Reality Is about Running through Walls

19 May 2010

For years now my favorite movie has been Easy Rider, starring Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson. It shocked the holy bee-jeebers out of the WWII generation when it came out in 1969 because it involved long-haired hippy types ditching “reality” and dropping acid.

But I think now my position has changed.

Can it be that another movie has come out that will bee-jeeber the “reality-TV”-consuming, cell-phone-connected, mindlessly-competitive, immense-vehicle-driving, burger-and-fries-eating generation of today as much as Rider did their grandparents?

I believe the answer may be “yes”!

Having succeeded in escaping unnoticed from a faculty meeting, I encountered a fellow sufferer likewise engaged, and she began telling me that she and her husband were thinking about returning to their native Belize to raise their young son because, frankly, the U.S. is currently such a mess, when she suddenly brightened and said to me, “Have you seen The Men Who Stare at Goats?”

When I told her that I had not, she responded, “You have to see it.”

At the time it didn’t occur to me that this comment had anything to do with my age, but now that I have seen the movie, I’m sure it did.

For those of you who haven’t seen it (www.imdb.com/title/tt1234548/), I don’t want to give the plot away, but it stars George Clooney and Jeff Bridges, and I’m relatively sure neither of them has ever had more fun playing a part. I will tell you this much: they play Jedi knights who return from relative obscurity to complete a mission to make the world a better place, and they enlist the aid of a young journalist, played by Ewan McGregor, in the effort.

It’s almost as if Clooney and Bridges are returning to complete the aborted mission, the mission to find “America,” that Fonda and Hopper began forty years ago – that they’re coming back from the opposite direction.

But while Rider had an apocalyptic ending, Goats ends on a decidedly different, almost a celebratory, note. To make a long story short, it’s a great movie, and you should go see it – more than once.

As I was watching it for the second time, I couldn’t help but think of something that happened at a popular culture conference, called “Reeling in the Years,” that I attended last year. One presentation panel dealt with nothing but the cultural contributions of the Grateful Dead. For four days, all day, these people stayed in the same room and talked about the Dead. At first I avoided this group because I suspected revisionist history, that Jerry Garcia had been morphed into a neatly-quaffed-choir-boy or an anti-drug crusader, but eventually my curiosity got the better of me – and then I didn’t leave the room either for the rest of the conference.

One guy passed around a printed pamphlet with a diagram of the Dead’s different musical styles, something he called The Grateful Dead Mode Star, the idea of the ‘Mode Star’ (according to the pamphlet) having been developed by Bertrand Bronson in 1946. Another had transcribed every version of “Truckin’” the group ever recorded – complete with mistakes.

What came to my mind while watching Goats, however, was a discussion of the song “Dark Star,” an early signature recording of the group, not as well known as “Truckin’” but just as singularly “dead.” In the middle of the discussion, one man stood up in the audience, a short, round, balding man with graying hair, and threw his hands up in the air and fairly shouted (but in a very friendly manner), “But it was like the whole spaceship LANDED!!!”

Everyone applauded, including me.

With the current wholesale efforts on the part of corporate America to turn back the clock in everyone’s head to a time in the U.S before the sixties happened, I had been tempted to consider a retreat to Belize myself, but, upon consideration, what that man said was right: the spaceship did land, and it’s still here – and I love my generation.

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Ph.D. candidate at New Mexico State University in the area of Rhetoric and Professional Communication Amy Dalzell was also a national delegate to the Democratic Convention in Boston in 2004.