtrack.
posted by bq at 1:39 PM on September 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

Equaled only by the soundtrack to American Graffiti
posted by bq at 1:41 PM on September 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

What would be the modern equivalent of this?

There are more books than movies about this, but this one hit me pretty hard.
posted by thivaia at 3:38 PM on September 16, 2023 [5 favorites]

This film was on high rotation in my Gen-X share-house in the early nineties. Mainly, I think, for the music and the depiction of friendships.
posted by Coaticass at 3:39 PM on September 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

(The show worked for me more than the novel, by the way, but that’s a taste thing)
posted by thivaia at 3:39 PM on September 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Henry M. J. Tonks: “Released 40 years ago this month, The Big Chill, with its spare plot and textured depiction of friendship, has a relatively small cultural footprint, as the lightest scattering of anniversary pieces attests.”

I have to disagree with this. I remember how it was before and after this picture came out and it was like night and day. The Big Chill shifted Sixties nostalgia into high gear. Todd Gitlin's The Sixties would come out a few years later. It was highly anticipated and was a featured selection of the Quality Paperback Book Club.
posted by ob1quixote at 5:09 PM on September 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

Thinking about it a little more, I think maybe Diner also plays a role in sending Sixties nostalgia into overdrive in the early 1980s.
posted by ob1quixote at 5:13 PM on September 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

Return of the Secaucus 7 came before The Big Chill and had a similar theme, though done on a much smaller budget. It's also a better movie, IMHO. (Diner was set in the late 1950s.)
posted by gudrun at 8:54 PM on September 16, 2023 [4 favorites]

"But, because we were tired of Great Causes, there was no more than a short outbreak of moral indignation, typified by Dos Passos' book, Three Soliders. Presently we began to have slices of the national cake and our idealism only flared up when the newspapers made melodrama out of stories such as Harding and the Ohio Gang or Sacco and Vanzetti. The events of 1919 left us cynical rather than revolutionary, in spite of the fact that now we are all rummaging around in our trunks wondering where in the hell we left the liberty cap-- "I KNOW I had it...and the moujik blouse.
It was characteristic of the Jazz Age that it had no interest in politics at all."

--F. Scott Fitgerald,
posted by clavdivs at 9:09 PM on September 16, 2023 [5 favorites]

No, it was The Doors that were a ska band. Chicago did subway muzak. This topic rears its head periodically on the web. I did not march a lot during the 60's. Twice maybe. A lot happened during that decade that was unique. When someone comes of age during a certain time and is the least bit receptive or sensitive, then your world view is somewhat shaped by those events. I know plenty of people who not affected at all by that decade. They missed the music and much more. I am not stuck back there. I try to live in the present as difficult as that may be. I am not as naive as I used to be. I am cynical but not apathetic.
posted by DJZouke at 5:52 AM on September 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

gudrun: “(Diner was set in the late 1950s.)”

Yes, Diner is about a group of friends in their early 20s meeting in a diner at Christmas, 1959. Which puts them in their 20s at the beginning of the Sixties a few years later. Like Joshua Glenn, I think that what matters most to what "generation" you're in is what happens during your 20s. That's what made me think Diner was of a piece with The Big Chill. The white war babies who really identified with both movies were the ones who were in their 20s during the events of the Sixties and were the ones most susceptible to nostalgia about that era.
posted by ob1quixote at 6:44 AM on September 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

This movie always gives me a very particular sense memory: being a small child of three or four and reaching down to the car's floorboards* to pick up the cassette liner notes for the soundtrack, which was always in the car and usually playing. I could read, at least enough to understand the title, but I had no idea what the words meant all together. I still don't; I suppose I will have to watch the movie to find out.

Because of the soundtrack, the songs "Whiter Shade of Pale" and "Tell Him" were some of the first songs I can remember hearing. It still relaxes me to hear them.

---
* Because only babies rode in car seats
posted by Countess Elena at 8:18 AM on September 17, 2023 [6 favorites]

Heck yeah! Instantly recognizable organ chords!
posted by bq at 3:27 PM on September 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

In 40 year old movie news, I just watched Valley Girl. Way better. (with better needle drops, too).
posted by 1970s Antihero at 5:01 PM on September 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

An interesting double feature.
The Big Chill and Ferris Bueller's Day off
posted by clavdivs at 5:17 PM on September 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

Definitely works with the Ferris Bueller: White Privilege, the Movie theory.
posted by latkes at 8:21 PM on September 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

“‘The Big Chill’ at 43,” Noah Gittell, Good Eye: Movies and Baseball, 30 September 2023
posted by ob1quixote at 3:02 PM on September 30, 2023