Winner of the 2018 Book Award from the American Studies Division of the
National Communication Association
Ongoing interest in the turmoil of the 1960s clearly demonstrates how
these social conflicts continue to affect contemporary politics. In The
Bad Sixties: Hollywood Memories of the Counterculture, Antiwar, and
Black Power Movements, Kristen Hoerl focuses on fictionalized portrayals
of 1960s activism in popular television and film. Hoerl shows how
Hollywood has perpetuated politics deploring the detrimental
consequences of the 1960s on traditional American values. During the
decade, people collectively raised fundamental questions about the
limits of democracy under capitalism. But Hollywood has proved
dismissive, if not adversarial, to the role of dissent in fostering
progressive social change.
Film and television are salient resources of shared understanding for
audiences born after the 1960s because movies and television programs
are the most accessible visual medium for observing the decade's social
movements. Hoerl indicates that a variety of television programs, such
as Family Ties, The Wonder Years, and Law and Order, along with
Hollywood films, including Forrest Gump, have reinforced images of the
"bad sixties." These stories portray a period in which urban riots,
antiwar protests, sexual experimentation, drug abuse, and feminism led
to national division and moral decay. According to Hoerl, these messages
supply distorted civics lessons about what we should value and how we
might legitimately participate in our democracy.
These warped messages contribute to "selective amnesia," a term that
stresses how popular media renders radical ideas and political projects
null or nonexistent. Selective amnesia removes the spectacular events
and figures that define the late-1960s from their motives and context,
flattening their meaning into reductive stereotypes. Despite popular
television and film, Hoerl explains, memory of 1960s activism still
offers a potent resource for imagining how we can strive collectively to
achieve social justice and equality.
