Back to the Fifties: Nostalgia, Hollywood Film, and Popular Music of the Seventies and Eighties Michael D

Home , After the Dance (play), At the Hop, Back to the Streets, Back to the Well, Chestnut Street Incident, Connie Stevens

Back to the Fifties

THE OXFORD MUSIC/MEDIA SERIES Daniel Goldmark, Series Editor

Tuning In: American Narrative Television Music Ron Rodman Special Sound: The Creation and Legacy of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop Louis Niebur Seeing Through Music: Gender and Modernism in Classic Hollywood Film Scores Peter Franklin An Eye for Music: Popular Music and the Audiovisual Surreal John Richardson Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance Kiri Miller Sounding the Gallery: Video and the Rise of Art-Music Holly Rogers Composing for the Red Screen: Prokofiev and Soviet Film Kevin Bartig Saying It With Songs: Popular Music and the Coming of Sound to Hollywood Cinema Katherine Spring We’ll Meet Again: Musical Design in the Films of Stanley Kubrick Kate McQuiston Occult Aesthetics: Synchronization in Sound Film K.J. Donnelly Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination William Cheng Sounding American: Hollywood, Opera, and Jazz Jennifer Fleeger Mismatched Women: The Siren’s Song Through the Machine Jennifer Fleeger Robert Altman’s Soundtracks: Film, Music and Sound from M*A*S*H to A Prairie Home Companion Gayle Sherwood Magee Back to the Fifties: Nostalgia, Hollywood Film, and Popular Music of the Seventies and Eighties Michael D. Dwyer Back to the Fifties

NOSTALGIA, HOLLYWOOD FILM, AND POPULAR MUSIC

OF THE SEVENTIES AND EIGHTIES

Michael D. Dwyer

1 1

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dwyer, Michael D. Back to the fifties : nostalgia, Hollywood film, and popular music of the seventies and eighties / Michael D. Dwyer. pages cm.—(The Oxford music/media series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–19–935684–3 (pbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN 978–0–19–935683–6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Popular culture—United States—History—20th century. 2. Nineteen fifties. 3. Nineteen eighties. 4. Motion pictures—Social aspects—United States. 5. Motion picture music—United States—History and criticism. 6. Reagan, Ronald—Influence. I. Title. E169.12.D99 2015 306.0973—dc23 2014047401

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

For my friends and family, who got me where I am, For Rachel, who will be with me wherever I will go.

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

1. Fixing the Fifties: Reaganism, Nostalgia, and Back to the Future 18

2. Rereading American Graffiti 45

3. “Old Time Rock and Roll” on Re-Generation Soundtracks 77

4. Michael Jackson, MTV, and Crossover Nostalgia 112

5. Star Legacies: James Dean and Sandra Dee in the Re-Generation 147

Epilogue: The Futures of Nostalgia 179

Notes 187

Works Cited and Consulted 195 Index 211

vii

Acknowledgments

There have been many times while writing that I have felt that the challenge was just too great, my skills as a writer too limited, my understanding of the material insufficient, my ideas too unfinished. One learns, as a writer, not to avoid these feelings but to work through them. So it is perhaps fitting that those feelings of inadequacy should return in my very last day of writing, when faced with the opportunity to acknowledge the contributions of all those who helped me to make this book a reality. Once again, I set myself against what seems to be an impossible task. I am certain that whatever thanks I can offer here are woefully inadequate, even to those whom I am able to mention by name. To those that go unnamed, please know that my heartfelt appreciation and deepest respect goes out to all who lent their time, labor, intellectual energy, and emotional support to me in the process of writing this book. There were many experiences and strands of thought that influenced the formation of this book, but its origin as a coherent project came from my experiences as a teacher and graduate student at Syracuse University (SU). Nearly everyone I came into contact with at and around SU—the staff at The Graduate School, members of the Writing Program, and office staff in 401 Hall of Languages—were supportive, helpful, and encouraging. And the value of the instruction, guidance, and training I received from the faculty in the English Department cannot be overstated.

ix x Acknowledgments I can say with utter conviction that you would not be reading this right now if it were not for the energy, insight, tenacity, and generosity of Steven Cohan. Discussions with him informed my research, improved my writing, and prepared me for every stage of producing this book. But Steve’s influence extends beyond this project—he has been both a mentor and a role model, showing me how to do the work of a scholar and teacher of media with rigor, with intelligence, with professionalism, and with joy. Roger Hallas and Susan Edmunds offered perceptive feedback and unflagging support throughout the early stages of the project, and the book is better for their contributions. Still other teachers at Syracuse, Carnegie Mellon, the University of Miami, and Ambridge sharpened my thinking and offered encouragement in important ways—thanks to Amy Lang, Patty Roylance, Greg Thomas, Adam Sitze, Gregg Lambert, Margaret Himley, Marian Aguiar, Kathy Newman, Melissa Ragona, Frank Stringfellow, and Kris Leonardo. Just as important to the development of the project was the support of col- leagues at Syracuse and Carnegie Mellon, who challenged my thinking, helped me to understand the value of intellectual community, and became trusted friends. Special thanks to Sarah Barkin, Rachel Delphia, Steve Doles, Caly Doran, Brigitte Fielder, Jessica Kuskey, Corinne Martin, Kevin Meegan, Jim Metcalf, Nate Mills, Mike O’Connor, Chuck Robinson, Jon Senchyne, Gohar Siddiqui, Tristan Sipley, Chelsea Teale, John Trenz, and Dominik Wolff. In 2010, I joined the faculty at Arcadia University, and have appreciated the col- legial atmosphere in the Department of Media and Communication and indeed across the entire campus. I would like to express my gratitude to Lisa Holderman, Christine Kemp, Chris Mullin, Alan Powell, and especially Shekhar Deshpande for welcoming me into the department, and to Janet Greenstreet and Anna Wagner for logistical support. I also want to recognize the contributions of two graduate assistants, Kaitlin Eubank and Jonathan Palumbo, for their research help. Finally, all of my undergraduates—but especially the team at Loco and my Spring 2014 Soundtracks students—have been a source of inspiration. You are the ones that make my work feel meaningful. Thank you. Outside of my home departments, I have benefited from the input and advice of scholars in moments large and small. Jane Feuer graciously agreed to read early versions of this project and offered valuable feedback. Theo Cateforis helped me to understand the importance of AOR. Chris Cagle gave me the opportunity to work through American Graffiti with the Philadelphia Cinema and Media Seminar. Matt Thomas and Drew Morton volunteered their time to read and comment on chapters. Meeting Amy Villarejo, Tim Dean, and Cecelia Ticchi early in my graduate career was an inspiration. Thank you to Ina Rae Hark and Josh Stenger, who helped me feel like I belonged at SCMS. Richard Dyer, Mary Celeste Kearney, Acknowledgments xi Alan Nadel, and Jeff Smith all offered small moments of encouragement—I do not know if they even remember these meetings, but I certainly do. In Media Res and Alphaville provided venues to work through ideas and readings that eventually made it in to this book. I also benefited from the opportunity to discuss this work in conference panels—for that I owe thanks to Scott Balcerzak, Tony Bleach, Rene Bruckner, Russ Kilbourn, and Katherine Spring. I am also thankful for the day-today support, stimulation, and entertainment from the community of media studies scholars on Twitter. In 2012, I had the fortune of meeting Norm Hirschy, acquisitions editor at Oxford University Press (OUP). Norm has been unceasingly enthusiastic, patient, encouraging, and positive since that day. I could not have asked for a better experience with a first book than the one I have had with Norm and the rest of the team at OUP. Thanks to Daniel Goldmark, editor of the Oxford Music/Media series; Lisbeth Redfield; and the insightful and thorough manuscript reviewers. Molly Morrison expertly led me through the production process. Heather Hambleton heroically tackled copyediting—an unenviable job. All of these people have made this book significantly better, and I am grateful for their labor, their professionalism, and their energy. Even as a nostalgic teenager I knew that I was extremely lucky to have the support of a strange and wonderful circle of family and friends. My mother, Lenore Larsen-Dwyer, is a model of determination and intelligence and principle and generosity that I appreciate more with every passing year. My father, Michael W. Dwyer, may never read this, but his passion for movies and music had a profound influence on me. My brothers, John and Matt, have cheered me on through this entire process, as has my extended family of in-laws, uncles, aunts, and cousins. Friends like Tracey Berg-Fulton, Emily Del Greco, Ahmad Douglas, Pat Fulton, Adam Hochstetter, John Homich, Nicole Homich, Greg Kouvolo, Jason Lease, Lauren Ross, Hayley Somerville, and Morgan Yates all encouraged my writing, but more importantly, helped me grow up into the person I am today. The Roboto Project and Pittpunk taught me about community and possibility. Red Star and FC Chamounix showed the value of teamwork. My grandmother, Rosemary Larsen, is a symbol of everything worth celebrating in humanity. To Rachel Collins, my best and favorite, I owe the greatest debts and most heartfelt thanks. For a decade she has been my most trusted editor, my most ardent supporter, my fiercest advocate, my keenest reader, my most reliable counselor, my most loving partner, and my best friend. The extent of my gratitude and appreciation for her patience, diligence, loyalty, and sacrifice as I worked on this project is immeasur- able. The future we pursue together, I know, will be one worth remembering.

Back to the Fifties March 1986 issue of Esquire. Author’s personal collection. INTRODUCTION

Under the headline “America on the Rerun,” the cover of the March 1986 issue of Esquire asked, “Why is Madonna pretending she’s Marilyn? Why is Ralph Kramden bigger than ever? Why is Ronald Reagan still our matinee idol?” The accompanying story penned by television critic Tom Shales argued that America was in the midst of an era defined by cultural processes of “replay, recycle, retrieve, reprocess, and rerun” (67). Considered in retrospect, Shales’s observations ring quite true. Given the industrial and technological changes in the entertainment industry (the circulation of syndicated television reruns, the growth of oldies radio and revival concerts, the popularization of home video technology, etc.), it is easy to conclude that Americans had begun to utilize the practice of “time-shifting” with more than just their new VCRs. For Shales, this cultural phenomenon was most prominently symbolized by “a President made up of reprocessed bits and pieced of old movie heroes”: Ronald Reagan (70). The fortieth president served as a symbol of an age when America seemed compelled to turn back the clock. As both a political and cultural figure, “the Gipper” relied on his ability to evoke the mythic Fifties small-town America depicted in film, television, and other forms of popular media—an America that featured a booming consumer economy, military strength, domestic stability, dominant “family values,” and national optimism and belief in “the American Way.” Never mind that, as Stephanie Coontz demonstrates in The Way We Never Were, this America did not actually exist. As media historian Daniel Marcus describes, Reagan’s rise to power was coincident with the New Right’s strategy in the late

1 2 Back to the Fifties 1970s and early 1980s of presenting “an overarching sense of national return to an earlier age after a period of American decline” (37). The nostalgic fascination with the Fifties in the United States, however, did not begin with Ronald Reagan, nor was it wholly defined by neoconservatism. The cover of another mass-market magazine evidences this. The June 16, 1972, issue of Life announced the “wacky revival” of the Fifties on American college campuses—hardly strongholds of conservative cultural attitudes. Rather, the teenagers interviewed by

June 16, 1972, issue of Life. Author’s personal collection. Introduction 3 Life drew lines of continuity between the Fifties and the Counterculture: “Those greasers were the first freaks,” one teen said (42–43). Outside of the pages of Life, the Fifties appeared in Hollywood film (1971’s The Last Picture Show), theater (Grease), and popular music (Don MacLean’s “American Pie”). In what follows, I argue that popular culture was a crucial site of contestation, debate, and exchange over the cultural definition of the Fifties in the United States. This is a book about the creation, circulation, and interaction of the competing meanings for the Fifties in Hollywood film and popular music in a period roughly defined by the fifteen years from 1973 to 1988. As the increasingly corporatized film and music industries developed synergistic production and marketing practices, they enthusiastically embraced the Fifties. Hollywood produced a slew of nostalgia films (American Graffiti, Porky’s, Back to the Future, Blue Velvet, and Hairspray, among many more) and found new markets for films from the 1950s via cable television and home video. Simultaneously, popular music mined its own past through the “Golden Oldies” radio format, revival concerts, and album reissues on cassette and compact disc. Allusions to Fifties styles stretched from the top of the charts (Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock and Roll”) to punk rock clubs (The Stray Cats’ rockabilly revival) and the jazz/folk scene (David Amram’s “The Fabulous ’50s”). Working collaboratively, the film and music industries delivered Fifties nostalgia through soundtrack albums (Diner, Dirty Dancing) and the emerging form of music videos (Madonna’s “Material Girl,” Morrissey’s “Suedehead”). While no single vision of the Fifties can be gleaned from the multiple invocations of the Fifties on record and in movie theaters, the persistent invocation of the Fifties in film and pop music strongly suggests that it had become a vital signpost in American cultural life. As Mary Caputi puts it in her book A Kinder, Gentler America, “persons of varying and often contrasting political opinions and professional interests have engaged [the 1950s’] varying connotations differently. But, importantly, they all engage it” (4). In film, “Fifties-ness” is often signaled through costume, hair, props, and decor: letterman jackets and blue jeans, poodle skirts and saddle shoes, switch- blades and hot rods, jukeboxes and soda shops. In music, “the Fifties” is invoked through pop songs that predate the British Invasion—Buddy Holly, doo-wop, rockabilly, bubblegum, and rhythm and blues. Along with many other symbols, these sonic and visual markers communicated a prosperous, peaceful, and optimistic period in American history after World War II but before the Kennedy assassination. Taken as a whole, these invocations of the Fifties in film and pop music participated in a broad-ranging cultural formation that had immense influence on American society. By using the term cultural formation, I mean something more than just a “style” or “aesthetic,” but rather the networks of representational practices, historical developments, spaces, social groups, articulations, and effects that 4 Back to the Fifties Lawrence Grossberg describes in his work. Equally indebted to Michel Foucault’s concept of “discursive formations” and Raymond Williams’s notion of “structures of feeling,” Grossberg’s “cultural formations” are articulated across a range of activities and sensibilities in everyday life, but not unilaterally or consistently—different social groups, or different social locations, might engage with a cultural formations more, or less, or in a different way We( Gotta Get Out of This Place 69–74). The specific cultural formation I investigate in this book is a retrospective pop cultural phenomenon that I call “pop nostalgia.” I identify pop nostalgia by three prominent features. First, its production, circulation, and reception are facilitated by commercial media for mass audiences. While individuals might have their own personal nostalgic attachments (bittersweet memories of their high school, wistful recollections of social movements or music scenes, etc.), pop nostalgia operates on a broader, cultural scale. Second, pop nostalgia can be prompted by tropes, symbols, or styles, even without claims for historical verisimilitude. A film set in the present, for example, can still evoke nostalgic response through strategic use of dialogue, soundtrack, or wardrobe. Finally, and most importantly, pop nostalgia is not to be found exclusively within the formal or stylistic qualities of texts, or the demographic qualities of audiences, but rather in the affective relationships between audiences and texts. In other words, pop nostalgia does not describe a genre (like the Western) or a reception practice (like queer readings) but rather the un-, semi-, or extra-conscious intensity one experiences with a cultural text that produces meaning for the past and the present. Period films, historical archives, documentaries, or other cultural forms that either do not generate or are not invested with affect cannot be understood as participating in pop nostalgia. Understanding pop nostalgia as an affective cultural formation is crucial because it broadens our focus from the texts themselves, or the biographies of audiences, and toward the historical, cultural, and political conditions that structure the way we collectively “feel” the past.

Scope of the Project: Why 1973–1988? Why the Fifties? Attempts at periodization are inherently fragile and artificial. This is perhaps even more the case when the periodization is applied to cultural phenomena. At the same time, management of the scope and scale of any analysis requires the boundaries that periodization offers. So here goes: my interest in this book is a period of American cultural history in which the nation alternately attempted to reckon with and move past a contentious and even frightening period of unrest, self-doubt, and upheaval (“the Sixties”). This period is marked by reassessments of Great Society social reforms, pitched battles over the permanency and character of civil rights movements, a Introduction 5 renewed emphasis on patriotism and optimism, and fierce debates over American identity and American responsibility in everything from international conflict to global environmental reform. This period of American history was also one in which the New Right gained political and cultural momentum. An appropriate starting point for this study is 1973, not only because it saw the end of the Vietnam War and the beginning of the Watergate scandal, but also because it marked the arrival of Ronald Reagan as a serious national political figure. Of course, it is important to remember that Reagan was neither the original nor the most prototypical member of the New Right. Nevertheless, his arrival on the national political stage still serves as a marker of a new era in United States cultural history, as Reagan became the most prominent symbol that embodied the shift away from “the Sixties” and toward a new (or was it an old?) American future. In using the term “the Reagan Era” to signify the period from 1973 to 1988, I do so not to suggest that Reagan wholly defined the time but only to acknowledge the massive influence he (and the backward-looking values he embodied) had on American society. This influence, I argue, extends beyond the years that Reagan resided in the White House. Similarly, throughout the book I differentiate between “the Fifties” (as a concept) and “the 1950s” (as the years 1950–1959). “The Fifties” operates as a key structuring myth of American self-understanding. In the broadest terms, this Fifties begins with the peace, prosperity, and blossoming consumer culture that followed the Second World War and end with the assassination of President Kennedy. Articulating the boundaries of a socio-historical period is always tricky business. I do not mean to argue that there is, or ever was, a singular Fifties. Rather, as Caputi explains, “the Fifties” represents “an array of ideological connotations, a swirl of aesthetic reso- nances, a battery of moral implications so highly charged and emotionally laden that any mention of the decade in the current context far exceeds literal, historical references” (1). For some, “the Fifties” connotes a fantasy ideal of American peace and prosperity that began with the close of World War II and stretched through the Eisenhower years and into the optimism of the Kennedy administration. For others, “the Fifties” signals a repressive and conformist era to be left in the dustbin of history. In any case, the idea of the Fifties has become a crucial point of reference for America’s self-image. One of the enduring legacies of American culture and society in the Reagan Era, I argue, are these competing visions of the Fifties. It is true, of course, that American popular culture has turned its attention to other historical eras, and that Fifties nostalgia exceeds this particular span of history. Films like Chinatown (1973), Star Wars (1977), and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) all clearly reference 1930s and 1940s Hollywood, while audiences in the 1990s were treated to a spate of films revisiting the Sixties—The Doors (1991), Malcolm X (1992), Apollo 13 (1995), and That Thing You Do! (1996), among others. 6 Back to the Fifties However, both the scale and scope of the Fifties “nostalgia wave” (as sociologist Fred Davis termed it in 1979) compel us to pay particular attention to Fifties nostalgia in the 1970s and 1980s. Alan Nadel points to Fifties nostalgia as one of American cinema’s hallmarks in the period. In terms of the sheer numbers, it is difficult to dispute that. I’ve counted over ninety Hollywood films that were set in, represented, or recreated the Fifties, with even more prompting Fifties nostalgia through soundtrack or narrative allusions. The amount of radio stations that transitioned to the Golden Oldies radio format and the number of Fifties artists who returned to the charts similarly suggest that the Fifties were in American hearts and minds more than twenty years later. The aforementioned popular magazines and academic studies in sociology (Davis’s Yearning for Yesterday), history (Miller and Nowak’s The Way We Really Were), and literary and cultural studies (Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism) all, to varying degrees, interrogated the Fifties nostalgia phenomenon. This is all to say that, while nostalgia for other eras in American history surely exists, the Fifties occupy a privileged position in what many scholars in cultural studies would refer to as the “national popular” of the United States. The “national popular” refers to not only the shared cultural texts and practices but also—and crucially—the shared identity of a nation. In other words, the Fifties was not only important in American popular culture but central to American self-understanding in the Reagan Era.

The “Re-Generation” In some very important ways, the American teenager is a product of the Fifties, particularly the popular film and music that courted the American youth market during that period. At the same time, the teenager became a symbol of American national identity in the postwar years. Among scholars of youth in film and popular culture, Leerom Medovoi’s work is noteworthy for its emphasis on the emergence of the teenager as an ideological as well as historical phenomenon. In Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity, Medovoi argues that postwar representations of the teen rebel, figures standing in stark opposition to established Cold War society, were the foundation for identity politics of the mid- to late twentieth century. The invention of the teenager (through marketing campaigns and psychiatric discourses) allowed postwar culture to both sanction and contain “youthful rebellion” and thereby justify the conditions of American society. While Medovoi does vital work in unearthing the 1950s emergence of the teenager as a matter of sociopolitical importance, what remains undone is analysis of the repeated invocations of this Fifties teenager throughout the rest of the century. If the figure of the Introduction 7 teenager helped the nation understand itself in the Cold War era, then analyzing the way that figure has been recreated, recontextualized, and revised will help us to understand America’s sense of historical trajectory, its shifting conceptualizations of then and now. The almost exclusive focus on teenagers and youth culture in the Fifties nostalgia boom of the Reagan Era draws connections between the youth of the characters depicted in these texts and the “youth” of the American superpower. The retrospective invocation of the Fifties teen struggling to define her identity or trying to make his way into the world often functioned as a synecdoche for a United States poised on the verge of maturity, at a point in its national history when everything (for better and for worse) began to change. But pop nostalgia didn’t just represent teenagers; it was directly sold to them as well. Many of the performers and texts that this book considers were offering visions of the Fifties to audiences that had no living memory of the 1950s. Fans of Back to the Future (1985) or The Ramones did not go to the multiplex or the record store in order to relive their youth. Rather, their brushes with Fifties nostalgia were part of a generational redefinition of America in its past, present, and potential futures. The title of Shales’s 1986 Esquire cover story, “The Re-Decade,” is a reference to Thomas Wolfe’s influential 1976 essay “The ‘Me’ Decade,” which outlines the way that Americans in the 1970s had abandoned communitarian values in favor of an emphasis on the individual. Influenced by economic expansion, the rise of self-help discourses, the rapid growth of the suburbs, the cultural politics of the New Left, and LSD, Wolfe explains, American culture had become increasingly self-enamored. Ten years later, Shales claims that Americans had elaborated on this cultural navel-gazing by looking backward as a way of turning inward. With new media and communications technology (home video, computer editing, cable television, the synthesizer, etc.) America’s relationship with time, and especially with its past, had been fundamentally altered. “[N]‌ever before have people, or a people, had nearly unlimited access to what has gone before, been able to call it up and play it back and relive it again and again,” says Shales (68). And beyond accessing artifacts of mass culture, this same technology allowed Americans of the 1970s and 1980s to continually access personal media archives: “No citizens of any other century have ever been provided so many views of themselves as individuals or as a society” (72). Taken together, the conditions that Wolfe and Shales describe fostered a “Re-Generation” of Americans that utilized an ever-expanding archive of media texts, cultural practices of replay, recycle, and reinvention to remake themselves as individuals and reimagine the nation itself. This generation, in other words, was uniquely positioned politically and historically to recast nostalgia from a personal to a popular experience. 8 Back to the Fifties

The History of Nostalgia Partially as a result of the New Right’s successful utilization of the Fifties in the “culture wars,” nostalgia garners skepticism and disdain from many academics and critics. This is so much the case that the term “nostalgia” is often used pejoratively to describe ahistorical and manipulative conceptualizations of the past. Fifties nostalgia’s association with Reaganism has led many to assume that nostalgia in politics is inherently regressive, an impulse to undo the reforms of the Great Society, or to walk back the (still insufficient) gains in civil rights for marginalized peoples. Noam Chomsky denounced the nostalgic tenor of American politics as creating a period of “organized forgetting,” in which it was “the responsibility of the system of ideological control and propaganda to … return the domestic population to a proper state of apathy” (4). In statements like these, the Fifties represent a period of apathy and quietism, even though the historical record shows them to be anything but. Similarly, critical theorists like David Harvey and Fredric Jameson position nostalgia as a distortion or commodification of the past, a practice that mystifies the material and historical realities of capitalist exploitation. Jameson specifically contends that the emergence of the “nostalgia film” in the 1970s and 1980s stands as a testament to American society’s inability to represent its own historical conditions and its transformation of history into fashion and commodities. This diagnosis of the function of nostalgia in popular culture has become almost omnipresent in scholarly work on the subject.1 It is somewhat peculiar that Jameson has had such an immense influence on the topic of nostalgia, as he expresses considerable ambivalence over using the term “nostalgia” at all. Describing the reappropriation of cinematic styles and cultural signs of the past (specifically, the recreation of 1930s film serials in 1977’sStar Wars), Jameson explains that the word “does not strike one as an altogether satisfactory word for such fascination” (66). Still, he argues, the “nostalgia film” participates in “a new depthlessness” (58), a “waning of affect” (61), and a crisis of historicity in which our authentic past is “gradually bracketed, and then effaced altogether” (67). When a film like Brian De Palma’sThe Untouchables (1987) recreates the famous Odessa Steps sequence from Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), in Jameson’s logic, the techniques of montage that were developed under specific historical and political conditions are replaced with “blank parody.” In other words, Jameson’s conceptualization of nostalgia/pastiche is that of a representational practice that flattens, evacuates, and eventually elides the authentic past. This, he argues, is a cultural process that facilitates the perpetuation of late capitalism. This is an argument with considerable merit. Surely, certain types of Fifties nostalgia generated in and around popular culture helped to clear cultural terrain for Introduction 9 the rise of neoconservatism in the latter part of the twentieth century in the United States. In addition, there can be no question that representations of the Fifties in film and pop music often obscure the actual historical conditions of American life for many people from 1950 to 1959. However, it is also important to understand the origin and historical development of the concept of nostalgia itself. Recall that Jameson expresses some trepidation over using the term. I would argue the other term he considers employing, la mode retro, more accurately describes the phenomenon he critiques. Retro, I contend, describes a representational practice that connotes historical eras through its use of cultural signifiers (in the case of the Fifties, poodle skirts, motorcycle jackets, ducktail haircuts, etc.) without any claim for historical truth. Retro, that is to say, is a quality of texts. Retro representations can prompt nostalgia, and can be complex and interesting in their own right. But—and this is a distinction on which I will insist—retro is not the same as nostalgia.2 Nostalgia is, and has been throughout its long and complex history, something else altogether. The term “nostalgia” was first used by Johannes Hofer, a Swiss medical student, in the research for his 1688 dissertation (Anspach 376). Hofer constructed the neologism by combining the Greek nostos, for “homecoming,” and algia, for “suffering,” and used the term to describe clinical cases of extreme homesickness among Swiss mercenary soldiers. Hofer speculated that the malady was due to “a continuous vibration of animal spirits through those fibers of the middle brain” (Anspach 384) and suggested that the incessant sound of cowbells ringing would damage the brain and ears in such a way that would result in nostalgia (seriously!). Over the next two hundred years, nostalgia would be diagnosed across the globe, with recorded cases in the ranks of the Russian Army in 1733 (Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country 11) and from the crew of James Cook’s HMS Endeavour expedition in 1768 (Bonnett 5). With the rise of psychiatric discourses in the nineteenth century, nostalgia came to be understood as a mental disorder rather than cowbell-induced brain trauma, and diagnoses for the disorder proliferated. There were so many cases of chronic nostalgia diagnosed in the American Civil War, in fact, that many regiments were specifically prohibited from playing songs like “Home, Sweet Home” or “Dixieland” that were understood to produce nostalgic longing that might drive soldiers to desert (Matt). In the early twentieth century, nostalgia was typically described as an “immigrant psychosis” that reflected compulsive tendencies related to the condition of melancholia. It was not until the mid- to late twentieth century that nostalgia became fully associated with the temporal dimension, and removed from the sense of spatial dislocation. Understanding the concept of nostalgia—and the cultural value we place on it—is fundamental to this project. So I want to pause here to draw specific attention to the conditions under which nostalgia emerges throughout its first 250 years. Before the mid-twentieth century, the primary victims of nostalgia were itinerant 10 Back to the Fifties soldiers enduring the challenges of protracted combat; sailors on life-threateningly long voyages; imprisoned and enslaved people forcibly removed from their homes; and immigrants dislocated from their families, traditions, and local cultures. Let us recognize here that nostalgia is not simply a romanticization or idealization of the comforts of home. Rather, nostalgia arises when the desire for homecoming is simultaneously coupled with a recognition of its impossibility. As such, it must be understood as a kind of affective critique, a response generated by reflection upon the conditions of its own emergence. Swiss pikemen fighting endless wars for a crumbling European aristocracy in the seventeenth century, I would argue, were not nostalgic because they had brain damage, a psychiatric disorder, or a perni- ciously romanticized notion of the beauty of the Alps. They were nostalgic because, frankly, getting slaughtered in the service of the French crown was a pretty rough gig. Similarly, we should understand the temporal nostalgia in contemporary culture as something more than just faulty historiography. Nostalgia is the product of an affective engagement with the present that produces a sense of loss. Whether that loss is real or perceived is not the point. The point is that we find something lacking in our current conditions. Scholars like Alastair Bonnett, Tim Wildschut, Constantine Sedikides, Janelle Wilson, Marcos Piason Natali, and Sean Scanlan have all used this history of nostalgia to inform their reconceptualizations of its cultural work. In their sociological investigation of nostalgia, Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley remind us that nostalgia can be “seen as not only a search for ontologocial security in the past, but also a means of taking one’s bearings for the road ahead in the uncertainties of the present” (921). Nostalgic longing, in other words, can be used in efforts to remake the present, or at least to imagine corrective alternatives to it. It is important to draw the distinction between retro as a representational mode and nostalgia as a critical affective response because this forces us to confront the contingencies that shape our ever-changing responses to texts: history, culture, politics, intertextual networks, even our subjectivity.

Fifties Nostalgia Beyond Reagan Once we understand nostalgia to be an affective response, we can begin to appreciate that, like horror, grief, or laughter, nostalgia can be directed toward diverse, overlapping, or competing interests. And in the case of Fifties nostalgia in the 1970s and 1980s, it was. When media studies scholars have addressed Fifties nostalgia in the Reagan Era, they have most often explained it as the simple product of blockbuster economics Introduction 11 in the entertainment industries and the rising tide of neoconservatism. Robin Wood linked the “reassurance” offered by Reaganism to the era’s films, which attempted to reinstate uncomplicated and untroubled notions of home, family, gender, nation, and morality (144–48). William J. Palmer, in his history of 1980s Hollywood, argued that the Fifties fascination in Hollywood was “simply mir- roring the fact that the decade itself, in its social history, was a sequel” (ix). To Palmer, the United States turned back to the Fifties in hopes of restoring supposedly traditional values and reinvigorating a faith in American progress. However, it is important to recognize that pop nostalgia representations of the Fifties are far from homogenous. Where American Graffiti (1973) presents the Fifties as a lost ideal, Blue Velvet (1986) highlights the subterranean perversion and violence lurking underneath the surface of Fifties cultural fantasies. In music, pop nostalgia was employed by platinum-selling musicians like Madonna and Michael Jackson, but also popped up in new wave, punk, and rockabilly scenes, as evidenced by The B-52’s,The Clash, and The Stray Cats. One of the primary arguments I make in Back to the Fifties is that Fifties nostalgia cannot be understood as a homogeneous concept with a discrete political and social import. It is not, in other words, all about Reagan politics and blockbuster aesthetics. Close examination of pop nostalgia in the Re-Generation reveals that “the Fifties” was an unstable and contested concept, and its meanings were the subject of vigorous and continuous debate. Consequently, Back to the Fifties is directed toward three central aims. First, the study of pop nostalgia in its varying contexts produces a more nuanced and accurate understanding of the Reagan Era as a period of political and social struggle that was not wholly defined, though certainly influenced, by the rise of the New Right.3 Whether one understands the New Right as a “backlash” to the political and cultural developments of the Sixties or an independent articulation of economic and political policy, it undoubtedly had significant influence on US society of the 1970s and 1980s. However, one must take care not to mistake the importance of the New Right for total ubiquity. The 1970s and 1980s also saw the emergence of multiple movements for social justice, the solidification of feminism and environmentalism within mainstream US culture, mass demonstrations against nuclear proliferation and apartheid in South Africa, advances for LGBT rights, direct action of groups like ACT UP, and protests against US military interventions in Central America.4 That is not to argue that the Reagan Era was in any way a golden age for the American left, but it is important to point out that the politics and cultural attitudes Reagan embodied were neither universal nor unchallenged. Second, and in the same vein, this study complicates existing accounts of the relationship between history and nostalgia. It might not be accurate historiography, 12 Back to the Fifties but at base nostalgia has its own important historicity. As Sprengler puts it, nostalgia “tells us something about our own historical consciousness, about the myths we construct and circulate and about our desire to make history meaningful on a personal and collective level” (3). Taking Fifties nostalgia in the Reagan Era as the object of serious analysis not only aids in understanding American historical consciousness in the period between the end of the Vietnam War and the fall of the Berlin Wall but also recasts the contemporary notion of “the Fifties” in America as a deeply historical construct embedded in the political and social conditions of the 1970s and 1980s. Finally, this study addresses crucial emerging concerns in the fields of film and media studies in an era of increasing access to, and manipulation of, films, music, and other cultural texts from the past. As the proliferation of new technologies allows greater access to ever-expanding archives of films, music, television shows, advertisements, and other texts, it becomes vital for film and media scholars to understand how texts travel through history, within history, and across different delivery technologies. The remediation, translation, and circulation of films will increasingly play a role in the formation of cultural memory and self-definition, and future iterations of these films—repackaged, repositioned, and remixed—will continue to serve diverse and complex ideological functions.

Focus on Film and Pop Music My study of Fifties nostalgia focuses on Hollywood film and American pop music, but I situate those texts among parallel ones in television, advertising, the popular press, and other forms of mass media. Working within the traditions of cultural studies, I approach films and songs as texts made meaningful by their situation within and among a vast network of cultural discourses. While I am committed to a media studies that is grounded in close textual analysis, my attention goes beyond the formal qualities of music and film and into the relationships between popular texts, audiences, and the adjacent texts that surround them.5 This book is especially interested in the ways those relationships are continually remade in retrospect. One cannot, for example, hear Bobby Vinton’s song “Blue Velvet” the same way after watching David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet. My interest in Fifties nostalgia of the Re-Generation ranges across multiple media forms. Fifties mania was present in film and popular music, yes, but also in theater (Grease), broadcast television (Happy Days and its assorted spin-offs), cable networks (Nick at Nite), art (Velvet Elvis paintings, Gottfried Helnwein’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams), video games (Rampage), chain Introduction 13 restaurants (Johnny Rockets), exercise programs (Sweatin’ to the Oldies), and popular fiction (Steven King’s Christine), among other things. In the course of this book, I do give attention to these kinds of developments; however, I have committed to a primary focus on the interaction between Hollywood film and popular music. These two industries, and the interaction between them, serve as a particularly rich area for investigation because of the intense collaboration between them in this period. In fact, “synergy,” the defining buzzword in media industries in the Reagan Era, was specifically coined to describe the relationship between film studios and record companies. Their cross-promotional cooperation was enhanced and expanded by the emergence of MTV as a cultural dynamo, which provided opportunities for Hollywood films and record companies to collaborate on a single text (the music video) as well as organize a coordinated “flow” among videos, promotions, and interview segments on cable television.6 The economic interdependence between film and recording companies in this period profoundly shaped film production and promotion, radio broadcasting and record distribution, and the landscape of American popular culture. At the same time, the complex interplay between image, soundtrack, star texts, and ancillary materials provides rich ground for studying the way that different forms of nostalgic affect are prompted. Film and popular music are both significant sites for the production of nostalgia. From its origins in Hofer’s research, the link between hearing and nostalgia has been noted. Among scholars of popular music, Tia DeNora and Simon Frith have described the ways that music can act as a powerful generator of memory and marker of generational belonging.7 Film and cultural studies scholars— Dika, Grainge, and Sprengler, to name just a few—have often focused on the specific impact of visual signifiers on the production of nostalgia. However, because the collaboration among film and music companies aimed to target both aging Boomers and Re-Generation teenagers with Golden Oldies stations, “nostalgia films,” revival tours, and cover videos, there exists a valuable opportunity to uncover intense negotiations over the cultural definition of youth, American identity, and cultural power. By following the multiple invocations of Fifties figures, styles, and narratives throughout different historical and political moments, genres, exhibition spaces, and media formats, we may get a more sophisticated sense not only of Fifties nostalgia but also of popular culture’s relationship to history. In using this approach, my intention is not to establish a definitive meanings of the Fifties, or to rescue pop nostalgia from its critics. Rather, I aim to offer a sufficient analysis of the diverse ways the Fifties were mobilized for various political and ideological ends, and in so doing, to complicate dominant understandings of the Reagan Era, nostalgia, and the Fifties. 14 Back to the Fifties

Organization I have structured this book in an attempt to gradually develop a more sophisticated understanding of pop nostalgia. In the first chapter, I begin with an analysis of how nostalgia works within a discrete text at a particular historical moment. In the second and third chapters, I consider how the nostalgia generated by a particular text evolves over time, and how pop nostalgic discourses proliferate across multiple texts. In chapters four and five, I consider how pop nostalgia functions differently within the same text for different audiences, and how those competing claims for retrospective definition of Fifties figures represent a struggle over contemporary social and cultural values. As I argue that pop nostalgia is not located in texts but in shifting networks between and among texts, audiences, and contexts, each chapter of Back to the Fifties considers film or pop music of the Re-Generation in relation to a different type of adjacent text (political speeches, video packaging, radio formats, music videos, and star texts). I do not claim that any of these adjacent texts have total influence upon the meaning of films or music considered here. Rather, in isolating these coordinates, I illustrate how the meaning of Fifties youth experience in these films and pop music is negotiated within overlapping and continually shifting vectors, altering the conditions under which interpretations are produced. Some chapters focus primarily on a single film or pop music performer, some on a narrative scenario repeated across several texts, and still others on star texts across film and music. As nostalgia itself is a phenomenon that resists simple chronology, this study does not begin in 1973 and march directly toward 1988. Fifties nostalgia did not evolve as a singular phenomenon, nor did it function consistently or universally across all contexts. The book attempts to show the way that Fifties nostalgia functioned across a range of different texts, each with its own contestations, contingencies, and conflicts. The progression of chapters thus reflects that nonlinear treatment of time. Chapter one, “Fixing the Fifties,” centers on Fifties nostalgia in the form we find most recognizable today, wielded by Reagan in his 1984 re-election campaign and narrativized in the blockbuster filmBack to the Future (1985). While one of the book’s primarily claims is that pop nostalgia for the Fifties cannot be explained solely through Reaganism, it is nevertheless crucial to understand precisely how Reagan and the New Right mobilized the idea of the Fifties in US culture. Beginning with Reagan’s vision of the Fifties and Back to the Future has the additional benefit of providing a baseline against which other, competing visions of the Fifties can be productively compared in ensuing chapters. In chapter one, I specifically argue that pop nostalgia, even in its most recognizable form, is considerably more complex than commonsense explanations of it acknowledge. As I show with the example Introduction 15 of Back to the Future, nostalgia is a productive and historical response, not one wholly defined by “forgetting.” Both the film and Reagan’s political rhetoric operate by “fixing” the Fifties in two respects. First, the Fifties is “repaired” by eliding the historical tensions and controversies that characterized the 1950s (segregation, the Kinsey reports, Cold War paranoia, etc.) and highlighting the bright, cheery prosperity of small-town America. The Fifties is “fixed” again by freezing the era in time—creating a monolithic idyll that is separated from the historical, cultural, and political conditions of the decades that surrounded the 1950s, the 1940s and the 1960s. Similarly, it is important to recall that Marty McFly in Back to the Future does not simply return to the past; he actively transforms it in order to correct the “failures” of history made manifest in his own time. In the same way, Reagan’s use of nostalgia was not the result of an inaccurate sense of history but rather the product of carefully constructed political and rhetorical strategy, designed to reject the cultural legacy of “the Sixties” by championing “the Fifties.” For this reason, it is misleading to characterize nostalgia as a “reduction” or “erasure” of history: nostalgia actively constructs an image in response to a historical engagement with the present. Stepping back in time, the second chapter, “Rereading American Graffiti,” uncov- ers the Countercultural origins of Fifties nostalgia. Attention to the early career of Fifties revival band Sha Na Na (particularly their performance at Woodstock) and the 1973 release of American Graffiti (produced by the New Hollywood collective American Zoetrope) reveals how Fifties nostalgia functioned before its association with Reagan. This history is rendered invisible by contemporary accounts of the film. Though it was produced and originally understood as part of the “New Hollywood,” with its attendant values of aesthetic experimentation and progressive politics, George Lucas’s film is now considered to be a prelude to the blockbuster era, with its associated values of commercialism and conservatism. The literal and figurative packaging of Fifties nostalgia is made visible in promotional materials that accompanied the film’s multiple reissues and rereleases. Through examination of promotional posters, trailers, and video packaging, as well as accounts of the film’s place in Hollywood history, I show how the nostalgia generated by cultural texts is shaped by the adjacent texts that surround them. The ensuing chapters take a wider view, tracking the Fifties across several texts from the mid-1970s to late 1980s and considering how issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality intersect with pop nostalgia. The third chapter, “The Same Old Songs,” charts the transformation of Fifties rock and roll into “Golden Oldies” through radio station formatting and Hollywood soundtrack albums. The evolution of rock and roll from “race music” to the safe alternative to new wave, punk, disco, and hip hop for white bourgeois men in the late 1970s was reflected in the rise of Golden Oldies radio formats and revival concerts. This process was aided and extended by 16 Back to the Fifties the increasing use of oldies in Hollywood film soundtracks. Placing 1950s songs into new contexts helped to revise the racial politics of their original production and reception and helped to shape the cultural definition of the Fifties as a whole. This process is demonstrated through the reoccurring trope of the teenager lip-synching to the oldies in films like Risky Business (1983), Pretty in Pink (1986), Beetlejuice (1986), and Adventures in Babysitting (1987). Like the cover versions of rhythm and blues records popularized by white performers in the 1950s, these lip-synching scenes feature white teenagers “covering” over the racial politics that characterized rock’s emergence. The chapter closes with readings of Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) and John Waters’s Hairspray (1988), which feature characters embodying Fifties music in order to invert the decontextualization that occurs in the teen films’ lip-synch scenes, and to critique the institutions that obscure or actively exclude the raced and classed origins of rock and roll. The growth of MTV from obscure cable channel to era-defining cultural jug- gernaut was one of the most important developments in film and music of the Reagan Era. Chapter four, “Crossover Nostalgia,” focuses on the role of Fifties nostalgia on MTV through the career of one of the era’s biggest and most influential figures: Michael Jackson. Jackson was the first Black artist to receive major airplay on MTV.8 His music videos reveal a careful negotiation of his Black masculinity, using the logic of “crossover” generated by record companies and radio stations. In “Thriller” and “Smooth Criminal,” Jackson embodies masculine archetypes from the Fifties in order to present his own masculinity as safe, traditional, and normative. At the same time, viewers with knowledge of the references made in his videos (to midnight movies in “Thriller” and to 1953’s The Band Wagon in “Smooth Criminal”) can generate alternative readings, ones in which Jackson’s performance of masculinity works as a self-reflexive masquer- ade, or critical signification, of dominant norms. The multiplicity of meanings surrounding Jackson, I show, is a product of record company strategies as well as the cultural logic of “crossover.” Jackson drew on the Fifties to burnish his masculine image with Black audiences, while avoiding the forms of Black male sexuality that might limit his commercial prospects in white-controlled venues, radio stations, and television networks. The ways that gender and sexuality are indexed in pop nostalgia texts of the Re-Generation is my focus in chapter five, “Star Legacies.” I introduce the concept of star legacies to describe the way that figures from film and music in the Re-Generation referenced the star texts of Fifties icons like James Dean and Sandra Dee. The “rebellion” or “conformity” that these stars respectively represented to the Re-Generation is a transformation of their screen images in the 1950s. Considering claims on Dean’s star legacy in music and videos from John Cougar Mellencamp Introduction 17 and Morrissey, as well as in Re-Generation teen films like Reckless (1983), Footloose (1984), and Heathers (1988), this chapter reveals how Dean served in the Reagan Era as a symbol for various kinds of masculine eroticism, authenticity, and “cool.” While Dean’s star text was continually lauded, Sandra Dee’s legacy was almost universally rejected, as the song “Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee” illustrates. The chapter closes with the emergence of girl-centric texts and the academic field of girl studies, which sought to recover the girl-image that Dee signified in the Fifties. Finally, the epilogue considers the persistence of the Fifties of the Re-Generation in contemporary America, thanks to Eighties nostalgia films like Hot Tub Time Machine (2010) and fan-created mashup videos like “Brokeback to the Future.” These texts not only work as entertaining parodies of time-travel films and the eccentricities of 1980s teen culture but also draw attention to the queer subtexts that readers could tease out of Back to the Future, a film that stands in for neoconservative mobilizations of Fifties nostalgia. The film and the remix video allow for new readings of Back to the Future, of course, but they also encourage viewers to look at pop nostalgia’s construction of history with a critical eye. Clearly, these chapters do not attempt to provide an exhaustive account of Fifties nostalgia of the Re-Generation, or representations of the Fifties in the Reagan Era. The project instead looks to contribute to reconsiderations of what I believe to be an often misunderstood and overlooked historical period in American cultural history, as well as a more sophisticated understanding of the social and political functions of nostalgia. Far too often, scholars and critics of media have allowed this chain of equivalencies to go unexamined: “the 1980s” = “Reaganism” = “Fifties nostalgia” = “loss of historical consciousness” = “regressive politics.” At its most basic level, this book is meant to challenge and complicate those too-simple equivalencies. Surely, Fifties nostalgia in film and pop music was part of the cultural project of members of the New Right—this book acknowledges that. But my intention is to encourage us all to recognize the ways that pop nostalgia for the Fifties was mobilized by those across the sociopolitical spectrum for diverse and sometimes competing ends. Promoting the Fifties as the point at which the grand American progress narrative was interrupted was one crucial way of transforming the complex and contro- versial historical 1950s into the mythic Fifties that Americans still, in many ways, make a part of their national identity. One cannot deny that this process was crucial to the rise of neoconservatism in the United States, nor can one avoid the massive impact that this process had on nostalgia in popular culture and the Re-Generation as a whole. This happened in no more visible arena than the political rhetoric of Reagan himself, so that seems like a good place to start. It is with Reagan’s “back to the future” politics that I begin this book. 1

FIXING THE FIFTIES

Reaganism, Nostalgia, and Back to the Future

Early in Back to the Future (1985), the film’s teenaged hero Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) wanders in shock through the main square of Hill Valley, California. Having accidentally engaged a time machine built by his friend and mentor “Doc” Brown (Christopher Lloyd), Marty has been transported thirty years into the past. Failing to orient himself, he stumbles over curbs, is nearly struck by a car, and gapes at pass- ersby. While Marty struggles to grasp the reality of his time travel (“This has got to be a dream,” he repeatedly says), the film’s audiences faced no such troubles. The film gets plenty of comedic mileage out of Marty’s inability to understand that he has been transported to the 1950s, largely because it could presume that its viewers would be in on the joke. The film’s audiences, large portions of them teenagers, could safely be expected to recognize the Fifties, even when Marty could not. Without any direct cinematic prompting, Back to the Future’s teen audiences were better prepared for time travel than the film’s teen protagonist. Of course, we could question whether the film’s teen audiences in 1985 had an accurate understanding of the historical realities of 1955. For this book, however, the salient point is that the knowledge the film presumes is not historical knowledge of the 1950s but rather cultural knowledge of “the Fifties” as a retrospectively applied vision of American society. In this chapter I discuss American culture in the mid-1980s, and its deep investment in a fantasy of return to the peaceful and prosperous Fifties. This fantasy was circulated and recirculated through popular

18 Fixing the Fifties 19 music and Hollywood film. These two claims are hardly groundbreaking—the notion that 1980s America romanticized the 1950s is as close to a consensus opinion as one could imagine on the subject of twentieth-century American culture. So why begin a book about the rich complexities of Fifties nostalgia in popular culture of the Reagan Era with an example of a film that aligns so simply, and so neatly, with our already-existing conceptions of nostalgia’s political and historical functions? Reader, I am glad you asked. Back to the Future provides an important starting point for three reasons. First, its generic status as a time-travel film provides a narrative backdrop to a broader cultural fantasy of return to a simpler time. In this way, Back to the Future is the most convenient and logical place to begin. Second, the film’s dreamlike vision of Hill Valley 1955 as an idyll of small-town, postwar America represents Fifties nostalgia in its most recognizable form. This offers a point of reference against which other forms of Fifties nostalgia that I discuss in later chapters can be contrasted. Finally, close analysis of Back to the Future, and the conditions from whence it emerged, reveals that even the seemingly simple, commonsense version of Fifties nostalgia and Reaganism involved a sophisticated production of historical knowledge and cultural values that belie any sense that nostalgia is merely historical “forgetting” or “erasure.” The Hill Valley that Marty stumbles through in 1955—with its blue skies, stately town hall, bustling sidewalks, and commercial prosperity—is illustrative of the fantasy of the Fifties circulated through the imagery and rhetoric of the New Right. As the name “Hill Valley” describes a material impossibility, the vision of small-town America it represents is an impossible and appealing vision of “the good old days.” Accordingly, Marty’s first exposure to the town square in 1955 is underscored by a pop song that similarly connotes a simpler, cheerier, and more pleasant America: The Four Aces’ rendition of “Mister Sandman.” The song is representative of the postwar pop vocal group tradition, with gentle, four-part harmonies backed by a small orchestra (most notably a harp, upright bass, muted horns, bells, and a small wood- wind ensemble). The Four Aces, a group founded by former Navy servicemen from South Philadelphia, stand in for the white suburban pop mainstream—it is important to recognize what they are not: not jazz, not folk, not “hillbilly” or rock and roll. The song “Mister Sandman” is also significant. The “dreamlike” qualities of the scene are echoed by Marty’s dialogue (“This has got to be a dream”) and reinforced by the gentle harmonies in the song’s refrain, (“Mister Sandman, bring me a dream”). Taken together, sound and image suggest that the Fifties, at the time of the film’s release, was something that the entire country was dreaming of. Indeed, neither Back to the Future’s promotion nor its narrative needed to clarify the particular vision of the Fifties the film would present (what a different film 20 Back to the Fifties it would be if Marty traveled to Greenwich Village or Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955!). The film did not need to clarify its premise of “1980s teen travels back to the Fifties” because by 1985 the “Hill Valley” version of history it relied upon had extended beyond the screenplay and into what, drawing on Lawrence Grossberg’s reading of Antonio Gramsci, we might call the “national popular” of the United States. Grossberg describes the national popular as the arena in which social and power relations are constructed, the realm of material cultural production (films, books, art, music, etc.) that comes “to constitute the common culture of the people, and a national identity” (We Gotta Get Out of This Place 255–56). Critics and commentators attempted to explain the Fifties fascination of the 1980s as it was happening. Even before the release of Back to the Future, a New York Times editorial remarked upon the peculiar fascination that teen films had with Fifties youth culture. The author of that editorial, famed critic Michiko Kakutani, posits several possible explanations for the phenomenon: the narcissism of baby boomers, the cynical recycling of teenpic conventions by risk-averse studios, and the shrewd pragmatism of screenwriters seeking to sell scripts by avoiding politics. “It might be easier, in certain respects,” Kakutani speculates, “to look at the unchang- ing primal preoccupations of youth—sex, popularity, identity—against such a neutral backdrop than against the more heightened tableau of the late 60’s” (22). These comments are especially interesting for our purposes here, as they themselves reinforce the notion of the Fifties as a “neutral” historical backdrop, less politically “heightened” than the historical conditions of the 1960s (again, we might recall Greenwich Village or Montgomery in 1955—hardly “neutral”). Kakutani argues that when films likeFootloose (1984) and The Outsiders (1983) drew on Fifties clas- sics like Rebel Without a Cause (1955) or The Wild One (1953), the former “purvey attitudes more conservative than those in the original films” (22). For Kakutani, the Fifties nostalgia boom was especially troubling because of what was forgotten by the Reagan Era—the sense of alienation, discontent, and injustice that was legible in 1950s teen culture and led to the culture of the Sixties. Just a few months after Kakutani’s piece ran in the Times, another noted intellectual figure of the 1980s took on the Fifties nostalgia trend. Fredric Jameson’s famous essay “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” appeared in The New Left Review in the summer of 1984. While Jameson’s concern is certainly more broad-ranging than Kakutani’s (Jameson’s aim is to describe how a new dominant mode of aesthetic production has been integrated into late capitalist expansion), he is also focused on the erasure of history through pop nostalgia. In this landmark work of cultural theory, Jameson identifies postmodernism in terms of what is lost in the transition from the previous era of modernism: the author, the distinction between high art and mass culture, genuine historicity, and the connection between art and Fixing the Fifties 21 productive material processes. Jameson finds a crystallization of postmodernist characteristics—the transformation of art into fashion and a “new depthlessness”— in the emergence of “nostalgia films,” which “restructure the whole issue of pastiche and project it onto a collective and social level, where the desperate attempt to appropriate a missing past is now refracted through the iron law of fashion change” (66). Although he grants that nostalgia films can take any historical era as their source (he discusses neo-noir films like Chinatown and Body Heat), Jameson contends that “for Americans at least, the 1950s remained the privileged lost object of desire” (67). Jameson argues that this predilection for nostalgia serves as a testament to society’s inability to represent its own material conditions, as well as its tendency to reduce history to fashion, style, and commodities. The end result, he determines, is a “crisis of historicity” in which “the past as ‘referent’ finds itself gradually bracketed, and then effaced altogether” (65). This cultural work facilitates the continuing expansion of capitalism, and hinders our ability to adequately grapple with its effects. Back to the Future can easily be understood as part of Jameson’s “crisis of historicity.” The reason that the film’s nostalgic look at 1955 is so appealing (at least from some political perspectives) is the complete absence of “the Sixties.” In 1955 Hill Valley, there is no trace of feminism, civil rights for racial minorities, student demonstrations, or (until Marty’s impromptu guitar performance at the school dance) rock and roll. While one might argue that these cultural and political movements were not fully formed by 1955, at the very least one must acknowledge that they (and the tensions to which they responded) were not completely absent.1 The notion that Re-Generation teenagers would simply find these issues edited out of their cultural representations seemed quite possible. Beyond being set in a pre-Sixties America, Back to the Future simply does not allow for the possibility that the Sixties might ever occur. As a result, the film has repeatedly been understood as essentially Reaganist in its treatment of history.2 It is clear that Back to the Future’s vision of the Fifties is highly selective. The film excludes the social tensions and social movements that existed in the historical 1950s in favor of a vision more in line with the Fifties America depicted in television reruns. In this, Back to the Future can easily be understood as reflective of the New Right for which Ronald Reagan served as champion. Reagan’s public persona in the 1970s and 1980s, Daniel Marcus argues, was an embodiment of “a belief in and yearning for a nation undisturbed by the social controversies and political traumas of post-1963 America” (62–63). That is, one way of understanding the Fifties nostalgia that gained a dominant position in the national popular by 1985 is as a rejection of the conditions of America in the 1980s, after years of social unrest, economic stagflation, and flagging national pride. The Fifties thus served as a fantasy alternative to an unsettling present. 22 Back to the Fifties It is not my intention to rescue Back to the Future from its association with Reaganism, nor will I argue here (as I do at other points in the book) that the nostalgia it prompts was utilized for progressive or resistant political purposes. My aim in this chapter is more modest. I want to challenge what we might call the “amnesiac” model of nostalgia, a model which presumes that nostalgia is an inherently ahistorical process that is simply about “loss,” “forgetting,” and/or “erasure.” This notion, exemplified by otherwise valuable histories of the period with titles like Sleepwalking Through History, not only misconstrues the operation of nostalgia but also flattens and negates the complexities of the Reagan Era. In response, I would argue that nostalgia must be understood not as a reduction or denial of history but as a fundamentally productive affective engagement that produces new historical meanings for the past as a way of reckoning with the historical present. As Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley persuasively argue, the amnesiac model bears “more than a passing resemblance to earlier forms of mass cultural criticism was homogenized and atomized at one and the same time, so being stripped of active participation in everyday historical consciousness” (924). By acknowledging the historical and productive qualities of even the most straightforward and recognizable form of Fifties nostalgia in the Reagan Era, we can begin to develop a more sophisticated understanding of how pop nostalgia operates. With that understanding, we can recognize and imagine nostalgia’s effects, and affects, operating differently than we typically grant. So let’s begin with this: Back to the Future does not simply champion the Fifties. As a pop nostalgia text, it engages in a practice that I term “double fixing.” In the film’s construction of a fantasy vision of the Fifties, the historical 1950s are not erased but fixed, in two senses of the term. First, the historical 1950s are repaired, made to more closely represent a vision of a bygone period that embodies particular values perceived to be absent or under threat in the present. In the case of the New Right’s nostalgia for the Fifties, this means presenting images of small-town America in which cheerful citizens, organized into traditional family structures and adhering to conventional Christian codes of morality, peacefully go about their business. Historical elements of the 1950s that do not fit this fantasy—the Montgomery bus boycotts, the House Un-American Activities hearings, furor over the obscenity of the Beats or the hips of Elvis Presley, fear of juvenile delinquency or global nuclear war, and sundry other cultural shocks—are not erased but rather managed, presented as the result of personal or moral failures or diminished as fodder for humor or trivia. The second order of fixing is a process of freezing or halting—the fantasy version of the Fifties cuts the historical 1950s off from the years that preceded and followed, treating the era as if it existed in a historical, cultural, and political vac- uum, wholly disconnected from the social and cultural potentials of the 1940s and the 1960s. Fixing the Fifties 23 Back to the Future is particularly suited for an analysis of double fixing. Not only does it rely on the New Right’s hegemonic fantasy of the Fifties, but it also re-enacts the double fixing of the Fifties within its own narrative. Marty’s return to 1985 is predicated on his ability to rewrite the history of the 1950s, and then to preserve those “fixed” conditions in perpetuity. In the process, his double fixing of the Fifties allows him to rescue his family from hopelessness and helplessness in the 1980s, and (crucially) restore a future they can productively and enthusiastically pursue. This narrative arc parallels the arguments about the nation’s path to progress promoted by the New Right in the 1970s and the 1980s. The ensuing sections of this chapter examine how the process of double fixing was developed and gained influence in the national popular in the Reagan Era. This chapter’s analysis of double fixing begins with the repair of the Fifties at home in Back to the Future. Marty fixes the 1950s by rehabilitating his father, encouraging him to more closely align with the Reagan Era ideal of muscular masculinity at the center of the nuclear family. Next, the chapter illustrates the second order of fixing in the framing of an isolated and homogenous Fifties in Reagan’s political rhetoric. The process of double fixing is enacted in the national popular through, and in some cases for, the teenagers of the Re-Generation. The chapter’s third section explores the rise of the “Reagan Youth” through the star text of Michael J. Fox, who rose to fame playing the neoconservative teenager Alex P. Keaton on the television sitcom Family Ties. The chapter comes to a close with a consideration of how Back to the Future projects the familiar double fixing of the McFly family into the civic and political sphere, just as Reagan’s rhetoric moved smoothly from the simple, person- alized anecdote into broad visions of economic and military policy. Each section in the chapter works to emphasize the productive and historical nature of pop nostalgia, and reminds us that the discursive and affective origins of the Fifties in the Reagan Era exceed the conceptual models of amnesia and erasure.

Fixing Our Fathers, Fixing Ourselves Before Marty crosses Hill Valley’s town square in the “Mister Sandman” sequence, he has spent several hours in 1955. Still, he can neither comprehend what has happened to him nor fathom why the people he encounters regard him with befuddlement and fear. It is not until Marty arrives in the town square that he begins to understand the reality of his time travel—a moment that coincides with the first reference to Reagan in the film. As he turns a corner, Marty’s gaze lands on a signboard advertising the feature at the downtown movie house. The film isCattle Queen of Montana, an unremarkable 1954 Western starring Barbara Stanwyck and Ronald Reagan. Marty 24 Back to the Fifties

Marty encounters Reagan in 1955. responds to the sign with a double take, turning toward the theater’s marquee to confirm that, indeed, Reagan is in Hollywood, not the White House. It is then, and only then, that Marty is able to orient himself in time. The quintessential Re-Generation teen can only locate his position in American history in reference to Reagan. Since Reagan’s emergence as a mainstream political figure in the 1970s and his rise to president and cultural icon in the 1980s were in large part made possible by his ability to embody a fantasy version of the Fifties, Reagan’s appearance in Back to the Future takes on a special resonance for this study. This small moment lets us know that the film is not set in the 1950s, but Reagan’s Fifties. This realization empowers Marty to utilize his Re-Generation knowledge and technological savvy to not only safely navigate the past but ultimately to improve it, enriching his family (and himself) in the process. First, however, Marty must deal with the problems that result from his acciden- tal displacement of his father, George (Crispin Glover), as the object of his mother Lorraine’s (Lea Thompson) erotic desire. This mishap threatens Marty’s very existence. As a result, Marty spends much of his time in 1955 rebuffing his mother’s amorous advances and aiding his father in winning her affection. In order to save himself, Marty must rewrite history and recreate his nuclear family at its very inception—the meeting of his parents as Fifties teens. This proves difficult, as Marty discovers that when it comes to manliness, his father does not know best. Upon a chance meeting with his teenaged father at a local cafe, Marty is brought face to face with his father’s shortcomings. As Marty watches, George is bullied by the oafish Biff Tannen (Thomas F. Wilson) and forced to grovel in front of Biff’s obnoxious toadies. George’s inability to stand up to Biff, Marty knows, is not only Fixing the Fifties 25 a boyhood foible but rather a generalized personality flaw—everyone in Hill Valley seems to push George around. Goldie, the diner busboy, tells George, “If you let people walk over you now, they’ll be walkin’ over you for the rest of your life,” and the film’s viewers can confirm the prediction, as the film has already featured scenes of Biff’s bullying continuing into 1985. In the logic of the film, the elder McFly’s victimhood in 1955 sets the course for the rest of his life. Further still, George’s weakness appears to be a heritable trait. Though Marty is frustrated by his father’s weakness in 1985, he exhibits many of the same cowardly tendencies. The film suggests this connection early in the narrative, when the vice principal at Marty’s school accosts him, saying, “I noticed your band was on the ros- ter for the dance auditions after school today. Why even bother, McFly? You don’t have a chance, you’re too much like your old man.” As viewers soon learn, in many ways Marty is too much like his old man. When Marty discovers that George writes science fiction stories but is afraid to let anyone read them, George’s rationale for keeping them secret is an exact echo of the language Marty uses early in the film to justify not sending an audition tape of his band to a record label: “What if I send it in and they don’t like it? What if they say I’m no good? What if they say ‘Get out of here, kid, you got no future’? I just don’t think I could take that kind of rejection.” Hearing himself, Marty adds, “Jesus, I’m starting to sound like my old man!” More will be said on Marty’s fear of having “no future,” but for now let us focus on Marty’s recognition of, and distaste for, the similarities he shares with his father.3 The film visually indicates that similarity in George and Marty’s first Fifties -meet ing, as they unconsciously strike the same pose, use the same nervous gestures, and regard one another with the same tentative distrust.

Like father, like son: Marty and George McFly in 1955. 26 Back to the Fifties In 1985, Vice Principal Strickland tells Marty that “no McFly ever amounted to anything in the history of Hill Valley.” Marty spends the bulk of the film making his then-feckless riposte, “History’s gonna change,” a reality. This, in many ways, is not only the film’s thesis, but the promise of the New Right for the Re-Generation. Remember, though, that Marty’s response to Strickland is not at all about rescuing his father from self-doubt, for at that point in the film time travel is not yet a consideration. Marty is speaking entirely for, and of, himself. In this way Marty embodies the Reagan-Era disaffection with an America that was not living up to its postwar promise. Marty’s role in augmenting the insufficient masculinity of his father is quite clear, and has been valuably explored by film scholars like Susan Jeffords and Marsha Kinder. But it is important to recognize that, at the film’s outset, Marty’s masculinity is also portrayed as insufficient. He too is unable to confront Biff or to risk rejection, and he knows it. Marty’s goal in the Fifties, then, is not only to repair his father’s masculinity but also to remake himself. To do so, Marty must transform his father into the Fifties hero that he never was. The story of George and Lorraine’s courtship—George falls out of a tree from which he was “birdwatching” (actually, clandestinely peeping into a woman’s window), is struck by a car driven by Lorraine’s father, and is nursed back to health by the smitten Lorraine—is interrupted by Marty’s arrival in 1955. This is not only because Marty is hit by the car instead of George but also because Marty provides Lorraine with a 1980s model of erotic masculinity, right down to his purple Calvin Klein underwear. Prior to Marty’s intervention, Lorraine recalls being drawn to George because “he seemed so helpless, like a little lost puppy.” After Marty’s arrival, she has a different take on his father: “George McFly? Well, he’s kinda cute and all, but not . . . well, I think a man should be strong, so he can stand up for himself, and protect the woman he loves.” A more perfect articulation of the models of muscular masculinity for the Reagan Era could not be found in 1980s teen film. In response, Marty plans to force George to take a more active role in his relationship with Lorraine, as opposed to the passive, voyeuristic one he has played prior to Marty’s 1955 arrival. In the film’s climax, Marty sets out to create a scene where George can play the role of hero, rescuing Lorraine from Marty’s feigned sexual advances. However, Marty’s plans go awry. First, Lorraine surprises Marty by having a libido of her own—she is not only receptive to sexual advances, she initiates them. Then, Biff and his cronies arrive and transform Marty’s staged sexual assault on Lorraine into a real one. When George finally arrives, he cannot simply play the part of the ideal Fifties man (and the ideal Reagan-Era father). He must instead become the ideal man by “standing up for himself, and protecting the woman he loves,” as Lorraine says. George does so, overcoming his fear and knocking out Biff with one punch. The impact on George’s social standing is immediate. No longer Fixing the Fifties 27 the butt of every prank, George is suddenly transformed into the big man on campus, garnering the praise of his peers and encouragement to run for class president. With this, George’s future with Lorraine is secured, as if the two had no other fate from this point but to live happily ever after. In the first order of what I have called “double fixing,” Marty performs a reparative cleansing of his father’s insufficient and deviant masculinity. After Marty has made the arrangement in 1955, it is, as if by destiny, “fixed” there for the rest of time. As Marty promised Vice Principal Strickland, history does change. By the end of the film, Marty has both safeguarded his family’s existence and secured a new and prosperous future for them. Upon his return to 1985, he discovers that George is no longer a simpering weakling but a bestselling author and model yuppie parent. This new George plays tennis in the mornings while Biff waxes his car. Lorraine, notice- ably thinner, basks in the sexual attention she gets from George (a radical change from an earlier parallel scene, in which the two rarely occupy the same frame). Marty’s two older siblings, lonely and poor in the film’s opening, are social and financial successes in this “new 1985,” arranging business meetings and romantic dates over brunch. Marty also benefits from fixing the Fifties. In the new version of 1985, he has the confidence to send his band’s demo to a record company, drives the pickup truck he’s always wanted, and has his mother’s blessing to spend a romantic weekend with his girlfriend.4

The McFlys: No future. Linda and Lorraine left( ), George and Dave (right).

The McFlys, new and improved. Dave and Linda left( ), George and Lorraine (right). 28 Back to the Fifties Jeffords equates Marty’s manipulation of history with Reagan’s political mythology, arguing that the New Right’s political logic relied on a mobilization of Fifties ideals of active, muscular masculinity:

As Marty coaches his father from a wimp to a rescuer, Reagan set out to coach America from acting the part of the “wimp” of the Carter years, being the doormat for communism and fundamentalist Islamic revolutions, to becoming the economically and socially successful international father of the Reagan years. Form the man/country that gave his children/citizens only shame, George McFly and the America he figures is turned into a father who can give his children just what they want—a well-rounded family and material success. (70–71)

The difference between a successful family and a hopeless one, the film argues, lies in the strength of the Fifties father figure, a role Reagan played with aplomb. But, when considering the links between the iconic pop-nostalgia film of the Re-Generation and the preeminent avatar of the New Right, we must remember that traveling back in time was never the point. Marty has no interest in staying in 1955—he rewrites the past in order to correct the failures made manifest in his own time, transforming his father into the mythic hero lionized in the Fifties and containing his mother’s unruly appetites in order to pursue a gratifying and prosperous future. Similarly, Reagan never argued that America needed a return to the social order of the Fifties—undoing Brown v. Board of Education or Griswold v. Connecticut was off the table in mainstream political discourse—but positioned the Fifties as the storehouse of values through which America could regain its great- ness. In both cases, the mediation of the Re-Generation was required to restore optimism and pride. By reaffirming “traditional” values in a fantasy vision of the Fifties, both Marty and Reagan promised not only a return to the past but, crucially, a pursuit of the future.

The Rise of Reagan

Just as we cannot understand the version of the Fifties that Reagan and Back to the Future present as singular or self-evident, we must also recognize that “Reagan” is a product of shifting historical and political discourses. As Martin Anderson writes in his history of the rise of the New Right, while Reagan was able to present himself as the leader of a popular movement, neither he nor any other neoconservative aco- lytes created the “Reagan Revolution.” Rather, Anderson argues, “it was the other Fixing the Fifties 29 way around. They were part of the movement, they contributed mightily to the movement, but the movement gave them political life, not the reverse” (xix). Rather than understanding him as the agent for socio-historical change, we might understand him as a figure uniquely suited to play the role history made available to him. Reagan’s rise to nationwide political prominence from the 1970s and 1980s, as Lance Morrow argued in Time in 1986, owed much to his experience as an entertainer, which outfitted him with a charisma that played well on the stump, on camera, and behind the podium.5 Others, like Ken Holden and J. Hoberman, have highlighted the importance of Reagan’s all-American, trustworthy screen persona, which bled into his campaign persona.6 However, just as important was the rise of the Fifties as a counterpoint to a demoralized America in the 1970s and early 1980s. This version of the Fifties contained a veritable wish list for many Americans in 1972: “family values,” a booming domestic economy, and strong stances against communist forces at home and abroad. Whether those qualities actually existed in the 1950s or were a retrospectively produced fantasy, Reagan’s ascendancy relied on his ability to embody the vision of the Fifties that was represented in pop-nostalgia texts like Back to the Future.7 This idea is so ingrained in Reagan’s legacy, in fact, that the opening chapter of Lou Cannon’s 1991 biography President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime takes its title from Robert Zemeckis’s film. Reagan succeeded in lionizing the social order of the Fifties while simultaneously rejecting his opponents’ politics as misguided, ineffective, and divisive. Certainly the political sphere in this period was a complex one, with many competing and overlapping interests involved. However, on the level of the national popular, the arrival of Reagan on the political stage embodied a constellation of sociopolitical attitudes and values that were broadly defined as the “New Right.” Reagan’s rise to political prominence, as the popular phrase “Reagan Revolution” suggests, also marks a new period in American history characterized by the waning of historical developments associated with the Sixties (the Vietnam conflict, the Watergate scandal, the counterculture, and Great Society social reforms), and the rising prominence of a neoconservative age that would dominate American politics for at least thirty years. To understand the history of Reagan’s strategic mobilization of the Fifties, we must recognize the crucial rhetorical turn in his early political career—after which he no longer defined himself solely in terms ofrejection (of communism, of the New Deal, of civil rights, of the Sixties) and instead began defining himself mostly in terms of return (to prosperity, to traditional values, to global security, to the Fifties). The pivot in Reagan’s rhetoric is especially notable since, as historian Toby Glenn Bates writes in his book The Reagan Rhetoric, Reagan’s primary strength as a communicator came from “a consistency of message and imagery” (4). Presidential 30 Back to the Fifties historians have also argued that Reagan’s triumph in the 1980 presidential election was in large part due to his strategic mobilization of a narrative of national progress identifying the Fifties as the high point of national strength and prosperity, “the stopping point of American historical progress, and … repository of the accumulated virtues and values of the past” (Marcus, Happy Days and Wonder Years, 61). This shift in emphasis, then, is crucial to understanding how Reagan came to national prominence, even while holding political positions not embraced by the majority of Americans. Reagan’s turn to the Fifties was also a turn away from an even nearer past—the political and social legacy of “the Sixties,” broadly defined as the social and political upheaval lasting from the Kennedy assassination to the waning of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal in the mid-1970s. Reagan’s antipathy for the changes the Sixties represented was most dramatically illustrated in 1969, with his decision to send 791 state and city police officers to quell demonstrations on the University of California, Berkeley, campus, which he had denounced in his 1966 gubernato- rial campaign as “a haven for communist sympathizers, protesters and sex deviants” (Rosenfeld F1). The ensuing struggle for People’s Park resulted in violent clashes between protesters and police; the death of bystander James Rector; and hundreds of wounded students, police officers, and community members. Despite the notoriety of this incident, Marcus argues that “Reagan’s Fifties-based persona helped him avoid the negative associations his involvement in Sixties controversies could have engendered” (Happy Days and Wonder Years 70–71). By the time Reagan began his national political career, this rhetorical deployment of the Fifties not only enabled him to go from a fringe position on the radical right to winning forty-nine states in the landslide 1984 presidential election, but it also became the overarching political strategy for the New Right’s consolidation of political, social, and cultural power. This rhetorical turn and its engagement with history are crucial to understanding the role of the Fifties in Reagan-Era culture. The Fifties and the Sixties were presented to Americans as an absolute binary, which not only eliminated the continuum of historical events that connected the two periods but also flattened them so as to fix one homogeneous meaning to the Fifties and another oppositional meaning to the Sixties. Let us consider two pivotal speeches from Reagan’s campaigning history. “A Time for Choosing,” a speech given in support of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, reveals the rejection-based ethos of Reagan’s anti-communist fervor at the beginning of his political career. On the other hand, “Time to Recapture Our Destiny,” the address Reagan made to the Republican National Convention upon accepting the presidential nomination in July 1980, illustrates the shift to a rhetoric of return. My choice of these two public speeches, among the most famous Fixing the Fifties 31 in his pre-presidential career, is not motivated merely by their shared titular focus on time. Beyond that, a contrast between these two addresses reveals the development of Reagan’s political usage of the Fifties that would become celebrated and in fact naturalized by the time Back to the Future became the top-grossing film of 1985. It bears remembering, after all, that Reagan was not a lifelong conservative Republican. In the 1940s, Reagan was a registered Democrat who supported Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, and in his (largely conciliatory) testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee, maintained, “I never, as a citizen, want to see our country become [so] urged, by either fear or resentment of this group, that we ever compromise with any of our democratic principles” (qtd. in Bentley and Rich 144–47; Kahn 59). Of course, Reagan’s public appeal, even in his days as president of the Screen Actors Guild, greatly relied on his acting persona—football hero, good soldier, faithful cowboy, and all-American “good Joe” (Hoberman “Return to Normalcy” 57). Stories abound of Reagan winning over both factory workers and management with his natural charm while touring the nation as a spokesman for General Electric. Michael Rogin goes so far as to argue that Reagan was increasingly unable to differentiate between his real life and his screen life, and as a result “merged his on- and off-screen identities” (3). Still, historian Matthew Dallek argues, by the time Reagan rose to national notoriety politically, he was largely considered to be an affable extremist, taken much less seriously than figures on the right like William F. Buckley, Richard Nixon, or Barry Goldwater. Reagan became so contentious, in fact, that General Electric terminated his spokesman position in 1962, deeming him too extremist in his anti-communist politics (Dallek 40). “A Time for Choosing” is illustrative of Reagan’s rhetoric at this point in his career. “A Time for Choosing” was televised widely, first as part of the Republican National Convention in San Francisco in July 1964, then as part of the “Rendezvous with Destiny” program in October of the same year. Dallek identifies Reagan’s sur- prising emergence in mainstream politics in the mid-1960s as a turning point in American political history, the opening salvo in conservative revolution that in many ways still defines the terms of our political debates. While Reagan’s “A Time for Choosing” speech was in support of Goldwater’s campaign against the incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson, Reagan had given versions of it (he called it “the Speech”) for years on the General Electric lecture circuit, and thus it can be understood as a practiced articulation of Reagan’s political worldview in the 1960s. Reagan strikes a critical tone at the outset, beginning with the line, “I have spent most of my life as a Democrat. I recently have seen fit to follow another course.” This opening not only sets up the speech as a critique of Democratic policy but also foregrounds the image of Reagan as a conscientious and independent thinker. The pursuit of “another course” can be read as referring to his switch to Republican political affiliation as 32 Back to the Fifties well as communicating the need for “ordinary Joes” to shift away from the New Deal and Great Society programs that had defined the Democratic Party. Reagan’s voice and tone in this speech is particularly interesting in retrospect. While his presidential manner was often affable, charming, and avuncular, his demeanor in “A Time for Choosing” is strident and often combative. More to the point, “A Time for Choosing” is definitively not nostalgic. A sample paragraph will illustrate:

Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us they have a Utopian solution of peace without victory. They call their policy “accommodation.” And they say if we’ll only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he’ll forget his evil ways and learn to love us. All who oppose them are indicted as warmongers. They say we offer simple answers to complex problems. Well, perhaps there is a simple answer—not an easy answer—but simple: if you and I have the courage to tell our elected officials that we want our national policy based on what we know in our hearts is morally right. (Reagan, “A Time for Choosing”)

The characteristic Reagan style is evident in this selection. He champions “simple answers,” bases his convictions on “common sense” and shared codes of morality, and aligns himself with the “ordinary people” and against “the politicians.” This speech also includes Reagan’s signature invocation of the Founding Fathers and sweeping narratives of American progress. But “A Time for Choosing” is much more interested in the present and the future than it is in championing the values of the past. In 1984, Reagan’s “morning in America” was a vision of optimistic new beginnings. In 1964, however, the “morning” that Reagan envisions is one of apocalyptic catastrophe. He insists that socialism, in the guise of the Democratic Party, has caused a perversion of American ideals: “Our natural, inalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation of government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment.” He condemns the Democrats as “taking the Party of Jefferson, Jackson, and Cleveland down the road under the banners of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin,” and warns that the policies of “accommodation” toward the Soviet Union will lead to disaster scenarios: defeat in the Cold War, “a thousand years of darkness,” “the chains of slavery,” and, eventually, the atom bomb. This, for Rogin, is an example of Reagan’s “demonology,” the “inflation, stigmatization, and dehumanization of political foes” that is at the center of American politics (xiii). This rhetoric persists in Reagan’s presidential speeches, but in this early stage in his political career he had not yet learned to temper it with cheery visions of Fifties America. Fixing the Fifties 33 Reagan’s “A Time for Choosing” speech may have been a high point in the Goldwater campaign. This may also be damning with faint praise. Goldwater was steamrolled in the general election, winning only fifty-two electoral votes. Reagan’s stumping, according to Dallek, “mainly deepened the impression that conservatives were anti-communist paranoids who saw subversives under every rock” and marginalized him among journalists, who dismissed him as “a huffy simpleton with strong ties to the Republican right” (64–65). Goldwater’s landslide defeat in some quarters signaled the end of American conservatism and inspired calls for a more moderate Republican party. These calls were only intensified when Reagan opened a Republican fundraiser with a sharp rebuke against moderate party members. “Good morning to all you irresponsible Republicans,” he told the audience. Reagan would go on in the same fundraiser to claim that there was “a vast conspiracy in the Eastern liberal press” to portray Goldwater as a warmonger and a savage (Dallek 65–66). While Reagan’s oratorical skill marked him as an up-and-comer on the (bleak) Republican scene, his rhetoric, as shown here, was often seen as antagonis- tic, paranoid, oppositional, and divisive—too caustic in its rejection of a particular course of action. A comparison with Reagan’s rhetoric in 1980 (while still opposing an incumbent) will throw into sharp relief the way that the vision of the Fifties that motivates Back to the Future would enable his transition from “radical fringe” to “Great Communicator.” More than sixteen years after giving “A Time for Choosing” for Goldwater, Reagan prepared a speech with a similar name. “Time to Recapture Our Destiny” served as Reagan’s formal acceptance of the nomination at the 1980 Republican National Convention in Detroit. As its title suggests, the speech relies upon the power of nostalgia to define an idyllic past, an insufficient present, and a promising future. Many of the hallmarks of “A Time for Choosing” persist in “Time to Recapture Our Destiny.” Reagan evokes sparkling images of American history (“Three-hundred-and-sixty years ago, in 1620, a group of families dared to cross a mighty ocean …”) and harshly condemns Democratic politicians (“The major issue in this campaign is the direct political, personal, and moral responsibility of Democratic Party leadership … for this unprecedented calamity which has befallen us.”). Crucially, however, in “Time to Recapture our Destiny” Reagan positions the post-Fifties political initiatives (more specifically, Great Society governmental initiatives) as deviations from the plot, divergences from the national narrative of progress that began with independence and would reach its summit in an impend- ing defeat of communism. Reagan studiously avoided specific references to the 1950s, due to concerns over his advanced age (he would be seventy years old at inauguration, the oldest incoming president by far). Specifically mentioning the 1950s or 1950s policy could also spark controversy (as Bates chronicles, Reagan made a major 34 Back to the Fifties gaffe in the 1980 campaign by stating his support of “states’ rights” in Philadelphia, Mississippi, site of infamous murders of civil rights workers). Instead of directly referencing the 1950s, Reagan indirectly alludes to the Fifties, as a point at which the nation lost its way. Because of the traction that the New Right’s pop-nostalgia discourses already had in American culture by 1980, the mention of “small-town” or “traditional” America drew on notions of the Fifties. In the speech’s opening lines, Reagan outlines his mission statement in terms of a return to the values of those times: “More than anything else, I want my candidacy to unify our country, to renew the American spirit and sense of purpose. I want to carry our message to every American, regardless of party affiliation, who is a member of this community of shared values.” Later, Reagan references the need to recover and renew American values that have been lost along the way:

Some say that spirit no longer exists. But I have seen it—I have felt it—all across the land, in the big cities, the small towns and in rural America. The American spirit is still there, ready to blaze into life if you and I are willing to do what has to be done; the practical, down to earth things that will stimulate our economy, increase productivity and put America back to work. (“Time to Recapture Our Destiny”)

By implying that something must be “recovered” from our tradition, Reagan implicitly condemns the Sixties and Seventies as divisive, misguided, and damaging. Reagan draws on his ability to embody the values of Fifties America (he is a “member of this community of shared values”) and obscures his own participation in fractious (and indeed, violent and destructive) Sixties controversy. The speech’s repeated use of phrases like “renew the American spirit,” “rebirth of the American tradition,” and “recapture our destiny” gesture backward in time to the period (in the New Right’s view) when America strongly embraced its values of “family, work, neighborhood, peace, and freedom.” Furthermore, the speech suggests that, for 1980s America, looking backward was intrinsically linked with the potential for future progress. It is the promise of that future that drives “Time to Recapture Our Destiny”: “They say that the United States has had its day in the sun, that our nation has passed its zenith … My fellow citizens, I utterly reject that view.” In short, the speech presents the same vision of American prospects that Marty finds inBack to the Future—one must go back to the past in order to move profitably to the future. Like the double fixing in the film, “Time to Recapture our Destiny” promotes the Fifties as a repository of American values and detaches the period from the historical movements (associated with Fixing the Fifties 35 the Sixties) that followed it. The doubly fixed Fifties are thus presented as a -sta ble and continually accessible site to which the nation can always return. Just as Marty must intervene in his family’s origins in the Fifties to attain the material and social success that he desires, Reagan intimates that the nation must return to its Fifties traditions in order to retain its position as a global superpower in the twenty-first century. While Reagan’s use of the Fifties remained implicit in his speeches (and campaign materials like the famous “Train” television spot in 1984), some neoconservative figures did explicitly link Reagan with the Fifties. The Reagan Revolution, penned by conservative strategists Robert Novak and Rowland Evans just after the 1980 election, celebrates Reagan’s efforts to “return the republic to an earlier day … that day might be fixed at 1955” (2). As I have argued, what is important about this is not simply that Reagan is associated with a prior era. It is more important to recognize that the “1955” that Novak and Evans reference stands in for an inflection point in a particular narrative of American national progress—a starting point for America’s status as modern superpower, and the point to which the nation must return in order to “recapture its destiny.” This is, of course, a narrative constructed in response to the political interests of Novak and Evans (and their New Right contemporaries) in the 1980s, an origin story. For Americans who lived through the 1950s and 1960s, it was much easier to separate the fantasy of the Fifties from the lived experience of history. While Americans may have become frustrated with ineffective government programs, foreign policy embarrassments, and the leadership of the Ford and Carter administrations, few were ready to forswear all the post-1950s policy advances (the Civil Rights Act, Medicare, the establishment of public broadcasting, environmental legislation, etc.). For the Re-Generation teenagers who did not live through those years, however, the New Right’s sunny portrayal of the Fifties held a different sort of influence. Taking part in the Reagan Revolution was a new brand of politically engaged youth, addressing a new sort of generation gap.

Reagan Youth: Michael J., Alex P.

“Reagan’s Youth Movement,” a 1984 article in The Washington Post, reported on just how effectively the president had reached young voters. According to exit polls, 58 percent of voters aged 18–25 in the 1984 election cast their vote for Reagan, and 38 percent of those young voters identified as Republicans (as opposed to the only 29 percent that identified as Democrats). This represented a gain of almost 20 percent for Republicans since the mid-1970s, and owed much to the oldest president 36 Back to the Fifties in American history. “He makes me feel good,” said one young Texan in The Post’s article, “He says there’s opportunity out there—take it and run” (Peterson 5). Reagan’s ability to make young people “feel good” was crucial to his cultural power and seemed to be most strongly connected to the economic aspirations of Re-Generation teens. Another youngster interviewed by the Post makes this explicit, as she recounts how she changed from a liberal-leaning independent to a Reagan supporter: “It’s fun to think you can save the world, but then you start working and look at that paycheck,” she says, “you can change pretty fast” (Peterson 5). While polls throughout the 1980s indicated that young voters did not align themselves with right-wing social and cultural views (there was no coincident embrace of a figure like televangelist and activist Jerry Falwell among American teenagers), economic pragmatism was the order of the day, even in American high schools and universities. Even before he starred in Back to the Future, Michael J. Fox had come to represent a generation of aspiring yuppies. This was largely due to his performance as Alex P. Keaton on the NBC sitcom Family Ties (1982–89). The Museum of Broadcast Communications described the immensely successful and culturally prescient series as a perfect demonstration of “the resonance between collectively-held fictional imagination and … ‘the structure of feeling’ of a historical moment” (Saenz). Creator Gary David Goldberg originally intended the show to focus on the family life of former hippies. Comedy was meant to emerge from the tensions between Elyse (Meredith Baxter-Birney), a successful architect, her husband Steven (Michael Gross), a public television station manager, and their three conservative children. Their only son, Alex, a teenage supply-side economics advocate compulsively clad in business attire, became the surprise focal point of the show after the first season. The role made Fox a star and propelled the show into the top ten of the Nielsen ratings for almost the entirety of its eight-year run on NBC. While Family Ties was originally written to present Alex ironically (Alex has a poster of William F. Buckley hanging over his bed and loses his virginity after attend- ing a Milton Friedman lecture), viewers responded enthusiastically to Alex and his tendency to mock his leftist parents. In many ways, Alex embodied the attitudes of a new generation that was much more interested in scoring big on Wall Street than supporting community television programming or designing eco-friendly homes. The first scene in the show’s pilot features the family watching a slide show of the 1969 National Mobilization to End the War demonstration in Washington, DC, which Steven and Elyse attended together. These slides would serve as part of the show’s credit sequence for several seasons. Alex’s response to the images is a mixture of contempt and ridicule, as he offers sarcastic comments like, “What were you pro- testing, good grooming?” This dynamic is the source of the series’ humor but also much of its pathos. In one early episode, Steven must apologize to Alex for refusing Fixing the Fifties 37 to allow him to “be himself” by taking a date to a racially segregated country club. The series, in other words, pits Steven and Elyse’s responsibilities as parents in the 1980s against their supposedly outdated political convictions. Family Ties’ portrayal of the tensions between Alex and his parents positions Sixties radicalism as the outdated establishment and conservatism as hip and rebellious. The transmission of conservative principles to the next generation was a key part of the New Right’s strategies, and the popular frenzy around the figure of Alex testified to Reaganism’s appeal to 1980s teens and the character’s resonance for original viewers of Back to the Future. This association between Fox’s television character in Family Ties and his Hollywood screen persona lingers even today—in the 2006 volume Recycled Culture in Contemporary Art and Film, the author repeatedly refers to Fox’s character in Back to the Future as “Alex.” Alex P. Keaton’s disdain for his parent’s vision of the world, and his animosity for what he felt were the failures or betrayals of Sixties culture to secure American prosperity and dominance, stood in for a larger cultural attitude among a segment of young people in the 1980s. This was not primarily an issue of the 1950s or 1960s but rather reflected the economic and social conditions of the early 1980s: slow economic growth, urban decay, and deindustrialization. This same sense of disappointment permeates Back to the Future and is suggested by the casting of Fox. He was so vital to Zemeckis and Gale’s vision of Back to the Future, in fact, that he was cast twice. Fox was the first choice to play Marty, but since Baxter-Birney was on mater- nity leave, Family Ties producers would not allow for a release. Consequently, the Back to the Future production began with Eric Stoltz as the lead, and filming continued for several weeks before Stoltz was released from his contract. An agreement between Fox and the Family Ties producers was eventually reached, and the entire film was shot around Fox’s Family Ties schedule, with the bulk of shooting occurring at night or during weekends. This also required recasting the role of Marty’s girlfriend Jennifer (Claudia Wells), as the actress originally cast (Melora Hardin) was taller than the diminutive Fox. The lengths to which the production went to secure Fox’s performance suggests not only that he is a fine performer but also that his star text brought an element to the film that other actors could not replicate. While it is clear that Back to the Future creates a fantasy vision of the Fifties, it also simultaneously constructs a fantasy of the Eighties. This vision comes from the perspective of the Reagan-Era teen disaffected with the ways that baby boomers had fouled up the country and jeopardized their future. If Hill Valley in 1955 is a dream, Hill Valley in 1985 is something of a nightmare. The initial depiction of Marty’s hometown is decidedly less cheery than the Fifties town square scene described in this chapter’s opening lines. The carefully manicured lawn that stretched in front of the courthouse in 1955 has been transformed into a crowded parking lot for 38 Back to the Fifties the town’s social services buildings. The two downtown movie houses that played Reagan films in 1955 Hill Valley have been converted into a pornographic theater and a low-rent church. Indeed, the square bears all the markings of a “blighted neighborhood”: adult bookstores, bail bond dealers, pawn shops, seedy hotels, and several abandoned and boarded-up storefronts. Graffiti (in Spanish, presumably from the dreaded Latin youth gangs of suburban California) covers both the courthouse and school; trash litters the streets; and the houses in town are dingy and unkempt. The city is falling into disrepair. “That was always one of the major elements of the story even in its earliest incarnation,” screenwriter Bob Gale has said. Zemeckis’s intent was “to take a place and show what happens to it over a period of thirty years. What happened to everybody’s home town is obviously the same thing. They built the mall out in the boonies, and killed all the business downtown, and everything changed” (Mayfield). The flip side of the film’s Fifties idealism is the notion of a city in decline in the 1980s. If the city is in decline, the McFly family is as well. In 1985, George is a doormat working at a dead-end job, still doing all of Biff’s work while receiving none of the credit. Lorraine swills gin in resignation as she makes a cake for her incarcerated brother, Joey (“We all make mistakes in life, children,” she says with a loaded look8 in George’s direction). Marty’s older brother lives at home and takes the bus to his fast-food job, while his older sister is hopelessly loveless. It appears that there isn’t much hope for the future in the McFly household, or in Hill Valley at all. Reveling in memories of the past is the only recourse Marty’s parents have—telling the story of Lorraine and George’s courtship takes on ritual properties in the house. As the children roll their eyes, Lorraine wistfully describes how she fell in love with George after he was hit by her father’s car in a freak birdwatching accident, their first date at the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance, and their first kiss. “It was then,” Lorraine says ruefully, “I knew I was going to spend the rest of my life with him.” George, oblivious to his wife’s despair, seems to take comfort only in reruns of 1950s episodes of The Honeymooners. The nostalgic past, for the McFlys, is a refuge from the increasingly bleak present. Once Marty travels back in time, however, he will discover that much of what his parents have told him about the Fifties has been a lie, or at least insufficient for creating the future that Marty desires. One main source of Back to the Future’s entertainment value stems from Marty’s unmasking of his parents’ nostalgic memories of the Fifties as falsehoods. The “birdwatching” that resulted in George’s car accident in Lorraine’s version of the story is revealed to be peeping Tomism. The restrictive morality that Lorraine espouses in 1985 (“When I was your age I never chased a boy, or called a boy, or sat in a parked car with a boy”) turns out to be revisionist history, as young Lorraine removes Marty’s pants at their first meeting, drinks liquor, smokes cigarettes, and aggressively pursues Fixing the Fifties 39 a sexual relationship with Marty. While these revelations unsettle Marty—he has earlier expressed a belief that his mother was “born a nun”—they also provide a rationale for his mother’s latter-day conservatism. In no small part the film appears to suggest that Lorraine’s fault was being too forward with George, and the price she pays in 1985 is a life of disappointment and regret.9 Though Marty finds the untold secrets of his parents’ past unsettling, he does take great pleasure in manipulating the circumstances of time travel to his own advantage. Using his Reagan-Era knowledge and style, Marty masters Hill Valley of 1955. The film thus suggests not only that Reagan-Era teenagers understand the world of 1985 better than their parents, but also that “teenagers of the 1980s know more than anybody else who has ever lived—the past can be disregarded and conveniently changed to fit the modern adolescent’s view of the way things should be” (Kroll). It is Marty’s Re-Generation tools, tastes, and pop cultural savvy that allow him to gain the respect and admiration of the entire 1950s community. The film highlights this discrepancy in knowledge when Marty eats dinner with Lorraine’s family and recognizes the episode of The Honeymooners (“The Man from Space”) on television. When he exclaims that he’s seen it before, Lorraine’s little brother Milton expresses his bafflement: “What do you mean you’ve seen it? It’s brand new.” When Marty tries to explain that he “saw it on a rerun,” Milton’s response, “What’s a rerun?,” draws the differences between the generations into sharp relief. 10 Marty soon learns to take advantage of his superior knowledge of media texts and technologies. When he needs to explain to 1955s Doc Brown how the time machine works, he shows him the video tape on the portable camcorder that he has brought along with him (Marty’s ability to record, replay, and remix audio and video is his secret weapon). Later in the film, Marty poses as “Darth Vader from the Planet Vulcan” to strong-arm George into asking Lorraine to the dance. Using a portable cassette player loaded with Eddie Van Halen guitar solos, Marty convinces George that his brain will be melted by the sonic attack unless he assents to Lord Vader’s wishes. One is reminded of Biff’s mocking salvo: “Don’t be so gullible, McFly!” The ease with which Marty learns to navigate and master 1955 Hill Valley, both geographically and interpersonally, suggests a belief in the superiority each succes- sive generation has over the preceding one, and a faith in the ingenuity of American youth to write their own future. The film’s most dramatic illustration of this comes in Marty’s musical performance at the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance. Filling in for the injured guitarist, Marty steps on stage with the band (Marvin Berry and the Starlighters) to perform “Earth Angel,” a doo-wop staple that was among the top hits of 1955. The song is significant because, as Timothy Taylor argues, doo-wop’s stylistic and generic separation from contemporary popular music sonically suggests 40 Back to the Fifties a bygone era. “Doo-wop’s quick exit from the scene and its conversion from a living, meaningful music for youth to a powerful sign of that youth,” Taylor explains, make it “a potent trigger for a structure of feeling of nostalgia” (95). “Earth Angel,” in other words, signifies “past-ness” more than a song from a different genre would. Had the Starlighters played another song from 1955 (Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock,” for example), the scene would not have the sonic connotation of a wholly different era, since rock and roll has maintained a central position in popular music since the 1950s. Doo-wop, on the other hand, had by 1985 been long relegated to the oldies circuit. Once his future is ensured, Marty celebrates by pushing the dance from doo-wop into the sonic future. Telling the crowd that he’s going to play “an oldie … well, it’s an oldie where I come from,” he leads the band in a rollicking rendition of “Johnny B. Goode,” which inspires the bandleader to call his cousin Chuck to exclaim, “You know that new sound you been looking for? Well listen to this!” The film thus positions Marty as the inventor of rock and roll (he even reproduces some of Berry’s signature dance movements) and the white middle-class suburb of Hill Valley as its birthplace. As with the function of Golden Oldies on airwaves and film soundtracks of the Reagan Era, or the cover versions of soul, rock, or R&B songs that white performers churned out in the Fifties, Marty’s performance not only “covers” the racial and sexual threats that early rock and roll presented to the Fifties social order, it also transfers the credit for its invention. Of course, Back to the Future is a comedy, and the transfer of rock innovation to Marty is played for laughs. Marty is unable to bask in the glory of his

Marty’s fingertapping recalls Eddie Van Halen. Fixing the Fifties 41 “Johnny B. Goode” performance because in the process of playing it he is unable to stay “in time.” Overcome by the music, Marty moves away from Chuck Berry’s signature guitar sound (crisp, staccato guitar notes, backbeat rhythms, inverted fifths, and clave accents) to sounds from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, belying his own love of synth-infused hard rock.11 Increasing the intensity of his solo while reducing its emphasis on the “Goode” melody, Marty engages in a high-feedback, legato guitar style that is associated with Jimi Hendrix, eventually transitioning into the hard rock and heavy-metal sounds of the 1980s. Similarly, Marty’s movements on stage transition from Berry’s “duckwalk” hops to the signature moves of guitar heroes of later decades of the more recent past. Impersonating Hendrix, Marty kicks his amp and plays the guitar behind his back and with his teeth. He imitates the windmill downstrumming of The Who’s Pete Townshend, slides on his back like Angus Young of AC/DC, and engages in fretboard finger tap- ping a la Eddie Van Halen. When Marty finally looks up from the Hill Valley stage, he finds the crowd staring at him in befuddlement and horror. “I guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet,” he says sheepishly, “but your kids are gonna love it.” Again, Marty’s generational difference, and the inevitability of his tastes, are reinforced. Though he is carried away in this particular moment, Back to the Future’s protagonist generally utilizes his technological and cultural knowledge to gain power and respect in the past. In so doing, Back to the Future portrays the Fifties as “simpler” in both senses of the word—adults and teenagers alike in 1955s Hill Valley (with the exception of Doc Brown) are easily duped, frightened, and manipulated by Marty. He leaves Hill Valley 1955 better off than he found it, and enthusiastically returns to a much-improved future. In the terms of Reagan’s “Time to Recapture Our Destiny” speech, the Fifties is not necessarily the best time that Hill Valley will see. That time lies in the future, if only its residents will embrace their destiny. In the world of Back to the Future, it is the 1980s teenager who spearheads that movement. In this logic, the country would be better off if history were simply changed to match the fantasy of the Fifties. In the absence of actual time travel, history is changed by the circulation of stories, myths, and fantasies of the Fifties as a better time. During the Reagan Era, some carefully calibrated a fantasy Fifties that included some elements of 1950s America yet screened out other elements—few people were explicitly advocating for a return to segregation, or compulsory house- work for women, or Cold War hysteria. The vision of the Fifties present in Back to the Future is indicative of a constructed nostalgia’s allure. Regardless of historical accuracy, the Reaganite fantasy of the Fifties was a pleasant, useful falsehood that many Americans were inclined to believe. 42 Back to the Fifties

Fixing the (Civic) Fifties As Alex P. Keaton chafes against what he understands to be the failures of his father, so too does Marty McFly lament his father’s failure. By replacing his father’s credo, “I don’t think I could take that kind of rejection,” with Doc’s mantra, “If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything,” Marty is able to reverse his family’s fortune. Until Marty’s intervention, the issues his parents faced in high school (George’s weakness, Lorraine’s vice, the inability of either to stand up for themselves against the domineering Biff) simply repeat themselves. Marty’s goal is to fix the broken promise of the 1950s to better match the fantasy version of the decade that gained prominence with Reagan’s rise. As he “fixes” his own family’s shortcomings in 1955, Marty simultaneously cleanses the Fifties of social agitation, racial oppres- sion, and the other cultural anxieties that actually gripped the decade. While the McFly family is the central focus of Back to the Future, the conditions of Hill Valley as a civic entity are also subject to the process of historical transformations that allow Marty to remake his family. Take, for instance, the most prominent piece of the Hill Valley set—the clock tower that adorns city hall and serves as the backdrop for the film’s climactic scene. Marty gains his knowledge of the clock in 1985 from a woman volunteering for the Hill Valley Preservation Society who wishes to ensure that the clock remains correct exactly twice a day. Like the clock, in the world of Back to the Future, whatever events occur in 1955 are preserved in perpetuity—if George allows Biff to bully him in 1955, Biff will always bully George. If George and Lorraine kiss in 1955, they will be together forever. The clock is the figurative site of the second order of “fixing” for which I have argued. The town clock, rendered inoperable by a lightning strike in 1955, not only provides a power source for Marty’s time travel but also suggests that Hill Valley itself has been “frozen in time.” When the lightning strikes, the clock hands stop at 10:04 p.m. and for the next thirty years remain fixed to the time of Marty’s exit from his reparative visit to 1955, perpetually pointing to the moment when the town’s destiny was sealed. As Marty wanders through the idyllic 1955 Hill Valley, he struggles to understand what has happened to his hometown. Simultaneously, the clock hov- ers behind his head onscreen, broadcasting precisely what has happened: the town is bustling and prosperous because the march of time has not yet been impeded. The chiming of the clock tower coincides with Marty’s realization of his travel, and the countdown until lightning strikes the tower—Marty’s only chance of getting home—provides dramatic tension. The stopped clock in 1985 is a symbol of Marty’s mission: for both Hill Valley and his family to be fixed, or repaired, Marty must return to the time before the clock struck ten. In other words, the film performs the process of double fixing by allowing Marty to perfect, and then freeze, his family and civic fortunes. Fixing the Fifties 43

Marty and the Hill Valley clock tower.

The Back to the Future trilogy offers the Fifties unchallenged historical significance. Nobody has any ability to change the condition of their individual lives by making changes in 1985—the die is cast by that time. Further, Marty cannot change history by returning to any other moment in American history. It is only by returning, again and again, to 1955, that Marty’s time traveling has any historical efficacy. This is the structuring logic of Back to the Future and its treatment of history. The specific way thatBack to the Future invokes the Fifties (as a time when “if you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything,” as the film repeatedly asserts) aligns with the rhetoric of the New Right. But Marty’s success relies entirely on his Reagan-Era knowledge that allows him to repair and protect the Fifties not as it was, but as the era “should have been.” In other words, the simple conceptualizations of Reagan-Era nostalgia to which so many critics respond are only part of the story. The real ideological work of pop nostalgia is not found in what is forgotten, left out, or elided, but rather in the repairs that are enacted and then eternalized, because those are the meanings that structure future actions, which can be directed toward conservative, or liberal, or moderate, or radical agendas. Pickering and Keightley remind us that nostalgia is often directed not toward the past but toward the future, representing a “desire for engagement with difference, with aspiration and critique, and with the identification of ways of living lacking in modernity. Nostalgia can be both melancholic and utopian” (921). Neither Back to the Future nor Reagan forget or erase history. Rather, they foster nostalgic affect prompted by critical reflection on contemporary historical conditions, and promote selective versions of the past to suit their visions of the future. The New Right mobilized nostalgic affect in order to marginalize 44 Back to the Fifties the activism and politics associated with the Sixties and promote neoconservative values associated with the Fifties. But Fifties nostalgia is not inherently or necessarily linked to neoconservatism, and, as I will discuss in the next chapter, it definitively was not in its infancy. Travel back in time with me. 2

REREADING AMERICAN GRAFFITI

While I make the case in this book that pop nostalgia became a particularly powerful and influential cultural formation from 1973 to 1988, it is important to recognize that Fifties nostalgia in popular culture is not confined to that fifteen-year period. Reagan and the New Right were effective and persistent in utilizing Fifties nostalgia in staking political or cultural territory, but they were neither the only nor the first to do so. Recognizing this is particularly important if we are to understand nostalgia as affect emerging from relations between and among texts, audiences, and the contexts in which they meet. These relations are, like the device that powers Doc Brown’s DeLorean, constantly in flux. As a texts move through history, they encounter new audiences, are placed in new contexts, or gather new historical and cultural reso- nances. Thus the political and social function of texts’ nostalgia inevitably change. Once we understand nostalgia in this way, we can begin to see it work in alternative and complicated fashions, shaped by audiences, adjacent texts, and the contexts from which it emerges. When we look beyond the considerable shadow of Reagan, we find Fifties nostalgia in the places (and times) we might least expect—even down on Yasgur’s farm. Jimi Hendrix’s set at the Woodstock Music and Art Fair on August 18, 1969, stands as one of the defining performances of his legendary career, and perhaps the most important cultural moment of the Sixties. This was not, however, immediately apparent. Due to a lengthy rain delay and nagging technical issues that had pushed the set to a Monday morning, not to mention the sheer exhaustion that accompanied

45 46 Back to the Fifties the three-day Woodstock experience, the crowds that remained for Hendrix were a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands that attended the festival. Further, Hendrix’s performance (with a newly formed backing band) left much to be desired for the brave souls who did stay to watch him perform. His longtime producer and recording engineer recalls a “disregard for professionalism” in the uneven and often off-key performance (McDermott and Kramer 215). Hendrix’s band (Gypsy Sun and Rainbows) was relatively untested (the Jimi Hendrix Experience had parted ways earlier that summer), and was out of sync for much of the two-hour set (Shadwick 192–93). Watching the performance, Hendrix seems aware of how sub-par it is, saying at one point, “Thank you again. You can leave if you want to, we’re just jam- ming, that’s all.” Many did leave. According to musicologist Mike Daley, Hendrix’s set only gained cultural recognition after the festival was long over, when Michael Wadleigh’s documentary Woodstock (1970) featured it. As Hendrix’s band transitioned out of “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)/Stepping Stone” and into the opening notes of the national anthem, Woodstock shows Hendrix flashing a peace sign, and the crowd offering its most enthusiastic response of the morning. Daley describes the performance:

Hendrix adorns the simple anthemic melody with scoops and articulations like a lone gospel singer … He follows the B section line “and the rockets’ red glare” with the wail of a falling bomb and its subsequent explosion. Some rolling confusion follows, screaming voices, machine gun rat-a-tats, unearthly strangled cries, a mother’s futile wails. Then the line “the bombs bursting in air,” followed by a low-toned siren, some unplaceable sounds of unreality, another bomb assault, twisted metal and bodies, a trickle of blood.” (Daley 55–56)

Much of the commentary that followed the festival, whether from Richard O’Brien’s dispatches for CBS News, the Woodstock documentary, Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock,” or Greil Marcus’s coverage in Rolling Stone, presented Woodstock as an alternative to twentieth-century American society. In this context, the reviews held up Hendrix’s interpretation of “The Star-Spangled Banner” as a piece of political critique. A memorial written after his death in 1970 singled out the performance as “politically deep and significant … a chillingly contemporary work, a vision of cultural crisis, of structural breakdown and chaos, screeching to an almost unbear- able tension which must, somehow, burst” (Hicks 209). Charles Shaar Murray of New Musical Express (NME) called it “a sonic portrait of a land in turmoil, a nation in danger of tumbling into the abyss cracked open by the contradictions between its ideals and aspirations and its reality” (54). Rereading “American Graffiti” 47 Hendrix was far less emphatic (or perhaps, far more coy) about the political message of his anthem. At a press conference shortly after the festival, Hendrix refused to ascribe any critical motivation to the performance, simply saying, “We played it the way the air is in America today” (Cross 271). He had, after all, made the national anthem a regular part of his live repertoire for some time, but never had it resonated so much (Johnson, “Why Woodstock Belongs to Jimi Hendrix”). In his first television appearance after Woodstock (September 9, 1969, on The Dick Cavett Show), Cavett asked Hendrix directly about the controversy that surrounded his performance.1 Hendrix replied, “All I did was play it. I’m an American, so I played it. I used to have to sing it in school … so it was a flashback.” When Cavett jokes about how Hendrix’s status as a military veteran of the 101st Airborne Division should deflect angry letters about the “unorthodox” interpretation of the national anthem, Hendrix quickly added, “That’s not unorthodox. I thought it was beautiful.” Hendrix’s comments here point to another reading of the famed Woodstock performance. We might consider Hendrix’s anthem as not merely a condemnation of American politics at that moment but also a reclamation of a particular idea of America from the (personal, affective) past. It is this dual rejection and reclamation, I would argue, that gives the performance its immense resonance. Surely, Hendrix’s improvisations and adaptations are meant to invoke, as Daley poetically argues, US military actions in southeast Asia, but this alone would not have distinguished it from many other songs performed at Woodstock. In choosing the highly symbolic national anthem, Hendrix is not only able to reclaim it as a text belonging to his own personal history (as a kid who sang it in school, or as a soldier in the 101st Airborne Division) but also to mobilize it within a very specific context, for a specific audience that could participate in its own kind of reclamation—“We’re American, so we claimed it.” In so doing, it is not only Hendrix, but the entire Woodstock Festival (and by extension, the Counterculture) that announces both its radical differences from the American mainstream (in tastes, values, hairstyles, etc.) and its steadfast belonging to and ownership of the United States. That is to say, the very concept of the United States itself was a contested cultural ideal, which diverse populations attempted to define (and redefine). So what is a discussion of Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock doing in a book about Fifties nostalgia from 1973 to 1988? In light of Hendrix’s performance of the national anthem (and the complex relations of national shame and pride that it articulates), it is interesting to note—as scholars of Fifties nostalgia like Elizabeth Guffey and Daniel Marcus have—that the band that took the stage immediately before Gypsy Sun and Rainbows was not one of Hendrix’s famous contemporaries (Blood, Sweat and Tears; The Band; and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young all played sets the 48 Back to the Fifties

Sha Na Na, 1972. Photo for William Morris agency is in the public domain. More licensing information at http://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sha_Na_Na_1972.JPG. previous night). Rather, the opening act for Hendrix was Sha Na Na, a Columbia University a-cappella group turned Fifties revival act. Appearing in greaser hairdos and cast-off costumes from a traveling production of Bye, Bye, Birdie, Sha Na Na played a set of covers featuring The Coasters’ “Yakety Yak,” Elvis Presley’s “Jailhouse Rock,” and Danny and the Juniors’ “At the Hop.” The band had gained a reputation Rereading “American Graffiti” 49 in New York for their wild “Greaser” revival shows, and had parlayed that into an invitation to perform at Woodstock. Founding member Robert Leonard told The New York Times in 2008, “The Grateful Dead loved us, Janis loved us, Jimi loved us” (Finn 1). Judging by the reaction shots of the crowd in the documentary, Sha Na Na’s Woodstock performance was initially disorienting, but eventually received warmly. More success was on the way. Sha Na Na would follow up Woodstock with a feature in Rolling Stone, a performance on Carson’s The Tonight Show, a tour with Frank Zappa, an appearance in Grease (1978), and eventually, their own syndicated television program that ran from 1977 to 1981.

The History of Fifties Nostalgia While Fifties nostalgia was well established as a recognizable and marketable trend by the 1980s, the example of Sha Na Na at Woodstock reminds us that pop nostalgia did not spring forth fully formed from the head of Robert Zemeckis in 1985. Sha Na Na’s Woodstock appearance evidences the almost immediate re-emergence of the styles, symbols, and sounds of the Fifties (“Yakety Yak” was barely a decade old in 1969) in the middle of a festival that positioned itself as a rejection of the conformity and restrictive moral values that were popularly ascribed to the Fifties. What is most fascinating and important about Sha Na Na’s performance is not, as Guffey argues in Retro, that they articulated a new “Fabricated Fifties” that circulated in retro culture (106–07). Neither is it, as Marcus argues in Happy Days and Wonder Years, that Sha Na Na began the process of replacing “the beatnik” with “the greaser” as the dominant symbol of Fifties youth culture (30). The work of both scholars is valuable and has been immensely influential to me in thinking through this chapter and this book as a whole, and I do not wish to dismiss their contributions out of hand. However, my particular interest in Sha Na Na at Woodstock, and the pre-history of Fifties nostalgia for which they stand in, is less in how they represented the Fifties than when and where they did so. Sha Na Na offered nostalgic visions of the Fifties in the context of the Woodstock Festival, within very specific historical, cultural, and demographic conditions. The reason the band’s juxtaposition with Hendrix makes for such a delightful piece of trivia, after all, is because it is so unexpected—we associate Fifties nostalgia with the 1980s and the Reagan Right, not with the Flower Children of Woodstock Nation. This is the case because the Fifties have come to serve as the symbol of everything that the Sixties, at least in theory, were set against—racism, sexual repression, quietism, and so on. But just as Hendrix’s “Star-Spangled Banner” can be understood as a simultaneous reclamation and critique of “American-ness” for the Counterculture, Sha Na Na’s 50 Back to the Fifties performance in that specific time and place functions as another sort of reclamation and critique, of a different sort of Fifties. In the last chapter, I argued that despite its reputation, the pop nostalgia in Back to the Future and Reagan’s political rhetoric was fundamentally historical, reflecting political and social debates of the 1980s. I made the case that the Fifties nostalgia the New Right wielded was only one of many potential visions of the Fifties, each with its own political or social agenda. Fifties nostalgia must not be understood as a necessarily pernicious quality contained within bad ideological objects. Rather, as Linda Hutcheon argues, nostalgia “is what you ‘feel’ when two different temporal moments, past and present, come together for you … it is an element of response—of active participation, both intellectual and affective—that makes for the power” (199). Nostalgia is, in other words, influenced by discourses that surround the text at the moment of the encounter. The Fifties nostalgia prompted by Sha Na Na at Woodstock operated differently than the nostalgic visions of the Fifties woven into Reagan’s speeches. Sha Na Na’s countercultural audiences were encouraged to participate in the reshaping, revision, and reconsideration of the Fifties. Part of the fun of Sha Na Na came from audiences reclaiming the Fifties that existed in their own memories, and reconcil- ing those memories to their current political, cultural, and aesthetic values—just as Hendrix could use the national anthem to both affirm his American-ness (“I’m an American, so I played it”) and comment on the current political and cultural state of affairs in the United States (“We play it the way the air is in America today”). For fans of Sha Na Na, the recontextualization of Fifties rock and roll into avant-garde performance (Zappa called Sha Na Na “the freakiest group around”) produced nostalgic pleasures, even as it acknowledged the excesses and limitations of the era from which the band’s material sprung. Sha Na Na was not, it should be said, alone in mining this cultural territory. In Colorado, Flash Cadillac and the Continental Kids began playing fraternity parties with Fifties rock sets. Blues guitarist Johnny Winter recorded songs by B. B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, and Chuck Berry, while The Flamin’ Groovies put a proto-punk spin on the Fifties on their debut record, Supersnazz. This was not just a matter of music. Rolling Stone ran Fifties style and slang guides in 1969, followed by a pair of cover stories in Life and Newsweek on the re-emergence of the Fifties in the 1970s.2 In 1971, Peter Bogdanovich’s major directorial debut The Last Picture Show (an adaptation of a 1966 noel by Larry McMurtry), a somber portrait of small-town America on the wane, won massive political acclaim. In the same year, Don MacLean’s “American Pie,” a song that chronicled ten turbulent years in rock from the death of Buddy Holly to the tragedy at Altamont, spent four weeks atop the Billboard charts. Rereading “American Graffiti” 51 Meanwhile, the original version of Grease—not yet a musical—was produced at a small Chicago theater. If these were among the first instances of Fifties pop nostalgia, George Lucas’s cinematic elegy for Fifties youth culture, American Graffiti (1973), represents the point at which it leapt into the mainstream. Lucas’s film touched off what sociologist Fred Davis called a “nostalgia wave,” one in which the styles, images, icons, and sounds of the Fifties became not only reliably marketable but culturally powerful. Beginning with American Graffiti, Americans used the Fifties to redefine the United States in its recent past, contested present, and potential futures. Rather than a precursor to texts like Back to the Future, we must understand that, in 1973 at least, American Graffiti’s nostalgia was of an entirely different sort. Rereading American Graffiti offers us the opportunity to uncover the ways in which Fifties nostalgia was (and indeed, is) utilized to serve diverse and often competing political, social, and cultural ends. These uses of nostalgia exceed the models of Fifties nostalgia with which we are most familiar, and are linked to the specific circumstances (historical, aesthetic, commercial) that surrounded the film’s original production and distribution. This chapter’s first goal is to situate American Graffiti within those contexts. This is especially important for this film, because retrospective categorization and periodization has sometimes resulted in American Graffiti being positioned as a precursor to the “Blockbuster Era” in Hollywood and the rising conservatism of the New Right. There is, however, considerable reason to argue that American Graffiti was understood as part of the American “New Wave” in Hollywood, along with films like Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Five Easy Pieces (1970). As I show in this section, audiences in 1973 understood Graffiti’s nostalgia not as a retreat to the past, but rather as a rumination on the Fifties held in cultural memory. Of course, films do not stay in the year they are released. Scholars like Janet Staiger and Barbara Klinger have emphasized the importance of analyzing the ways that films acquire new meanings and associations as they move through time.3 As American Graffiti was recut and rereleased in multiple theatrical and home video formats, its nostalgia was literally repackaged, placing it in contact with other political and social values. This chapter concludes by considering the way that the film self-critically reflects upon the very nature of nostalgia. The affective pull of the film’s forms of memory creates a pastiche of the Fifties, in Richard Dyer’s sense of the term—a form of “knowing imitation” that allows for critical reflection on the imitated form. The film’s nostalgia draws attention to the consequences of being seduced by nostalgic visions of the past, and also emphasizes the historical conditions that motivate the longing for the good old days in the first place. Dyer’s 52 Back to the Fifties framework offers us an opportunity to consider the historicity of nostalgic affect, and the complex modes in which audiences indulged in it.

Critiquing Graffiti

In Back to the Future, 1955 serves as the pivot point for Hill Valley’s entire history. Similarly, at the end of the night depicted in American Graffiti, the fates of its seven young protagonists are sealed. The teenagers in Lucas’s film seem keenly aware of the weight of their futures on their present. Throughout the night, the main characters—Steve (Ron Howard), Curt (Richard Dreyfuss), Laurie (Cindy Williams), John (Paul Le Mat), Carol (Mackenzie Phillips), Deb (Candy Clark), and Toad (Charles Martin Smith)—approach the issues that they know will define their lives, with romanticism, trepidation, and some exuberance. Upon gaining stewardship of Steve’s car, Toad assures himself, “Tonight is going to be different.” The magic of the night allows him to transform from Terry the Toad, loveless nerd, to Terry the Tiger, the guy who can pick up the Connie Stevens look-alike, Deb. For Toad (as well as the rest of the gang), this night will be the last one in which such a transformation is possible. Some film critics and commentators might make the same argument about the function of Fifties nostalgia after American Graffiti—that it set the mold for a reductive, reactionary vision of the Fifties, one that Back to the Future could presuppose. American Graffiti’s immense commercial success and influence on pop nostalgia over the last thirty years has prompted some to locate the film as a turning point in Hollywood history and in cultural attitudes toward the Fifties. With its enormous box-office success (grossing over $115 million in North America alone), cross-platform exploitation, merchandising, spin-offs, and sequels, Graffiti can be positioned as one of the first modern summer blockbusters (Kilday). The pursuit of these box-office successes that could serve as the source for merchandising opportunities ushered in the era of “high-concept” multimedia film properties that would define American filmmaking in the 1980s. Justin Wyatt defines this era of -film making as dominated by film products shaped by industrial and economic impera- tives, and characterized by “an emphasis on style within the films, and through an integration with marketing and merchandising” (7). David A. Cook, in his history of 1970s Hollywood titled Lost Illusions, places American Graffiti in the chapter titled “Manufacturing the Blockbuster,” which chronicles the evolution of postclassical Hollywood’s reliance on mega-hit pictures (37). The rise of blockbuster filmmaking that followed American Graffiti as the beginning of the end for quality in Hollywood. As a 2003 book review in Cineaste blithely states, “American Graffiti is Rereading “American Graffiti” 53 a key film of the Seventies … because it launched the career of George Lucas. His bankroll and adolescent sensibility helped to make Hollywood the teenage waste- land it is today” (Rafael 83). Aside from decrying its aesthetic consequences, commentators have also critiqued American Graffiti as a cultural symbol of the emergent New Right. Pauline Kael, for example, argues that Graffiti presents a history that marginalizes and/or ignores the “Fifties experience of women, African-Americans, homosexuals, and others, leaving huge swaths of the population out of its vision, and lionizes their invisibility” (“The Current Cinema” 153). In “Postmodernism,” Fredric Jameson specifically names American Graffiti as the first “nostalgia film,” a cycle of representation which participates in the commodification of history, representing culturally the logic of late capitalism (66–67). For both critics and theorists, then, American Graffiti marks a turning point in the transformation of the Hollywood film from art to commodity. In this (flawed) understanding of Hollywood history, the films of New Hollywood are aligned with the politics of the New Left and deemed “progressive,” whereas nostalgia films of the 1970s and 1980s are presented as equivalent to the soulless blockbusters in Hollywood and corporate-driven politics of Reaganism. I want to be very clear on this point: my intention in this chapter is not to defend the marginalization of women and minorities in American Graffiti that Kael rightly critiques, nor is it to take issue with Jameson’s ultimate diagnosis that global capital transforms and manipulates cultural knowledge of history to perpetuate existing relations of production. I do, however, want to offer the reminder that our reactions to popular texts are always rife with complexities and contradictions. Just because an affective response operates one way in one instance does not mean it will do so in another, or that it has always done so. As we have already seen in the example of Sha Na Na at Woodstock, Fifties nostalgia—particularly as it emerged in the early 1970s—was not understood as fundamentally retrograde. Clearly, the economic success of American Graffiti paved the way for more pop-nostalgia films and records to enter the mainstream, and the New Right strategically utilized this “nostalgia wave”. Surely, in some cases this led to an understanding of history shaped more by retro stylings than material or historical realities. However, in recognizing these facts we must also resist the impulse to consider any single version of nostalgia as the natural or inherent one simply because it has become dominant. Pop nostalgia, like any other cultural formation, is capable of containing multiple and contradictory politics and values. Jane Feuer reminds us that, when analyzing popular media of the Reagan Era, “it is the contradictions that enable us to see what Stuart Hall and others mean when they characterize ‘hegemony’ as a struggle over meanings, a process that is always ongoing even when (as during the mid-eighties) it seems as if one side has won a decisive victory” (Seeing 54 Back to the Fifties Through the Eighties 16). The dominant political meanings of Fifties nostalgia attained a hegemonic status not on account of their inherent truth but rather as the result of complex networks of discourses that are historically and culturally contingent. In other words, the particular kind of nostalgia that Jameson critiques is not necessarily a product of the “nostalgia films” themselves. Rather, it is the product of a conditioned response to those films, a set of interpretive practices that emerged as the result of struggles over the cultural definition of the Fifties as a whole, and of Fifties teens in particular. As such, alternative readings of American Graffiti are not only possible but were widely available at the time of the film’s release. Jameson’s analysis citing American Graffiti as evidence of the incompatibility of postmodern aesthetics with genuine historicity is, after all, a reading framed by the discourses of nostalgia that surrounded the text in 1984, when Jameson first pointed to it—discourses that are not inherent to the film but historically and politically contingent. Many aspects of 1980s culture retrospectively influenced the way we read American Graffiti: the massive success of Star Wars, Reagan’s landslide re-election, the persistence of Happy Days after it had (literally) “jumped the shark,” Richard Dreyfuss’s performance as a writer (a grown-up Curt?) wistfully looking back to the Fifties in Stand By Me (1986), and countless other shifts in contextual ground.4 If nostalgia is more about the present than it is about the past, and if the “present” from which nostalgia is launched is ever shifting, the meaning of any particular nostalgia can never be a fixed one. That is to say, the historical and ideological conditions that influenced the watching of American Graffiti in 1973 were vastly different from those in 1984, when Jameson’s “Postmodernism” was originally published. Jameson’s 1984 analysis, in fact, has become part of the constellation of discourses that guides our own reading of the film today and directs our understanding of how Fifties nostalgia operates ideologically. The conditions of watching will continue to shift as new texts are brought into contact with the film, and as a result, our readings of it (and the history it presents) will continue to change. This does not mean that we cannot identify political and social values endorsed, transmitted, or circulating through particular texts. It simply means that the politics are not inherent or universal. The nostalgia that is present in American Graffiti can be—and has been—invoked to serve diverse and competing ideological purposes, whether it be the subject of celebration for Reaganites of the New Right, offered as the subject of critique over the phallocentrism of Hollywood by Kael, or reveled in by viewers who share a sense of loss of the Fifties—whatever form that loss might take. Still further, the assignment of any rigid ideological operation to American Graffiti (let alone to an entire body of “nostalgia films”) enacts new types of historical effacement. In particular, it elides the historically specific contextual discourses that surrounded American Rereading “American Graffiti” 55 Graffiti’s production and reception in the early 1970s. Playing the national anthem at Woodstock is different than playing it before a ball game. Sha Na Na opening for Hendrix is different than Sha Na Na’s syndicated variety show leading into the evening news. In this chapter, I want to challenge the assumption that American Graffiti can be read as belonging exclusively to either the Blockbuster Era in Hollywood or the Reagan Era in American culture or politics, and to focus on the years 1962 (the time of the film’s diegetic action) and 1973 (the year of the film’s initial release) as points of transition and transformation. Focusing on these particular years undoes the second order of “fixing” articulated in the first chapter, denying the presumed ontological differences between “Fifties,” “Sixties,” and “Reagan Era,” and focusing on the continuities and linkages among them. The second reason this chapter recontextualizes the film historically is in order to reconsider the nostalgia it prompted upon its original release compared to reissues and rereleases.

The New Hollywood Blockbuster The late 1960s were a period in which significant industrial and cultural changes in American filmmaking allowed space for new ideas about what commercial American narrative film could be. The shifts in economic, technological, ideological, and aesthetic aspects of Hollywood film from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s have been termed, in varying quarters, “the American New Wave,” “the Hollywood renaissance,” or “the New Hollywood.” Placing American Graffiti into the context of the “New Hollywood,” with all the ambiguities and complexities of that term, is important for understanding the degree to which the film (and the nostalgia it prompts) has been transformed through its various iterations in its theatrical and aftermarket releases. What does it really mean to call a film a product of the New Hollywood? Film studies has yet to reach any consensus on its definition. As Geoff King argues, “there is no agreement on an unambiguous definition of New Hollywood, or even that it exists” (1). Thomas Schatz uses the term to describe industrial conditions of the postclassical period that relied increasingly on the blockbuster; Robert Kolker focuses on the generation of American directors that moved into Hollywood from film schools in the 1960s and 1970s; and Todd Berliner focuses on narrative style of the period. Film critics and commentators, on the other hand, seemingly are more united in celebrating and romanticizing the period. Peter Biskind, in his bestselling Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, presents the New Hollywood as “the last time the community as a whole encouraged good work, the last time there was an audience that 56 Back to the Fifties could sustain it” (17). Such a depiction should not be accepted uncritically. Just as Reagan’s positioning of the Fifties provided a lens through which 1980s America might see itself, the lionization of New Hollywood also works to guide our understanding of contemporary Hollywood film as degraded or inauthentic, championing the “good old days” of Hollywood that (perhaps coincidentally) line up with the tastes and preferences of baby boomer critics and scholars. Alternatively, the term “New Hollywood” has been used to define the changing industrial conditions in American filmmaking, a new set of production and marketing practices that created what King describes as “the Hollywood of giant media conglomerates and expensive blockbuster attractions” (New Hollywood Cinema 3). Increasingly, precipitated by growing corporate ownership of film studios that brought a more rigid business structure to an industry that had aspirations of artistry and auteurism throughout the previous two decades, producers relied on saturation releases to maximize profits from a smaller output of films. Kael, the critic who most prominently championed the American New Wave, famously lam- basted this Hollywood business practice in a 1980 column, arguing that the new managerial structure in Hollywood was not only threatening to the aesthetic value of Hollywood films but also to the public interest (“The Numbers” 274). Film historians have largely characterized the Blockbuster Era along the same lines, explain- ing that it led to films that were “increasingly ‘fantastic’ (and thus apolitical)” (Schatz 29) and “linked historically with a reactionary backlash in American culture, especially in the years leading up to and during the Reagan administrations” (King, New Hollywood Cinema 8). Such assessments roughly align with accounts from film scholars like Justin Wyatt, Richard Maltby, and others.5 As the statements from Kael, Schatz, and King demonstrate, critics often consider the emergence of the Blockbuster Era in political terms. The same can be said for the New Hollywood. King describes the “American New Wave” or “Hollywood Renaissance” version of New Hollywood as “offering some degree of radical political potential, in both content and departures from classical style,” and understands those films as “a reflection of some of the radical currents in American culture in the period” (8). Clearly, these general associations are insufficient to understand the full complexity of both periods in Hollywood filmmaking. The style and substance of the American New Wave films can be linked just as legitimately to industrial changes and economic pressures (bulging youth demographics, fierce competition from television, the erosion of the Production Code, etc.) as it can be to the politics of the time. Similarly, the perceived social conservatism of the blockbuster can be understood as driven not merely by ideological commitment but also by economic prudence in a time when the single-screen arthouse was disappearing, requiring films to court Rereading “American Graffiti” 57 wider audiences and take fewer risks. One could argue all day over whether it is possible to politically characterize eras of commercial filmmaking, but regardless of the accuracy of such political associations (“New Wave = progressive,” “blockbuster = reactionary”), the efficacy of these distinctions on our understanding of films’ political and social meaning is immense. Because this sort of political shorthand is so prevalent in popular and critical discourses, cultural perceptions of American Graffiti’s artistic merit and (more importantly, for this study) the political function of its Fifties nostalgia are influenced as much by its placement in Hollywood history as by any reading of the film itself. Today, George Lucas is known as the emperor of the Star Wars galaxy, presiding over billions of dollars’ worth of films, spin-off television programs, animated specials, cartoon specials, breakfast cereals, playground equipment, video games, action figures, apparel, and countless other merchandising tie-ins. But in 1971, after his initial feature flopped, Lucas was just the “stinky kid” who tagged along with Francis Ford Coppola. Their rise from the rival graduate film schools of USC and UCLA to the heights of mainstream success was the result of a host of dramatic changes in the process and product of Hollywood filmmaking during the American New Wave in the 1960s and 1970s. The collaboration of Coppola and Lucas in forming American Zoetrope served as a symbolic and material attempt to establish a new mode of American filmmaking that would radically alter the Hollywood landscape and create artist-centered spaces free from the interference of the executives and managers that Kael would famously excoriate. American Graffiti, born out of the partnership between the two filmmakers, must be understood as part of this moment in Hollywood history. This is not an argument made arbitrarily. There is considerable evidence that at least some filmgoers in 1973 conceived of the film as part of a renaissance in Hollywood. A 1973 review in The New York Times, for example, called the film “the most important American movie since Five Easy Pieces, maybe since Bonnie and Clyde,” tying the film in with landmark films in the American New Wave. The review further pronounced it “a lasting work of art,” granting the film a legitimacy that might not be presumed today (Farber, “Graffiti” 1). Lucas first met Coppola on the Warner lot. He had originally intended to study animation, but when he arrived the animation division had been shuttered, leaving him to hang around the set of Coppola’s project, Finian’s Rainbow (1968). The two collaborated on Coppola’s next film,The Rain People (1969), a production of mostly film students with little financing or budget support. The crew set up an impromptu studio in an abandoned Nebraska grain silo—a space for collaborative filmmaking. In that spirit, Coppola, Lucas, and independent filmmaker John Korty would form American Zoetrope in San Francisco the autumn of 1969. The collaborative spirit upon which Zoetrope was founded was one of the driving 58 Back to the Fifties factors behind American Graffiti. In promotion for the film, Lucas said, “Francis is involved on all my pictures, and I’m involved on all his pictures. We more or less work together as collaborators. What we do is look at each other’s scripts, look at the casting, then at the dailies, at the rough cut and the fine cut, and make sug- gestions … we complement each other, and we trust each other” (Farber, “George Lucas” 4). Surely, linking Coppola’s name to the project on the heels of the massive success of Patton (1971) and The Godfather (1972) was partly promotion. But Lucas’s emphasis on the collaborative spirit of their relationship also portrays Graffiti as the product of a new kind of filmmaking. The vision of American Zoetrope (and of the New Hollywood in general) was to create new visions of American film. Speaking about the impulses behindAmerican Graffiti, Lucas positioned himself largely as an anthropologist: “When I was in junior college, my primary major was in social sciences. I’m very interested in America and why it is what it is … It’s really more interesting than primitive Africa or ancient New Guinea—and much, much weirder” (Farber, “George Lucas” 6). His unimpressive anthropological assessments aside, the very fact that Lucas would make such an argument in an interview designed to promote the film says something about how films (and filmmakers) positioned themselves at this historical moment. This emphasis is echoed in what is perhaps a film’s most important marketing device: its title. Studio officials wished to call the film Another Slow Night in Modesto, but the film’s production team held firm. As a title, American Graffiti not only highlights the centrality of the film’s American-ness but also frames the story as the trace of a lost civilization, the “graffiti” that is left behind and deciphered later. For Lucas and Coppola (as well as many of their audiences), the films that were part of the New Hollywood both functioned as artistically and commercially viable objects and told their audiences something about what it meant to be American. Just as Hendrix looked to reclaim and redefine the national anthem, or as Sha Na Na reclaimed and redefined music from the 1950s, American Graffiti works to reclaim and redefine the American Fifties.

The Writing on the Wall in 1973

By the time American Zoetrope began production on American Graffiti, the Counterculture’s energy had waned, and the country’s self-image had taken significant damage. Many of the films of the New Hollywood reflected this, -sug gesting that the American dream had lost its promise, or worse, had become a nightmare. American Graffiti, in its debut, was initially understood as part of this cultural moment. A 1973 review in Film Quarterly is illustrative of this, suggesting that American Graffiti’s Fifties nostalgia was not understood as a celebration of an Rereading “American Graffiti” 59 idealized era but a lament for the loss of American innocence: “American Graffiti is not just a checklist of Fifties memorabilia; it uses them to recapture the attitudes of the period, particularly the innocence that Vietnam, Oswald, hard drugs, birth-control pills, Nixon—the whole spectrum of Sixties shake-ups—would alter, perhaps destroy, forever” (Dempsey 58). In an interview, Lucas describes his intent in writing the film in similar terms: “I wanted to document the end of an era, how things change … and parallel that with what was going on in the United States at that time, in terms of the loss of innocence” (Bouzerau). We are accustomed to thinking about Fifties nostalgia as characterized by a romanticized vision of the Fifties, but Lucas’s film is no celebration. It’s mourning in America. “Innocence” is a peculiar term to append to the Fifties, particularly when it comes from a film that emerged out of the aesthetic and political atmosphere of the Bay Area in the 1960s. After all, the political upheavals of the Sixties, and the dominant themes of the cinematic output of the New Hollywood, were in many ways oriented toward uncovering the injustices and inauthenticities at the heart of the American experience, and debunking the values commonly associated with the Fifties. Yet, this sense of “innocence” may have less to do with an idealized social and moral order and more with recognizing 1962 as a moment when the fantasy of innocence was traumatically, but necessarily, shattered. This is made most plain in the development of the film’s primary figure of audience identification. About halfway through the film, Curt hitches a ride with his ex-girlfriend Wendy and her friend Bobbie. Curt is in search of the dream girl—who may or may not be imaginary—he spotted earlier in the evening. Wendy, needling Curt, announces loudly to Bobbie, “Did you know that my ex is going to become a presidential aide? It’s a secret, so don’t tell anybody, but his big ambition in life is to shake hands with President Kennedy.” Narratively, the line serves to reveal Curt’s desire to leave Modesto, the loftiness of his career aspirations, and perhaps a childish hopefulness that Curt wishes to conceal. For the film’s audiences, particularly those watching in 1973, the line operates on an additional register. They know all too well what Bobbie, Wendy, and Curt do not—that Kennedy will be assassinated the following year, which will usher the United States into a series of cultural and political upheavals. The 1973 audience knows precisely what’s in store for them: Vietnam, the Nixon presidency, Watergate and COINTELPRO, Kent State and Attica, tensions in the Middle East, and economic stagflation at home. The emotional impact of this realization for the audience is not only an appreciation of the charming idealism that Curt represents but also a painful recognition that, for them, those times are gone forever. This, more than the idealization of a fantasy version of history, is nostalgia in action. The pang of loss that is part of its affective impact can be directed toward many pursuits in the present. 60 Back to the Fifties For Curt, Wendy’s teasing simply represents a confrontation with his perhaps-naive optimism, and he is embarrassed enough to deny it. “Maybe I’ve grown up, maybe I’ve changed my mind,” he tells Bobby coolly. But his repeated “maybes” hint that Curt is less certain of his future than he was at the beginning of the night, when he had decided he would eschew his scholarship from an East-Coast coast college and stay in Modesto. Curt doesn’t know whether his fantasies of leaving his hometown to pursue his dreams are just kids’ stuff, or whether it is his relationship with Wendy that he really needs to grow out of. Significantly, the choice is still open to him. For audiences in 1973, immersed in news of Vietnam and Watergate, such choices seemed closed off, and ambition and optimism seemed much harder to come by. The decision of whether he will leave Modesto for college or stay at home is, in many ways, the film’s center. At the film’s outset, Curt insists he “just needs a little more time” with his beloved hometown, and it is easy to understand why. As Steven Farber writes in a 1973 review of the film, Curt’s hometown has an unde- niable appeal: “Cruising through town one summer night, a boy can see his old friends, meet glamorous or dangerous new people, experience just about everything […] from the sublime to the ridiculous. Why would anyone want to leave?” (“Graffiti” 8). The conflict in the narrative is coded as a problem of space. But it also functions as a question of time—will Curt seek to hold on to his (Fifties) past or boldly embrace his (Sixties) future? This temporal coding of space plays out in the film’s visual signifiers (roller-skating waitresses, hot rods, etc.) as well as its wall-to- wall rock soundtrack (which opens with 1955’s “Rock Around the Clock” and is dominated by songs released before 1959). For this tension to operate, however, the audience needs to understand why Curt would want to stay as well as why he must leave Modesto (and the Fifties) behind. The film is, in some ways, a story of Curt learning to let go of the past. This largely occurs through two key scenes in the film. The first is with his high school English teacher Mr. Wolfe, whom Curt finds -sur rounded by starry-eyed girls at the high school hop. Curt smiles when he sees him, and seems to feel a connection to Mr. Wolfe—as if he were the kind of intellectual figure that Curt idealized as a student. The two share physical similarities, and it is clear that they have a certain affection for one another. Mr. Wolfe slaps Curt on the back as he pulls him outside, and Curt takes great pleasure in being treated as an equal. The two steal a smoke outside the school gym, where Mr. Wolfe recounts his own experience leaving for Middlebury College after graduating high school.

Curt: Only stayed a semester? Mr. Wolfe: One semester. After all that, I came back here. Curt: Why did you come back? Mr. Wolfe: I decided I wasn’t the competitive type. I don’t know, maybe I was scared. Curt: Well, I uh—I think I may find that I’m not the competitive type myself. Rereading “American Graffiti” 61 The sympathetic bond between Curt and Mr. Wolfe is quickly shattered, however. Immediately after this exchange, someone interrupts the two. Someone calls out, “Bill?,” only to be revealed as a classmate of Laurie’s named Jane. Noticing her own breach in formality, Jane quickly adds, “Um, Mr. Wolfe? Can I speak with you a minute?” The exchange reveals to Curt that Mr. Wolfe’s relationship with girls at the dance has gone much further than flirting. Curt is taken aback and mut- ters a hasty goodbye, glancing back to see Mr. Wolfe speaking softly to Jane while strains of the 1959 hit “See You in September” become audible (chorus: “Will I see you in September / Or lose you to a summer love?”). This scene is significant not only because Curt’s esteem for a role model (a Wolfe in sheep’s clothing?) crumbles before his eyes but also because Curt glimpses a potential future for himself—and finds the prospect jarring. This scene provides one of the first indications that Curt’s Fifties youth was perhaps not so innocent (with lecherous teachers preying on high school girls) and gives the audience a hint that Curt might decide to leave (The last strains of the song incant “Bye bye, so long, farewell.”). Curt’s decision to leave is cinched in another scene, in which he meets iconic radio DJ Wolfman Jack, who is a sort of spiritual guide to the youth of Modesto. Local legends about the Wolfman abound in American Graffiti (as they did in Wolfman’s real-life role as a jockey for XERB). But what Curt finds in the radio station is not the hero of his imagination but a portly station manager plugging tapes into a control panel and eating Popsicles from a busted icebox. As the soundtrack plays the 1960 single “A Thousand Miles Away” (which might refer to the Wolfman’s real location, the whereabouts of Curt’s dream girl, or where Curt’s future lies), the station manager recommends that Curt “get his ass in gear” and go see the “great big beautiful world out there” rather than waste his youth in Modesto. Though the Wolfman is a hero to thousands, including Curt, meeting the station manager reinforces Curt’s understanding that there is no way for him to stay. After the meeting,

Wolfman Jack in American Graffiti. 62 Back to the Fifties Curt no longer views Wolfman as a god but, at best, an ordinary man trapped in a tiny mundane radio booth. Curt’s rebellious hero of Fifties rock is either a fraud or a prisoner. In these scenes, Curt experiences the pain of realizing that perhaps his Fifties paradise isn’t quite so perfect. If American Graffiti takes great care to not revel in its vision of the Fifties, what is the point of its nostalgia? Is it a nostalgic film at all? Considered in the context of its original production and reception, it becomes clear that the film is less about the Fifties than the consequences of the end of the Fifties, felt in 1973. Audience members watching Lucas’s idealistic teenagers in 1973 could not ignore what a generation of young Americans had endured since 1962. The film’s famous epilogue delivers yet another reminder. Just before the credits, the film presents a series of yearbook photos, each accompanied by text describing the fates of the four male main characters: “John Milner was killed by a drunk driver in December 1964. Terry Fields was reported missing in action near An Loc in December 1965. Steve Bolander is an insurance agent in Modesto, California. Curt Henderson is a writer living in Canada.” In other words, all of the young men that the narrative follows are destroyed, contained, or exiled—John by a car accident, Toad in Vietnam, Steve by the spiritual death of suburban conformity, and Curt banished to Canada, presumably as a draft dodger. Nearly everyone involved in the film’s production reviled the epilogue, but Lucas insisted it was necessary because, as he later said, “it puts the entire film in context” (Bouzereau). The context it provides makes a historical reading of the film not only possible but necessary. Cutting through the enchantment of the film’s presentation of Fifties teen culture, the epilogue reminds audiences of the costs that the class of ’62 had paid for the nation’s actions in the years between 1962 and 1973. In a 1974 Film Quarterly interview, Lucas reflects on American Graffiti as both a response to the stagnation of the New Left as well as a potential recuperation of the “American idealism” that existed prior to Kennedy’s assassination. The sense of an innocence lost that may be regained is clear in Lucas’s language:

It’s too easy to make films about Watergate. And it’s hard to be optimistic when everything tells you to be pessimistic and cynical. I’m a very bad cynic. But we’ve got to regenerate optimism. Maybe kids will walk out of the film and for a second they’ll feel, “We could really make something out of this country, or we could really make something out of our lives.” It’s all that hokey stuff about being a good neighbor, and the American spirit and all that crap. There is something in it. (Farber, “George Lucas” 8) Rereading “American Graffiti” 63 It might be tempting to read this sentiment as being in line with the current rhetoric coalescing around a need for “a return to American values.” That might be accurate, but perhaps not in the way Ronald Reagan would frame it. Sociologist and former Students for a Democratic Society president Todd Gitlin has recently argued that the New Left’s loss of momentum may have come from the its disengagement with national identity. Gitlin writes that far too often the political movements that grew out of the 1960s “relinquished any title to patriotism without much sense of loss” (135). In Lucas’s perspective, political burnout was inevitable when “kids in the last ten years have been beating their heads against the wall, and their brains and their blood are all over the pavement” (Farber, “George Lucas” 8). While it may be difficult today to characterize George Lucas as a politically engaged filmmaker, I argue that by linking the Fifties in particular, and “the American spirit and all that crap” generally, with the New Left/New Hollywood,American Graffiti allows its viewers a memory of where the Sixties came from—the Fifties ambition and idealism that Curt embodies. In this way, nostalgic responses to American Graffiti “un-fix” the Fifties, defining it not as a counterpoint but rather a prelude to the Sixties. The film complicates the popular understanding—which would become dominant in the Re-Generation—that the two decades were polar opposites. “Everybody looks at the fifties as complacent,” Lucas says in Farber’s interview, “but I look at the fifties as … an era of optimism, not complacency. It was the era of Martin Luther King” (“George Lucas” 8). After years ofStar Wars prequels and special editions, we might resist taking Lucas at his word. This is, after all, the same person who cannot decide whether Han or Greedo shot first at Mos Eisley. We might be understandably skeptical of his assessments of civil rights movements in the United States. But the very fact that Lucas would make rhetorical gestures toward reclaiming the protest spirit of the Fifties while promoting a film from the New Hollywood is significant. Most importantly, it reveals that the cultural meaning of the Fifties at the time of Graffiti’s release was up for discussion and not wholly defined by neoconservative politics. Lucas’s American Graffiti did not need to invent a new image of the Fifties—it needed only to call on the memories that already existed in its audiences’ minds. To wit: in his Chicago Sun-Times review of American Graffiti, Roger Ebert chose not to reflect on the film so much as his own memories. The legendary critic recalls specific details of his teenage life (cruising in his ’54 Ford, hamburgers at Steak ’n Shake, radio tuned to WLS), finally using those memories to ruminate on the condition of America in 1973:

When I went to see George Lucas’s “American Graffiti” that whole world—a world that now seems incomparably distant and innocent—was brought back with a rush of feeling that wasn’t so much nostalgia as culture 64 Back to the Fifties shock. Remembering my high school generation, I can only wonder at how unprepared we were for the loss of innocence that took place in America with the series of hammer blows beginning with the assassination of President Kennedy. (Ebert)

Ebert’s encounter with the past in American Graffiti offers him the opportunity to ruminate on the conditions of American society in the years after the film’s final scene. As I have argued, this was the dominant reading of American Graffiti upon its release and the meaning explicitly presented in promotional interviews. But Ebert’s response (which was typical of many of the film’s initial reviews) reveals the way the film produces emotional experiences (a “rush of feeling”) via the personal memories of its viewers.

The Wolfman’s Call

The memories that American Graffiti prompts may arise from its wall-to-wall rock soundtrack. These songs don’t merely provide setting and atmosphere (though they do of course feature the classic “Fifties” sounds—pre-British Invasion rock, R&B, and doo-wop—that help set a mood for the film of carefree, “innocent” youth). As Jeff Smith points out in The Sounds of Commerce, American Graffiti’s nearly nonstop use of pop music also utilizes a “system of extramusical allusions and associations activated by the score’s referentiality” (155). These extramusical associations, held in the memories of Graffiti’s audiences, open up interpretive possibilities that the film’s visual elements do not provide. For example, when Curt first spots his dream woman (Suzanne Somers), the 1956 hit “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” plays in the background. The selection of this particular song, rather than any of the innumerable songs from the era about falling in love, might suggest that Curt is the song’s titular “fool,” providing commentary on the scene’s action and Curt as a character. Further familiarity with the soundtrack might link Curt’s “foolishness” with his youth—“Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” was recorded by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, the doo-wop outfit made famous by Alan Freed. In their early days, The Teenagers relied heavily on Lymon’s soprano vocals, which communicated an innocence, precociousness, enthusiasm, and immaturity. These same qualities could be read onto Curt in this scene, and help to suggest that his dream girl is a figment of his romantic imagination. Smith argues that in Graffiti, “musical allusions serve to underline the subtext of a scene, offer critical commentary on a dramatic situation, or even foreshadow later developments in the narrative” (172) as well as help to provide “a convenient interpretive schema for the journalists and magazine critics who reviewed the film” (174). Rereading “American Graffiti” 65 Smith expertly analyzes the allusionary functions of many of Graffiti’s songs, and I will not attempt to recreate his work here. But I will point out that the “extramusical associations” and “interpretive schema” to which he refers are not limited to knowledge regarding the performers, albums, and genres of popular music. They also include the distribution methods of popular music. It is significant, I think, that American Graffiti begins with the sounds of radio. Before any images hit the screen, we hear someone surfing through the dial, finally landing on a clear channel just in time to hear the station identification “XERB! Su-per Gol-den!” Similarly, the soundtrack album for the film is constructed as a radio broadcast, with commentary by Wolfman Jack scattered throughout the double LP set. In this way, American Graffiti might draw on extramusical memories of a teenage radio monoculture, in which all the kids in town would hop into their cars and tune in to the same radio station. The fantasy of a singular, coherent, national “teen” culture became all the more appealing as proliferating FM radio, cable television, and decentralized suburban commercial development created more dispersed “niche” youth programming and youth (sub)cultures throughout the 1970s and 1980s. However, audiences with more specific memories of Fifties radio (particularly in California) might bring different extramusical associations to bear on the film’s radio opening. XERB, the radio station identified before the film’s soundtrack kicks in, is a vitally important institution in the history of American rock music. Located in Rosarita Beach on the Baja peninsula, XERB was one of the most important and influential “border blaster” radio stations in US history. These powerful AM stations based their operations in Mexico in order to circumvent US regulations while still targeting the US youth market. These stations were among the first to broadcast R&B records, and as such were enormously important to the popularization of rock and roll in the 1950s and 1960s. Outside the jurisdiction of American regula- tors, these stations often pushed the envelope in dealing with taboo sexual, political, or social issues, and thus laid the groundwork for some of the challenges to those taboos in the 1960s.6 XERB made Wolfman Jack a legend, partially because he represented an escape (spatially, aesthetically, and ideologically) from the restrictions of small towns like Modesto, and partially because XERB’s continental broadcasting radius tied far-flung fans together. These extramusical associations and their attendant interpretive schema are not fixed—they too move through time, and in the process new meanings for the film emerge. I confess that when I first saw American Graffiti (on VHS sometime in the 1980s) and heard its opening radio sound effects, I presumed that “Super Golden” was meant to suggest the “Golden Oldies” radio format that had gained significant market share a decade after the film’s release. I watched the film presuming that the radio tuning was a narrative frame, as if tuning the radio to an oldies station 66 Back to the Fifties had touched off memories for some invisible narrator who would be revealed at the film’s closing, as in a film like Stand By Me (1986). The reliance on personal memory, association, and allusion makes pop-nostalgia texts especially interesting subjects for diachronic reception study. As the associations (whether personal memories or textual points of contact) change around a pop-nostalgia text, the function of its nostalgia will change as well.

Packaging Nostalgia The film’s original promotional materials explicitly appeal to audiences’ personal memories of the Fifties. The direct address in the film’s tagline, “Where were you in’62?,” for example, presumes that the audience has memories that go back that far. More significant than the tag’s assumptions, however, are its implicit instruc- tions. It directs the audience to enter into the province of memory in preparation for the film. Unlike history, memory has no pretensions of comprehensive or objective truth. Memory is personal, affective, and impressionistic. Understood as memory, American Graffiti’s depiction of the past becomes legible as more than just “bad history.” Its self-reflexive evocation of the feelings of 1962 serves not as an escape or retreat but rather provides a context against which the present (and potential futures) can be understood. The nature of the memories that American Graffiti presupposes is reflected in the poster artwork by Mad Magazine’s legendary cartoonist Mort Drucker. Mad reveled in political satire through the 1950s and 1960s, and Drucker’s distinctive cartoon style would suggest that the film was not a simple celebration of the Fifties. Still further, the illustration and design of the poster suggest neither a linear narrative progression nor a single narrative center, but rather a deluge of memories in response to the question that the tagline asks. Each image from the film that the poster presents (Steve and Laurie embracing, the parking lot at Mel’s Drive-in, or the band at the high school hop) is taken out of its original context, as if the background to the memory has faded away. Like memories, the vignettes pile on top of one another and flow into and through one another, all working together to create a composite image. Moreover, the function of music in binding these images together, as represented graphically along the edges of the illustration, suggests the degree to which the disparate images are intertwined in memory. The poster brings to life the memories evoked by the question “Where were you in’62?” Moreover, the film’s theatrical trailer literally positions the viewer’s memories as activating the film’s action. The trailer begins with a first-person shot, looking down at a class of 1962 yearbook. A Wolfman Jack voice-over announces the American Graffiti theatrical poster. 68 Back to the Fifties film’s title. Immediately a hand (with a conspicuous wedding band—suggesting an adult viewer returning to the yearbook, not a kid taking it to the cafeteria) moves into the frame and opens the book to an image of a high school dance. As the tagline is displayed on screen, the image of the high school hop is reinforced by the song “At the Hop,” performed by Fifties revival act Flash Cadillac and the Continental Kids. As Wolfman Jack asks, “Where were you in’62?,” the camera tilts to the right (as if it were a tilt of the viewer’s head that accompanies an encounter with a long-forgotten photograph), then quickly zooms into the picture as if the viewer were irresistibly and suddenly drawn toward the images in the yearbook. This zoom is broken by a match cut to a shot of the dance, making it appear that the picture has suddenly sprung to life. The cinematography, as well as the repeated tagline (four times in the first forty seconds of the trailer), reinforces the role of viewer memory in the film. The trailer does not introduce viewers to the characters or plot but implores them to search their own memories and (as the yearbook suggests) their own historical archives in order to muster the affective power that enables the film’s operation. One’s engagement with the film is thus meant to be both personal and emotional. What American Graffiti offers, these promotional materials seem to suggest, is not “what it was like” to be in the Fifties. Where Back to the Future offers its viewers the opportunity to see what it would be like to travel in time, American Graffiti asked its original audiences to do their own personal time traveling, bringing with them their own personal memories of the moment of historical transition, from a

American Graffiti trailer: ’62 yearbook, opening the vault, encountering the past, and activating memories. Rereading “American Graffiti” 69 position once removed. Prompted by the film, audiences in 1973 could indulge in their own personal recollections of the Fifties, but they could not recapture that time. It was, and remains, irrecoverably lost. This is nostalgia: a productive, critical affective response to text and context. To be clear, it is not my intention to suggest that American Graffiti does not draw upon the same commonplace shorthand cues that Back to the Future and other pop-nostalgia texts rely on. Recognizable signs of Fifties-ness pepper Lucas’s film from the very first shot with its neon-sign style title card underscored by “Rock Around the Clock.” The soundtrack is wall-to-wall 1950s rock (as David Shumway points out, many of the songs chosen would likely not have appeared on radio in 1962), and the cars invoke the 1950s—Steve drives a’58 Chevy Impala, Falfa (Harrison Ford) a’55 Chevy 150, Laurie a laughable’58 Edsel Corsair, and Curt’s dream girl a ’56 Thunderbird. The film’s usage of Fifties signifiers (even those out of fashion by 1962) is readily apparent. However, we must also understand those signifiers’ meanings as culturally and historically contingent. In 1973,American Graffiti was presented as a personal, affective engagement with an America that seemed to have been lost. This was as much a function of the texts and contexts that surrounded the film in 1973 as it was a product of the film’s cars, songs, or visual style. Consider a text that literally surrounds the film more recently: the packaging of the American Graffiti/More American Graffiti “Drive-In Double Feature” DVD set. The box that contains the film is designed to evoke the Wurlitzer 1015 “bubble-dome” jukebox, a classic Fifties symbol. Without changing the text of the film itself, the packaging’s recontextualization of the film both disengages it from the particular historical moment of 1962 and alters the prescription for audience engagement with the film, erasing reference to affective memory and replacing it with a commodity of retro style. The jukebox packaging has little historical connection to the 1950s (The Wurlitzer 1015 was a product of the 1940s and was unable to play the 45 rpm records released in the 1950s without modification.). While the original poster art (featured on all previous video releases) evokes images from the film itself, the double feature boxed set reduces the film’s meaning (not to mention the sequel) to a symbol of “Fifties-ness” that is not even a product of the decade at all. The literal and figurative repackaging of the film no longer positions the film as an experience of personal memory but rather as an artifact of what Elizabeth Guffey calls “retro culture.” Describing how retro is distinguished from nostalgia, Guffey writes, “Where nostalgia is linked to a romantic sensibility that resonates with ideas of exile and longing, retro tempers these associations with a heavy dose of cynicism or detachment” (20). The jukebox in this case figures as an abstract symbol of “Fifties-ness.” Additionally, the imagery of a jukebox places the film’s music in a radically different context than the radio-centric presentation offered in 1973. Coin-operated jukeboxes 70 Back to the Fifties

Jukebox style: American Graffiti boxed set (left) and Wurlitzer 1015 (right). Credits: Image on right used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.01 license, http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/2.0/legalcode. Photo originally taken by Peter Dewit, available at http://flickr.com/people/faceme.

(Wurlitzer 1015 or otherwise) were stuffed with 45 rpm discs manufactured for the more pop-oriented singles market—a market that was more risk averse; less likely to feature Black artists in R&B, soul, and rock; and contained none of the banter or commentary that disc jockeys could provide (Garofalo 334). The radio, particularly “border blaster” stations like XERB, could push aesthetic, cultural, and political boundaries, and local disc jockeys largely determined the playlists. That is to say, for music fans in the Fifties, “border blaster” radio and jukeboxes represented radically different (and perhaps diametrically opposed) elements of popular music culture. American Graffiti’s initial release relied on the specificity of these distinctions, but the jukebox DVD packaging does not acknowledge them. In many ways, American Graffiti premiered as a New Hollywood film, but in its post-1973 circulation (along with its soundtrack albums, official and unofficial merchandising, sequel, and association with other pop-nostalgia texts) American Graffiti was repositioned as high concept. As the jukebox on American Graffiti’s DVD packaging has no diegetic referent (there are no jukeboxes of any kind in American Graffiti), the box appears to link the film to the ABC sitcom Happy Days, which prominently featured a jukebox in its opening title sequence and primary set. Bizarrely, the film that Jameson calls the “founding document” of the nostalgia film cycle requires quite a bit of translation and intertextual reference to fit into the category it has been reputed to have Rereading “American Graffiti” 71 created! The process of dislocation and relocation that the DVD box performs is not remarkable because it violates the original or “true” meaning of the film, or the Fifties that it invokes. Instead, the changing box art illustrates the power of extradi- egetic materials in positioning the film (and the forms of Fifties nostalgia that it prompts) within historically contingent patterns of representation. As Dyer argues, when a text’s meaning changes through time, “the text does not itself change … the words are what they are, but the perception of their significance and affect changes. Different periods and cultures see and hear different things in texts”Pastiche ( 54). Those “different things” are selected and emphasized in American Graffiti to create a self-reflexive, and self-critical, form of nostalgia.

Pastiche: Being John Milner However much these promotional materials might encourage us to remember the Fifties, the film explicitly warns viewers against attempts to recapture or relive the glory days. It is important, after all, that the film specifically positions itself in 1962, at the end of the Fifties. While the film might ask us to remember the Fifties, it has no illusions of going back—that time, the film very clearly shows us, has passed. Narratively, the film affirms Curt’s decision to leave the past behind. But his decision is not easy, nor is it meant to be—the Fifties in American Graffiti is not presented as a set of retro signifiers easily consumed and tossed aside. Instead, American Graffiti encourages a self-reflexive form of nostalgic affect, highlighting both the seductive appeal and dangerous consequences of living in the past. Richard Dyer’s “pastiche” is a useful concept in this context. Dyer argues that pastiche is a form of “knowing imitation” that selects and combines elements of culturally and historically recognizable texts styles, or symbols. Pastiches do so not to pass themselves off as the original, but rather to afford audiences the opportunity to engage in the affective experience of the object that is being imitated while also critically reflecting upon it. This understanding of pastiche breaks from other uses of the term in academic and cultural discourse, which have treated “pastiche” as something approximating a dirty word. Genette uses “pastiche” to signify simple and unreflective stylistic imitation (27). Jameson more forcefully denounces it as “a neutral practice of … mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction” (Postmodernism 65). By contrast, Dyer argues that pastiche represents a very specific kind of imitation, one that, unlike duplication or forgery, does not attempt to mechanically or decep- tively slip by the audience. Instead, pastiche signals its own process of imitation and highlights its relationship to that which it imitates. 72 Back to the Fifties The rhetorical value of pastiche is in its ability to engage in historically and culturally constructed emotional practices while simultaneously, and consciously, uncovering the machinery of their operation, revealing the ways that our affective responses to the world are contingent on historical, cultural, and political processes that often operate outside our field of vision. This concept is a valuable one for a rereading of American Graffiti, because it gives us a framework through which to think about the film’s use of nostalgia as neither a misreading of its narrative message nor mindless indulgence in maudlin emotion. The film does, in some ways, romanticize the Fifties, but it is clearly cognizant of the dangers of nostalgia. In fact, its bittersweet portrait of Fifties life may serve to illustrate the seductive pull, and destructive consequences, of always looking backward. American Graffiti inspires nostalgia by representing the alleged “end of innocence” (for both its characters’ waning childhoods and the country’s post-WWII consensus). These feelings should not be dismissed as mere sentimentalism but rather understood as shaped by the social reality of the early 1970s. The primary function of pastiche, according to Dyer, is rhetorical—it mobilizes a given “feeling” from the past in order to apply it to the present. Lucas’s stated intent to “regenerate optimism” with the film provides the motivation for Graffiti’s pastiche. Viewed as pastiche, Graffiti may not necessarily be only an exercise in forgetting (the material conditions of the Fifties; the exploitation of women, minorities, and working classes), as Kael or Jameson might argue. Those readings are certainly worth taking seriously. However, the film also might be understood as an exercise in remembering (the hope, idealism, and feeling of an America that has long since been lost). The formulation of memory, science has shown, is always engaged with the conditions of the present. Just as the civiliza- tions represented in Utopian fiction are less about practical possibilities than they are about imagining correctives to social problems, so too might pop-nostalgia texts help us feel the loss, and inspire the return, of particular values in the present. Dyer argues that pastiche “allows us to experience the fiction and the response to it while simultaneously indicating its shallowness and showing its illusoriness” and “that it is precisely by drawing close to what it critiques that it is able to convey more forcefully why that needs to be critiqued, namely, because it works” (Pastiche 163). Though American Graffiti has been fairly criticized for the form its nostalgia takes, its value as pastiche opens up a reading that is decidedly more complicated than simple “yearning for yesterday.” Graffiti highlights the danger of overindulgence in nostalgia by dramatizing nostalgia’s emotional appeal. The embedded critique of nostalgia can be found throughout the film, but is most dramatically embodied in the character of John Milner (Paul Le Mat). While trying to convince Curt of the wisdom of leaving Modesto, Steve blurts out, “Do you want to be like John? You can’t stay seventeen forever.” This is a line Rereading “American Graffiti” 73

John Milner, Fifties style. highlighted in the trailer, suggesting its importance to the film as a whole, and the importance of John as a point of reference for the rest of the film’s characters. Though he is only twenty-two years old, he seems to be of an entirely different generation than the rest of the kids in the film. His costume and hair reinforce this. He is made up entirely in the Fifties mold—ducktail haircut, pack of cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve of his white t-shirt, and a souped-up ’32 Deuce coupe. Though he is older than the rest of the gang, he shows no real interest in growing up. “You go on ahead!” he yells to Curt. “I’m stayin’ right here. Havin’ fun! As usual!” But from his sullen demeanor it seems clear that John is having less fun than he used to. Everything about John, from his clothes and his hair to his car, seems a little out of place among the class of 1962. A pack of girls thinks his Fifties style is a joke, and they trick him into taking kid sister Carol (Mackenzie Philips) as a surprise babysitting assignment. When Carol enthusiastically takes charge of the radio (“Don’tcha think The Beach Boys are boss?”), John again reveals his dissatisfaction with the changes that are surrounding him: “I don’t like that surfin’ shit. Rock and roll’s been goin’ downhill ever since Buddy Holly died.” In this exchange, which echoes the aforementioned scene with Curt and Wendy, the audience knows something that John does not—that The Beach Boys (and eventually The Beatles) are set to transform popular culture and usher in the Sixties. John blames his sense of decline on his environment: “The whole strip is shrink- ing!” Of course, John knows that it is not the strip but his tastes, values, influence, and efficacy that are on the wane. While he is something of a Modesto legend, the envy of all the drag racers, he also knows that his time as king of the road is running short. Like Curt confronting a possible future in Mr. Wolfe, Milner takes Carol to the junkyard, visiting the former hot rod champs that were destroyed by drag races. “That’s Freddy Benson’s ’vette. He had a head on collision with a drunk,” he tells Carol. “It’s pretty grim when a guy gets it and he’s not even his own fault.” 74 Back to the Fifties Mortality is clearly on Milner’s mind throughout the film. Falfa, the stranger in the black ’55 Chevy with a skull hanging from his rear view mirror, clearly functions as a harbinger of John’s death. In the film’s climactic drag race, Milner wins, but only because Falfa rolls his car. Milner lives to race another day, but he knows his time is limited. “I was losin’,” he solemnly tells Toad. Yet Milner seems incapable of moving on. While he knows that racing will lead to his destruction he seems to have nothing else to look forward to, and no other options but to relive his high school adventures. So he keeps racing, and as we learn from the epilogues, he’ll die behind the wheel. His nostalgia is rendered as almost classically tragic. John is perhaps the most appealing character in the film precisely because he exemplifies many of the iconic virtues of heroes of his era. His looks, hair, car, and clothes all reference the teen rebels that came to serve as America’s vision of itself in the 1950s as anti-authoritarian, self-made, honest, principled, and free from creep- ing conformity. But despite John’s genuine appeal, his waning influence and assured destruction certainly show the psychic and material danger of living in the past. The sympathetic connection the audience has for John is precisely why his inability to move into the future is so heart-wrenching, and why the film’s critique of nostalgia is rendered so important. The film’s depiction of the Fifties as represented in the idyllic small town of Modesto works in precisely the same way as its compassionate critique of John Milner. True, the real material history of 1962 was never “innocent,” as Kael and others have argued. And one could, of course, critique nostalgia by simply showing that its idealized version of the past does not stand up to rigorous historical scrutiny. But, as Dyer argues, “if we don’t get inside the feelings of culture and values that we find problematic, we risk not understanding them and alienating ourselves from those who do respond to them. Then critical cultural politics runs the risk of being irrelevant and impotent” (Pastiche 168). In order to honestly engage with the social and political implications of Fifties nostalgia in 1973, American Graffiti must acknowledge the allure of Fifties nostalgia, even as soon as 1962. The way the film pastiches the Fifties forces viewers to experience the longing for that “simpler time” (even as it depicts that time as lost forever, if it ever existed at all). In the end, the film acknowledges the appeal and value of nostalgia, while simultaneously warning of the dangers of overindulgence in it. The only way out, as the film’s ending shows, is forward.

Forward to the Future

American Graffiti is an example of pop nostalgia that utilizes the past to critically engage with the present. It also reflects on the dangers of overindulging in Rereading “American Graffiti” 75

Curt turns away from his high school past. retrospection. This is perhaps best articulated by a single, silent shot from the film’s first act. Just before his conversation with Mr. Wolfe, Curt wanders the hallways of his old high school aimlessly, on one last trip down memory lane. Then, as if out of habit, Curt turns to a locker and smiles—it’s his old locker. He turns the dial right, left, then right again, giving it a confident pull. But when he tries to lift the handle, Curt finds that the combination has been reset. He smiles, shrugs, and moves down the hallway. Cinematically, this scene is rather inconspicuous. The camera movement is minimal, and the sparse action occurs in one unbroken shot. There is no dialogue, and it is one of the only scenes in the film without audible pop music on the soundtrack. In short, not much happens. But it is also a scene in which Graffiti reminds its viewers that there is simply no way back to the Fifties. Curt “can’t stay seventeen forever” because the locks have already been changed, the locker reassigned to a new student who will take his place. But with those doors no longer open to him, new opportunities await. That doesn’t mean the walk down the hall was useless—Curt needs to deal with the emotional challenge of leaving but also face up to the painful reality of the impossibility of staying. American Graffiti’s treatment of the past works in a similar way. The film turns back to the Fifties for comfort during troubling times, takes stock of the values and spirit that may have been lost along the way, and stoi- cally affirms the necessity of moving on. Every other character in the film remains in Modesto. Curt is the one to leave, and we, the audience, leave with him. The film closes with Curt leaving his friends and climbing on a plane emblazoned “Magic Carpet Airlines” (suggesting that Curt is about to take a ride on the Counterculture). The plane ascends into the sky with Curt watching out the window as the white’56 Thunderbird cruises out of town. The epilogue appears with only the drones of the engines as accompaniment. The 76 Back to the Fifties epilogue holds for a moment and finally gives way to the end credits cued to the sound of The Beach Boys’ “All Summer Long.” Interestingly, this song is the only anachronistic one that appears on the soundtrack, as it was released in 1964. The song’s appearance at the end of the film’s visual text pushes the film’s viewers out of 1962 and further into the Sixties. As the only song in the soundtrack that does not have to compete with dialogue or visual action, the lyrics are allowed an extra emphasis. The song’s refrain, “Every now and then we hear our song / We’ve been having fun all summer long / Won’t be long ‘til summer time is through,” not only comments on the end of Curt’s final summer of his childhood but also serves as a fitting summary for the film’s attitude toward the Fifties—fun while it lasted, but ultimately a time that must end. Like the film that precedes it, the lyrics of “All Summer Long” enjoy the pleasures of nostalgia while recognizing its limits (“Won’t be long until summer time is through”). American Graffiti warrants the attention of anyone attempting to understand how nostalgia operates in popular culture, and not only because it represents a “point of origin” for the Fifties nostalgia wave. More importantly, the film’s production, circulation, and reception reveal that the ideological and cultural work of nostalgia is not inherent to the text, is subject to change over time and in new contexts, can be critical and self-reflexive, and can be directed toward progressive social change. Prompted by both filmic and musical elements,American Graffiti’s nostalgia is enriched by extratextual knowledge and associations that the industrial and technological conditions of the Re-Generation made possible. The relationship between popular music and Hollywood film would only become more intertwined as the 1970s moved on, and the evolution of that relationship further complicated the cultural fascination with the Fifties that American Graffiti heralded. The use of the songs, artists, and production styles of Fifties rock and roll in the films of the Reagan Era, and the influence of Hollywood’s Fifties nostalgia on the shifting meanings of pop music (of both the 1950s and the 1980s) are the focus of the next chapter. 3

“OLD TIME ROCK AND ROLL”

ON RE-GENERATION SOUNDTRACKS

In addition to enjoying massive success with critics and at the box office, American Graffiti also served as a prototype for mobilizing and marketing previously recorded popular music in, and through, Hollywood film. The double LP soundtrack American Graffiti, released in August 1973 by MCA (Universal’s parent company) spent forty-one weeks on the Billboard charts, and was eventually certified triple platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). MCA went back to the well in 1975 with another double LP soundtrack, More American Graffiti (not to be confused with the 1979 film sequel of the same name). In addition, there were multiple reissues on 8-track, cassette tape, and compact disc, as well as a slew of unofficial spin-off compilation albums. Graffiti’s soundtrack albums exemplify the changing status of the soundtrack album in the economic and industrial practices of high-concept Hollywood, even as it had originally emerged as a product of the earlier New Hollywood era. Pauline Reay points out that high-concept Hollywood was essentially “a mix of music, marketing and cinema” (93), and American Graffiti’s circulation throughout the 1970s and 1980s shows the extent to which that mix could provide long-term commercial success for an unproven director’s low-budget film with no stars and an odd narrative structure. As corporate media conglomerates took control of film studios throughout the 1970s and 1980s, they began to leverage their holdings in the music, publishing, merchandising, and broadcasting industries to transform films into highly profitable cross-platform properties. As a

77 78 Back to the Fifties result, film soundtracks with previously recorded pop music, once considered innovative in the context of the New Hollywood, became an integral commercial element of Reagan-Era filmmaking practices. In his important account of high-concept film production, Justin Wyatt suggests that filmmaking in this period was defined by “an integration with marketing and merchandising” (7). Collaboration between the film and music industries was particularly vital in high-concept Hollywood, as it could serve as both marketing strategy and merchandising product. In fact, “synergy,” one of the prime buzzwords in corporate board rooms of the 1980s, was specifically coined to describe the relationship between film studios and record companies in “a multimedia marketing campaign that benefits all the players” (Denisoff and Plasketes 257–58). A soundtrack album generates interest in its associated film, and the film reciprocates by promoting the soundtrack album and the artists featured on it. The 1980s emergence of MTV (Music Television), the cable television channel that rescued the record industry from a protracted swoon in sales, also offered another platform for media conglomerates’ cross-promotional strategies. The synergistic practices became so dominant that Marianne Meyer reduced it to the simple mathematical equation: “movie + soundtrack + video = $$$” (168). Accompanied by popular music videos, compilation soundtrack albums for Flashdance (1983), Footloose (1984), and Top Gun (1986) became some of the best-selling records of the decade. The next chapter has more to say about the rise of MTV, but this chapter centers on the persistence of Fifties music in the pop soundtracks of Re-Generation teen films. The rise of the soundtrack album, presaged by the massive success of soundtracks for American Graffiti, Grease, and Saturday Night Fever (1977) not only represented cross-promotional achievements for media conglomerates but also provided opportunities for audiences to make intertextual connections between and among sounds and images, singers and actors, and album and film narratives. These kinds of connections generated extra layers of meaning to both the film and musical experience. Jeff Smith argues that the Fifties sounds on American Graffiti’s soundtrack allow it to utilize “vast associational networks of spectatorial memory and affect” The( Sounds of Commerce 176). These memories and affects are unpredictable—for example, an audience member’s negative personal memories associated with The Flamingos’ “I Only Have Eyes for You” can affect how that person experiences the scene in which Terry and Debbie kiss. As a result, that individual might have a different read on Terry and Debbie’s relationship, the characters themselves, or the film as a whole than other viewers have. Film soundtracks can add information, set atmosphere, or offer commentary on the narrative action of each scene by triggering meanings that can be wholly inaccessible and even unimaginable to a film’s production team. At Re-Generation Soundtracks 79 the same time, soundtracks can also play on the cultural meanings associated with particular songs, albums, artists, genres, or periods of pop music history. The sound of so-called girl groups can, in some cases, suggest a pre-rock cultural moment, even though girl groups like The Supremes existed alongside iconic rock acts like The Beatles. A soundtrack thus might operate as what Smith calls “a hermeneutic filter” that allows audiences with knowledge of popular music to extract additional or alternative meanings from a film. Smith explains:

On one level, an audience of uninformed viewers may interpret the song as background music pure and simple. As such, they may make judgments regarding the overall style and its appropriateness to considerations of setting, character, and mood. However, an audience of informed viewers will recognize the song’s title, lyrics, or performer, and will apply this knowledge to the dramatic context depicted onscreen. In such a way, musical allusion also serves as an expressive device to either comment on the action or suggest the director’s attitude toward the characters, settings, and themes of the film. (Smith Sounds of Commerce 168–69)

Such “insider knowledge” requires not only familiarity with the artists, genres, styles, and history of popular music, but also an understanding of the cultural significance of the music in relation to the onscreen action. These meanings hinge on the way popular music is situated among other texts in popular media (music videos, compilation albums, album art, other adjacent texts, etc.). The songs on American Graffiti’s soundtrack were also transformed by their appearance in the film and on the soundtrack album. Consequently, the 1950s music packaged as “oldies” appearing on Re-Generation soundtracks participated in the redefinition of the meaning of Fifties pop music, and by extension, the Fifties as a whole. An instance of this redefinition occurs in a joke in Back to the Future, when Marty performs “Johnny B. Goode” at a high school dance. The punchline occurs when we discover that Marty’s performance rewrites history, as the bandleader Marvin Berry calls his cousin Chuck to relay to him “that new sound you’ve been looking for.” The Re-Generation reinvents rock and roll in Back to the Future, placing the white suburban teenage male at the forefront of rock (and relegating the Black musicians and social conditions that actually produced it to the background). Marty’s bodily performance of Chuck Berry’s signature dance movies is especially important here, as Marty’s body becomes the site at which a radical recontextualization of rock music is accomplished. Of course, the humor in this scene depends on the viewer knowing that Chuck Berry was an important 80 Back to the Fifties innovator in the history of rock and roll. At the same time, the history of Golden Oldies had at its core precisely this form of racial substitution. The Re-Generation in this way ventriloquizes Fifties forms using the body of the white bourgeois teen to contain, and reframe, forms of rock and roll (and its powers of racial contagion) that were considered dangerous and potentially revolutionary in their original reception. Many teen-centric films of the Re-Generation that engage in pop nostalgia are diegetically located in the Fifties—Porky’s (1982), The Outsiders (1983), and Stand By Me (1986), just to name a few. But in many other teen films, the Fifties is invoked not within the narrative but on the soundtrack. These films enable nostalgic affect even without visually representing the past. This chapter analyzes the nostalgia prompted by these films and their soundtracks. In contrast to previous chapters in which I have structured my analysis around one central film, here I consider the varying ways that oldies—as a radio format, genre, and cultural category—served as a crucial pop-nostalgia intertext for several teen films of the Re-Generation, and how these films used their soundtracks to mobilize, invoke, or draw on nostalgic visions of the Fifties. Analysis of pop nostalgia on Re-Generation film soundtracks and radio formats reveals the proliferation of multiple and competing meanings of the Fifties in the Reagan Era. These films and their soundtracks revised the cultural understanding of Fifties pop, R&B, and rock and roll, recontextualized in the form of Golden Oldies. In particular, I give close attention to the placement (and displacement) of racial and sexual politics on these soundtracks, and within the discourses that repackaged Fifties music. After—and because—oldies became pop-nostalgia texts of a particularly potent cultural status, they were mobilized in Re-Generation film soundtracks to multiple and sometimes contradictory effects. This chapter first charts the rise of “oldies” as a term and “Golden Oldies” as a radio format in the context of historical and industrial changes to the recording and broadcasting industries in the twentieth century. When “broadcasting” began the transition to “narrowcasting,” and “mass culture” morphed into “niche programming,” oldies became a way of targeting a very specific market demographic. As disco, glam, new wave, and hip-hop all challenged the hegemony of the rock form and the privileged position of the white bourgeois male, pop music of the Fifties (taken outside its original historical and cultural context) was repurposed as “Golden Oldies,” music of “simpler times.” The struggle to defend rock’s dominant position in the pop music landscape and the effort to concentrate political and cultural authority in the body of the white male were intertwined. Re-Generation Soundtracks 81

Inventing Oldies

The term “oldie,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was rare until the twentieth century. It seems to have originally referred primarily to aged people, but the word gained an association with the dated but still-beloved cultural artifact (the “oldie-but-goodie”) in the 1930s. By mid-century, “oldies” was a popular but loose term that was applied to all manner of referents at different stages in their cultural circulation. In one 1943 issue of Billboard, for example, “oldies” was used to refer to audience members at a Ted Lewis nightclub performance (“Lindy Seers Wrong”), the Hollywood films available to Soviet moviegoers (“Jive on Up-Beat”), segments of a vaudeville performance (“Vaudeville Review”), and a sheet music collection (“Warner Pubs”). Jokes, books, dances, films, dramatic performances, songs, and the people that performed or enjoyed them could all be called “oldies.” Today, we think of “oldies” primarily as referring to music. This is largely a result of the internal logic, and resultant lingo, of the radio broadcasting business, which I will attempt to briefly (and crudely) summarize here.1 Music has, of course, been a feature of commercial radio broadcasting since its inception. The rise of television in the 1940s and 1950s as the dominant news and entertainment medium in the United States, however, dramatically increased the radio’s reliance on music. As producers, performers, and programs fled radio broadcasting for the exploding field of television, radio turned increasingly to prerecorded music rather than live performance. Reebee Garofalo points to the moment when “WINS in New York announced in 1950, over the strong objection of the American Federation of Musicians (AFM), that it would be programming records exclusively from then on” as a turning point for both the radio and record industry (336). In the wake of this, the music industry, slowly shifting from an emphasis on sheet music publishing to the sale of records, found common purpose with radio. Columbia and RCA had in the late 1940s transitioned into the production of 33 1/3- and 45-rpm records on vinyl, which were more durable and easier to ship than shellac 78 rpm records. This provided the opportunity for a more vibrant consumer market for records—if they could get adequate promotion. To encourage the rise of recorded music on radio, record companies routinely supplied free copies of new releases to DJs in the hope that they could turn them into hits. Record companies would provide radio stations with material for their broadcast (for fees negotiated by copyright holders). In return, radio stations would provide the record companies with promotion, “breaking” new artists to increase album sales and performance royalties for jukebox plays on the 45-rpm singles market. 82 Back to the Fifties Faced with increasing competition from other broadcasters, an explosion in recorded music available for broadcast, and hours of dead air to fill, radio stations had to decide how to choose what music to play. Record companies and radio broadcasters both had an incentive to privilege new records and new artists. This emphasis increased in the early 1950s. According to industry legend, radio station operator Todd Storz observed patrons in an Omaha diner play the same songs on the jukebox again and again, then noticed that the waitresses happily selected the same songs after their shifts were over (Fong-Torres 38). Inspired by this, Storz pioneered the “Top 40” radio format, in which DJs presided over a regimented “playlist” of the most popular songs, interspersed with new records that the station would integrate into the list or quickly jettison. Storz’s stations in Nebraska and later New Orleans became wildly successful, and the format became the standard on AM radio (Hall, “FM Protects”). Top 40 was particularly effective at capturing the teenage market and provided a space for certain forms of doo-wop, R&B, and rock and roll to flourish on the radio. Unlike the highly specialized radio formats with which we are now familiar, Top 40 was not segmented by genre or style. As E. Alvin Davis explains, Top 40 offered “an amalgam of tastes and styles and represented a variety of music” from Fats Domino to Dean Martin to the Singing Nun (1750). In the age of Top 40, “oldies” was used as a term within the radio broadcasting industry for any record that was not categorized as a new release. In this way, oldies have been a fixture on commercial radio for longer than rock and roll has been. Porky Chedwick, legendary DJ on Pittsburgh’s WAMO, began spinning his “dusty discs” on the airwaves in the late 1940s, which gained him the title of “the first bona fide oldies DJ in America” (Weigle 48). “Oldies” in this context did not signify any indulgence in nostalgia but rather a specialization in particular musical eras, genres, or styles outside of the Top 40 singles—in Chedwick’s case, R&B records. The fact that individual programs like Chedwick’s stood out by providing space for older records illustrates how radio programming privileged new releases. Innovations in market research, as well as modifications from influential station managers like Gordon McLendon in Texas, Rick Sklar in New York City, and Bill Drake in California, only intensified the rationalization and disciplining of pop music on the radio. In the 1960s the association of “oldies” with pop music of a prior era began to solidify. Decca released a compilation album in 1960 called Golden Oldies that featured songs by Bill Haley, Bobby Darin, and The Crickets. Los Angeles doo-wop group Little Caesar and the Romans had a hit single with “Those Oldies (but Goodies) Remind Me of You” in 1961. In 1964, Scepter released The Shirelles Sing the Golden Oldies, featuring several doo-wop standards from the 1950s. In the following year the Howard Theater in Washington, DC, hosted a “Golden Oldies Re-Generation Soundtracks 83 Cavalcade” featuring groups like The Orioles, The Five Keys, and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Major radio stations (like WGN in Chicago and WOR in New York) began programming Golden Oldies radio hours in the mid-1960s, and radio stations transitioning to a full oldies format soon followed. Golden Oldies emerged as radio format in response to industrial and technological changes in radio broadcasting, in response to the dominance of Top 40 programming, and as a reaction to the transformation in the sound of rock music. Beginning in 1967, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) began enforcing regulations that severely limited the practice of simultaneous broadcasting of the same programming on AM and FM stations. Just as the proliferation of available channels on ultra high frequency (UHF), cable, and satellite television allowed for more and more narrowly defined TV channels, the opening of the FM dial encouraged station managers to use market research and demographic targeting to specialize in particular musical styles or genres. This was especially true for smaller stations that could not compete with the larger and better established AM stations in major markets. Oldies was but one response to this push to specialize—small FM stations tried jazz, classical, or Caribbean music, or attempted to distinguish themselves from their AM counterparts by employing all women DJs before moving to the oldies format (Gent 39). Oldies became a reliable strategy to target an older, more affluent audience, however (Davis 1749). Bill Weaver, then of Santa Ana’s KWIZ, told Billboard that his inspiration for innovat- ing the oldies format was that “in Top 40 radio I saw all of the business we were los- ing, that I couldn’t touch, because our programming didn’t fit. Or we didn’t reach the right demographics. The beauty of an oldies format is that we get the important age groups and almost nothing below 18 years old and very little above 49 years old” (Hall, “Weaver to Consult” 27). Weaver’s oldies format worked on a strict rotation process: a DJ would play a song from 1950–1955, one from 1956–1960, and one from 1961–1965, followed by a new record. Smaller record labels and publishing houses began to see the benefits of oldies as well—by providing free or cheap oldies records (or in some cases sending syndicated oldies programming) to radio stations, publishing houses and labels could goose back-catalogue sales, drive performance royalties, and encourage new mechanical royalties through rerecordings and cover versions (“A-R Giving DJs 1st-Class Servicing” 32). By the early 1970s—with the success of Richard Nader’s revival tours, bands like Sha Na Na, and soundtrack albums like American Graffiti’s—entire stations began converting to a Fifties format. In 1972, The New York Times identified Golden Oldies as the hot new programming trend in radio, with stations like WCAS in Boston, WCAU in Philadelphia, WIND in Chicago, WCBS in New York, and KUUU in Seattle increasing their market share with the help of 84 Back to the Fifties music from the Fifties. The Times attributed the change to oldies being a “rejection of the heavy social messages in many modern lyrics,” a signal of “another cyclical dry spell in popular music creativity,” and a business practice designed to help an aging rock audience to “forget its problems and return or at least recall those happy high school times—the prom, no wars, no riots, no protests, the con- vertibles at the drive-in” (Malcolm 21). There were also considerable economic incentives driving the expansion of the oldies format. The 1971 Sound Recording Amendment passed by the US Congress left records released prior to 1972 outside of federal copyright law. This meant that stations playing oldies records did not need to pay royalties to performers, only music publishers. By 1979, even punk rock icons The Ramones were waxing nostalgic, recording with Phil Spector for their album End of the Century and releasing a single, “Do You Remember Rock ’n’ Roll Radio?,” that paid tribute to girl groups and Alan Freed.2 By the early 1980s, many stations had transitioned to all-oldies formats, with a particular emphasis on Fifties music, as well as Motown, surf-rock, pre-leisure-suit Elvis, and pre-psychedelic Beatles—in other words, records that reinforced the “good times” sensibilities of the Fifties “Hill Valley” fantasy, even if they were produced in the 1960s.

Cross-Generational Affiliations Popular music scholars have long identified the formation of group identity as one of rock’s primary functions. Much of this work is premised on the notion that consumption of rock music precipitates subcultural formations, wherein “rock rests on an ideology of the peer group as both the ideal and the reality of rock communion” (Frith, Music for Pleasure 213). This, as entertainment executives well know, makes rock music an especially potent tool for the purposes of directed and targeted marketing. Similarly, David Shumway argues that in the first Hollywood films to utilize wall-to-wall rock soundtracks, “the most important effect of the music is not to provide commentary … but to foster generational solidarity” (38). Contemporary audiences of films like The Graduate (1967) and Easy Rider (1969), claims Shumway, were encouraged by the soundtrack “to identify with the film’s protagonists and with ‘our’ generation, whom they are supposed to represent” (38–39). If, as Shumway suggests, rock music in Hollywood films creates a sense of generational identity, it follows that soundtracks might direct that generational identification within a film’s narrative borders (encouraging viewers to identify with particular characters, for example) or within a system of intertextual social and cultural meanings (e.g., marking a film as “Countercultural” or “Gen X”). Re-Generation Soundtracks 85 In the Reagan Era, courting the generational affiliations of the “MTV Generation” became a lucrative business. This is the era when Pepsi branded itself “the choice of a new generation,” after all. The multimedia conglomerates that controlled most US film and music production used every tool at their disposal to appeal to the valuable youth market. Soundtracks were one of these tools. As Stephen Prince describes it, “during the eighties, the majors targeted a core audience that could be reached simultaneously through film and pop music” (133). While Prince (and others) have illuminated the way new music was sold to Re-Generation teens through film soundtracks, it’s important to note that old (or oldies) music was sold through these same channels. Soundtracks from pop-nostalgia films like Animal House (1978), Diner (1982), and Stand By Me (1986), as well as rock biopics like American Hot Wax (1978), The Buddy Holly Story (1980), and La Bamba (1987), featured music that directly appealed to the listeners of oldies radio. As I argue in Chapter Two, a significant portion of the audiences for these films were—and are—able to draw on their personal memories of the 1950s and bring them to bear on their response to both film and soundtrack. However, oldies do not appear exclusively in films that are easily identifi- able as nostalgia films. Rock music from before the British Invasion played on soundtracks of science-fiction offerings likeWeird Science (1985) and Teen Wolf (1985), mainstream comedies like Caddyshack (1980) and Stripes (1981), and action blockbusters like Top Gun (1986). Oldies even inspired the titles of Hollywood films in the Reagan Era: Sixteen Candles (1984), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), Some Kind of Wonderful (1987), Walk Like a Man (1987), and Johnny Be Good (1988), to name only a few. The persistence of oldies in films primarily marketed to youth challenges the notion that rock soundtracks only (or primarily) produce feelings of generational belonging. Clearly, the nostalgic meanings for the Fifties conjured by oldies in a teen film like Sixteen Candles are different than those invoked by the soundtrack of Diner. Oldies music in these soundtracks is not exclusively tied to personal memory or a shared generational past, nor is it wholly defined by a single discrete vision of the Fifties. Rather, nostalgic meanings for the Fifties proliferated across these films, each articulating a complex relationship between a fantasy of the past and the 1980s teenager of the day. Writing about the use of classical music in Raging Bull, Mike Cormack has argued that the proliferation of possible meanings for filmic music (cinematic, cultural, and historical) creates “pleasures of ambiguity” for different film audiences (26). I maintain a similar phenomenon is at play in the use of oldies music in Re-Generation teen films. We might think of this ambiguity over the cultural meaning of oldies on these soundtracks as a result of the redefinition of popular music in general during the Reagan Era. However, we must also consider how the 86 Back to the Fifties ambiguity over the meaning of oldies also stems from struggle and negotiation between competing demographic groups claiming ownership of rock and roll in the 1970s and 1980s. These claims work to stake out privileged cultural territory for groups with starkly different senses of generational, racial, class, and sexual identity. Before Marty plays “Johnny B. Goode” at the end of Back to the Future, he introduces the song by saying, “Okay, this is an oldie … Well, it’s an oldie where I come from.” Marty thus positions the song as one that belongs distinctly to another generation, and forecloses upon the possibility that the song will produce a generational affiliation between himself and his audience. The identification between Marty and the teens who listen to his song, as well as the connection between oldies music and consumers of 1980s teen films, is instead made on the ground of “youth.” Marty does not know the song because it speaks for his generation, rather, he knows the song because it is a foundational text for rock and roll, which had established itself as inherently linked to “youth” itself. Lawrence Grossberg holds that youth identity produced by the cultural formation of rock does not correspond to chronological or biological notions of age but rather to youth as an affective category. Seen in this light, the function of oldies in Reagan-Era teen films is to articulate “youth” as a recognizable cultural and political affiliation. According to Grossberg, by the 1980s, youth was becoming an ever more contested signifier:

Youth itself has become a battlefield on which the current generations of adolescents, baby boomers, parents and corporate media are fighting for control of its meanings, investments and powers … Youth today is caught in the contra- diction between those who experience the powerlessness of their age … and the generations of baby boomers who have attached the category of youth to their life trajectory, in part by redefining it as an attitude (“You’re only as old as you feel”). For the baby boomers, youth is something to be held on by cultural and physical effort. (We Gotta Get Out of This Place 183)

In this context, the competing claims over the cultural definition and ownership of rock and roll in popular music are also claims over the cultural power of youth. Baby Boomers vociferously rejected new forms of pop music developments in favor of “oldies” as a way of claiming cultural power and authority over the symbols of “youth” (freedom, vibrancy, energy, cool, etc.). At the same time, Re-Generation teens could reinscribe oldies with new meanings, teasing out new values and tensions from established cultural texts. Re-Generation Soundtracks 87

I Reminisce about the Days of Old The “cultural and physical effort” described by Grossberg is especially visible in the rise of “roots rock” in the mid- to late-1970s. As the first rock-and-roll generation entered middle age, a strain of American rock attempted to direct the genre “back to its roots,” often through the country and southern rock traditions. Bob Seger, a Detroit-area rocker who leapt into rock stardom with his 1976 album Night Moves, is emblematic of this movement. His album was lauded as “rock and roll in the classic mold: bold, aggressive and grandiloquent” and praised for its “songs of reminis- cence” like “Night Moves” and “Mainstreet” (Rachlis). The opening track, “Rock and Roll Never Forgets,” uses the language of memory to encourage audiences to reinvigorate rock, imploring aging listeners to return to the pleasures of rock fandom with the refrain, “Come back, baby/rock and roll never forgets.” Night Moves seems to suggest that audiences in the 1970s are the ones that have forgotten the simple bodily pleasures of rock consumption. Two years later, Seger returned to champion traditional rock music in song. “Old Time Rock and Roll” was originally released on the 1978 album Stranger in Town, but it became a smash hit after its appearance in Risky Business (1983). The song’s sing-along chorus growls, “Still like that old time rock and roll/That kind of music just soothes the soul/I reminisce about the days of old/with that old time rock and roll.” This, to a large degree, matches descriptions of the appeal of oldies from 1970s radio station managers who championed oldies as “a great memory jogger. All of a sudden the words or an incident come flooding back” (Malcolm 21). Sentiments like these lead Shumway to argue that the “convention that popular songs call up for us memories of earlier periods in our lives is so powerful that we might be inclined to call oldies the tea-soaked madeleine of the masses” (40). The sonic qualities of Seger’s song are interesting in this regard. Though Seger’s image radiated blue-collar white masculinity, “Old Time Rock and Roll” was written by George Jackson (a member of the R&B outfit The Ovations and songwriter for Clarence Carter and Wilson Pickett) and recorded by the team at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, who had spent years cultivating an association with legendary R&B and soul performers like Aretha Franklin, The Staples Singers, and Etta James. The jangly, honky-tonk piano sounds in the recorded version of the song (absent from live performances) combine with the blues riffs that adorn the verses to position Seger as the 1970s inheritor of the authentic (Black) tradition of rock. But “Old Time Rock and Roll” does not just revel in the past—it also directly critiques contemporary music in the present. While “Rock and Roll Never Forgets” encourages listeners for whom “sweet sixteen’s turned thirty-one” to “go down to the concert or the local bar” where “the crowd will be swaying” to the music, in “Old Time Rock and Roll” Seger insists on 88 Back to the Fifties staying at home. In the opening lines Seger practically tells you kids to get off his lawn, saying “just take them old records off the shelf / I’ll sit and listen to them by myself.” As opposed to the exhortation to reinvigorate public spaces of rock culture in “Rock and Roll Never Forgets,” Seger’s later song has him cloistered in his living room, because “today’s music ain’t got the same soul.” When Seger critiques “today’s music,” it is not rock and roll that he dismisses—rock has retained its “soul,” its authenticity rooted in its (raced and classed) forms of masculinity. Rather, it is emerging forms of music that threaten to displace rock’s dominant position and destabilize white heterosexual males’ cultural authority. In the second verse, Seger defiantly sneers, “Don’t try to take me to no disco / You’ll never even get me out on the floor.” The fact that Seger would proclaim his unwavering dedication to rock is not particularly notable. His loyalty to rock was, of course, in his own self-interest as a rock musician and songwriter. However, it is revealing that Seger’s pledge of allegiance to rock takes the form of an explicit rejection of disco.3 Popular music historians describe the seemingly overnight explosion in popularity of disco in the late 1970s as “instantly polarizing, especially to numerous rock fans who saw disco’s orchestrated and synthesized style of dance music as the antith- esis to rock music’s ‘naturalized’ mode of authentic expression” (Cateforis, The Rock History Reader 181). Beyond the commercial threat disco’s success represented, it also destabilized white heterosexual masculinity as the locus of power in American popular music. As one article in The Village Voice argued:

The real animosity between rock and disco lay in the position of the straight white male. In the rock world, he was the undisputed top, while in disco, he was subject to a radical decentering … Examined in light of the ensuing political backlash, it’s clear that the slogan of this movement—“Disco Sucks!”— was the first cry of the angry white male. (Braunstein 2)

The politics of disco in many ways worked against the established traditions of rock performance in the 1970s. Alice Echols has called disco an explicitly political space, where sexually empowered women and gay men (especially those from predominantly Black and Latin urban communities) could “reclaim the body as an instrument of pleasure rather than an instrument of labor” (Shaky Ground 161). When disco’s acceptance and celebration of these figures went mainstream, Echols argues, it resulted in an atmosphere in which white men “felt themselves shoved to the sidelines by women, ethnic minorities, and gays,” and “many rock fans believed disco was taking over, possibly even supplanting, rock” (Shaky Ground 161). The backlash against disco (or, more accurately, the visibility and prominence of Re-Generation Soundtracks 89 disco’s gay and minority audiences) evident in events like Comiskey Park’s Disco Demolition Night, took the form of a defense of rock.4 Thus, “Old Time Rock and Roll” appeared in Reagan-Era soundtracks not just as a song but as a rallying cry. Rock and roll in this formulation did not represent the soundtrack of difference but a resistance to difference. This “insider rebellion,” as I call it, combined popular notions of resistant youth cultures and marginalized populations (“outsiders,” we could say) and grafted it onto reactionary cultural politics that sought to secure the hegemonic position of the white male in US society, and rock and roll in the entertainment industry. Perhaps no Re-Generation teen film dramatizes this “insider rebellion” more explicitly than the film that made Tom Cruise a star: Risky Business (1983). Cruise plays the affluent goody two-shoes teenager Joel Goodsen (he’s a “good son,” get it?), a sheepish high school senior and “Future Enterpriser” who embraces his entre- preneurial spirit by opening a brothel in his parents’ suburban home. But the film’s narrative is largely ancillary to a few iconic moments—it is a film remembered most for a scene in which Joel dances sans pants to “Old Time Rock and Roll.” While Seger’s song is certainly not an oldie per se (at least not in 1983), it does rely on a pop- nostalgia conceptualization of rock’s origins in the Fifties. A question worth asking is: of all the songs a 1980s teen might choose to blast through a home stereo system, why does Joel select a five-year-old song that celebrates the music of the even more distant past while trashing the cultural forms of the present? It seems to me that the packaging of Fifties music as “oldies” produced a cultural notion of “old time rock” that worked to affirm and celebrate the desires of white, middle-class heterosexual males like Joel, in a time when their economic, sexual, and cultural power seemed to be eroding.5 The sequence begins with a close-up of Joel’s fingers manipulating the dials on his father’s expensive home stereo equipment. In the next shot, Joel slides on his parents’ polished hardwood floor, indicating his residual childish impulses as well as the absence of his parents from the space. The iconic costume suggests his unleashed boyish sexuality (tight white briefs) as well as the “loosened” upper-middle-class morality (unbuttoned dress shirt.) Using domestic items to aid in his fantasy (he employs a tall brass candlestick as a make-believe microphone), Joel takes pleasure in strutting about like a rock star (highlighted by the cheering crowd noise inserted into the sound design). He punctuates his lip-synching with high steps, hip jiggles, and fist-pumps in the tradition of rock and roll figures like Mick Jagger or David Lee Roth. Joel then swaggers into the tidy living room, exchanges the candlestick for fireplace broom, and transforms into an air-guitar god. Finally, his energy seems to puncture the fantasy of cool—Joel ultimately flings himself down on the couch and wiggles uncontrollably. The famous dance sequence in Risky Business. Re-Generation Soundtracks 91 Gaylyn Studlar has convincingly argued that Hollywood in the 1980s functioned to “hegemonically secure male subjectivity [that] depends on the fundamental display of the male body, especially the youthful or youthful-looking male star” (173). Surely, we can see this dynamic at play in Risky Business’s dance scene. However, the dance scene also emphasizes the way that Joel’s body (and his sexual power) is contained within and by the domestic space of his empty middle-class home. It is only through the fantasy of rock performance (the kind of fantasy Seger championed, it should be said) that the shy, insecure Joel is able to temporarily loose himself from restrictive modern codes of behavior for an ambitious “Future Enterpriser” and “be a man” by expressing his unruly masculine desires. As such, the sequence presents “old time rock and roll” as a commodity that offers the pleasurable fantasy of outsider rebellion delivered to safe “insider” cultural spaces of privilege like Joel’s Chicagoland suburban palace. Simultaneously, the scene points backward to a racially and sexually decontextualized “politics of fun” that is located in rock’s mythic Fifties origins and absent in Joel’s Reagan-Era existence (Grossberg, “Is Anyone Listening” 51). Aside from its enormous influence and unquestioned status as an instance of soundtrack, film, and music video effectively coalescing in Hollywood, the dance sequence in Risky Business reveals how a particular framing of the class and racial politics of rock inherited from aging Boomers was reinscribed in the body of the idealized Reagan-Era teen. This is legible both in the scene’s visual elements and in what Anahid Kassabian calls the “affiliating identifications” of the hit Seger song playing on the stereo. Unlike the classical Hollywood score, which aims to “draw perceivers into socially and historically unfamiliar positions,” Kassabian argues that film soundtracks that feature previously released music allow filmgoers to “bring external associations with the songs into their engagements with the film (2–3). The “affiliating identifications” at play in this scene, I argue, are the pop-nostalgia discourses of oldies. This shared point of reference aligns Seger’s reactionary cultural politics with those of Re-Generation teens like Joel Goodsen. But other teens in the Re-Generation heard different things in oldies, and embodied them in different ways.

The Same Old Songs? Oldies Speaking through the Re-Generation One of the benefits of thinking seriously about the function of oldies music on 1980s teen film soundtracks is seeing the different values that Fifties music stood in for throughout the Reagan Era. Close attention to these invocations of Fifties music 92 Back to the Fifties illuminates the ways that the Re-Generation transformed the cultural meaning of the songs, artists, genres, and styles that re-emerged in popular culture decades after their original production and circulation. It is important to understand that these songs are not simply “repeated” on pop-nostalgia soundtracks. When Marty performs “Johnny B. Goode” in Back to the Future, it is neither a forgery nor a copy. It is a repetition with a difference, a transparent cover that layers new meanings on top of existing ones. Similarly, Marty is transformed by the Fifties music that is channeled through him—by singing “Johnny B. Goode,” a song about a humble but immensely talented guitar-playing youngster destined to be “the leader of a big ol’ band,” Marty gains the confidence and swagger of a rock star that he lacked in the film’s opening. The bodies of Re-Generation teens served as one of the primary sites and most prominent registers of Fifties music redefinition. The body could serve as a vehicle for spectacular expression of resistance (as in Dick Hebdige’s analysis of subculture), or display the persistence of the forms of Fifties youth culture (as in the return of the “Loco-Motion” dance craze in 1987). In a more specific case, a series of films, including Pretty in Pink (1986), Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), Adventures in Babysitting (1987), The Lost Boys (1987), and Beetlejuice (1987), feature scenes in which teenagers mouth the words to oldies songs. By performatively inhabiting an established musical form (as in karaoke), these characters open up oldies to new and alternative readings. At the same time, 1980s teenagers in these films are transformed as the music of an earlier generation “speaks through” their bodies (as in ventriloquism). Freya Jarman-Ivens, following the work of Kevin Connor on ventriloquism, argues that

Pretty in Pink: Duckie (Jon Cryer) tries a little tenderness. Re-Generation Soundtracks 93 “the body-voice relationship is a looped one, a matrix in which body and voice each produce the other” (8).6 Beyond providing a rationale for the inclusion of oldies on the films’ soundtracks, these scenes are remarkable because of the diverse ways in which the sounds of the Fifties are channeled through the Re-Generation, and the ways the Reagan-Era teen can perform new meanings for well-traveled musical forms. They’re the same old songs, to paraphrase The Four Tops, but they have different meanings as time goes on. Theo Cateforis writes about one such scene from Pretty in Pink, in which the lovelorn teenage boy Duckie (Jon Cryer) passionately impersonates Otis Redding’s rendition of “Try a Little Tenderness.” Cateforis argues that Duckie’s lip-synching constitutes a gender performance that he dubs “karaoke masculinity,” in which the decidedly un-macho Duckie reproduces the traditional gender binary in popular music wherein men serve as active, energetic performers, and women are relegated to the role of passive audience member. Such performances are prevalent among teen films, Cateforis claims, because “an established popular song communicates through its history and genre associations an accepted form of masculine identity. In a sense it has already articulated what the teen male wishes to say or become, in a way immediately recognizable to the audience” (“Rebel Girls and Singing Boys” 186). While this scene does not neatly fit into this chapter’s analysis (Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness” is not from the 1950s; it was recorded in 1966), the song did occa- sionally circulate on oldies radio, and its sonic and genre characteristics encouraged an association with an era that predates “Sixties rock.” At any rate, Cateforis argues that Duckie’s attempts to embody Redding’s song largely because he feels his own masculinity is too insufficient, juvenile, or unreliable. This is a convincing reading, but I would expand it by noting not only what song and artist Duckie chooses to perform but also where he performs it. The scene begins when Duckie dramatically enters TRAX, an independent/New Wave record store,7 to visit the store’s two employees: Andie (Molly Ringwald), the object of his romantic affection, and Iona (Annie Potts), the store manager and hip older sister figure to Andie. As much as Duckie’s embodiment of Redding’s legendary soul performance works to augment his masculinity in front of the two women, it also/alternatively functions as a display of cultural capital within the context of an edgy independent record store, a sign that his musical knowledge of (and passionate attachment to) genres like soul extends beyond MTV and Top 40 fare. This “karaoke masculinity” can be found in the teen vampire filmThe Lost Boys, in which the pubescent Sam (Cory Haim) gleefully sings along to Clarence “Frogman” Henry’s 1956 hit “Ain’t Got No Home” in the bath. Like Duckie, Sam is an ineffective adolescent, “a lonely boy” whose father has abandoned him. Sam’s lack of a father figure not only makes his family vulnerable to attacks by marauding 94 Back to the Fifties

Sam, the “lonely boy” of The Lost Boys. teenage vampire gangs, it also results in a gender indeterminacy reflected in shifting registers in the song’s vocals, from “lonely boy” to “lonely girl” to “lonely frog.”8 Jack Halberstam has observed this tendency in the history of rhythm and blues as a sort of queer performance—one that unsettles the traditional gender binary that rock music so often works to reinforce (185). In The Lost Boys, Sam is not the only adolescent facing domestic instability—every teenage character in the film “ain’t got no home,” at least in the sense of the “traditional” two-parent, single-family household. Even the titular “Lost Boys” vampire gang are motivated by their search for a “mother” to accompany their leader and father figure Max (Edward Hermann). In its lyrical content and vocal style, Sam’s performance of Henry’s song thus articulates a longing for the patriarchal nuclear family ascribed to the Fifties, and demonstrates the consequences of its breakdown. In Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Adventures in Babysitting, on the other hand, Ferris (Matthew Broderick) and Chris (Elisabeth Shue) do not perform oldies hits to compensate for inadequate sexual efficacy and power. Rather, their lip-synching draws on the established authority of dominant codes of sexuality to celebrate and reaffirm their adherence to them. In Babysitting, The Crystals’ “Then He Kissed Me” is heard before the first frame of the film is shown—the opening strains of the song play over the production credits. In the film’s first shot, Chris appears on camera lip-synching to the girl-group classic just as the vocals begin. The song tells the story of a girl who meets a boy at a dance, falls in love, gets married, and lives happily ever after. Chris enthusiastically lip-synchs and dances to the song while preparing for her anniversary date with her boyfriend, aligning the fairytale love story of the song with her own personal fantasies. When the song concludes, the film reveals that her boyfriend is anyone but Prince Charming—he breaks the date with Chris and eventually turns out to be a liar and a cheat. The song replays during the credits, after Chris has successfully secured a new love interest. When Chris’s fantasy of Re-Generation Soundtracks 95

“And Then He Kissed Me” inAdventures in Babysitting (left) and Ferris (Matthew Broderick) lip- synchs in Ferris Bueller (right). a Fifties-style romance returns, so too does the song. “And Then He Kissed Me” thus represents Chris’s desire not only to be located in a heterosexual coupling but to be the passive object of romantic love—the one who is kissed, is wooed, is married. However, considering the degree to which the film reveals that Chris’s initial boyfriend did not match up to her fantasy image, it is worth wondering whether the song might be considered less of celebration and more of foreboding (an oldies version of the Jaws theme, perhaps?). It’s possible, in other words, to think of the film’s use of “And Then He Kissed Me” as a commentary on the seductive, and destructive, power of patriarchal fantasies of romantic bliss. Ferris Bueller is not only an active sexual presence in his lip-synching scene, he is the center of the universe. Ferris hijacks a float in Chicago’s Von Steuben Day parade, transitioning from a crooning faux-performance of Wayne Newton’s “Danke Schoen” to The Beatles’ cover of the Fifties single “Twist and Shout.” Surrounded by leggy blondes, Ferris plays the part of rock star, provoking the crowd of spectators to twist and shout themselves, as they erupt into spontaneous choreography. Men and women, young and old, all races and creeds are united in celebration by the oldies hit. The scene became so iconic that “Twist and Shout” recharted in 1986, spending seven weeks on the Billboard singles chart. Ferris Bueller, in other words, inspired 1980s teenagers to listen to The Beatles’ homage to Fifties rock with new ears, creating new affiliating identifications with a song at a generation’s remove. The Beatles’ original courtship of rock authenticity came from their embrace of Fifties R&B—Ferris Bueller wins approval from a multicultural city by embodying the “pre-political” Beatles. Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice provides an interesting point of comparison to these scenes, because its use of 1950s pop music comes from outside the traditions of rock or R&B.9 The film centers on Barbara and Adam Maitland (Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin), a young couple who die in an automobile accident. The Maitlands return as ghosts, only to discover that their charming Connecticut home has been sold to Charles Deetz (Jeffrey Jones), a yuppie real-estate developer from New York City. Under the direction of his would-be sculptor wife Delia (Catherine O’Hara) and 96 Back to the Fifties interior decorator Otho (Glenn Shadix), Charles begins “renovating” the Maitland’s home into a nightmare caricature of 1980s modern art. Aided by Charles’s teen daughter Lydia (Winona Ryder), the Maitlands resolve to frighten Charles and Delia away from the house. Their first serious attempt to do so comes at a dinner party that Delia is hosting for some New York art-world socialites that she wishes to impress. One by one, each of the guests is possessed by the Maitlands, who force them to perform Harry Belafonte’s 1956 calypso hit “Day-O/The Banana Boat Song.” While the Maitlands mean for this experience to be terrifying (perhaps playing on the themes of brutal agricultural labor and racialized subjugation suggested by the song’s lyrics), the Deetzes and their guests immediately see the haunting as a potential commodity. Together, the Maitlands and Otho begin to imagine ways that they can charge Manhattanites to experience the haunting as another sort of decontextualized experience of “fun” detached from the song’s historical and cultural origins—“Day-O” is, for all intents and purposes, a plantation song that expresses the misery of subjugated peoples. The Deetzes want to turn it into an amusement park ride.10 Later, when the Deetz and Maitland families learn to live in harmony, Lydia requests calypso ventriloquism for herself, and gives a performance of Belafonte’s 1961 cover of Trinidadian Carnival song “Jump in the Line.” However, when Lydia (who is sympathetic to the origins of the house and resistant to her parents’ commodifying impulses) ventriloquizes the song, she uses it to integrate the experiences of past and present—the Deetzes and the Maitlands, the living and the dead. “Jump in the Line” is (lyrically, at least) less tied to the subjugation of Caribbean and West Indian people—this song simply celebrates the pleasures of dance. In this way, Beetlejuice uses Belafonte’s calypso both to indulge in the pleasures of decontextualized oldies but also to point out the violence of the commodifying impulse that can radically transform one’s experience of someone else’s song. Whether it is giddy play-acting in the privacy of the bedroom or the bath (Babysitting, The Lost Boys), an intimate performance among friends (Pretty in Pink), or a choreographed production that literally stops traffic in ChicagoFerris ( Bueller), the spectacular display of teen bodies in these scenes draw on the sexual and gender politics of the

Possessed by Calypso: “Day-O” (left) and “Jump in the Line” (right). Re-Generation Soundtracks 97 oldies music on the soundtracks. But these sexual and gender politics are not necessarily the politics of the music itself, nor do they highlight the only or even the most prominent political meanings associated with those songs. The teen bodies in these films are white bodies, and as such they also revise the racial politics of the Fifties rock and roll songs that they delight in performing. But this transformation should not be understood as just another example of the white establishment’s co-optation of Black musical forms, if for no other reason than the music represented by “oldies” had been co-opted from the moment that Porky Chedwick started spinning records in 1948. Moreover, white middle-class youth in the Fifties embraced the traditions of Black music and culture, rock historians argue, at least in part as a rejection of the conformity and containment of postwar bourgeois suburban life. Even in the early Fifties, pioneer- ing rock artists like Chuck Berry and Ray Charles were drawing substantial numbers of white suburban fans. “Facing a choice between the sterile and homogeneous suburban cultures of their parents or the dynamic street cultures alive among groups excluded from middle-class consensus,” George Lipsitz explains, “a large body of youths found themselves captivated and persuaded by the voices of difference” (122). When Fifties music re-emerges in the radio, records, and film soundtracks of the 1980s, it still operates as an alternative to sterility and homogeneity—Ferris Bueller’s “Twist and Shout,” for example, serves as a testament to Ferris’s exuberant sponta- neity and infectious charisma. In this scene, oldies work to define, in Grossberg’s terms, a politics of fun that is “defined by its rejection of boredom and its celebration of movement, change, energy … lived out in and inscribed upon the body” (“Is Anyone Listening?” 114). The lip-synching performances of these songs work as a kind of evidence of this music’s power and the legitimacy of these teens’ celebra- tory enjoyment. However, it seems clear that oldies in these scenes do not represent a radical or emancipatory form of difference. Ferris’s jubilant lip-synching is, after all, an imitation of an imitation—he is impersonating a white group (The Beatles) covering a song originally recorded by Black R&B musicians (The Top Notes in 1961, The Isley Brothers more famously in 1962). In most cases, the combination of oldies music and teen films in the 1980s, as with the rejection of disco in favor of rock, represented a defense against difference, an affirmation of cultural insiders like Ferris Bueller and their ability, or privilege, to “transcend” race and “just have fun.” The development of oldies on FM radio, the rejection of disco by figures like Bob Seger, and the ventriloquizing of Fifties rock on 1980s soundtracks are intertwined. The racially and sexually destabilizing potential of genres like disco, glam, punk, new wave, and hip-hop are rejected in favor of a notion of “old time rock and roll” in which white bourgeois males occupy the privileged center. Oldies attribute an Edenic innocence to American popular music in which rock had no political or social agenda but simply served as fun for (white, 98 Back to the Fifties heterosexual) teenagers. The lip-synching scenes in Reagan-Era teen films depict, and confront, the way in which Hollywood soundtracks often transformed oldies’ racial and sexual politics. To frame rock and roll in this way, eliminating the very real racial and sexual politics that were inseparable from its emergence in the Fifties, results in oldies that are doubly fixed. Hollywood film soundtracks of the Reagan Era presented the body of the 1980s teenager as a space that could resolve the inherent contradictions that such a framing of rock produced. However, as I have argued for the range of pop-nostalgia texts, the political and cultural function of oldies was neither homogenous nor static. If films like Risky Business and Ferris Bueller enacted a radical decontextualization of rock, other film soundtracks, as inBeetlejuice , recontexualized and reconceptualized oldies in critical ways. Another film, Blue Velvet (1986), recasts the sweet oldies love songs on its soundtrack into haunting ballads of sexual violence and trauma. The uncanny elements of the film that critics have long located in its narrative are also present in its soundtrack. It invests the songs with new affiliational meanings through a process of familiarization, estrangement, and disembodiment.

Blue Velvet through Our Ears … Though it is better known for its disturbing depiction of voyeurism, in which the teenage protagonist Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) witnesses primal scenes of sexual violence between lounge singer Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini) and sociopathic villain Frank (Dennis Hopper), Blue Velvet also features a lip-synching scene. At the hideout of local drug dealer Ben (Dean Stockwell), Frank turns on a stereo and cues Ben to lip-synch the first verse of Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams.” With an arch overhead and curtains framing Ben’s performance, this scene in Blue Velvet approxi- mates the staging of Joel’s lip-synching scene in Risky Business. However, Ben’s manner in this scene (“so fucking suave,” in Frank’s words) clashes dramatically with the juvenile expression of “karaoke masculinity” on display in the other lip-synching scenes discussed earlier in this chapter. This difference is underscored (literally and figuratively!) by the melodramatic lyrical style of “In Dreams,” characteristic of what Peter Lehman describes as Orbison’s “rock aesthetic that challenges conventional, normative masculinity” (118). Ben’s visible stage makeup illustrates the song’s peculiar reference to a “candy-colored clown” and highlights Ben’s eroticism as distinctly performed. In Risky Business we are to understand Joel’s performance as revealing something authentic and hidden that is repressed within him, but in Blue Velvet the lip-synching is disturbing—the song’s contemplative and tender-hearted sonic qualities contrast with the violent and dangerous figures that perform it. Re-Generation Soundtracks 99

“In Dreams” in Blue Velvet.

Blue Velvet is a valuable case to include in our analysis of the function of oldies on Reagan-Era soundtracks because it demonstrates the ways that the meaning of individual musical texts can fluctuate and evolve, even within a film. “In Dreams” reappears in Blue Velvet in the scene immediately following Ben’s lip-synching act. After leaving Ben’s residence, Jeffrey arouses Frank’s wrath. In response, Frank has his henchmen hold Jeffrey at knifepoint. Furious, Frank grotesquely applies lipstick, huffs nitrous oxide, and roughly kisses Jeffrey before demanding the “Candy-Colored Clown” be played on the car’s tape deck. Then, as a strange woman incongruously dances on the roof of a car, Frank menacingly repeats Orbison’s chorus before savagely beating Jeffrey. For Mark Mazullo, these scenes emphasize the film’s fascination with performance, “drawing the viewer even more deeply into the haunting quality of the recording’s sound, and its connection to the mysterious events on screen” (508). Mazullo makes a connection between the manufactured “unnatural” sound of early 1960s studio recordings (in which studio producers like Phil Spector radically altered the “authentic” delivery of live music) with the unre- liability of the film’s dream-visions. Let us carry that line of thought forward in time to think about the manufactured associations that Fifties music gathered in its positioning as oldies. As I have argued throughout this book, the recontextualization of Fifties signifiers in the Reagan Era does not necessarily equate to the erasure of historical meaning. In Blue Velvet, the contrast between the innocuous-sounding music and the violent and perverse images allows the film to undermine the supposed “innocence” of oldies and write new meanings into the same old songs. The use of “In Dreams” inBlue Velvet created a wealth of new musical meanings—not only for the song, but for Orbison’s catalogue and career. The song was rerecorded (Lynch received a co-producer credit) and released on an album of Orbison’s greatest hits (titled In Dreams) shortly after the release of the film. That 100 Back to the Fifties recording of “In Dreams” charted in 1987, largely on the strength of its appearance on the Blue Velvet soundtrack and a music video featuring footage from the film. In the wake of this success, Orbison took on a new image as a melancholic, mysterious elder statesman of American popular music, a musical connection back to the Fifties untainted by “sellout” commercialism (Orbison never hosted a variety show, released a disco record, or featured in a major scandal). He began working on a variety of projects with a diverse group of musicians and producers (Rick Rubin, Glenn Danzig, Bob Dylan, k. d. lang, T Bone Burnett, U2, Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, and Bonnie Raitt, among others) on a concert film, collaborative album (The Traveling Wilburys Vol. ),1 and solo record (Mystery Girl). This resurgence relied on a retrospective (and, after his death in 1988, posthumous) redefinition of Orbison’s music and persona. Lynch acknowledges that these transformations were the object of some concern for Orbison, who originally did not want his song associated with a story of drugs and violence: “It is a beautiful song … it just so happened that a song in a certain situation could mean something else” (qtd. in Lehman 62). That “something else” came to define much of Orbison’s resurgence, popularly and critically, in the 1980s. Lehman argues that it was Lynch’s “shocking use of the song in the context of true perversity that sparked the critical discourse of darkness that has come to occupy such a central place in interpreting Orbison’s music … Lynch’s use of ‘In Dreams’ changed forever the way in which Orbison’s music would be received” (117). In this way, Kassabian’s affiliating identifications in film soundtracks work in reverse—the film creates new historical meanings for music. These new meanings are only possible because of the historical development and affective power of pop nostalgia in the Reagan Era. The use of oldies on the soundtrack ofBlue Velvet, then, goes beyond simple irony. It is not, or perhaps not only, that oldies function as treacly deceptions. Rather, the film’s soundtrack subverts, and perverts, the affiliating identifications and external associations with oldies music that audiences bring with them into the film. The resulting discomfort is produced not only because a familiar soundtrack is applied to a dark or violent scene but also because of the realization that perhaps such sinister elements were present in the seemingly “innocent” songs all along, a thought that can transform listeners’ experiences of the entire corpus of oldies. It is this process of estrangement at work in the soundtrack that I argue is key to understanding Blue Velvet’s engagement with oldies. This process of estrangement or defamiliarization of oldies begins with Blue Velvet’s opening titles. Bobby Vinton’s chart-topping version of the Fifties pop standard “Blue Velvet” plays over a billowing blue velvet curtain—there is a perfect alignment, in other words, of the sound, image, and film as a whole. After the titles, audiences are treated to a series of fantasy Fifties images: red roses under a blue sky Re-Generation Soundtracks 101 and white picket fence, local firemen cheerfully waving from their truck, school- children being guided across the street by a kindly crossing guard, and an old man watering a well-tended suburban lawn. These pop-nostalgia images of small-town Americana underscored by Vinton’s crooning are dramatically undercut when the old man watering his lawn suffers a sudden stroke. The camera moves from the man’s still-convulsing body on the ground to the subterranean insect world beneath the neatly manicured lawn. This sequence has long been examined for its transition from the familiar to the grotesque (a dynamic that continues throughout the film), but few have acknowledged the parallel transformation of the song “Blue Velvet,” both in the diegetic space of the film and in its extra-diegetic life on compilation albums and oldies radio. The macabre turn in the opening sequence begins to dis- entangle the song from the “fantasy Fifties” images with which oldies radio had associated it. Torn from its pop-nostalgia context within minutes of the film’s opening, Blue Velvet’s use of “Blue Velvet” on its soundtrack irrecoverably transforms the song, leaving it a fundamentally different cultural object than it was before.11 After the opening sequence, the song returns with the first appearance of Dorothy, and serves as the impetus of Jeffrey’s obsession with her. Bathed in blue light and wearing heavy blue eye shadow, Dorothy captivates the onlooking Jeffrey with a breathy lounge-jazz performance of the song in a dingy nightclub. As Dorothy delivers lines like “She wore blue velvet / Bluer than velvet were her eyes,” reaction shots of the smitten Jeffrey signal his growing interest in her and register a contextual revision of the song’s meaning. At this point, the song gains a second function as the theme for Jeffrey’s burgeoning infatuation with Dorothy. Jeffrey stands in for the song’s lovelorn narrator; conversely, the song’s narrator is aligned with Jeffrey, an unsuspecting young man about to enter a world of sexual obsession and sadomasochistic desire. Like the camera tracking underground to reveal the swarms of cockroaches living below the manicured lawn, Jeffrey and the audience enter a world “that was always hidden.” Describing the film’s “subversion of apple-pie normalcy,” J. Hoberman argues that the film “ruthlessly defamiliarizes a comfortable, picture-postcard facade of malt shoppes, football fields and rec-room basements” (Vulgar Modernism 154). The same could be said, I argue, for the film’s redefinition of “Blue Velvet” and the oldies genre to which it belongs. The song undergoes a third, fourth, and fifth revision as a result of Blue Velvet’s infamous scene of Freudian voyeurism, in which Jeffrey sneaks into Dorothy’s apartment, hides in her closet, and watches her undress and change into a blue velvet dressing gown (“She wore blue velvet”). At this point the song becomes associated with Jeffrey’s sexual titillation—but that association is broken when Dorothy discovers Jeffrey in the closet, threatens him with a knife, and demands that he remove his clothes. In a matter of moments Dorothy changes from the object of 102 Back to the Fifties Jeffrey’s erotic gaze to a potential castrator threatening him with a knife, then again to a seductress who begins to caress Jeffrey’s naked body. “Blue Velvet” then might suggest the humiliation, fear, and confusion that Jeffrey experiences. This does not last long, however, as Jeffrey is forced back into the closet when Frank arrives at Dorothy’s door. As Jeffrey watches, Frank then enacts a bizarre ritualized sexual assault of Dorothy. “Baby wants blue velvet,” Frank murmurs, taking a bit of the fabric from Dorothy’s robe into his mouth before sexually and physically assaulting her. By the end of the scene, “Blue Velvet” becomes aligned with Frank’s perverse sexual desire, as blue velvet literally serves as his fetish. Jeffrey’s disorientation at the unexpected horrors he witnesses in Dorothy’s apartment is recreated in our disorientation over the meaning of “Blue Velvet.” Two of the song’s contextual meanings come into direct conflict the next time we hear “Blue Velvet.” Desperate to contact Dorothy again, Jeffrey returns to the night club to see her sing. He quickly realizes that Frank is also in the audience, clutching a piece of the blue velvet robe and weeping softly to himself. As Dorothy sings the lines, “Then when she left / gone was the glow of blue velvet,” the camera lingers on Frank’s emotional reaction to Dorothy’s performance. In this moment the song’s meaning within the film becomes unanchored from Jeffrey—unlike the Re-Generation teens discussed earlier in the chapter, Jeffrey is unable to fully embody the song. Even as the song is linked to Jeffrey’s growing infatuation with Dorothy, it also clearly references Frank’s perverse and violent, yet deeply emotional sexual obsession with the same woman. This may suggest that Frank and Jeffrey are two points on the same continuum—Frank later tells Jeffrey, “You’re like me.”. However, Frank and Jeffrey are not the only ones who embody “Blue Velvet.” Dorothy also takes ownership of the song in the film’s closing moments. The end of the film repeats the idyllic sequence of pop-nostalgia images featured in the opening, accompanied by a final shot of Dorothy reunited with her son. As she clutches her boy, the camera captures her looking mournfully into the distance, and the soundtrack changes to Dorothy’s semidiegetic delivery of the song’s final line: “And I still can see blue velvet through my tears.” In this moment, “Blue Velvet” becomes a haunting refrain for Dorothy, a testament to the effects of the physical and emotional abuse that has been heaped upon her. The film thus mobilizes the song in radically different and sometimes contradictory ways. “Blue Velvet” variously operates as a marker of the film’s small-town all-American setting, as a leit- motif for Jeffrey’s fascination with Dorothy, as an anthem for Frank’s fetishistic perversion, and as a memorial for Dorothy’s personal trauma. Regardless of one’s understanding of Vinton’s song before seeing Blue Velvet, the song becomes “un-fixed,” opened to multiple new readings and interpretations, in the course of watching the film.One could argue thatBlue Velvet’s use of Re-Generation Soundtracks 103 oldies works as a sort of sonic critique. Mazullo argues that the film’s use of oldies “displaces them as unproblematic objects of nostalgic desire” and “creates the opportunity for a reimagining of their history, or at least an interrogation of the desires and states of mind . . . that cause us to write—as individuals, as a culture more broadly conceived, even as subcultures—our histories in the way that we do” (495). For the film’s audiences, the situation of “Blue Velvet” in particular and oldies in general as innocent or safe is undermined, both within the space of the film and in the world of commercial radio and record sales. Like Jeffrey discovering that his pristine small town has a dark underworld lurking just below the surface, listeners of Blue Velvet’s soundtrack are forced to confront the possibility that the saccharine, safe, and non-threatening reputation of oldies are actually a cover story for more sinister subtextual meanings. Now viewers must also treat the use of oldies in films like Adventures in Babysitting with extreme suspicion. Glenn Altschuler has argued that, although first and foremost a commercial product, rock in the Fifties “continued to resist and unsettle ‘mainstream’ values” (34). But conventional wisdom held that the rise of the very same music in the 1980s, gathered under the umbrella of oldies, represented a “movement away from the screaming of the disk jockeys and more recent popular music to the simpler rock and roll and softer, more romantic tunes” (Malcolm 21). Such a position presumes that oldies music represented values in line with neoconservatism. In Blue Velvet, oldies are subverted as a form of critique, revealing them to be a facade mask- ing individual violence, perversion, and obsession. By comparison, John Waters’s Hairspray (1988) treats oldies not as something to be critiqued but something to be rescued. Through its own process of double fixing, Hairspray attempts to position the “softer, romantic tunes” and novelty dances of the late 1950s and early 1960s as imbued with a significant social and political meaning. In Waters’s film, the white teenager who participates in rock fandom is reimagined as political dissident, committed to a new collective politics of race and sexuality in the United States.

Recontextualizing Oldies: The Case of Hairspray

Hairspray, John Waters’s biggest commercial success, centers on the transformation of the “pleasantly plump” Baltimore teenager Tracy Turnblad (Ricki Lake) from East Side “hair hopper” to student activist. The transformation is precipitated by her participation in the dance program The Corny Collins Show, a fictionalized version of the actual Baltimore television program The Buddy Deane Show. Like American Graffiti, Hairspray is set in 1962, a point of immense historical transition for teenagers poised on the verge of maturity. Unlike American Graffiti, however, the Fifties 104 Back to the Fifties in Hairspray is not an era to be left behind reluctantly. When Tracy’s working-class mother, Edna (Divine), chastises her daughter for her hairdo, Tracy dismisses the criticism by wailing, “Mother, you’re so Fifties.” As I have argued, Graffiti’s style, sound, and imagery continually invoke the Fifties as an idyllic era lamentably, yet irreversibly, coming to an end. Simultaneously, the film critically reflects upon the historical moment of its own release. In contrast, Waters’s film repeatedly invokes the Sixties as an ideal to be pursued with conviction and joy, rejecting the “fantasy” version of the Fifties as gauche, restrictive, and unjust. This is just as perceptible in the film’s soundtrack as in any of the film’s visual elements—where American Graffiti utilizes several songs of the early to mid-1950s to evoke the rapidly disappearing Fifties, Hairspray’s several anachronistic songs, released after the spring of 1962, pull the audience forward into Sixties movements for social justice. While the film does differ from the others discussed in this chapter in significant ways (it is diegetically located in the Fifties and is more recognizable as a “nostalgia film”), its soundtrack directly responds to the use of Fifties music in films like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and in the oldies radio format. Hairspray’s soundtrack is primarily stocked with seemingly innocent songs from artists like The Ray Bryant Combo, Gene Pitney, The Five Du-Tones, and Little Peggy March, with nary a civil rights anthem or explicitly political lyric among them. Yet, in line with Altschuler’s characterization of Fifties rock as revolutionary, the film portrays this music as anything but “safe” and “innocent.” The film’s antagonists stigmatize it as “colored music,” and this wakens the protagonists’ political consciousness. Fifties rock and roll serves as the vehicle for the radicalization of Tracy and her comrades. In All Shook Up, Altschuler argues:

Enmeshed in the racial politics of the 1950s, rock and roll was credited with and criticized for promoting integration and economic opportunity for blacks while bringing to “mainstream” culture black styles and values. In the South, rock and roll became a lightning rod for die-hard segregationists who associated the music—and African Americans—with depraved beliefs and behavior. (35)

The film’s portrayal of the popular music of the Fifties thus casts the songs and -art ists on its soundtrack in a new light for those who might only have heard the music on oldies radio, commemorative albums, or pop-nostalgia soundtracks. By blending Waters’s infamous “trash” sensibilities, conventions from previous pop-nostalgia texts, and direct allusions to the institutional policies of white supremacy that helped to cultivate early rock and roll, Hairspray offers new meaning within its own narrative border, as well as for nostalgia films, oldies radio, and retro culture Re-Generation Soundtracks 105 writ large. The film recontextualizes oldies by investing the music with meanings that link the sexual and racial politics of rock’s origin to the conditions of 1980s America. In Hairspray, oldies thus serve as a palimpsest in which new meanings are layered over faded past ones, never entirely eclipsing older layers but rather drawing them into a new composite historical text. While there are no lip-synching scenes in Hairspray, the numerous dance scenes allow oldies to speak through white teenage bodies in a roughly analogous way. Tracy’s growing interest in and participation with rock music by way of dance registers her growing political consciousness. At the film’s outset, Tracy’s only exposure to rock and roll is in her own living room, dancing along to the all-white Corny Collins Show every day after school. But when Tracy and Penny sneak out of the house to attend the Corny Collins Record Hop, Tracy personally witnesses the enforced segregation of rock consumption, as uniformed security guards turn Black teenagers away from the record hop. Tracy notes the injustice right away, but her desire to get down with the in-crowd overcomes her principles. The disciplining and regimentation of rock saturates the experience, even in the first dance that Tracy gets to participate in, the Madison. While the “It’s Madison Time” sequence partially operates to display Tracy’s enthusiasm and dancing panache, the form of the dance also begins to characterize the social meaning of The Corny Collins Show as a whole, both in its charming (yet outdated) appeal and its ruthless and constricting structure. Tracy’s positioning in the frame, as well as her interactions with other characters (Amber and Link, particularly) highlights her as a symbol of difference who nonetheless is able to fully integrate herself into the performance. Symbolically, the Madison illustrates the appeal of the white conformist Fifties against which Tracy eventually rebels. The Madison is a line dance that requires dancers to repeat a single basic step multiple times, adapting the step in response to “calls” that reference popular culture of the era (“The Rifleman” or “The Jackie Gleason,” for example). The dancers never break formation, freelance, or face one another. Even the camera movement and editing in this scene work in smooth, clean lines, with orderly cuts at right angles timed to match neatly with the song’s 4/4 rhythm. The scene thus presents the Madison as a dance that can only be successfully performed with a structured and synchronized conformity. The scene is among the film’s most charming, as Tracy’s exuberance at finally being accepted into the in-crowd radiates from her every step. However, while Tracy’s dancing ability allows her to participate flawlessly with her teen idols, her aberrant and unruly body marks her as an outsider. Though she is adjudged by Motormouth Maybelle (played by real-life soul music legend Ruth Brown) to be one of the best dancers at the hop, and she easily maneuvers the steps of the dance at her audition, the members of the Corny Collins Council 106 Back to the Fifties

Tracy does the Madison at the Corny Collins record hop.

(the board of teenagers that votes to include new featured dancers on the show) are not so appreciative. Council members berate and harangue applicants over their class status (“Exactly how many sweaters do you have?”), their sexual activity (“Are you now, or have you ever, gone steady?”), their politics (“Would you ever swim in an integrated swimming pool?), and their bodies (“Aren’t you a little fat for the show?”). This series of comments link the derisive attitude of the council to the repressive political practices of the Fifties that sought to reject difference and concentrate cultural power in the hands of “traditional Americans.” In this way, Hairspray represents The Corny Collins Show as participating in the same decontextualization of rock’s racial and sexual politics that is repeatedly discussed by rock historians and critics: seeking the spoils from a white, suburban mass market, recording and broadcasting institutions in the Fifties “shunned controversy, exploited black performers, bleached the music, and promoted white rock” (Altschuler 35). Renee R. Curry has argued that Hairspray dramatizes this process. According to Curry, the film’s dance scenes work as a “revolutionary communication vehicle” in which certain dances, like the Madison, are coded as “white” and “conformist” while others are coded “Black” and “revolutionary” (166–67). In opposition to the Corny Collins caste, Tracy symbolizes the liberating potential of rock consumption. Her movement from “white” to “Black” dancing embodies the transgression of rock fandom and the origins of the struggle for civil rights. Tracy’s embodiment of Fifties rock directly opposes the location of “real” Fifties music in the bodies of white men (as with Bob Seger or Risky Business), and refuses to portray the appeal of oldies as residing only in a “politics of fun” (as Ferris Bueller does) or as compensation for personal insecurity (Pretty in Pink). As opposed to the haunting estrangement of Re-Generation Soundtracks 107 oldies in Blue Velvet, the difference registered inHairspray is a source of both personal pleasure and collective political liberation. The rigidity of the Madison and the repression of The Corny Collins Show can be productively compared to a later scene, in which Tracy, Link, and Penny go to a dance in Motormouth Maybelle’s record shop. Tracy and Penny pair off with their respective partners (Tracy with the hunky Link, Penny with Motormouth Maybelle’s son, Seaweed) and dance “the dirty boogie.” In comparison to the staid, disciplined Madison, the dirty boogie suggests an unleashed sexual energy. The libidinal power of the dancing is accentuated by the diegetic music in the scene. The song, Bunker Hill’s “Hide ’n Go Seek,” utilizes offbeat syncopation, a technique present in African polyrhythm tradition as well as early rock and roll music. The lyrics are rife with sexual innuendo (What’s say, let’s get together / And play some hide and go seek? / Let’s go, let’s play!). The vocals are punctuated by backbeat hand-claps as well as yelps, hoots, and wails in call-and-response patterns, again recalling rock’s roots in African musical traditions. In the Madison scene, the footsteps and finger snaps of the dancers are easily discernible, but at Motormouth Maybelle’s all other sounds are drowned out by the music, delivering the impression that Tracy, Link, and Penny are overwhelmed by the music and its energy. This sense is further supported by the visual composition of the scene, in which Tracy, Penny, and Link are surrounded not only by Black dancers but also by Black music (in the form of records, photographs, and concert flyers from artists like Etta James, Ray Charles, Little Anthony, James Brown, Marvin Gaye, and Mary Wells). The taboo of misce- genation is suggested by the pairing of Seaweed and “checkerboard chick” Penny, as they confirm their sexual interest in one another on the dance floor. This pairing is temporarily blocked by Mrs. Pingleton, who barrels into the record shop mania- cally wielding a knife, bent on rescuing her daughter from Motormouth’s “voodoo spells” and Seaweed’s sexual advances. The racism of Penny’s mother in this scene is played for laughs, but it also suggests the degree to which rock and roll was the source of considerable white fear and potential violence. Though it is enacted with fewer histrionics, the steadfast institution of segregation on The Corny Collins Show is, at base, no different than Mrs. Pingleton’s crazed rescue mission. In addition to the politics of race suggested by the scene, Tracy and Link’s dancing indicates another form of transgression elicited by the teens’ exposure to Black Baltimore. In her engagement with rock music and dance, Tracy becomes not a sexualized object of desire (as Prudence Pingleton might fear) but rather a sexual subject. Tracy asserts her sexual agency and pursues her own erotic desires through the dirty boogie. This sequence stands in stark contrast to an earlier scene depicting Link and Amber making out in a convertible. Link takes a stereotypically dominant sexual position in that scene, climbing on top of the submissive Amber as she giggles 108 Back to the Fifties

Tracey and Link play “Hide and Go Seek.” girlishly. In opposition, Tracy’s pleasure in the “Hide ’n Go Seek” scene comes from her newfound sexual confidence and power, which has been facilitated by her status as “the baddest white dancer in Baltimore.” One particular two shot of the couple is suggestively underscored by the song’s lines, “Aw, man, will you put down / That thing you got in your hand / Find your hole and get in it.” As Link and Tracy dance together, it is clear that Tracy takes the lead and that Link’s body is directed to best serve Tracy’s visual and physical pleasure. The dance opens with Tracy first miming a lasso that she uses to snare Link, then a fishing rod she uses to pull him in—these movements are significant because they suggest that Link’s body is an object Tracy can actively pursue and obtain. Link theatrically removes his jacket and moves closer to Tracy, producing his tongue to her very apparent satisfaction. By the time the appropriately named Prudence Pingleton interrupts, the substantially taller Link is situated well below Tracy, visually suggesting her as sexually dominant and their coupling as choreographed around Tracy’s sexual pleasure. Of all the Fifties nostalgia texts of the Reagan Era,Hairspray is one of only a few that explicitly acknowledge the existence of segregation, and it is certainly the only one that makes the violence and intimidation that enforced segregation an integral part of its narrative. Hairspray reminds its viewers that segregation was not simply a holdover from less enlightened times but a deeply institutionalized commitment to subjugate racial minorities in perpetuity. Toying with conventions of the teen film, Hairspray overlays the traditional female teen film narrative with a story of Tracy’s political radicalization. Once Tracy becomes conscious of the systematized injustice at play in her beloved hometown, she works to build coalitions with her friends and family, as well as with strangers across boundaries of gender, class, and race. In this Re-Generation Soundtracks 109 way, the film depicts the transition from the Fifties to the Sixties as the product of collective political conviction and struggle. Innocence is not lost in Hairspray but rather unmasked as a refusal to confront the injustices that structure everyday life. The heroes of the film, whether by choice or not, reject “innocence” in favor of the social and political consciousness popularly aligned with the Sixties. Of course, as a Waters film, there is a winking quality to nearly all of Hairspray’s scenes. After Tracy, Link, Penny, and Seaweed attend a Motormouth Maybelle Soul Revue that turns into an anti-segregation rally, they sneak into the alley behind the hall to make out. As a rat crawls over her foot, the wide-eyed Tracy moons, “Oh Link, I wish I was dark-skinned,” to which her paramour replies with a paraphrase of William Blake: “Tracy, our souls are black, even though our skin is white.” Penny, for her part, can scarcely wait for Seaweed to answer her question, “Will integration ever come?,” before gushing, “Go to second! Go to second!” Though Tracy, Link, Seaweed, and Penny are unquestionably the heroes of Waters’s story, this is an element of critique in the scene’s absurd humor. In an essay exploring the camp stylistics of Hairspray, Caetlin Benson-Allott argues that in this scene “the film implies that the students do not understand the stakes of U.S. racism, even that their very desire for integration might be premised on their failure to recognize racial injustice” (148). Thus, in scenes like this one, the film critiques the white ethnocentrism of its viewers and encourages nostalgic memories of the past in order to commodify and profit from them. Indeed, Hairspray’s focus on the white teenager Tracy as the agent of social change (the mostly Black crowd at the film’s climactic race riot chants “Free Tracy Turnblad!”) does not present the history of violence and struggle over racial justice before, during, and after 1962, thus allowing its mostly white bourgeois audience to commodify and consume the civil rights movement as a nostalgic pleasure centering on the contributions of a white teenager. Like Back to the Future, Waters’s film attempts to “fix” history by correcting the failures of the historical 1950s made manifest in the Reagan Era. However, Hairspray’s notions of what constitutes the failure of the past, and problems of the present, are dramatically different from those described in Chapter One of this book. For Hairspray, the failure of the past was not the disruption of the Fifties’ social order but rather that the disruption didn’t go far enough. While Hairspray’s happy ending has The Corny Collins Show declaring itself integrated, the real-life inspiration for the program, The Buddy Deane Show, was canceled in 1964 rather than allow mixed-race dancing. Curry argues that Hairspray represents “the longing perhaps of Waters himself for a rede- signed history, one that vivifies its black and white issues” (166). In other words, Hairspray represents a different sort of “fantasy Fifties”—one that seeks to restore the pleasures of nonconformity and re-energize the belief in public activism and 110 Back to the Fifties civil disobedience. Waters’s film might be understood as an attempt to “regenerate optimism,” as George Lucas claimed as motivation for American Graffiti, but it is also an endorsement of the commitment it takes to enact social change in the face of irrational and indeed violent opposition. The constant invocation of the Fifties in the film’s mise en scène (with outlandish hairdos, outfits, and cars) as outdated and gauche works, in Benson-Allot’s view, to mitigate its own participation in a Jamesonian nostalgia culture. “Because Hairspray promotes integration as a nostalgic moment, and thus creates commodity from a political movement, it also codes its commodity-ridden mise-en-scene as a symptom of the film’s camp sensibility: the very commodification of integration also becomes a critique of that impulse” (145). In other words, the camp stylistics present in the film’s mise en scène draw attention to, and critique, the depoliticizing impulses of the nostalgia film, throwing the film’s happy ending into question. While I find this argument compelling, its exclusive focus on the film’s visual elements neglects to consider the film’s soundtrack. Certainly the novelty songs on the soundtrack, like Little Peggy March’s “I Wish I Were a Princess” or Gene and Wendell’s “The Roach,” function as examples of “bad taste” in the way that Benson-Allott describes. However, the majority of songs are of the style popular on oldies radio and revival tours during the 1980s, including Chubby Checker’s “Pony Time,” The Five Du-Tones’ “Shake a Tail Feather” and Dee Dee Sharp’s “Gravy.” Songs like these are not sonic equivalents of outdated beehive hairdos. They are commodities that are decidedly in fashion and up to date for the Reagan Era (which saw Kylie Minogue cover “The Loco-Motion” and The Fat Boys cover “The Twist”).Hairspray ’s narrative directly critiques The Corny Collins Show for stripping rock and rhythm and blues of its original racial and sexual politics. The same criticisms the film makes of The Corny Collins Show can be extended outside the narrative border of the film and into radio formats, record labels, and television networks of the Reagan Era, rendering the film’s critiques immediate and pressing. After watching the writhing teenagers in Hairspray, Sharp’s “Gravy” becomes legible not as a bubblegum novelty song but a thinly coded affirmation of female sexual desire and authority. Sharp can both admit “I want to ride the gravy train with you” and insist that her partner “treat me right.” Knowing that, audiences can reflect upon the effects of oldies radio, compilation albums, or commercial jingles that hold up oldies as “innocent” in contrast to “depraved” artists of the 1980s like Madonna or 2 Live Crew. The Hairspray soundtrack in this way alters the interpretive networks that surround Fifties rock and roll. In the process, it challenges the Golden Oldies conceptualization of popular music and the culture and historical era that produced it. Re-Generation Soundtracks 111 The rise of oldies, the emergence of Hollywood soundtrack albums as synergistic keystones, and the cultural redefinition of “rock” as the province of figures like Bob Seger and Ferris Bueller were symptoms of broader changes in the marketing and distribution of pop music in the late 1970s and early 1980s. These processes are not separate from or exterior to popular music but constitutive of it. “Twentieth century popular music means the twentieth-century popular record; not the record of something (a song? a singer? a performance?) which exists inde- pendently of the music industry,” Simon Frith explains, “but a form of communication which determines what songs, singers, and performances are and can be” (Music for Pleasure 12). After a brief period in the late 1960s and early 1970s in which popular music styles and genres were presented side by side at music festi- vals, on free-form radio, and in jukeboxes, changes in radio broadcasting in the 1970s saw pop music become organized into more thinly sliced genres, formats, and targeted demographics. The result was the racial segregation of pop music (and, to some extent, pop music audiences) that reflected the “white flight” of middle-class white families from racially diverse American cities into suburban cloisters. The efforts of one artist to break through this “format segregation,” on radio stations and the new outlet of Music Television (MTV), are the subjects of the next chapter. 4

MICHAEL JACKSON, MTV, AND CROSSOVER NOSTALGIA

While the recycling and repackaging of Fifties music described in the last chapter are significant culturally, economically oldies largely exist on the margins of the popular music business. More central were the radical shifts in music distribution (particularly on FM radio and cable TV) in this period. The opening of the FM radio dial and the strategy of targeting more narrowly defined demographics facilitated the growth of Golden Oldies, along with other highly specialized and segmented radio formats. Establishing a format, argues Jody Berland, “ensures that a station is clearly distinguishable from other stations . . . through a clear musical identity constructed in harmony with the precise demographics and researched common tastes of the targeted audience” (“Radio Space” 181). But programming and formatting must be understood as political and cultural processes as well as sound business practices. David Brackett reminds us that “the act of dividing and hierarchizing musical styles and audiences is never innocent or natural […]: some stand to benefit from the way the hierarchy is constructed while others will lose out” (“Politics and Practice” 777). As Hairspray’s Tracy Turnblad could attest, the segmentation of pop music audiences often works to reinforce structural and societal inequities. Changes in radio broadcasting in the 1970s saw pop music become more rigidly organized into more thinly sliced genres, formats, and targeted demographics that reinforced discursive and ideological constructs of generation, gender, sexuality, and race. Partially in response to these transformations in radio, record companies adjusted their development and production strategies. In the early 1970s, CBS Records

112 Michael Jackson, MTV, and Crossover Nostalgia 113 commissioned a study from a group of graduate students at the Harvard Business School. The product of the students’ labors, “A Study of the Soul Music Environment Prepared for Columbia Records Group,” became famous in the music industries as “The Harvard Report.” Noting the growing success of independent soul labels like Motown and Stax, as well as the effective segregation of the record and radio industries through a process of rationalization and market research, the report recommended that CBS’s music divisions actively seek to find artists, albums, and songs that could “cross over” from the Black-oriented soul, funk, and R&B charts to the white-oriented Top 40 and AOR (album-oriented rock) charts (George, Death 150; Sanjek 65). The “crossover hit” became the brass ring for record companies. It also became the subject of intense controversy and debate, as critics like Nelson George in Billboard considered the consequences of the loss of economic control and aesthetic autonomy within Black-owned record labels, management firms, and record stores.1 The pursuit of crossover hits in the Reagan Era was an enormous influence on the development of the new pop sound featured on the blockbuster albums from Madonna, Whitney Houston, Prince, and George Michael. Crossover fever also fueled the expansion of a relatively new cultural form—the music video aired on MTV.2 All of these industrial changes in popular music—the segmentation of radio formats, the pursuit of crossover hits, the increasing importance of blockbuster albums, and the growing influence of MTV—are observable in the meteoric rise of Michael Jackson.3 Jackson was, of course, a mainstream success before the Reagan Era. He spent his childhood fronting The Jackson 5, who scored platinum records for Motown and CBS and were featured in short-lived stints on television with a Saturday morning cartoon show (The Jackson 5ive, 1971–73) and a CBS variety show (The Jacksons, 1976–77). As a solo performer, Jackson secured a supporting role in a Hollywood “soul musical” (1978’s The Wiz) and a multiplatinum solo record (Off the Wall, 1978). Still, as the 1970s wore on, Jackson struggled to cross over the ever more intensely fortified boundaries of format and genre. His time with the Jackson 5 was defined by his status as a precocious child star, and his solo output in the late 1970s, while commercially successful, was circumscribed by the racialized boundaries of “soul” and “disco.” However, with the astronomical success of Jackson’s solo albums in the 1980s (Thriller in 1983 followed by Bad in 1987), Jackson crossed over the racialized borders of popular music and became perhaps the world’s biggest entertainment icon. Reaching those heights was no easy feat. Jackson experienced resistance from powerful media institutions that sought to preserve the effective segregation of Black performers to radio stations, concert tours, and record labels on the margins of the mainstream before Thriller, and dealt with skepticism from some influential Black cultural figures who suspected Jackson had lost touch with his working-class Black roots afterThriller . In both cases, Jackson partially responded through 114 Back to the Fifties pop-nostalgia representations of the Fifties in his music videos. Jackson’s use of the Fifties, however, did not operate in the same way for all audiences. Just as the logic of “crossover” encouraged record labels and music producers to blend different elements to simultaneously appeal to racialized formats, genres, and demographic groups, Jackson’s mobilization of Fifties nostalgia sent different messages to his fans in middle-class white suburbs and working-class Black communities.4 Jackson’s 1980s career reveals the way that nostalgia can change over time and vary across texts, as well as simultaneously serve different semantic and cultural functions, within the same texts, for different audiences. We can see this at work in the opening moments of the video for “Thriller.” Immediately after the titles, Michael drives with his nameless girlfriend (Ola Ray) down a quiet secluded road. The car sputters, slows, and finally stops. His girlfriend gives him a suspicious look, to which he responds defensively: “Honestly, we’re out of gas!” When his girlfriend asks, “So … what are we going to do now?,” there is a quick reaction shot of Michael, then another cut, this one to the couple’s feet walking down the road. The sequence is presented as comedy, but it is also the first indication of the video’s complex use of the Fifties and its ways of establishing that Jackson is, as he says later, “not like other guys.” The video presents a veritable “greatest hits” of pop-nostalgia Fifties signifiers. Michael wears a varsity letterman’s jacket and blue jeans while his ponytailed paramour is clad in a poodle skirt and saddle shoes. They drive down peaceful small- town streets in a powder blue 1957 Chevrolet Bel-Air convertible—the iconic ’57 Chevy of Hot Wheels and Matchbox fame. The video presents Jackson and Ray, in other words, as the most recognizable archetypes of Fifties teenagers that circulated in the Re-Generation. But how does the video treat these archetypes? We might begin to answer that by choosing how to read the two shots—or, perhaps more specifically, the space between the two shots—that follow the car’s breakdown: the reaction shot of Jackson and the close up of the couple’s feet.

Thriller: Reaction shot (left) and cut to feet (right). Michael Jackson, MTV, and Crossover Nostalgia 115 If we take the girl’s question as sincere, we read Michael’s look as innocent or perhaps even naïve. His defensiveness (“Honestly, we’re out of gas”) is a testament to both his innocence and his dismay at his girlfriend’s suspicion. In this reading, Michael adheres to his morality and honor—he understands what his girlfriend is apprehensive about, but holds fast to his principles. In this case, the cut to the feet might be celebrated as a triumph of “traditional values.” If, alternately, we take her question as an attempt at seduction, we can read into Jackson’s reaction a bit of shyness, anxiety, or perhaps fear. He is “not like other guys” because he is not driven by his sexual desires, or is too juvenile or repressed to even consider taking advantage of the situation. In either case, the cut to the couple’s feet works to comic effect—while they might not be capable of imagining alternatives for what they might do in this situation, we certainly can. In either case, these readings position Jackson as the kind of safe, innocent “all-American boy” of the Fifties that was lionized in pop nostalgia of the 1970s and 1980s. As I will show, Jackson’s crossover potential with white audiences was predicated on his eschewal of overt expressions of sexuality that were associated with many funk, soul, and R&B performers of the 1970s. Yet his girlfriend’s implied suspicion that Michael might be manufacturing the car’s breakdown hints that Michael might not be so innocent, after all. In this reading, the reaction shot of Michael (see image 4.1) is suggestive, flirtatious, even conniving. Kobena Mercer’s oft-cited essay on the video suggests that the video’s “innocent representation is unsettled by Michael’s statement: ‘I’m not like other guys.’ The statement implies a question posed on the terrain of gender, and masculinity in particular: why is he different from ‘other guys’?” (36). Mercer endeavors to answer this question with reference to the tabloid rumors that swirled around Jackson’s sexuality in the late 1970s and early 1980s: “Inasmuch as the video audience is conscious of the gossip which circulates around the star, the statement of difference provokes other meanings: is he homosexual, transsexual or somehow presexual?” (39). But Mercer leaves out another possibility. If we follow an alternative interpretation of this scene wherein Jackson’s difference from “other guys” is an inability to suppress his sexual urges like a “good boy” of the Fifties, then the cut to the couple’s feet is not a smash cut for comic effect but rather an ellipsis suggesting that the teens have taken the opportunity to “thrill” themselves in the parked car. Linda Williams reminds us that in the era of the Motion Picture Production Code (the era that is being represented and recreated by the video’s replication of Fifties teen horror conventions), ellipses in editing “were especially frequent and felt as ellipses … when they elide sex acts” (40). In this case, we are forced to look at the innocent, all-American boy image as a performance, and one that Jackson utilizes strategically for his own purposes. 116 Back to the Fifties The ambivalence suggested by this sequence in the video parallels the crossover commercial strategy of Jackson’s solo career. For white, “mainstream” pop music audiences, Jackson’s invocation of the Fifties was meant to signal a safe, apolitical, nonsexual form of entertainment to be distinguished from Black performers in funk, disco, or hip-hop. For Black audiences, Jackson’s use of the Fifties does not simply recreate the pop-nostalgia images that proliferated across popular culture with a Black man at their center, though that was certainly important. In his for- ays into pop nostalgia, Jackson also highlights the artifice of mainstream “Fifties” images, portraying them as just a stage trick, or a bit of show business. Henry Louis Gates has identified such “critical signification” as a strain of African-American cultural production in which forms of dominant culture are reproduced, often with a wink or tongue planted firmly in cheek. This kind of vernacular “signifyin(g)” highlights the performative nature of dominant codes and in the process inverts and subtly critiques the social structures that produce them—though it can also work as a form of homage or respect, in which the repetition of established cultural forms is meant as tribute (52–53). As I argued in Chapter Three, nostalgia for the Fifties was prompted by a mul- titude of texts scattered across the pop culture landscape of the Reagan Era, each working toward its own political and social ends, and each engaged in a cultural process of negotiation and struggle over the meaning of the Fifties. In this chapter, I want to show how pop nostalgia can simultaneously work to different ends, within the same text, for different audiences. The treatment of the Fifties in Jackson’s pop nostalgia music videos draws on both forms of critical signification—celebration and critique—outlined by Gates. In accordance with the logic of crossover, Jackson utilizes different conceptualizations of the Fifties in order to position himself in relation to his Black and white audiences. Jackson draws on the Fifties to burnish his masculine image as well as to contain it, and he celebrates figures from the Fifties as much as he deflates them. In the process, Jackson is able to succeed within the boundaries of commercial culture while also enacting, as Mercer puts it, “resistance to his own formulaic social construction” within it (12). Much of the important scholarly work on Jackson’s career has focused on his flu- idity, his ability to “morph,” to “moonwalk between contradictions,” or otherwise trouble the seemingly stable categories of race, gender, and sexuality.5 Mercer’s essay on the “Thriller” video, for example, casts Jackson as “a spectacle of racial and sexual indeterminacy.” But if Jackson’s race or sexuality are “indeterminate” in his videos it is not because they are wholly fluid or indiscernible; rather, it is because they are irreducible to any singular vision. Throughout the 1980s, different audiences made different determinations regarding Jackson’s cultural significance and meaning, especially in terms of race and masculine sexuality. This was not a process that was Michael Jackson, MTV, and Crossover Nostalgia 117 imposed on Jackson’s work from the outside; it was part of the commercial strategy surrounding Jackson’s media productions. In order to contextualize Jackson’s music and video output, this chapter first covers the major changes in the business of radio broadcasting and album sales that led to the calcification of racially segregated genres and formats in the 1970s, and eventually the rise of MTV in 1981. It then concentrates on the innovation of “crossover” logic in the recording industry and considers the ways that logic impacted the early part of Jackson’s career as a solo artist. The chapter then turns to two of Jackson’s most influential videos—1983’s “Thriller” and 1988’s “Smooth Criminal”—and explores the way that they utilize Fifties tropes and iconography. These videos represent subtly different pitches to Black and mainstream audiences (and correspondingly, subtly different visions of the Fifties). They also reflect the shifting cultural concerns around Jackson himself.

Format Segregation and the Founding of MTV MTV’s influence on the culture and aesthetics of the Re-Generation is almost universally recognized, and Jackson’s impact on the form of music video and the programming strategies of MTV simply cannot be overstated. In order to fully appreciate and comprehend Jackson’s impact, however, one must first understand the structural reorganization of radio broadcasting after the opening of the FM band, as these conditions shaped MTV’s industrial and commercial strategies. While the technological capability to broadcast in FM existed as far back as the 1930s, it didn’t begin to flourish commercially or culturally until the late 1960s. In an effort to increase competition and diversity among radio stations, the FCC ruled in 1964 that station owners must program different material on their AM and FM stations in large markets. Coupled with the inclusion of FM radios in American cars, these regulations helped radio stations “brand” their audiences, increase their advertising rates, and ultimately expand their revenue (Keith and Sterling 301–05). With an influx of advertising dollars making FM broadcasting commercially viable for the first time, and FCC regulations making enormous chunks of programming time available, a vast new space for experimentation opened up at the same historical moment when a thriving Counterculture was exploring new political, social, and aesthetic values in music. In Chapter Three I discuss how the dominance of Top 40 on AM stations allowed for the rise of more targeted formats like Golden Oldies. But Golden Oldies was only one of the new formats to emerge in this era. Where AM music stations generally kept their focus more narrowly on Top 40 pop hits, DJs on new “free form”—or later, “progressive”—FM stations 118 Back to the Fifties had more freedom to expand their playlists, discuss culture and politics, or test the formal limits of commercial radio broadcasting. This period of FM broadcasting has been described as reflecting “sharper divisions in American society” of the 1960s, responding by “incorporating alternative and counterculture content as well as increasingly mainstream music and talk” (Keith and Sterling 129). Former Top 40 DJ Tom Donahue expressed his frustration with traditional Top-40 radio formats in an article in the November 23, 1967, issue of Rolling Stone titled “AM Radio Is Dead and Its Stinking Corpse is Rotting Up the Airwaves.” Breaking from the Top-40 mold, influential free-form DJs like Bill “Rosko” Mercer at WOR-FM in New York City and Donahue in San Francisco aired “deep cuts” from artists like Joni Mitchell, Jefferson Airplane, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, and Janis Joplin, interspersed with social and political commentary. Eschewing the singles released on 45 rpm records, these stations focused on the 33 1/3 LP albums, sometimes playing records in their entirety.6 Within years, market research analysts began to see the revenue potentials of the college-aged audiences tuning in to progressive FM. (Top-40 AM radio stations had the reputation of drawing the less-prized teenage girl market—those who were listening to The Monkees or Sonny & Cher rather than the Stones or the Grateful Dead.) Soon commercial radio was adapting the successes of progressive radio into a more regimented, and more commercially oriented, radio format. Speaking to the Cleveland Plain-Dealer in 1975, WMMS DJ Kid Leo described this as the end of an era: “The emphasis is shifting back to entertainment instead of being ‘relevant’ … That’s Album-Oriented Rock. That’s a name for the 70s” (Olszewski 119). AOR took its name from the emphasis on deep cuts from LP “albums” rather than the “singles” distributed on EP and featured on AM Top-40 radio. AOR took the “album cuts” but left the political and musical experimentation behind, in order to maximize ratings and, by extension, appeal to advertisers. In AOR, the playlist was removed from the DJ’s control and was instead determined by extensive market research conducted by radio programming consultants. Promising higher ratings and advertising revenue, these consultants, argues Joseph Piasek, “turned thematic sets into music ‘sweeps’ designed for Arbitron’s ratings methodology, and handed FM station owners a homogenous and more manageable format” (23). Much like the impact of hundreds of new channels on cable and satellite television making “niche programming” possible, music on American radio in the mid-1970s became hyper-specialized. Using enhanced techniques in audience research and market analysis, station programmers designed playlists to target specific demographics. One of the most influential forces in this movement was the partnership between consultants Lee Abrams and Kent Burkhart. Burkhart’s research team would distribute in-store surveys Michael Jackson, MTV, and Crossover Nostalgia 119 to record store customers and would follow up with phone interviews: “We call them about a week later and ask them how they like the album and which cuts they like best,” Burkhart told Billboard in 1978, “We call about 5,000 a week” (King 22). Burkhart also conducted multiple focus group sessions in which par- ticipants would discuss music. The sessions were videotaped and then analyzed by psychologists. Far from the freewheeling experimentation of Donahue, this new form of FM broadcasting was relentlessly rationalized in order to appeal to audiences from a key demographic—white males ages seventeen to thirty-five. The effect of the rationalization of FM broadcasting in the 1970s, Berland argues, was to demonstrate that demographics, not music, was “radio’s real commodity … to be sold to advertisers in exchange for revenue to the broadcaster” (Berland “Radio Space and Industrial Time” 183). This transformation occurred at the very same time that Golden Oldies emerged, and for many of the same reasons. The emphasis on “entertainment, rather than being relevant,” as Kid Leo said, or the celebration of “apolitical tunes,” as the Oldies backers had it, must be understood not only as a reaction against the politics or aesthetic experimentation in popular music of the late 1960s and early 1970s, but also of the radical, satirical, or just off-color commentary wrapped around that rock music on progressive radio stations. As a result, AOR and the institutions that would build on its innovations participated in a cultural revision of popular music in the United States. Piasek argues that “AOR radio, by stripping rock and roll of its rhythm and blues heritage and rejecting its subversive possibilities, significantly contributed to branding rock as a marketable commodity” (23). In practice this meant, as Burkhart told Billboard, “taking superstars like Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles and playing them over and over” (King 22). The benefits to radio station owners and record companies were immediate but short-lived. By the decade’s end, the music industry would be in disarray, mired in a “great depression” and turning to new media technologies to save it. Theo Cateforis describes the conditions of the industry in 1979 thusly:

An industry accustomed to yearly upward profits was sent reeling, and, faced with a sea of abnormally large overstock returns and sharply declining sales, the major record labels panicked. Companies began to lay off employees at an alarming rate. In August, Business Week reported that the music industry had cut one thousand employees in a workforce of only fourteen thousand. Five months later Rolling Stone estimated that the number had increased to two thousand. The result was a bloodletting that had decimated a significant portion of the industry’s workforce. (Are We Not New Wave? 36) 120 Back to the Fifties Faced with these circumstances, the recording industry and radio broadcasters could have initiated an across-the-board re-examination of their marketing and distribution practices in the United States, giving particular attention to their increasingly narrow focus on young white middle-class males and the attendant cultural redefinition of rock and roll. Examination of the trade and popular press from the years around the so-called great depression of ’79 suggests that station owners and record executives took another approach. The problem, the industry concluded, was not that their formats were too narrow or restrictive but rather that they had allowed themselves to be seduced by “fads” like disco, new wave, and punk, and had strayed too far from “rock” as AOR defined it. Their challenge, they decided, was to find new ways to promote and market AOR music more effectively, and to reach their target demographics on more platforms. MTV was originally an effort to achieve both of those goals, as Denisoff describes in his invaluable history of the company’s early years, Inside MTV.7 The company was one product of a 1979 merger between American Express and Warner Cable, forming Warner Amex Cable Communications (WACC, or Wamex). Warner Cable had some possibly profitable channels (the Star Channel, later renamed The Movie Channel, and the newly formed Nickelodeon). But American Express was particularly interested in Warner Cable because of the potential for expanding market research. Warner Cable had developed the innovative QUBE service, operating in Columbus, Ohio, which had interactive capabilities that allowed viewers to respond to multiple-choice prompts during programming (casting votes, register- ing opinions, etc.). American Express thought that QUBE might be a way to sell financial services through cable television, as well as be a site for advanced market research—particularly of highly targeted demographics. The prospect of using cable television to target middle-class white males from eighteen to thirty-five years old was part of the Wamex plan from the very beginning. John Lack, one of Wamex’s first hires as executive vice president of programming and marketing, explicitly aimed to capture the youth market for television in the same way that AOR did for FM radio. Two more of Lack’s hires—Bob Pittman, hired from WNBC in New York, and John Sykes, brought in from CBS Records in Chicago—reflected this commitment to relentless demographic targeting and AOR format discipline. Additionally, Les Garland, influential pioneer of the AOR format, was hired as a programming consultant. Lack saw rock music videos as a key to capturing young viewers in a cost-effective way for a few reasons: record companies were desperate and still in the throes of a depressed market in album sales; advertisers had no television avenue outside of Saturday Night Live to target the age twelve to thirty-four demographic; and cable television, while poised to rapidly expand, was only providing news, sports, and old Michael Jackson, MTV, and Crossover Nostalgia 121 movies (Denisoff 26–27). However, there was still the matter of acquiring the videos from the record labels without paying for their production. The labels were hoping that music videos (which were originally produced to promote artists globally in the absence of a world tour) would be an additional source of revenue, not an additional promotional expense. Still nervous about home audiotaping and wary of the practice extending to new video recorders, record companies were not keen on the idea of paying for the production of music videos then handing them over to a brand new cable channel for free.8 MTV’s pitch to record companies was that, at a time when AOR stations were shortening their playlists, music videos could break new artists and promote new records. Breaking new artists is vital to the record industry, as unproven artists most often signed contracts more favorable to the record company, with smaller production costs and higher potential earnings for the label. While MTV was telling record companies that the channel would be a way to escape the restrictions of radio formats, Wamex was assuring advertisers and cable operators that MTV would be a station committed to the principles of AOR programming (market research, demographic targeting, regimented playlists, etc.) Using psychographic studies and mining data from test music video programming, John Lack worked to convince advertisers and cable operators that MTV would deliver the right audiences—white suburban male viewers with disposable income. Under the direction of Lack and Pittman, Wamex commissioned a “market segmentation study” that surveyed almost a thousand people, then sliced that information into demographic segments. The result was a musical playlist designed to target middle-class white males from ages twelve to thirty-four. In a recent oral history of MTV, Lack described the intentions of the study:

See, the whole pitch to the board of directors at WASEC had nothing to do with music videos. It had to do with demographics … We said, If this music channel reaches twelve to thirty-four year olds, we can deliver an audience for advertisers they can’t get through broadcast television. Cable providers would sign up new subscribers, because this would be available only on cable. (Marks and Tannenbaum 21)

Lack promised a group of cable operators that the channel “would reach out for target audiences that are not traditional, high-profile TV viewers,” meaning teenage and “upscale adult” white suburbanites (Denisoff 46–47). Responding to questions from television advertisers about the possibilities for programming, Pittman explained, “This is an AOR music channel—we’re not playing all kinds of music” (Loftus 302). The market data—and the continuing slump in record sales—was enough to convince a small group of investors to sign on to the MTV experiment. 122 Back to the Fifties But even as MTV celebrated its premiere in August of 1981, there were rumblings of discontent about the channel’s connection to AOR. Industry insiders and critics alike had noted the absence of Black artists from MTV’s early rotation. Danny Bramson, president of Backstreet Records, worried at the premiere party, “I only hope that they don’t end up with a bland, homogenized approach that duplicates what has happened to so much radio” (Hilburn, “Music TV” G3). Internally, some members of the MTV staff were concerned with the exclusion of Black artists. MTV’s director of acquisitions claimed to have fought to include more artists of color on the station, only to be rebuffed: “I voiced my opinion to Bob [Pittmann]— we all talked about it. Bob comes from radio … He knew what they wanted was an AOR channel” (Denisoff 46). Responding to the same concerns in the press, Pittman insisted over and over again that MTV’s programming choices were motivated by cold, hard data, not racial animus. From a demographic-analysis perspective, this made a certain degree of sense. Cable television was not yet nationwide—it was more concentrated in rural communities and small, mid-American markets more invested in the white-dominated field of rock music. But what MTV’s executives never seemed to grasp was that resentment had been growing over the racial implications of the AOR format’s influence, even without explicitly racist intentions on the part of program directors. Black artists and record companies began to chafe against the format, arguing that their album sales were damaged by their inability to appear on the biggest radio stations through discriminatory programming practices. The newly organized trade group the Black Music Association had taken their dissatisfaction with AOR practitioners to the press as early as 1979 (“A Marriage of Mind and Music” 10). By the time the first Billboard Video Music Conference was held in Los Angeles in November 1981, just two months after MTV’s debut, MTV executives found themselves in a full-fledged media controversy. One of the most-anticipated panels of the conference, “Record Companies: An Expanding Role in Video Entertainment,” featured representatives from several record companies: A&M, Warner Bros., Chrysalis, Atlantic, Polygram, and CBS. While MTV’s John Sykes was not listed as a participant in the panel in Billboard’s pre-conference preview (“Agenda”), according to Denisoff, Sykes became the center of attention when the panel was convened. Label reps peppered Sykes with criticism regarding the absence of Black performers on the channel. It was a mark of MTV’s early success that the controversy gained so much traction. The central argument the channel made to record labels was that if they would finance the production of videos and provide them to MTV for free, they would recoup their expenses in increased album sales. Within six weeks of the August premiere of MTV there was data to show that new artists who were getting no radio airplay (Squeeze, Adam Ant, The Stray Cats, and Duran Duran) were still doing brisk Michael Jackson, MTV, and Crossover Nostalgia 123 album sales in MTV-serviced markets. “You could almost make a tactical map of the country, darken the MTV areas and see the sales of certain records increasing in those areas,” wrote Steven Levy. “A Nielsen survey commissioned by MTV early this year quantified this effect—sixty-three percent of MTV viewers averaged nine album buys a year, and four of those purchases were influenced by what they had seen on the channel” (129). This made the exclusion of non-AOR artists not only a cultural issue but a financial one. Into this controversy stepped the talented and bombastic Motown artist Rick James, who had built a strong following in the late 1970s. His 1981 LP, Street Songs, which featured the hits “Give It to Me Baby” and “Super Freak,” went triple platinum and peaked at #3 on the Billboard charts. James had sold nearly ten million records, but both he and his label, Motown, were frustrated by his inability to get airplay on MTV. In a 1983 interview with the Los Angeles Times, James became the first major recording artist to publicly criticize MTV’s format segregation, calling the lack of Black performers on the channel “an obvious case of discrimination” (Goldstein 88). In the following weeks, James continued his public-relations assault on MTV’s format, telling Billboard a week later, “I’m hoping my speaking out in public about MTV’s discriminatory policy will make other acts go on the record about it” (George, “Slick Rick Says MTV Is Sick”). He later appeared on ABC’s Nightline calling attention to the format segregation and claiming he had been personally blackballed by the channel for speaking out, then told Rolling Stone that MTV’s programming was “like taking black people back 400 years” (Connelly 47). James was indeed a threat to MTV, as he represented the potential for a cultural backlash to the channel just as it was attempting to gain credibility with investors, cable operators, and advertisers. To Wamex’s dismay, artists and critics alike took James’s cue and began to speak out against MTV. Even Bob Seger, an artist who had benefited from AOR as much as anyone, asked in the pages of Musician, “Where are Marvin Gaye and the rappers?” (White “Bob Seger” 60). During an on-air interview on MTV, David Bowie pressed VJ Mark Goodman to answer the question, “Why are there practically no Blacks on the network?” Rock critics, particularly those that harbored resentment over the death of progressive radio, intensified their critiques of MTV. Rock and Roll Confidential’s Dave Marsh drew the connection between MTV and AOR explicitly: “MTV’s programmers—Bob Pittman, Les Garland, and Lee Abrams all learned their tricks at AOR, a true school for scandal” (Denisoff 119–20).The New York Times’ John J. O’Connor didn’t pull his punches, either, observing that “MTV executives, for their part, have insisted, not a little arrogantly, that their product is focused on rock-and-roll, an area of music that supposedly is not fre- quented by black performers. Roll over, Chuck Berry” (O’Connor 23). 124 Back to the Fifties

Crossing Over with Thriller While MTV faced criticism over the racial implications of its AOR programming principles, Michael Jackson and his record label were planning the biggest crossover record in history. To be sure, Jackson was a major star and a household name. His contract with Epic Records (a subsidiary of industry giant CBS) was among the most lucrative in the business. But despite his fame, notoriety, and commercial success, Jackson was constrained by the perception of him as a pop performer (as opposed to a serious “artist” in rock, soul, or folk). Even though Jackson’s debut solo record, Off the Wall, sold over eight million copies in the middle of the record industry’s calamitous depression—Rolling Stone rebuffed CBS’s attempts to get Michael on the cover. Jackson and CBS would again be stung when Off the Wall only gar- nered three Grammy nominations, despite being the top-selling record in history for a Black artist. Far worse, Jackson dealt with coded and explicit racism from within the entertainment industry. One particularly loathsome instance involved Jackson’s friendship with another former child star, Tatum O’Neal. When Jackson invited her to accompany him to the New York premiere of The Wiz, her management forbade her from going. In her autobiography, O’Neal remembers, “I was told, in exactly these words: ‘You can’t go to a premiere with a nigger’ ” (101). In the run-up to Thriller, both Jackson and his team at Epic/CBS were heavily invested in breaking through the restrictions of radio formatting and reaching not just mainstream but blockbuster success. The label approved production costs for the album up to the million-dollar mark. The album was slated for a late November release to hit the holiday gift-giving season. While Quincy Jones tried to temper expectations about the album’s commercial prospects in the depressed pop music marketplace, Jackson cheerfully told Ebony, “I think we’ll have at least seven hit singles off this one” (Sanders 130). With Thriller, he didn’t just want a hit—he wanted the biggest record of all time. CBS was on board. It is important to remember that CBS did not sign Jackson away from Motown simply because he had been a child star. He was also recognized as the heir apparent to a Black musical tradition that stretched back to the Fifties (and beyond). Some of the best writing on Michael Jackson’s music from scholars and critics like Marc Anthony Neal, Nelson George, Sylvia Martin, Joseph Vogel, and Touré have begun to reveal the ways that “Jackson was always in conversation with his influences” (Neal, “Sampling Michael”). As a youngster, Jackson honed his craft working on the so-called Chitlin’ Circuit—the nightclubs, theaters, and other venues that had been hospitable to Black performers dating back to the era of Jim Crow. Many of The Jackson 5’s earliest performances were in clubs opening for seasoned soul performers. As Neal points out, young Jackson would studiously watch James Brown, Michael Jackson, MTV, and Crossover Nostalgia 125 learning to imitate his movements and aggressive vocal techniques. When Motown songwriters were working on the song that would eventually become the smash hit “I Want You Back,” Barry Gordy suggested they channel Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers’ 1955 hit “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?,” a song that paired precocious young voices with romantic themes beyond their performers’ years (George, Thriller 34–35). Perhaps the most influential Fifties performer from the Chitlin’ Circuit to Jackson’s career, however, was Jackie Wilson, to whom Jackson paid tribute at the 1983 Grammys (Cocks and Worrell 56). Nelson George lists the links between the two stars:

The way Michael holds the microphone. The way he holds his upper body as he spins. His hand gestures with his non-microphone-holding hand. How he tilts his head and isolates his body parts as he dances. There’s a bit of Wilson in all of these MJ moves … . There are beautiful echoes of this old master in young Michael, a performer just defining his adult style. (Thriller 60)

Throughout his career Jackson drew on the vocal styles and movements of Black performers from the 1950s in an attempt to display his Chitlin’ Circuit bona fides and claim his space in the tradition of Black entertainers that stretched from Motown and James Brown back to the Black Vaudeville circuit. Jackson is often held up as a musician of the crossover pop genre, which Tamara Roberts describes as a “hybrid” sound that “transcends race,” (20) while David Brackett suggests Jackson’s pop is “genre play” that “mixes or blends genres in ways that evoke a kind of racial integration” (“Black or White?” 172). But as Susan Fast points out, while Jackson did work to incorporate other sounds and musical traditions into his music, the writing, recording, and production of his music was always rooted in Black traditions. Fast reminds us, “Jackson always worked with black producers and almost exclusively with black musicians,” and his songwriting was always grounded first in Black popular music, whether it was produced with Quincy Jones, Teddy Riley, Jimmy Jam or R. Kelly” (296–97). In the early 1980s, in other words, Jackson operated within the context of Black genres, Black artists and producers, and Black record labels. But with Thriller, CBS, Quincy Jones, and Jackson all actively pursued “crossover” success, from the conceptual to the recording and post-production stages. In pursuit of that goal, the songs penned for the album were written with both Black and white audiences in mind. The album spans boundaries of genre and format—there are ballads (“Human Nature”), funk (“P.Y.T.”), disco (“Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ ”), R&B (“Billie Jean”), and adult-contemporary offerings (“The Girl is Mine”). The songwriters and 126 Back to the Fifties studio musicians who worked on the album’s production also reflected the commitment to crossover. Steve Porcaro of the multicultural rock band Toto wrote the ballad “Human Nature.” Other members of Toto participated in the recording of “Human Nature,” as well as “Baby Be Mine.” “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ ” features percussion work from Brazilian session specialist Paulinho da Costa. “Beat It” includes a scorching guitar solo from Eddie Van Halen, which was meant to appeal to hard rock audiences. CBS also went for older AOR fans as well—the album’s lead single for the album was not the legendary “Billie Jean” but rather “The Girl is Mine,” an adult contemporary duet with Paul McCartney. Thriller’s composition not only blended existing styles and genres, it also created something new. In his musicological analysis of Jackson’s crossover style, Brackett argues that in “Beat It,” Jackson takes “two genres believed to lie on opposite ends of the affective and associative spectrum, heavy metal and electro-funk, and did not so much fuse them as create a generic montage” (Brackett “Black or White?” 172). It bears mentioning here that “crossover” was not just about including “rock” sounds—elements of rock, pop, and jazz (and eventually hip-hop) are always blended with Jackson’s roots in funk and R&B to create a new notion of mainstream “pop.” Pop music itself was remade in Thriller’s image, blending elements of “white” and “Black” popular music. CBS’s crossover strategy paid immediate dividends. “The Girl is Mine” raced up the Billboard charts, reaching #5 on the Hot 100 within two weeks—a strong indication that the song was receiving airplay on mainstream “white” radio formats (AOR, adult contemporary, MOR, etc.), and Billboard began predicting big sales for the record as a whole (“Top Album Picks”). By December 18, 1982, a cover story in Billboard celebrated Thriller’s success in breaking into AOR playlists, largely on the strength of “The Girl is Mine” and “Beat It.” Billboard reported that “close to 50 of the nation’s 500 AOR stations are playing the record, including such generally mainstream AOR outlets as WRKI Danbury Conn, WSLQ Roanoke and WQDR Raleigh—all Lee Abrams stations,” adding that it was the first time in recent memory that a Black artist had infiltrated AOR so completely (Green 1). The fact that the trade press was so struck by Thriller’s ability to break through on AOR reveals the degree to which the racial borders of popular music were considered impassable. By February of 1983, Thriller was reaching untold heights in record sales and crossing over all boundaries on radio. It was certified platinum by the RIAA on January 31, had reached #1 on the Billboard album charts, and had two singles on the Hot 100 singles charts (“Billie Jean” was in the top five; “The Girl is Mine” in the top twenty-five). And yet, CBS and Epic were being stonewalled by MTV. Denisoff describes the outcome of a CBS/Epic strategy session: “One executive suggested having Michael Jackson appear on the CBS Morning News and repeat [Rick] James’ charges of racism. […] Finally, the ultimate weapon was introduced: curtail MTV’s Michael Jackson, MTV, and Crossover Nostalgia 127 supply of free videos “ (103). There are conflicting accounts over how the dispute between CBS and MTV over playing Jackson’s videos was ultimately resolved. The story that appears most often in print involves CBS invoking the “nuclear option” of pulling their videos from MTV. David Benjamin, vice president of business affairs at CBS, told Vanity Fair, “I call Sykes; he picks up. ‘John,’ I say, ‘the fickle finger of fate is pointed at you. I am now invoking the 24-hour kill clause in our contract. By tomorrow at this time I want every CBS video off MTV’ ” (Anson). CBS president Walter Yetnikoff recalls, “I called Pittman and said, ‘You have to play this video.’ He said, ‘We’re a rock station, Walter, we don’t play black music.’ I said, ‘That’s great, I’m pulling all my stuff. Then I’m gonna tell the whole world what your attitude is towards black people’ ” (Marks and Tannenbaum 178). MTV executives have repeatedly denied this version of events, but the circulation of this story at the very least reveals a popular association of MTV in the period with a stubborn insistence on the AOR format and a lack of interest in racial or musical diversity. Whatever negotiations occurred behind the scenes, Jackson’s videos did make it to air, and almost immediately became some of the most important pieces in the history of the music video form. In an environment where his Black masculinity caused industrial and cultural anxiety, Jackson’s videos apply the logic of crossover to significations of the Fifties. Jackson’s use of the Fifties appealed to Black and mainstream audiences in strategic ways, both honoring the legacy of Fifties entertainers and critically reflecting on idealized versions of the Fifties. In particular, Jackson drew on Fifties Hollywood, with its values of glamour and spectacle, to legitimize new media forms (like music video) and to establish his dominant place within them. While Jackson’s singing, dancing, and stage manner drew on the legacies of performers like Frankie Lymon, James Brown, and Jackie Wilson, Jackson’s appearances on television were often influenced by the conventions and tropes of Fifties Hollywood. This is apparent in many of the skits onThe Jacksons. Each episode featured short comedic sketches along with a special guest host, interspersed by musical interludes. In one episode, Jackson, clad in a leather motorcycle jacket and a truly awful ducktail wig, led his siblings in a number called “Do the Fonz.” The song was a deservedly unreleased novelty track from The Heyettes’ album of Happy Days-inspired tracks for London Records. The Jacksons’ performance of “Do the Fonz” has largely been forgotten. But years later, Jackson reused portions of the choreography (specifically, the greaser hair-combing moves) in his legendary television performance of “Billie Jean” at the Motown 25th Anniversary Concert. Jackson continued his reliance on Fifties Hollywood in the production of his music videos. The first two videos from Thriller—the ones that Walter Yetnikoff fought so hard to get on MTV—both utilized images associated with the Fifties. 128 Back to the Fifties “Billie Jean” drew on the private-eye figures of the postwar noir tradition in its visual style and, as Amir Khan has argued, invoked and negotiated with figures from Fifties Hollywood in its costume and iconography (192). “Beat It” was widely understood as a modern-day reimagination of West Side Story, despite director Bob Giraldi’s claims that he had never seen it (Marks and Tannenbaum 180). Despite Giraldi’s denials, the sight of rival street gangs dancing their way through a knife fight is sure to draw comparisons to the Sharks and the Jets. The greatest use of Fifties Hollywood tropes in Jackson’s videography, however, comes from “Thriller”—which might be the most important music video in MTV’s history. As a song, “Thriller” was almost an afterthought. It was not expected to be one of the album’s hits. Neither Quincy Jones nor Walter Yetnikoff rated the song. Few critics isolated “Thriller” as a standout on the album, treating it as a fairly standard dance track with a novelty twist—a 1980s version of Bobby “Boris” Pickett’s “Monster Mash.” TheVillage Voice predicted that listeners would much prefer the song “on the dancefloor than in [the] living room” (Christgau “Consumer Guide”). Six other tracks on the album were chosen as singles before “Thriller” was released in November 1983, nearly a full year after “The Girl is Mine.” By that time, it looked like the album’s remarkable reign at the top of the charts would come to an end. Jackson and his close advisor Frankie DiLeo, head of production at Epic Records, saw a “Thriller” video as an opportunity to reinvigorate sales for the album and raise the bar for music videos. With CBS not particularly interested in producing a video (the record had already sold millions upon millions, why pay to continue promoting it?), Jackson underwrote the project with his own money. He signed Hollywood director John Landis, who had recently directed An American Werewolf in London (1981). Hatching a plan to revitalize the theatrical film short, Landis and Jackson submitted a proposed budget for “Thriller” of nearly a million dollars (four times the cost of “Billie Jean,” which had an unusually large budget as it was) to Yetnikoff at CBS. Yetnikoff adamantly (and according to Landis, profanely) refused to fund the project beyond $100,000. But Jackson’s commercial success with Thriller and his favorable contract afforded him a level of creative autonomy most recording artists never attain. Jackson, his lawyer (John Branca), and Landis’s producer (George Folsey) came up with a plan to finance the production: they sold exclusive broadcast windows to Showtime and MTV for the video (and, nominally, the featurette The Making of Thriller) for a combined $550,000. Effectively, Jackson’s team forced MTV to do for Jackson the one thing that it had vowed to never do for record companies—pay for the production of a music video—only a year after refusing to play his videos at all! Jackson’s team continued to break new ground in the industry, signing an innovative agreement with Vestron Video to distribute the “Thriller” video on VHS—an agreement that helped to establish the home video-rental Michael Jackson, MTV, and Crossover Nostalgia 129 business (N. Griffin 67–68). The video boosted album sales by over half a million (Cocks 58). What’s more, Jackson radically broke from the established form of music videos, submitting a cinematically ambitious “short film” with a runtime of almost fourteen minutes.9 As opposed to videos that existed to promote a song or album, “Thriller” represents one of the first times a video existed for itself. In fact, the song “Thriller” had to be entirely remixed for the video, exchanging the traditional verse-chorus-verse structure of the album version for a more narratively oriented musical structure. Mercer argues that with the promotional imperative for selling albums lifted, the video “celebrates the success that the LP has brought Michael Jackson” (30). This might be overstating things; “Thriller” was still very much a promotional vehicle, though it promoted the home video rather than the album. More than that, however, “Thriller” helped to promote Jackson by repositioning and reforming his public image, both as an artist and as man. “Thriller” marked the first time that Jackson interacted with a woman in his video career. Developing Jackson’s masculine sexuality was an explicit goal for the video’s producers from the start. “The big thing was to give him a girl,” said Landis in a 2010 “Thriller” retrospective in Vanity Fair (N. Griffin 68). Landis’s direction specifically emphasized Jackson’s role as a sexual one, not just a romantic one. Griffin recalls Landis encouraging Jackson to repeat a scene, saying “Make it sexy this time … as if you want to fuck her” (60). The promotion for the video also played up Jackson’s sexual appeal. In the opening segment of the Making of Thriller documentary, fans lining the streets of East Los Angeles are asked why they have come out to watch the filming. The responses from women of color (“He’s the sexiest man I’ve ever met in my whole entire life”; “He’s exciting!”) and white Valley Girls (“He’s so sexy and so gorgeous”; “He’s cute and he sings!”) all position Michael as an object of multicultural desire. At the same time, men in the crowd appreciate Jackson because of his “talent” and “class,” as well as his connection to authentic street performance—Mexican-American boys in the crowd pay Jackson high praise by calling him “bad” for his ability to “pop” (a style of street dancing). Both the video and its promotional materials, in other words, worked to establish Jackson’s masculine credibility among audiences across races and genders. But they did so carefully, with an assist from the Fifties. The early exclusion of Rick James (for whom Black male sexuality was an explicit part of his image) from MTV shows how difficult it was for even massively successful artists to cross over to mainstream [white] musical arenas. Ever sensitive to and savvy of commercial dynamics, Jackson and his team at CBS employed crossover strategies in his videos’ treatment of race and sexuality. In middle-class Black publications, Jackson’s sexuality was consistently a subject of curiosity, concern, and 130 Back to the Fifties rumor: a 1977 issue of Jet, for example, featured an item headlined “Michael Denies Sex Change; Says He Is Not Gay and Did Not Swim Nude with Tatum” (“The Sexes” 46). Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Ebony almost constantly asked Jackson about his desire to get married and his relationship with Diana Ross, and emphati- cally denounced the speculations of the gossip magazines regarding Jackson’s sexuality. In “Thriller,” Jackson’s appearance with a formerPlayboy model Ola Ray worked to address those anxieties. And though “Thriller” was designed to emphasize Jackson’s sexuality, the use of Fifties imagery in “Thriller” also communicated to mainstream white audiences that Jackson was indeed “not like the other [Black] guys”—Jackson could never be said to be “explicit” or “raunchy.” Instead, for white audiences in the Reagan Era, Jackson represented a “safe” and “politically neutral” form of Black masculinity that we might now call “postracial.” Part of Jackson’s appeal to mainstream white audiences in the 1980s was the absence of the kinds of overt sexuality or explicit political consciousness that were so intrinsic to the images of Prince, Rick James, or soul icons like Marvin Gaye or Isaac Hayes. Sonically, “Thriller” is a fairly standard example of late 1970s/early 1980s disco and funk, utilizing guitars, synthesizers, and horns. This standard approach is coupled with stock sound effects (and a closing monologue) from the midnight movies that were marketed to the burgeoning teen market in the 1950s. In this way, the song itself blends the style of the Re-Generation with forms associated with the Fifties. The funk bass in “Thriller” recalls (or nearly steals, to be less generous) the bassline from Rick James’s “Give It to Me Baby,” and the surging synths in the song’s opening are reminiscent of Prince’s “1999” (Lyle). But the wolf howls, creaking doors, the hint of theremin from the Juno 106 synthesizer, and the spoken “rap” performance by Vincent Price all gesture toward Fifties horror film (“the terror on the screen,” as the lyrics go). Jackson’s combination of Black musical conventions (drawing from the legacies of Jackie Wilson and James Brown and borrowing from contemporaries Rick James and Prince) and “white” filmic conventions (that of the teen horror flick) gave him the ability to assert a sexually mature Black masculinity and still appear safe, innocent, and marketable to white audiences. Just like they did for teens at 1950s drive-ins, horror films in Jackson’s “Thriller” provide a justification and a mask for playing with sexuality. The song’s lyrics present a menace in several monstrous forms (“the beast about to strike”; “the thing with forty eyes”; “night creatures”; and assorted aliens, ghouls, and demons). The first three verses of the song address the dangers the monsters represent, but the fourth verse reveals that these monsters can be escaped when “you change the number on the dial.” Coupled with the obviously dated monster-movie effects, the song conjures the “midnight movies” of UHF television—low budget films, often from the horror genre, that were shown repeatedly. The monsters are, in other words, Michael Jackson, MTV, and Crossover Nostalgia 131 programmed reruns. The horrific encounter thus becomes the rationale for the potentially pleasurable sexual encounter. Jackson’s sexual attention is presented as both protection from these rerun specters (“Now is the time for you and I to cuddle close together/All through the night / I’ll save you from the terror on the screen”) as well as an experience akin to their hauntings (“I can thrill you more than any ghost would ever dare try”). This dichotomy serves the means by which the “song becomes self-referential, metaphorically about the very taboo thrills that have made young white people seek out black music, and their parents fear for the consequences” (Oyola, “Thrills, Chills”). In this way, “Thriller” confronts the same racial, sexual, and political anxieties that fueled the segregation of The Buddy Deane Show and American Bandstand in the 1950s, and lurked in the background of the institution- alization of AOR and format segregation of the 1970s. In the “Thriller” video, Michael’s wholesome Fifties image literally hides the beast that lurks inside him. This is revealed after he offers his girlfriend a promise ring, then a warning: “I’m not like other guys,” he says nervously, “. . . I mean, I’m different.” At this point the video recycles several horror film conventions. There is a shot of a full moon emerging from behind dark clouds, an orchestral score blares, and Michael undergoes a transformation from a baby-faced sweetheart to bloodthirsty werewolf. Shots of his teeth, ears, hands, and face changing forms are interspersed with his girlfriend, terrified and screaming, which indicates both Jackson’s uncontrollable animal- ity as well as the position of the woman as a potential victim to the monstrous appetite of the creature that asked her to go steady just moments before. The horror! Mercer characterizes this segment of “Thriller” as “parody,” and it is easy to understand why. The video lays on the conventions of the teen horror film so thickly it is difficult to take it seriously. The hyperdramatic musical score, the canned sound effects, and the utterly nonsensical behavior of the characters (If Michael knows he is a werewolf, why does he decide to take his steady out on a date during a full moon … unless that’s the plan all along?) seem overdone. Landis’s previous films often poke fun at the Fifties (he directed Animal House [1978] and The Blues Brothers [1980]), and he lampooned the horror genre in both American Werewolf and his directorial debut Schlock (1973). However, close attention to the treatment of the Fifties in the video suggests that we might instead consider the video what Gates calls a “critical signification” of the Fifties. Rather than simply ridiculing the absurdity of Fifties horror conventions, Jackson’s video presents these conventions as artificial and silly while showing how their effects can still be “thrilling,” in a variety of ways. We are reminded of the pleasures of outmoded Fifties conventions just as Werewolf-Michael closes in on his helpless girlfriend. As the beast prepares to strike, we cut to a 1980s movie theater, where a 1980s Michael sits next to his 1980s girlfriend, watching the fictional Fifties horror film Thriller. While his girlfriend (still played 132 Back to the Fifties

Jackson and Ray, with Fifties movies in the background. by Ray) and the rest of the audience cringe at the terror on the screen (which we never see), Jackson happily munches popcorn, impervious to the film’s horror. When Ray pathetically asks, “Can we get out of here?,” Jackson is first emphatic (“No! I’m enjoying this!”), then annoyed (as she storms out of the theater), and finally amused (“You were scared, weren’t you?”). For Michael, his date’s fear is laughable because the Fifties horror film is so outmoded and clichéd as to be obviously artificial (“It’s only a movie!”). The theater, which serves as the backdrop for Michael and his girlfriend’s argument, is similarly out of time—it is the Palace Theater in Los Angeles, a former movie palace that had become a second-run and grindhouse theater by the 1980s. Fittingly, the horror movie posters hanging outside the theater gesture backwards to Fifties horror: the films advertised are House of Wax (1953) and The Mad Magician (1954), both Fifties horror films starring Vincent Price, and Schlock, John Landis’s homage to, and send-up of, monster movies of the 1950s. Although Michael is able to resist the horror effects of these Fifties films, he realizes that his girlfriend cannot—and that realization is appealing to him. As the synths from “Thriller” make their first appearance, Michael notes that his girlfriend’s susceptibility to fear can draw her closer to him. Just as in the opening sequence, we viewers are left to wonder: is Michael honorably and innocently accompanying his girlfriend home, or has he just manufactured an opportunity for sex? In the long tracking shot that follows, Michael teases, flirts, and embraces Ray as he sings the song’s three verses (The video’s version of the song strings the three verses together at the beginning, shifts the “rap” spoken word to the middle, bumps the chorus to the end, and omits the bridge entirely) (Wiley 106–08). This rearrangement not only Michael Jackson, MTV, and Crossover Nostalgia 133 clears space for the video’s famous dance number but also emphasizes a narrative in which the addressee’s attention is turned from the external fear of demons, ghouls, and sundry creatures to the prospect of “cuddling close” “all through the night.” “Thriller” focuses on Jackson’s sexual agency and masculine power—his powers of seduction and ability to best any rival (be it man or beast). But the video cannot (or will not) address Jackson’s sexual agency directly; it prefers to dance around it. The video’s famous dance segment begins with a return to Fifties monster-movie conventions. The two lovebirds skip past a graveyard and out of the frame. At that point, Price’s “rap” (itself a blend of the Fifties voice of Price and the 1980s conventions of hip-hop) plays over images of zombies rising from the grave, shuffling down the street, and eventually surrounding the happy couple. The bass groove of the song stops and is replaced by the score that accompanied the werewolf movie seen earlier in the video. The camera movements—a whirling pan, followed by a dolly zoom—also approximate Fifties film conventions and presage another monstrous transformation. In the next shot, Michael morphs into a zombie, leading the other ghouls in a rousing bit of choreography before changing back into human form to deliver the chorus (“I could thrill you more than any ghost would ever dare try”). This portion of the video thus combines the two elements of Jackson’s masculine appeal that were highlighted by the fan reactions in The Making of Thriller: his sex appeal and his dancing talent, which are both presented as authentically Black, filtered through the white form of Fifties popular culture. Jackson’s sexuality is thus emphasized both by its animal ferocity and his ability to channel it into virtuosic talent as an entertainer. At its close, the video offers one last bit of ambiguity. Michael leads the ghouls in the closing choreography and his girlfriend escapes, taking refuge in an abandoned house (of course). The “Thriller” beat fades away, replaced again by swelling monster-movie music. Predictably, the monsters break through the windows, door, and floor of the abandoned house, led by Zombie Michael. In an echo of the werewolf movie from the beginning of the video, the transformed Michael looms over the screaming girl. Suddenly, the film cuts away. Michael, returned to human form, innocently asks, “What the problem?” As a wave of relief passes over the girl’s face, Michael offers to take her home. It is morning. It was only a dream. But what was the dream, exactly? Again, we have experienced an ellipsis of indeterminate length. Both Michael and his girlfriend are wearing the same clothes they were wearing at the movie theater the night before. Even if we assume that Michael is not a monster, was Michael really so innocent, or was it an act deployed to seduce? The video’s final shot emphasizes this question. As he walks his girlfriend toward the door, Michael turns back to the camera and smiles. His eyes are glowing an inhuman yellow, and Vincent Price’s haunting laugh plays in voice-over. Jackson’s final look back at the camera suggests a wink or a nod to audiences in the know, an 134 Back to the Fifties

Thriller: The animal within. assurance that even though he might look safe enough for mainstream audiences, he is truly an animal on the inside. A common thread throughout press coverage of Jackson was that his shy, timid, and often peculiar behavior would stop the moment he stepped onstage. There he would “come alive,” becoming an unstoppable dynamo. Jackson’s ability to transform himself, in his affect as well as his physiognomy, became a central part of his public persona. This, argues Victoria Johnson, makes Jackson’s star text function in a unique way. Whereas Richard Dyer’s important conceptualization of stardom suggests that stars are able to negotiate and reconcile diametrically opposed values through a central “core” identity, Jackson’s constant shape-shifting and “active flight from a ‘core’ identity resists this model of the ultimately ‘knowable’ individual” (Johnson “A New Look” 58). This might have made Jackson the perfect crossover artist—one whom different audiences could interpret in different ways. After Thriller, however, this same quality also represented a threat to Jackson’s credibility with some Black audiences, who began to suspect that Jackson was not authentically masculine, not authentically Black, and not connected to urban Black audiences.

“Is Michael Jackson for Real?” While tabloids had picked at Jackson’s eccentricities and hunted for scandals for years, significant concerns with Jackson’s Blackness started with the Victory Tour. After reuniting with his brothers at the Motown 25th Anniversary show Michael Jackson, MTV, and Crossover Nostalgia 135 in 1983, Michael Jackson reluctantly agreed to record one last album with them, performing under the name “The Jacksons” (the name “The Jackson 5” remained the property of Motown). They recorded the album Victory and planned for a stadium tour in the summer of 1984. John Branca told Rolling Stone in March 1984, “I’m not sure the tour was Michael’s first choice. He might have preferred to do other things. But he found it important to tour at his brothers’ request and his family’s request” (Goldberg and Connelly 27). Tensions among the Jackson family had long been the subject of rumor, but with the Victory Tour, the strain became increasingly public. The tour drew tremendous crowds and was a windfall for the Jackson family, but in public relations terms it was a catastrophe. Produced by boxing promoter Don King and Chuck Sullivan (son of the owner of the New England Patriots), the tour was beset by troubles. A mail-order lottery system for selling blocks of four tickets, which required an outlay of $130 for the chance at tickets, drew sharp criticism. In a syndicated piece that ran in newspapers nationwide, two critics argued that “the Jackson tour has not been about music. It’s been about greed and arrogance” (Glen and Shearer 24). Questions about management’s competence continued, so much so that promoters were predicting in the pages of People that the tour would be canceled (Carlson 45–46). The public relations nightmare would only intensify when Ladonna Jones, an eleven-year-old girl from Texas penned an open letter to the Dallas Morning News expressing her shock and betrayal that she could not afford the requisite block of four tickets. “I’ve always believed you to be a person of feeling up until now. I’m so disappointed in you,” wrote Jones. “How could you of all people be so selfish? Is your appearance here in Texas Stadium only for the rich?” (Aasen). Jones’s letter fed a narrative that Jackson was abandoning his most faithful fans. Jackson quickly called a press conference, acknowledging Lewis’s letter and announcing that the lottery ticket system would be suspended and that his share of tour revenues would be donated to charities including the United Negro College Fund (Taraborrelli 315). By that point, however, the damage had been done. James Brown allegedly refused to appear on stage with The Jacksons at Madison Square Garden (Taraborrelli 317). Animosity among the brothers seeped into the press until the tour reached its unhappy end at Dodger Stadium, where Michael Jackson unexpectedly announced that he would no longer tour with his brothers. A 1987 profile in Spin by Quincy Troupe summarizes the difficulties Jackson faced in this period:

Since Thriller and the Jacksons’ disastrous Victory tour, he has managed to generate the most powerful backlash in the history of popular entertainment. There have been bitter family feuds, an acrimonious rift with the Jehovah’s 136 Back to the Fifties Witnesses, broken friendships with Diana Ross and Paul McCartney, and the burden of a celebrity so unmanageable that it drove him into isolation. Even in seclusion, reports of his plastic surgery, his private menagerie, and his hyper- baric chamber conspire to make him a national joke—a joke repeated each time another line of irrelevant Michael Jackson merchandise hits the stores. In record time, he has gone from being one of the most admired of celebrities to one of the most absurd. (44)

To some degree, this backlash was led by music critics who championed the grittiness, supposed authenticity, and white heterocentrist sexuality of “rock.” Troupe points out the discrepancy in how the press treated Jackson and other “rock” performers: “Bruce Springsteen plays the guitar, writes songs that are subject to literary criticism, and dances like a white guy. Whereas Michael Jackson represents a black cultural heritage that white rock critics either don’t know about or would rather appreciate nostalgically from someone who’s dead” (48). Considering some of the prominent voices in rock criticism at the time, it’s hard not to agree that the very same critics who were calling for Jackson’s inclusion on AOR and MTV were now lambasting him for being little more than a revenue generator. David Fricke argued that Victory was a timid and cynical rehash of previous Jacksons albums (167). Greil Marcus critiqued Jackson’s concerts as pure commodification. Robert Christgau called the Victory Tour a “mass culture spectacle” that had excluded young Black audiences. Just three years after Rolling Stone took out a full page ad in Billboard apologizing to Michael Jackson for refusing to put him on the cover, the magazine ran a Mickey Mouse caricature of Jackson on the cover of the September 24, 1987, issue for its story, “Is Michael Jackson for Real?” The skepticism of white rock critics was accompanied by something much more worrying—the slow erosion of Jackson’s Black fan base. The logic of crossover, after all, required artists to solidify their position in Black-oriented radio before climbing up the charts on AOR and Top 40. But by the time Jackson’s next album was slated to be released—Bad, in late 1987—Black-oriented radio had undergone significant changes. Partially as a result of Jackson’s success, artists like Prince, Whitney Houston, and New Edition emerged as crossover rivals. At the same time, hip-hop’s climb into the mainstream provided a new pathway to musical success. These shifting commercial and cultural values among Black Americans are registered in a 1987 Village Voice piece, which asks New Yorkers about their impressions of Jackson. A subway rider offers that “Michael went too far in the white direction”; aspiring actors in Central Park speculate that Janet Jackson might just be Michael in drag; and Def Jam rappers Whodini mock Jackson in front of thousands at Madison Square Garden. These remarks, however outlandish or absurd, also register the Michael Jackson, MTV, and Crossover Nostalgia 137 growing sense that Michael Jackson was not who he said he was (Trebay 15–17). Suspicions regarding Jackson’s racial identity slid into questions of his gender and sexuality, in the tabloids as well as in everyday conversations. It was as if the “critical” element of Jackson’s performance of Gates’s “critical signification” had fallen by the wayside, leaving fans with the impression of a mass media spectacle that pretended to be white, that pretended to be innocent, and that pretended to be masculine, but did so with neither efficacy nor irony. This shift in Black audiences’ attitudes toward Jackson is visible in the work of another crossover success story of the 1980s: comedian Eddie Murphy. In Murphy’s 1983 stand-up film Delirious, Murphy concedes that Jackson “ain’t the most masculine fellow in the world,” but then jokes that his innocent, sensitive demeanor is just a performance, a “hook” to seduce women. This joke is consistent with the readings of the “Thriller” video that play on Jackson’s ability to critically signify the innocent, all-American boy. Andreana Clay elucidates how, in Murphy’s 1987 stand-up film Raw, the jokes on Jackson come from a different angle. Murphy mocks Jackson’s lack of physical prowess (“I’ll fuck Mike up … Mike don’t weigh but a buck-oh- five!”) and his religion and sexuality (“[Jackson] went on television and said ‘I don’t have sex because of my religious beliefs’ … Brothers were like ‘Get the fuck outta here!’ ”) Murphy is no longer presenting Jackson’s manner as a ploy to get women but as a mask for deficient masculinity or closeted homosexuality. Murphy’s bit continues, mocking white audiences for their sincere belief in Jackson’s “innocent” public persona. Affecting a square, nasal voice, Murphy jokes, “White people were like, ‘That Michael, he’s a special kind of guy! He’s good, clean and wholesome!’ ” In Murphy’s material in Raw, Clay argues, as “Jackson fails to secure an accept- able Black masculinity, he lands at the other end of the spectrum by making white people believe he is exceptional” (10–11). Murphy’s changing Jackson jokes suggest that in the Thriller-era, Jackson’s all-American boy image was recognized among at least some Black audiences as a critical signification upon the national archetype of morality and masculinity, but by the late 1980s, those same Black audiences laughed at Jackson’s persona as a sham that only white people could fall for. This crisis of credibility led rock critic Dave Marsh to describe Jackson’s position in the late 1980s as being caught in a “crossover trap” engineered by his family and the music industry: he had crossed over to the realm of white, mass culture superstardom, and in the process forfeited the chance to return to Black culture. Anxiety over Jackson’s crossing over was at the root of tabloid coverage of Jackson’s alleged skin bleaching (it was later revealed and subsequently confirmed by autopsy that Jackson lived with vitiligo, a skin condition which causes depigmentation). In the years immediately after Thriller, however, a significant portion of America believed that Michael Jackson wished to be white, and that his cosmetic surgery, 138 Back to the Fifties changing hairstyles, and celebrity friends were all “signs of black self-hatred become self-mutilation,” as Greg Tate wrote in an editorial entitled “I’m White! What’s Wrong with Michael Jackson” (15). Jackson’s detachment from urban Black youth was highlighted again in the pages of Spin, which presented the brief attempt for a collaboration between Jackson and Run-DMC in 1986 as less a clash of personalities and more a cultural divide (Troupe 48). The increasing public suspicion regarding Jackson’s Blackness threatened his viability with all audiences. This brings us back to the question thatRolling Stone asked in September 1987: “Is Michael Jackson for real?” That question, in many ways, was the central one during the first decade of Jackson’s solo career. At first, the music industry had to be convinced that Jackson could reach the commercial heights of white superstar performers like Elvis Presley and The Beatles, that he had sufficient viability as a crossover entertainer. But when Jackson finally did achieve superstardom, fans and critics remained suspicious of Jackson’s authenticity. This emphasis on authenticity reveals the cultural expectations that came along with stardom in American popular music in the twentieth century. These cultural expectations are significantly different than those we have for stars in film, television, theater, or sports. We assume these performers embody roles as part of their craft, and value their ability to transform themselves to suit the needs of a particular narrative, season, cast, or team. It is difficult to imagine, for example, a film critic asking “Is Meryl Streep for real?” because her roles do not neatly map on to our limited understanding of her private life. Similarly, one can hardly imagine Sports Illustrated condemning Larry Bird for being a brash and ruthless competitor on the basketball court, but a reserved and unassuming person in his private life. And yet, we understand stars in the realm of popular music slightly differently. Bruce Springsteen is celebrated as much for his “honesty” as he is for his technical skill as a musician. Artists like Notorious B.I.G. or Kurt Cobain are lauded for their use of music to capture their idiosyncratic inner lives and particular life experiences. Since Robert Pattison’s The Triumph of Vulgarity, scholars of popular music have noted the connections between rock and nineteenth-century Romanticism, as well as rock’s reliance on myths of primitivism, its emphasis on emotion over intellect, and its investment in masculine sexual power. Building on Pattison’s work, Andrew Goodwin notes the distinction between rock, which is “locked into an essentially Romantic discourse of self-expression, even where mimesis, truth, and faithfulness to ‘reality’ are stressed,” and the culturally devalued genre of pop, denigrated for its supposed “manipulation, self-consciousness, and artifice” (104). Jackson’s status as a crossover pop artist afterThriller thus made him suspect to rock critics, especially when compared to artists like Bruce Springsteen. These same rock critics became even more skeptical through Jackson’s association with MTV. The channel became a lightning rod for rock critics, Simon Frith argues, because “it seemed to mean the Michael Jackson, MTV, and Crossover Nostalgia 139 replacement of rock values (sincerity, musical dexterity, live performance) with old pop conceits (visual style, gimmickry, hype)” (Frith 210). Jackson’s 1987 album, Bad, can easily be seen as a conscious response to questions about his authenticity, both as a Black man in America and as a musical artist. These questions were quite different than those he faced in the early 1980s. In the run-up to Thriller, Jackson needed to convince mainstream audiences that his Blackness was not to be understood as sexually or politically threatening. Prior to Bad, Jackson needed to convince both Black and white audiences that he was not a fraud. Beginning with the album’s title and cover art, Bad attempted to bolster Jackson’s “street” credentials and masculine power. Sonically, the album replicates some of Thriller’s crossover strategies. The opening single, “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You,” is a sweet, inoffensive adult contemporary duet; “Bad” is a hard-driving funk number; “Dirty Diana” features a complex heavy-metal guitar solo; and “Man in the Mirror” features a gospel choir. At the same time, however, Bad explicitly tackles sexuality (“I Just Can’t Stop Loving You,” “Dirty Diana”), urban poverty (“Man in the Mirror”), and even violence (“Bad,” “Smooth Criminal”) in ways that Thriller does not. Jackson attempted to bring a sense of grittiness and authenticity to his music videos as well. The “Bad” video, directed by Martin Scorcese, was loosely based on the real-life story of Edmund Perry, a Harlem native and Exeter honors student who was shot by a plainclothes policeman in June 1985 during an alleged mugging attempt. Scorcese’s reputation as an auteur, the location shooting in Brooklyn and Harlem, and the real-life subject matter all aided Jackson’s attempt to show solidarity with and connection to urban Black audiences. Ever in Jackson’s corner, Ebony lauded the video, saying, “A mature Michael delivers a social message with a cast of Black actors and dancers,” and “Motivated by pride of race and prodded by his concern over gang violence, Michael filmed the video in Harlem” (Johnson, “Michael Jackson is Back” 144). But both the video’s narrative and reception suggest that there were some chasms that Jackson could not cross over twice. The video is structured around the prep-school student Darryl (Jackson) who returns home to New York City to find his neighborhood friend Mini Max (Snipes) disdainful of his education and questioning his blackness (Max repeatedly calls Darryl “Dobie Gillis”). A few attempted robberies, some spectacular dance moves, and some soulful call-and-response singing later, the two agree to go their separate ways—Darryl back to prep school, Max back to the streets. For audiences in 1987, the problem was not imagining Jackson as an entitled prep-school kid, but imagining him in the context of urban Black life. This aligns with comments like this one, from a New York bike messenger interviewed by the Village Voice: “Michael just looked too much like a woman to strut around like a homeboy in chains” (Trebay 15). Again, Jackson navigated a tricky crossover situation through the Fifties. 140 Back to the Fifties

“Smooth Criminal”

“Smooth Criminal,” the fourth music video from Bad, premiered in late 1988. The video addresses the challenges toward the authenticity of Jackson’s Blackness and masculinity through a stylized representation of the Fifties. The song was not highly valued by Quincy Jones, and six other singles from the album were released before it. Still, there is significant reason to believe that the song was conceptually important to the album. Preparations for filming the video began years before the album was released, suggesting that Jackson saw the video as this album’s version of “Thriller”— another undistinguished single made iconic by its video. In fact, Bad was originally slated to be called “Smooth Criminal” before CBS objected at the prospect of putting Jackson’s photograph under the label “criminal.” If we understand Bad as Jackson’s attempt to present a new “authentic” image of Black masculinity, putting Jackson closer to urban environments, the importance of “Smooth Criminal” suggests that Jackson was interested in projecting a very specific kind of “street” image. At first blush, the “Smooth Criminal” video seems less about the Fifties than it is about the hardboiled tradition. The video is set in a nightclub featuring a retinue of gangsters, gun molls, jazz musicians, and dancers from many races and ethnicities. Meanwhile, the lighting, composition, and cinematography are all reminiscent of film noir—director Collin Chilvers showed Jackson The Third Man (1949) to give him a sense of style for the shoot. Accordingly, the video is rife with high-contrast, low-key lighting, canted frames, and crowded interiors. The noir visual style resonates with the song’s narrative, which centers on a crime scene. The song’s narrator (a detective, perhaps) arrives in an apartment too late to rescue the woman who lives there, and he begins to piece together the mystery (“He came into her apartment / He left the bloodstains on the carpet”). In the ensuing verses, the narrator pursues the murderer in vain (“Every time I tried to find him/He’s leaving no clues behind him”), while the structural return to the chorus suggests that the detective figure has become obsessed, continuously replaying the discovery of the body over and over again in his head (“Annie are you okay? / Are you okay, Annie?”). However, as the “Bad” video proved, having Jackson play a hypermasculine hardboiled detective presented its own set of problems. Accompanying the 1980s neo-noir cycle (featuring films like Blade Runner and Body Heat, among many others), urban Black culture in the 1980s demonstrated an increasing fascination with gangster imagery. Films like Brian De Palma’s Scarface (1983) gained cult status partially due to this fascination, which influenced the styles and themes of Black music in the period. The rap duo Double Trouble often performed in matching “gangster” suits and hats (most famously in the 1983 film Wild Style), and gangster narratives proliferated in hip-hop lyrics Michael Jackson, MTV, and Crossover Nostalgia 141

Jackson in “Smooth Criminal”—gangster chic. from Schoolly D, N. W. A., and the Geto Boys (Prince 88). This was the same period when Walter Mosley was writing the first of his Easy Rawlins detective novels, Devil in a Blue Dress (itself named after the oldie “Devil with a Blue Dress” by Shortie Long). Mosley’s Easy Rawlins stories adapted the Phillip Marlowe or Sam Spade figure for the Black communities of Southern California. “Smooth Criminal,” in other words, did not arbitrarily draw on the figure of the gangster. Rather, it participated in a broader Black cultural trend that merged Hollywood gangster imagery with traditional Black “baaadman” narratives. While Jackson’s hardboiled character in the video is tough enough when he needs to be (he snatches the pot from a craps game, brawls with bullies, and shoots a bad- die brandishing a knife), he is just as often bewitching and cunning, turning foes to his side by strength of his charisma, or cleverly evading them. There is “smoothness” to his criminality. Repeatedly in the video, men and women approach Jackson with menace, only to be charmed into dancing with him. Other times, Jackson appears to be cornered by foes that are much bigger and stronger, only to spin away, leaving the lunks dumbfounded. He seduces women on the dance floor but knows when a femme fatale is laying a trap. More than just a “tough guy,” the Jackson in the video performs a stylish, sophisticated navigation of the criminal underworld associated with the American gangster tradition. Despite this smoothness, however, Jackson’s claim on a “criminal” image risked alienating mass audiences and betraying his own personal beliefs by appearing to endorse or glorify criminality. This anxiety is something Jackson himself acknowledges in a 1987 interview at the Ebony/Jet Showcase in Brooklyn, trying to clarify that the album title Bad “is like a way of saying you’re cool, 142 Back to the Fifties you’re alright, you’re tough … I’m not saying I’m like … criminally bad.”10 Both commercially and culturally, Jackson was forced to walk a very fine line, distancing himself from actual criminality while defending against criticisms that would treat his “badness”—which was meant to communicate his solidarity and sympathy with Black urban communities—as inauthentic or artificial. The resolution to this challenge lay in Jackson’s homages to and significations of Fifties Hollywood. In the wake of Victory, Jackson worked to reorient his star text away from the realm of rock or soul stardom—with its reliance on “authenticity”—and toward the stardom of Hollywood musicals. This was intentional and strategic. In November 1979, before Jackson’s Off the Wall, Jackson wrote a letter to himself on the back of a tour schedule. Jackson was twenty-one years old at the time and attempting to chart a course for his career away from his child-star image and toward a new, stand-alone star persona. Jackson wrote: “I should be a new, incredible actor/singer/dancer that will shock the world.” To do this, he vowed to “study and look back on the whole world of entertainment and perfect it” (Logan). Jackson’s videos certainly evidence that commitment to studying the history of American popular culture, particularly the musical. In his preparation for “Smooth Criminal,” Jackson studied the history of Hollywood musicals, from the Freed unit to Flashdance. Reflecting on Jackson’s death, Paula Abdul remembered that he “could tell you in detail about every M.G.M. musical there was. He once told me that he wanted to incorporate the classic overall entertainer that existed during that era and mix it with a new, fresh, cutting-edge style” (qtd. in Fast 288). Jackson made that mix a fundamental part of the choreography of “Smooth Criminal.” Jackson worked with Vincent Paterson—who had danced in the “Beat It” video and choreographed “The Way You Make Me Feel”—to implement moves from the Broadway tradition, and with Jeffrey Daniel—member of the R&B duo Shalamar and a dancer on Soul Train—to provide dance moves inspired by street and nightclub dance styles. Just as Jackson “sampled” from Jackie Wilson, James Brown, Mavis Staples, Frankie Lymon, and Smokey Robinson, he also paid explicit tribute to some of Hollywood’s most celebrated musicals and musical performers. Streaming video websites are crowded with comparison videos of Jackson’s dancing with greats like Eleanor Powell, John Sublett, Sammy Davis Jr., Gene Kelly, and Bob Fosse. Those legends recognized and appreciated Michael’s dancing skill and his references to their work. In 1984, Bob Fosse told Time: “I think he’s terrific… . Maybe he’s more a synthesizer than an innovator, but it’s never the steps that are most important. It’s the style. That’s what Michael has” (Cocks 59). In the “Smooth Criminal” video, references to Hollywood musicals abound: the choreography in the craps game section is a nod to Guys and Dolls; the two-tone whistle in the breakdown comes from Michael Jackson, MTV, and Crossover Nostalgia 143 West Side Story; and Jackson’s leg movements and hat tilts are reminiscent of Fosse’s choreography. But most of all, “Smooth Criminal” is indebted to Fred Astaire’s performance in The Band Wagon (1953).

Freddy Are You OK?: Jackson, Astaire, and the Legacy of “Real Showmen” Most obviously, the “Smooth Criminal” video references Astaire in “The Girl Hunt” segment of The Band Wagon. Jackson’s costume—white hat with a black band, white suit, blue shirt, blue socks, spats, and a white tie—matches Astaire’s. In addition, sets and props echo those in the “Dem Bones Cafe” sequence in The Band Wagon, with its corner stage, small bar, and central dance floor crowded by tables. There are small choreographic allusions to the “Girl Hunt”: the crouched movements of gangsters in the foreground, the sway of the jazz band in the background, and the way Jackson dances with the woman in a red dress and long black gloves (recalling Cyd Charisse’s femme fatale). It is tempting to view “Smooth Criminal” as a generic tribute to Astaire or as an example of postmodernist aesthetics that plucked images from their original

Astaire in “The Girl Hunt”. 144 Back to the Fifties contexts and reduced them to “style.” In closing and by contrast, I want to argue that Jackson specifically and deliberately mobilized Astaire’s star text, specifically “The Girl Hunt,” as part of a commercial strategy of crossover and a cultural strategy of critical signification. Jackson drew on the Fifties image of Astaire in The Band Wagon in an attempt to address cultural anxieties over his particular Black masculinity, but in the process was able to signify the performative nature of masculinity more broadly defined. While Jackson took inspiration from countless performers, Astaire was an especially important figure for him.Moonwalk , Jackson’s 1988 autobiography, was dedi- cated to Astaire and includes multiple references to him. In it, Jackson identifies Astaire alongside James Brown and Sammy Davis Jr. as belonging to the category of “real showmen” that he idolized as a child (70), and he crows about the day Astaire called him to compliment his dancing (213). The notion of a real“ showman,” a con- summate entertainer, was crucial to Astaire’s star text from his earliest vaudeville days to his studio albums with Bing Crosby in the 1970s. Even when wearing a top hat and tails in his 1930s RKO (Radio-Keith-Orpheum Pictures) days, or representing the values of “old-fashioned show-biz” in the latter stages of his career, Astaire embodied the humble pleasures of the “show,” what Jane Feuer calls the “conta- gious spirit inherent in musical performance” more than aspirations for high art (“Self-Reflexive” 452). Facing cultural anxieties over his stardom, it is no surprise that Jackson turned to showmen both Black (James Brown, Jackie Wilson, Sammy Davis Jr.) and white (Bob Fosse, Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire) as his cultural predeces- sors. Embracing the “real showmen” also provided Jackson with a new model of masculine stardom from which to operate. While Jackson drew on Astaire’s influence in myriad ways, “The Girl Hunt” seems to have been a source of particular fascination for him. Both before and after “Smooth Criminal,” Jackson turned to “The Girl Hunt”: an episode ofThe Jacksons variety show that aired January 22, 1977, had Jackson dressed in a white suit and dancing with a series of Cyd Charisse look-alikes; the title track to his 1991 album Dangerous quotes Astaire’s voice-over (“The girl was bad, the girl was dangerous …”); and 2001’s “You Rock My World” reprises the bar fight that Astaire wins at the Dem Bones. What drew Jackson, over and over again, to this particular moment in Astaire’s enormous screen output? It might have been due to the rising influence (and marketability) of gangster imagery in the late 1980s and early 1990s, particularly among hip-hop audiences. As his biographer suggests, Jackson might have been keen to utilize the fashion (particularly the hats) and shadowy visual style to mask his rapidly changing features (Taraborrelli 623). In addition, I would note that the figure of the hardboiled detective afforded Jackson the opportunity to play with, and at, varying forms of masculinity. Michael Jackson, MTV, and Crossover Nostalgia 145

Astaire and Cyd Charisse in The Band Wagon (left) and Jackson’s recreation in “Smooth Criminal” (right).

Male musical performers, Steven Cohan writes, offer an alternate vision of masculinity, because their song and dance performances emphasize their “to-be-looked-at- ness” that Laura Mulvey famously identified as the “feminine” position in the system of Hollywood representation (One is reminded of what one goon whispers to the other in “Smooth Criminal,” just before Jackson begins to dance: “Watch him!”). The result, Cohan explains, is not simply a reversal of gendered representation but rather “a highly self-conscious and theatrical performance that constructs his masculinity out of the show-business values of spectatorship and spectacle” (“Fred Astaire” 62). For Jackson, troubles arose when the values of spectacle (those embodied by the “real showmen” he idolized) were put up against the values of authenticity (embodied by Springsteen or Run-DMC). This is why it is so important to remember that “The Girl Hunt” is, within the narrative confines of The Band Wagon, a performance of a performance of masculinity. Astaire plays Tony Hunter, an actor who plays the role of Rod Riley (a tongue-in- cheek play on Mickey Spillane’s hardboiled detective character Mike Hammer). Astaire’s turn as Rod Riley is memorable precisely because we are prompted (through his characterization as Tony Hunter) to understand it as a performance, and appreciate his skill and panache as a showman to approximate cultural figures already recognizable to us. This shift, Cohan explains, allowed Astaire to “revise the terms of male movie stardom by emphasizing talent over looks, dancing over action, spectacle over narrative” (“Fred Astaire” 61). The Band Wagon doesn’t ask us to believe that Fred Astaire could brawl his way out of a bar fight—it asks us to enjoy the way that Astaire plays the role. The backlash to Jackson’s “Bad” video came from the clash between its urban realist aesthetic and the spectacular nature of Jackson’s performance style. “Smooth Criminal” deftly steps around that conflict by invoking the legacy of “pure entertainment”—a legacy that also allays white anxieties about soul power, hip-hop, 146 Back to the Fifties and overtly politicized and sexualized Black popular culture. At the same time, Jackson was able to claim a central position in American popular culture for Black Americans, reversing the process by which performers like Astaire (most infamously in the “Bojangles of Harlem” number in Swing Time [1936]) or another “king” (Elvis Presley) had adopted/co-opted Black cultural forms. The logic of crossover required Jackson to address specific aesthetic and cultural desires for audiences both Black and white. Jackson reached back to the Fifties to stake privileged cultural territory for Black Americans and draw lines of continuity for white audiences. This was not, however, a situation wholly specific to Jackson, or even Black performers generally. Driven by an intense focus on corporate synergy and a proliferation of media outlets (via cable and satellite television, record labels and stores large and small, and the fracturing of radio formats), and facilitated by an ever-expanding and more accessible archive of media texts, the producers and marketers of popular culture consistently faced the challenge of appealing to multiple audiences, simultaneously, through the same text—sometimes using subtle modes of critique and homage, parody and pastiche, signification and celebration. So it should come as no surprise that pop nostalgia also functions this way. Once we understand nostalgia as an affective response to representations of the past, we can understand that an array of nostalgic affect can be generated in response to any single pop-nostalgia text. Consider these questions: Does Michael Jackson’s invocation of Bing Crosby represent homage to a role model? A reclamation of Black cultural traditions from a performer who infamously performed in blackface? A debasement of the legacy of one of Hollywood’s most beloved figures? An ironic twist on the forms of entertainment of a prior generation? Was Jackson’s celebration of Astaire a claim for “traditional” forms of masculinity that Astaire’s screen roles (like Tony Hunter) embodied, and that Jackson struggled to meet? Or was Jackson’s use of The Band Wagon a camp performance of Astaire? Those questions are unanswerable because, like Jackson himself and Fifties nostalgia generally, they are irreducible to any singular vision. Jackson’s mobilization of Fifties stars (whether it was Fred Astaire or Jackie Wilson) in his own work allowed him to simultaneously address radically disparate audiences. At the same time, Jackson’s use of Fifties stars also functions as a form of historiography, crafting entertainment lineages between his own star persona and those who came before him. A broader examination of the nostalgic reclamation of Fifties star texts is the subject of the final chapter. 5

STAR LEGACIES

James Dean and Sandra Dee in the Re-Generation

Michael Jackson’s strategic use of the sounds and images of Fifties stars, discussed in Chapter Four, was hardly unusual. Re-Generation performers regularly cultivated associations with Fifties movie stars and pop idols. Images of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley appeared in advertisements, on magazine covers, and on commemorative merchandise. Films like the Buddy Holly Story (1978), La Bamba (1987), and Great Balls of Fire! (1989) introduced Fifties stars Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and Jerry Lee Lewis to new audiences. Stars of the Fifties were also regularly the subject of allusion in pop music, as evidenced by Madonna’s recreation of Monroe in the “Material Girl” video, “Weird” Al Yankovic’s parody of I Love Lucy in his 1983 release “Hey Ricky,” or The Clash’s 1979 homage to Montgomery Clift in “The Right Profile.” The propensity of Fifties stars to appear in Reagan-Era popular culture was also a function of their newly increased visibility via videocassette and cable television. However, one Fifties star enjoyed a particular cultural resonance in the Re-Generation: James Dean. Along with Monroe and Presley, James Dean was the most visible Fifties star in popular culture of the 1970s and 1980s. This is despite the fact that Dean’s screen output was quite limited (only three Hollywood films and a smattering of television credits). Over twenty-five years after his death, Dean seemed more present than ever. His image graced T-shirts, posters, advertisements, and memorabilia. In 1984, the renowned Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein included Dean in his adaptation of

147 148 Back to the Fifties Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks” titled “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” The symbolic ramifications of the star’s death became the subject of a 1977 film by James Bridges (September 30, 1955) and a 1982 film by Robert Altman Come( Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean), not to mention a single from The Eagles (“James Dean”) that became a fixture in live performances throughout the 1970s. Dean is referenced in lyrics by musicians like Lou Reed (“Walk on the Wild Side,” 1972), Elton John (“Amy,” 1972), Van Morrison (“Wild Children,” 1974), David Allan Coe (“Rock and Roll Holiday,” 1976), Bruce Springsteen (“Cadillac Ranch,” 1980), Government Issue (“I’m James Dean,” 1981), Rudimentary Peni (“Teenage Time Killer,” 1981), Mötley Crüe (“Use It or Lose It,” 1985), Public Enemy (“Rebel Without a Pause,” 1987), and Billy Joel (“We Didn’t Start the Fire,” 1989). Episodes of Happy Days (“You Go to my Head,” 1974), ALF (“It Ain’t Easy Bein’ Green,” 1987), and Mystery Science Theater 3000 (“The Crawling Hand,” 1988) all reference Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Dean’s image was so omnipresent that it blossomed into a full-fledged stock character in 1980s teen films. These “Deanager” figures replicated the visual iconography (blue jeans, sideburns, motorcycle jackets, cigarettes, etc.) and the cultural values (rebellion, cool, American-ness, authenticity, etc.) popularly associated with Dean. At the same time, the Deanagers’ claims on Dean’s legacy not only draw on the polysemous meanings of his star text but also extend, revise, and amend those meanings in new contexts. One example of this process occurs in “Jack & Diane,” the single from John Cougar’s multi-platinum album American Fool, which topped the Billboard charts for the entire month of October 1982.1 It remains Mellencamp’s most commercially successful single to date and is central to his public image. The song’s sparse arrangements—voice, acoustic guitar, bass drum, keyboard, and hand claps—align Cougar with artists like Bruce Springsteen, the sonic qualities of “Jack & Diane” parallel its lyrics’ emphasis on simple pleasures. Focusing narratively on the coming of age of its titular characters, “two American kids growin’ up in the heartland,” “Jack & Diane” lionizes and idealizes the white, patriarchal, heterosexual relations that were in many ways associated with the Fifties. The connection to the Fifties is made explicit in the song’s third verse, when Jack “collects his thoughts for a moment / scratches his head and does his best James Dean.” Another Dean reference follows when Jack quotes Dean’s repeated “well then there” from Rebel Without a Cause. These references to Dean partially function to mark the narrative as a Fifties one. But surely “James Dean” has a specific set of meanings that the song would not conjure had Jack done his “best Rock Hudson,” “best Ricky Nelson,” or “best Pat Boone.” For Cougar and his 1980s listeners, what is the nature of Jack’s “best James Dean”? What does it signify? What are the values and meanings it is meant to provoke? Star Legacies 149 “Jack & Diane” is an ode to the virtues of small-town American teenagers in patriarchal heterosexual relations. Jack is described as a would-be “football star,” Diane a “debutante in the back seat of Jackie’s car.” The music video features Jack and Diane in all-American activities (eating hot dogs at the Tastee-Freez, driving around town both on a motorcycle and in a Corvette) and displays Jack’s masculine physical power as he carries Diane on his back and playfully wrestles her to the ground. In this way, Jack’s “best James Dean” can be read as an eroticized small-town American masculinity that reflects republican individualism as well as sexual power and allure. Describing the emergence of a new image of masculinity in 1980s popular culture, Sean Nixon identifies a “fascination, almost a reverence, for a mythical America of the past—the America that had produced Dean and Presley, the ’57 Chevrolet, Sam Cooke, The Misfits and a host of other heroes and cult objects” (117). This figure is precisely the one that the John Cougar of 1982 attempted to embody. Mellencamp’s performance as “Jack” in the music video, which includes home movies and photographs of Mellencamp with his first wife Priscilla Esterline, suggests that he was trying to use Dean’s star text to define his own. Like Dean, Mellencamp is an Indiana native, and his emergence as a star in the 1980s relied upon the projection of Fifties-inspired heartland masculinity as his calling card. Mellencamp’s management and promotional team repeatedly compared him to Marlon Brando and Bob Dylan in the press, attempting to play up his American authenticity and artistic bona fides. The eroticism in Mellencamp’s early imagery is legible across his early albums, and even in his original stage name, “Johnny Cougar.” His agent, Tony DeFries, told Seventeen in 1983, “We wanted something uniquely American, something hot and wild. Johnny Indiana was one of our choices, Puma, Mustang—but nothing was as hot as Cougar!” (E. Miller 163). Mellencamp gradually jettisoned the stage name but maintained the Fifties rebel look for press photos, album art, and stage performances, as the 1986 cover of Rolling Stone illustrates (see image 5.1). Both the name and the appearance rely on a combination of the “uniquely American” heartland imagery and “hot and wild” masculine eroticism. In this way, Mellencamp’s public presentation in the 1980s (whether it was self-generated or the result of DeFries’s savvy promotion) attempted to establish lineage from Dean to the Re-Generation rebel figure that Mellencamp attempted to cut. Mellencamp was just one among many artists in the 1970s and 1980s that attempted to channel Dean. Kevin Bacon’s performance as new-kid-in-town Ren McCormack in Footloose (1984) incessantly references Dean. Bacon’s blue jeans, red jacket, and hairstyle visually approximate James Dean’s Rebel character Jim Stark, and his tortured gestures and mumbled lines harken toward Dean’s performance in East of Eden (1955) and Giant (1956). Using these markers, Footloose draws on Dean’s star text to establish its hero’s American authenticity and erotic appeal. Beyond the 150 Back to the Fifties

Heartland eroticism: January 1986 cover of Rolling Stone. Author’s personal collection. visual symbols of “Dean-ness,” the film features complete re-enactments of iconic scenes from Dean’s films. Footloose memorably references Rebel Without a Cause in its reiteration of the latter film’s famous “chickie run.” The iconic scene of Dean’s Jim Stark and his rival Buzz (Corey Allen) charging toward the edge of a cliff in stolen cars is transformed in Footloose into a head-to-head game of chicken between Ren and the bully Chuck (Jim Youngs), as they ride toward one another on borrowed farming equipment. While the costuming, editing, and cinematography of these scenes are clearly similar, Footloose’s version reduces the stakes (nobody dies or is injured Star Legacies 151

Ren’s “chickie run” in Footloose. in the tractor showdown) and crucially restages the conflict to more directly focus on the expression of masculine power and authority. In Rebel’s chickie run, Jim and Buzz race toward a cliff, toward oblivion, in a contest that has been understood as a confrontation with the nothingness their alienated generation is facing.2 In Footloose, Ren and Chuck compete directly against one another for alpha-male status and the affections of Ariel (Lori Moore). Accordingly, the spatial configuration of the scene is reoriented—in Footloose, Ren and Chuck do not confront nothingness but drive directly toward one another. Ultimately, Ren wins the contest, gains the status of big man on campus, and becomes romantically involved with Ariel shortly thereafter. Rebel’s chickie run is tragic; Footloose’s is triumphant. In response to Footloose’s appropriations of Dean, popular film critics fiercely denounced the film’s unoriginality and artifice. If Bacon’s performance approxi- mated the form of Dean’s rebellion, these critics argued, the content of that rebellion was radically altered, if not evacuated. Bacon is not a symbol for the alienation of his generation; he just wants to cut loose. The film’s primary struggle is over whether its fun-loving, clean-cut teenagers will have a school dance. The Bible-thumping rev- erend Shaw Moore (John Lithgow) has outlawed dancing and rock music in the small town, but Ren encourages his newfound friends to rebel by learning to cut a rug. By the end of the film, the teens get their prom, Ren gets the girl, and everyone boogies happily ever after. Reviewers dismissed Footloose’s abundance of pilfered style but scarcity of substance. Time’s review, for instance, was wryly titled “Revel Without a Cause” (Corliss). The New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani argued that 152 Back to the Fifties “although it blatantly appropriates the storylines, scenes and imagery from such 50’s films asRebel Without a Cause and East of Eden, Footloose waters down those elements, turning a portrait of adolescent alienation into one of high spirited teen-age fun” (22). In this view, Footloose recasts adolescent rebellion as a fight for the right to party; the ultimate end is personal gratification. For Kakutani, this represents more than a violation of the sanctity of Fifties film. She argues that when Hollywood reformulates the Dean image in Footloose, “our sense of the past—and in this case, of teenagers in earlier eras—also undergoes a revision” (1). The Re-Generation invocations of Dean enact a revision of his star text, aligning his form of rebellion not with a generation of teenagers growing up absurd but with the Reagan-Era concerns about individual material fulfillment. This revision simultaneously legitimates and contains adolescent rebellion in the Re-Generation. Footloose’s appropriation of Dean does not explicitly address the issues of suburban alienation, the threat of juvenile violence, and the political and cultural contentiousness of the Sixties that Dean supposedly prefigured. For many critics, this represents a political and aesthetic disavowal of the values for which the “real James Dean” truly stood. In the place of these meanings, Footloose offered a celebration of the muscular male and endorsed a reconsoli- dation of power in patriarchal heterosexual relations. Predictably, many critics and scholars in the 1980s felt the reappropriations of Dean’s star text betrayed his legacy, subverting (or perhaps, perverting) the authentic meaning of Dean’s rebel image. This chapter takes another step in the book’s ultimate goal of developing a richer and more nuanced understanding of the role pop nostalgia played in American cultural life from 1973 to 1988 by focusing on the claims on, contestations of, and negotiations over a single Fifties text—Dean himself. Before progressing any further, I should clarify that I do not attempt to distinguish the “real James Dean” from “inauthentic” or “inaccurate” claims on his legacy by Re-Generation music and film. When I speak in this chapter of the claims on “James Dean,” I draw on Richard Dyer’s work on stardom, which casts “star texts” as semiotic and ideological constructs that function to articulate “what it is to be human in society” (Heavenly Bodies 8). The meanings, values, and politics that coalesce around the polysemous “star text” are often opposing or contradictory, but they are reconciled and made coherent when embodied by the star. Dyer argues that in this way, stars represent the “magical synthesis” of otherwise irresolvable cultural contradictions (Stars 30). Stars like Dean not only embody a new kind of individual but also represent social types that negotiate the particular cultural and political tensions of the society from whence they appear. Star Legacies 153

Star Legacies Beyond Mellencamp and Bacon, a slew of young actors filled Deanager roles, and the press and promotional industries rushed to bestow on several actors the mantle of “the next James Dean.” Matt Dillon was among the first to draw such comparisons in the wake of his appearances in juvenile delinquent dramas like Over the Edge (1979) and The Outsiders (1983). Dillon’s sometime costar Mickey Rourke also cultivated an association with Dean—as much for his Method acting credentials and uneven temperament off-screen as his performance in Fifties-nostalgia films like Diner (1982) and Rumble Fish (1983). The press also granted “new James Dean” status to Sean Penn, Johnny Depp, River Phoenix, Christian Slater, and Beverly Hills, 90210 costars Jason Priestley and Luke Perry. While these comparisons may have simply been a shorthand to promote a young actor filling a particular type, or a way to invest a little-known performer with cultural legitimacy, it speaks to the importance of Dean’s Fifties stardom to the Re-Generation that his legacy was so persistently invoked. Does the invocation of the Fifties star in the 1980s, like the invocations of Dean in “Jack & Diane” and Footloose, work to articulate what it is like to be a young man in the 1980s, to negotiate the tensions in American masculinity and sexuality in the Reagan Era? Or does it seek to tell us something about what it was like to be a young man in 1955, to continue to explore the tensions in American life inherited from the age of postwar containment? Or, perhaps, does the return of Dean represent a form of mourning for the loss of “traditional” conceptualizations of sex and gender? In pursuit of these questions, the remainder of this chapter will consider the ideological function of what I’ll call “star legacies.” With the re-emergence of Fifties stars on videocassette and cable reruns, Fifties star texts were repeatedly extended, amended, and even repudiated in struggles over what the legacies of these stars would be in the Reagan Era. This was particularly true in discussions of sex and gender for Re-Generation youth. The multiple claims on the star legacy of James Dean in the Reagan Era reflected America’s changing understanding of its own traditions of family, sexuality, identity, and individuality. The numerous and complicated invocations of Dean, and the ways that Re-Generation films and pop music utilized his legacy, not only influenced the ways audiences understood Dean’s films (or, more broadly, his star text) in retrospect but also reshaped the cultural meaning of “teen rebellion” and its attendant politics of gender and sexuality. In addition, he became a vision of what America stood for, and fought for, in the Cold War era—a symbol of a coherent American ideal of “hot” eroticism and “cool” authenticity. Ironically, it is that very coherence that Dean’s Fifties star text worked to destabilize. 154 Back to the Fifties In the 1950s, “cool” would not have been a quality ascribed to Dean’s screen persona. Rather, the characters he played in Fifties family melodramas were tortured, emotionally vulnerable, and desperate for parental approval. Steven Cohan has argued that Dean, among other new emotional male stars in the Fifties, represented “boys who are not men,” their masculinity distinct from the he-man machismo of older stars like John Wayne. These male stars, Cohan argues, functioned to disrupt “the conflation of ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’ underwriting the symbolic economy with which ‘boys’ were made legible as the opposites of ‘men’ ” (Masked Men 203). While Dean’s stardom is popularly aligned with “rebellion,” the “rebellion” in Dean’s self-presentation, on screen and off, is always a function of his eroticized and explicitly emotional masculinity. This is articulated in Rebel by Judy (Natalie Wood), when she answers Jim’s question of what kind of person girls look for by saying, “A man … but a man who can be gentle and sweet, like you are. And someone who doesn’t run away when you want them, like being Plato’s friend when nobody else liked him. That’s being strong.” In Dean’s Fifties career, his masculinity was defined not by his detached “cool” but by his vulnerability, tenderness, and emotional volatility. This was true of his characters (Dean’s most famous line in Rebel, “You’re tearing me apart!,” was delivered through tears) as well as his off-screen reputation in the gossip magazines (his heartbreak over his failed courtship of Pier Angeli). By the time Bacon does his best James Dean in Footloose, however, vulnerability and sensitivity were distinctly out of fashion. While Bacon’s Ren is certainly no bully, he is more in line with Susan Jeffords’s conceptualization of the “hard body” than with the “soft” masculinity that Dean represented in the Fifties. Jeffords argues that the patriarchal values reinforced by Reaganism—individual success, strength, militarism, self-reliance, and machismo—were symbolized in Hollywood by muscular male bodies. Footloose’s Deanager Ren fits within this tradition—his athletic body and physical power are highlighted in costumes, dance sequences (which feature powerful quasi-gymnastic routines3), manual labor scenes, and a fight scene. Ren is not entirely without sentiment—his sensitivity with Ariel and urban sophis- tication distinguish him from the other boys in town. But unlike Dean’s film performances, Ren’s emotion is controlled and contained by a “manliness” signified by his chiseled physique and blue-collar job at a mill. While the Deanager may be internally troubled, his vulnerability is hidden under a hard shell. In this way, Footloose effectively transforms Dean’s legacy by “hardening” it. Star texts are historical. They include not only the onscreen performances but a panoply of cultural discourses that surround the star, discourses which possess what Dyer calls a “temporal dimension” (Stars 79) and therefore are continually subject to revision. In Heavenly Bodies, Dyer analyzes the changes in Judy Garland’s star text Star Legacies 155 after her break with MGM, her attempted suicide, and her growing association with urban gay male audiences. As Dyer points out, these incidents resulted in “a reading of her career before 1950, a reading back into the earlier films, recordings, and biography in the light of later years” (Heavenly Bodies 139). Garland’s image in the 1950s was altered, as was public understanding of her whole career. It is this sort of retrospective revision of a star text that was the source of such consternation in the original reception of Footloose. Critics bristled at the notion of Dean as a music video star or as an object of nostalgic longing for a time “when men were men.” Far from being merely an identikit collection of Fifties signifiers, the Deanager figure served as a site for the refision of the Fifties that Dean in some ways exemplified. The retrospective invocations of star texts (which simultaneously alter the meanings, values, and emotions applied to their referent) are what I mean when I discuss claims on “star legacies.” Star legacies are part of star texts, of course—they can even be part of multiple star texts. When Madonna staked her claim to being the Marilyn Monroe of the Re-Generation, Madonna’s stardom became part of Monroe’s star text, and vice-versa. Naturally, star legacies represent the aspect of star texts most subject to nostalgic affect. Star legacies can be altered well after the star’s screen career is over, or even, as in the case of Dean, after the actor is dead. The propensity of teen stars to be promoted as “the next James Dean” and the incessant mobilization of the Deanager figure (as pitchman, as sex symbol, as martyr, as villain, etc.) did more than produce new meanings for Dean (or concepts of “the individual”) for a new generation. These claims upon Dean’s star legacy—the attempts to retrospectively redefine or revise discourses that Dean signified—also impact our understanding of the alienated postwar youth (and other social types) that his stardom signified. While Kevin Bacon and other Deanagers of the Reagan Era all possess their own star texts, I focus here on their influence on Dean’s star legacy and how their films reframe what “James Dean,” and his star text’sattendant discourses of masculinity, mean to America. Simultaneously, these Deanager films rewrite the star texts of their young actors, as they are invested with a “Dean-ness” for a new generation. The Deanager combines Jeffords’s hard-bodied masculinity and dogged self-determination with eroticized emotional vulnerability and psychological dysfunction. While charismatic and sexually appealing, the Deanager often threatens to disrupt or even destroy the existing social order. In Footloose, Ren threatens only a dancing prohibition, but in other films the Deanagers’ positions outside patriarchal family constraints makes them a danger to themselves and to others. Fifties star texts were not only claimed and extended in the Reagan Era; they were also rejected. I close this chapter by examining the star legacy of Sandra Dee, who serves as an illuminating counterpoint to Dean. Dee’s star text was also the subject 156 Back to the Fifties of considerable revision in the Reagan Era, but where Dean’s legacy was continuously rewritten, Dee’s story in the Reagan Era is one of utter abandonment. I have chosen to focus on James Dean and Sandra Dee in this chapter not only because they were two of the biggest teen stars of the Fifties but also because their screen output is almost entirely contained within the Fifties—unlike Marlon Brando or Elizabeth Taylor, whose careers continued apace in the 1980s, Dean and Dee were out of the pictures entirely by then. Dean died in a tragic automobile accident in 1955, and Dee slowly faded away in the 1960s after her doomed marriage to Bobby Darrin and her struggles with alcoholism, depression, and anorexia. As a result of their absence, the star texts of Dean and Dee were more ame- nable to ongoing reinvention by Re-Generation audiences. Allusions to the star texts of Dean and Dee (and their associations with Fifties “rebellion” and “conformity”) reflected anxieties over gender and sexuality in the 1980s, in the wake of second-wave feminism, “family values,” gay rights, and the panic over HIV/AIDS. Dean’s image in the 1980s was simultaneously commercialized as an erotic symbol of American masculinity, positioned as a forbearer of the Counterculture, and (as Michael DeAngelis has explained) celebrated as queer icon. Sandra Dee provides an illuminating counterexample, as she was mostly referenced as a figure to be dismissed, rejected, transcended, or forgotten. The contestations over the star legacies of Dean and Dee in the Reagan Era were also part of America’s retrospective redefinition of its own “traditional values.” The version of “innocent” Fifties girlhood that Dee came to stand for (despite, as I argue, the actual content of her film performances) became the rationale for the wistful longing for, and outright rejection of, Dee’s star text in the 1980s. Contrast this with the celebration of the independent, rebellious masculinity that Dean signified (despite, again, the actual roles that he played). In some ways, the championing of Dean’s form of masculine “rebellion” and denigration of Dee’s “conformist” femininity is akin to the practice of retconning—altering previously existing storylines in order to match a later narrative. Dean’s screen characters always worked to reinforce traditional forms of masculine authority, while Dee’s performances often challenged prescribed codes of girlhood. Yet when the Re-Generation revisited their star texts, Dean was understood as a martyr, Dee a conformist and cautionary tale. The numerous and complicated invocations of James Dean and Sandra Dee in pop-nostalgia texts certainly transformed the way their stardoms were understood in retrospect. Beyond that, however, the star legacies of Dean and Dee also influenced the cultural meaning of “teenage rebellion” in the 1980s, especially in its associated politics of gender and sexuality. Despite the cultural anxieties that their star texts generated (or perhaps reflected) in the 1950s, in the Reagan Era, Dean and Dee served as a vision of what America stood, and fought, for in the Cold War Star Legacies 157 era. They were symbols of American ideals that could be injected into Reagan-Era debates about the Re-Generation.

Competing Visions: Reckless and Heathers

When critics maligned Footloose as a perversion of Dean’s authentic rebellion, a sense that Dean (as an individual or as a signifier) truly stood for nascent Countercultural politics, not the regressive forces of consumerism and Reaganism, fueled their out- rage. Linking Dean to cultural movements of the Sixties was common in much of the Dean hagiography produced in the 1970s and 1980s: most prominently, David Dalton’s popular 1974 biography James Dean: The Mutant King, and televised retrospectives like James Dean Remembered (1974) and Forever James Dean (1988). The understanding of Dean as a proto-hippie was held among champions of the Reagan Revolution, as evidenced by conservative columnist George Will’s summary of Dean’s legacy for The Washington Post: “Feeling mightily sorry for himself as a victim (of insensitive parents), his character prefigured the whiny, alienated, nobody-understands-me pouting that the self-absorbed youth of the Sixties considered a political stance” (7). For Will and his contemporaries, the Dean legacy was the subject of suspicion and antagonism because its sexualized and politicized forms of rebellion represented a threat to the “traditional” domestic order. One reason that Dean’s status as the definitive teen rebel generates so much anxiety in representatives of “parent cultures” like George Will is because Dean’s rebel image has such a powerful erotic allure. Working alongside hagiographic television specials and commemorative merchandise, Re-Generation films featuring Deanager figures participated in a retrospective response to Dean’s political and sexual iconicity. In their narratives and imagery, these films revised both the causes and the effects of Dean’s eroticized forms of rebellion, through the political and psychological frameworks of the Reagan Era. In films of this period, Deanagers are given diverse origin stories and narrative resolutions, are depicted as heroes and villains, and embraced as heroes or rejected as monsters by audiences. With the actor himself long since dead, these depictions engaged with the “temporal dimension” of Dean’s star text by amending the cultural meaning of “James Dean.” By filtering Dean’s image through the conditions of the 1970s and 1980s, these films trained teens born well after the star’s death how to respond to the Dean star text. Reckless (1984), a film that premiered just two weeks before Footloose, reflects the anxiety over the politics of the Dean legacy; it treats the teen rebel with as much wariness as it does reverence. Promotion for Reckless also shows how much the film relied upon the erotic allure of its Deanager figure. The film’s star, newcomer Aidan 158 Back to the Fifties Quinn, was praised in reviews for his “raw sexual energy” and “emotional abandon” (Armstrong 8). Another syndicated interview called Quinn a “James Dean for the ’80s … more than just a pretty face with a sulky pout,” then conveniently mentioned that “Quinn keeps threatening to remove his jacket so he can freely flex his back muscles, well-developed from work as a hot-tar roofer in his native Chicago” (Freedman 7). Language like this, omnipresent in the run-up to Reckless’s premiere, emphasizes Quinn’s blue-collar eroticism and all-American heritage, fitting neatly into the tradition of Dean-imitators in the Reagan Era. However, Quinn’s motorcycle malcontent in Reckless significantly differs from other 1980s Deanager figures, particularly in his sexual and familial relationships. In Reckless, Quinn plays Johnny Rourke, the only child of an alcoholic millworker and an absent mother in a dead-end Ohio Valley steel town. Compared to Ren’s fairly stable home life with his mother, aunt, and uncle in Footloose, Rourke’s experiences entail considerable domestic trauma. This is portrayed as the source of his disaffection with his hometown, as evidenced by the film’s first shot. In the opening scene, Rourke gazes out over the steel mill at which his father works while drinking a can of Iron City Beer, his father’s preferred brew. Rourke sets the can down, then drives his motorcycle to the edge of a cliff before coming to an abrupt and dramatic stop, knocking the can (a symbol of his father’s weakness) into the ravine below. Aside from indirectly recalling the “chickie run” from Rebel Without a Cause, this scene reveals the particular inflections of Dean’s legacy that Reckless enacts, locating the failures of the father as the motivating factor for rebellion. The disaster that Rourke courts in this version of the chickie run, after all, is falling over the cliff and into the mills—in other words, into the same life as his father. The dying steel industry of Weirton, West Virginia, serves as the backdrop and the dominant metaphor for the decaying state of Rourke’s family. When Rourke is summoned to the mill to drive his father home (he is routinely drunk on the job), is the film reveals that his father’s drinking became a problem after Rourke’s mother left the family and moved in with the mill foreman. It is his father’s inability to recover from this loss—not the loss of his mother itself—that is portrayed as the source of Rourke’s psychological and emotional turmoil. The intense focus on paternal failure in Reckless is undoubtedly inherited from Dean’s teen melodramas. Dean’s three Hollywood films generally locate the source of social problems in the absence of strong, supportive father figures. Seemingly, these politics are totally commensurate with the Reagan-Era understanding of the patriarchal nuclear family as a panacea for all social ills. Locating the primary drama of adolescent rebellion in the home rather than in social conditions made for a new understanding of teenagers, and Dean’s appearances in family melodramas made an enormous contribution to the cultural legibility of teenage rebellion. Star Legacies 159 Leerom Medovoi argues that the rebellion for which Dean stood in the Fifties was not conceptualized as a threat to American society. Rather, teenage rebellion was understood as the guarantor of democracy and American individualism. While moral panics over juvenile delinquency certainly influenced policies and attitudes toward young people in the 1950s, there were also arguments for the importance of the kinds of rebellion that Dean represented. Robert Lindner, the psychoanalyst who authored the study that was eventually adapted to become Rebel Without a Cause, understood rebellion to be a necessary and valuable weapon in the nation’s struggle against conformity and authoritarian regimes. In a 1956 essay for McCall’s titled “Raise Your Child to Be a Rebel,” Lindner argued that rebellion was necessary to avoid a child becoming “a slave to the irrational pressures of any authoritarian system” (104). In this sense, some understood Fifties teen rebellion as healthy, as well as necessary to sustain the twentieth-century American way of life. Thirty years later, however, teen rebellion in some circles became less the subject of romanticization and increasingly pathologized. Reckless, in its rehearsal of the Dean-inspired rebel narrative, reformulates the causes and effects of teenage rebellion for its 1980s audiences. By the conclusion of Rebel, the father redeems himself by being the strong masculine role model that Dean’s character has always desired. In Reckless, such resolutions are rendered impossible. Rourke’s father is ultimately destroyed by the combination of the dying steel industry and his alcoholism. He is killed in an accident on the job. Rourke’s mother does not even attend the funeral, leaving Rourke a rebel without a home. Outside of Fifties America’s “containment culture” that Alan Nadel has outlined, Aidan Quinn’s rebel Deanager is rendered as potentially dangerous. In Reckless, rebellion is not a crucial step to identity formation but rather a symptom of psychological dysfunction. This is suggested in Reckless when Rourke gets access to his school records. His psychological profile reads: “Onset of difficulties can be traced to a period immediately following mother’s abandonment of family. Since that time there has been increasing evidence of antisocial behavior. He is potentially dangerous and destructive.” Throughout the film, Rourke is prone to violent out- bursts, fighting with classmates, brawling with his father, threatening Tracey (Daryl Hannah), and even setting his house on fire. In Lindner’s terms, Rourke represents a “negative rebellion” that can only escape conformity “in fundamentally antisocial and politically exploitable ways” (Medovoi 32). The teenage rebel in 1980s America is thus transformed from symbol of American self-definition to another potential “enemy within,” an opportunity for political demonology. In Rebel, dysfunctional homes drive Jim, Judy, and Plato to attempt to create an alternate domestic sphere for themselves, literally “playing house” in an abandoned home in one memorable scene. In Reckless, Rourke and good-girl Tracey seek refuge 160 Back to the Fifties not in a domestic relationship but an erotic one. The long, graphic sex scenes turned many critics off—one reviewer argued that “the true passion of Reckless is lust, not rebellion” (Armstrong 8), but what is meaningful in these scenes is the absence of (or perhaps escape from) romance and sentiment. Their sexual relationship does not represent potential salvation in a new family unit (as Jim and Judy found in Rebel); it is only a temporary escape from the painful and unfulfilling experiences with their parents. Rourke and Tracey, unable to reconcile their relationship to their home lives, eventually run off together—a significant difference from the final image in Rebel wherein Jim is able to introduce Judy to his father. Reckless does not hold out hope that the traditional family can be repaired, nor can it be remade in teenage romance. Rourke’s rebellion represents a serious threat to the social order, as it cannot be channeled into steady heterosexual relations. The treatment of the Dean star legacy registers the teen rebel as not only emotionally vulnerable but also psychologically imbalanced. With Quinn’s Rourke, the Deanager (a symbol of Baby-Boomer youth rebellion) is cast as a psychopath who cannot be reintegrated into the home. We must understand this at least in part as a reflection of the anxieties over the legacy of Dean’s eroticized rebellion. If, as George Will describes it, Dean’s rebel character prefigured the political positions of the New Left, then the alterations of Dean’s legacy in the Reagan Era register a profound anxiety over the legitimacy and efficacy of youth revolt against American sociopolitical standards. This anxiety seeps through the 1989 black comedy, Heathers, which casts its Deanager, Jason “JD” Dean (Christian Slater) and his rebellion as violent, perverse, and pathological. As his nickname suggests, JD gestures toward the social concern over juvenile delinquency, and the erotic and tragic appeal of James Dean. Heathers operates (perhaps ironically) as a cautionary tale about the dangers of Dean’s erotic charisma, and it endorses the rejection of Dean’s legacy. In Heathers, the sexual relationship between the rebel JD and sweetheart Veronica (Winona Ryder) quickly spins into a high school class war against “the Heathers,” the three spiteful girls who sit atop the teenage food chain. For Veronica, who has been adopted as an “honor- ary Heather,” JD represents the promise of emancipated self-definition, free from the constraints of her high school social class. Like Rourke, JD’s rebelliousness is a fundamental part of his sex appeal, and Veronica’s persistent attraction to him only underscores the Deanager’s dangerous potential. Almost immediately after JD and Veronica have sex for the first time, JD’s rebellious tendencies intermingle with violent ones, as he tells Veronica that Heather Chandler (Kim Walker) “is one bitch that deserves to die.” In the moment, Veronica is charmed by what she sees as JD’s acidic humor, revealing how—in some cases at least—the Deanager’s eroticism and rebellion serve as the cover story for his violent impulses. Star Legacies 161

Heathers: The rebel as psychopath.

As with Jim’s and Rourke’s, JD’s rebellion is the product of domestic dysfunction. In their conversations throughout the film, JD and his father (who is in the demolition business) engage in role reversal, with JD playfully calling his father “son,” and his father asking the boy, “Hey Dad, how was work today?” This joking, lighthearted though it may be, suggests the absence of a clearly defined paternal ideal for JD. His mother is absent, having committed suicide: “She walked into the building two minutes before my dad blew the place up. She waved at me, and then … Boom.” Heathers also portrays teenage rebellion as the result of domestic trauma, not a necessary psychosocial stage of development. Unlike most other Deanager figures, however, JD cannot be reformed, and his rebellion offers no significant escape. JD is not Heathers’ hero. He is positioned in the film’s final act not only as the villain but also as a horror-film Big Bad that must be destroyed. Dean and other postwar teen rebels, Medovoi argues, helped legitimize adolescent rebellion and distinguish American society from authoritarianism and conform- ism. Dean’s status as a teen rebel relies on an eroticism that operates as a critique of postwar suburban society, which “glamorized the sexiness of a boy whose struggle for identity leads him away from the asexual, impotent drabness that would otherwise await him” (Medovoi 191). In Heathers, however, JD’s radical challenge to high school society is a symptom of his own monstrosity. Even JD seems to share this perspective, as he answers Veronica’s charge, “You’re not a rebel, you’re a fucking psychopath,” by chuckling, “You say tomato, I say to-mah-to.” His emotional vulnerability and sexual virility are not, as in the original case of Dean, symbolic of a new, more appealing form of masculinity. Rather, they are symptoms of his psychological dysfunction, and evidence of the danger he represents to society. This is, 162 Back to the Fifties ultimately, the case that Will makes regarding James Dean’s influence on the youth of the Sixties. Veronica’s turn against JD’s murderous urges is coincident with the end of their sexual relationship. In the couple’s arguments, Veronica repeatedly tells JD to “grow up.” In so doing, she reorients the teenage rebellion that he represents as a symptom of arrested development. At the film’s close, Veronica kills JD and rescues her high school classmates, rejecting both his plans for school destruction and the erotic appeal of the rebel. “Do you know what I need—” she tells him before shooting him in the chest, “cool guys like you out of my life.” With this, the rejection of Dean’s legacy is narratively accomplished. Tellingly, JD welcomes his destruction, as if he has been imprisoned by his “negative rebellion.” Heathers seems to argue that the best tribute to Dean’s legacy is to allow the rebel to rest in peace. Though the film acknowledges the Deanager’s charisma and blames his dysfunction on failed parents, the eroticism and victimization of JD only underscore the threat he poses to American society and highlight the need to reject him as a model of manhood. Alternatively, this could all be an ironic commentary on the Reagan-Era fear of rebellion. By identifying teen rebellion as a distinctive feature of American adolescence, Medovoi argues, American society in the Fifties could distinguish itself from fascist and communist societies, as well as combat the menace of Gray Flannel Suit conformity. This cast adolescence as a time in which dominant values could be questioned, or even resisted, setting the stage for the identity politics of subsequent decades. The resistance to postwar social and cultural values that Dean exemplified in his fraught relationship with onscreen parental figures was often, if not always, registered by his form of masculinity. While audiences could locate different aspects of Dean’s performance as the source of his appeal, those aspects almost always operate in an erotic register. The rebellion in Dean’s texts, in this view, comes out of audience identification with and desire for Dean. Elizabeth Cowie explains that the figure of the star affords spectators the opportunity to frame and reframe the star in the realm of fantasy, showing that the forms of “double fixing” that I describe in Chapter One are never totalizing. Cowie argues that when audiences engage in fantasy over stars, they participate in the “making visible, present, of what isn’t there, of what can never directly be seen” (127–28). This form of engagement allows Dean to be defined, and redefined, in radically different ways—as a marker of authenticity and eroticism by John Cougar, as icon of personal fulfillment inFootloose , as “the first student activist” by veterans of the New Left, or as psychopathic force inHeathers . These redefinitions, diverse as they may have been, all relied on an essentially heterosexual and patriarchal understanding of Dean’s eroticism. This vision, as I show in the next section, was not universally held. Star Legacies 163

Queering Dean and the Inheritors of the Dean Legacy Stars represent and reflect cultural values for the societies in which they circulate. However, in the process of determining the cultural meaning of stars, audiences must work through contradictions and ambiguities between the star’s public and private persona. For example, audiences and fans in the Re-Generation might have known everything there was to know about Madonna the singer, actress, and cultural icon, but they simultaneously recognize their ultimate inability to access the interior life of Madonna Louise Ciccone the human being. This negotiation between the knowable and unknowable in pursuit of the true meaning of the star drives much of the most passionate interest in stars—an attempt to understand what the star is “really like,” or understand “the man (or woman) behind the myth.” Michael DeAngelis ties audiences’ pursuit of a star’s “true” meaning to the experience of melodrama. Specifically, DeAngelis relates our irresolvable desire for the “true” star to melodrama’s “fantasy of the origin of self,” in which the melodramatic subject enacts the impossible pursuit of a lost “state of wholeness” (DeAngelis 6). This fantasy that stars make available to film audiences “remains pleasurable only to the extent that ultimate resolutions are deferred,” and as a result, “film studios and public relations agencies maintain a significant economic investment in extending the star’s process of emergence and redemption by withholding and disclosing information over the course of a career” (7). The incentive within the industry to extend and highlight the irreducible quality of star texts facilitates the continuous revisiting and revising of stars. In this light, Dean’s stardom presents a special case, as his star text was developed almost entirely posthumously. His death came only five months after his star-making debut in East of Eden. One could convincingly argue that his untimely death is the most significant aspect of Dean’s star text—it certainly altered Warners’ promotional strategies for Rebel, as his death came just a month before the film’s release. For DeAngelis, Dean’s death makes his star text of interminable extension and revision, “a story without ending.” The impossibility of audiences ever accessing “the real James Dean” fuels their desire, positing a resolution that is perpetually deferred, reinvoked, and revised ad infinitum. The fantasy of “what might have been”—if Dean had lived, “if only” he had not climbed into his Porsche Spyder that fateful night—establishes Dean’s star text as an object of incessant negotiation and revision. Even though a figure like Brando was by almost any standard a bigger star than Dean in the Fifties, Brando’s survival and shifting cultural meaning through the 1960s and 1970s make him a less likely subject for audience reinvention in the 1980s. Dean’s cultural status as “forever young,” therefore, leaves the resolution of his identity (social, political, and sexual) to audience fantasy, regardless of (or perhaps despite) its containment within the melodrama genre. 164 Back to the Fifties The complex processes of Dean’s reappearance and revision are, as I mention in this chapter’s opening, present across the pop culture landscape in the 1980s. With the emergence of MTV, however, pop music stars immediately became more visible figures in the determination of identity and cultural values, particularly with the success of MTV icons like Michael Jackson, Madonna, Prince, Cyndi Lauper, or The Beastie Boys. They became, in other words, more potent stars. With Hollywood films trend- ing toward the high-concept blockbuster, the music video served as a more intimate and direct interaction with stars. As Nicholas Greco has written, “the images con- veyed in the [music] video give the viewer limited information, both about the singer and the events that are occurring … the video works to maintain and continue the draw of the celebrity” (145). Writing about Madonna’s claims on the star legacy of Marilyn Monroe in the video for “Material Girl,” Andrew Goodwin argues that “fiction, narrative and identity in music television are generally located at the level of the star-text, not within the discursive world of the fiction acted out by the pop star” (101). That is to say, when Mellencamp references “James Dean” in performances of “Jack & Diane,” it is not “Jack” but Mellencamp himself who is associated with Dean. So it also is with claims on Dean’s legacy made by another Re-Generation musician, Morrissey. Perhaps no pop star of the era had a more intimate and direct relationship of desire with his fans than Moz (as his fans call him), both as a solo artist and as frontman for The Smiths. Called “one of the most singular figures in Western pop culture” (DiCrescenzo), Morrissey has carefully cultivated an association with Dean throughout his career, and his stardom, like Dean’s, can be understood as reli- ant upon the production of mystique. “Morrissey’s ambiguities and mysteries,” Greco explains, “contribute to an overall sense of the singer as an enigma, a puzzle that must be solved, an incomplete persona which is revealed over time, eliciting desire for the whole” (25). This is particularly true regarding Morrissey’s ambiguous sexuality, which has been the subject of ceaseless debate and speculation by fans, critics, and even Morrissey himself. This is, of course, a feature of Dean’s stardom as well, particularly in the wake of Kenneth Anger’s salacious anecdotes in Hollywood Babylon. Whether it was his penchant for using what Nadine Hubbs has called “queer insider language” (285) in his lyrics, his tendency to don pearls or ladies’ thrift store clothing, or the way his vocals often soar into a fragile falsetto, Morrissey’s star text has been largely defined by questions of his sexuality. Reviews and features after The Smiths’ first album variously stated that Morrissey “admits that he’s gay” (Henke 45); “had a lot of girlfriends in the past and quite a few men friends” (Mills 14); is “dramatically, supernaturally, non-sexual” (Owen); and is “a kind of prophet for the fourth sex” (McCullough). In an interview with New Musical Express representative of his responses to inquiries about his sexuality, Morrissey said, “I refuse to recognise the terms hetero-, bi- and homo-sexual. Everybody has exactly the same sexual needs. Star Legacies 165 People are just sexual, the prefix is immaterial” (Kopf 6–7). Morrissey’s resistance to binary definitions of sexuality allows him to be the object of “crossover appeal,” a term DeAngelis uses for stars that are able to simultaneously and equally appeal to gay and straight audiences. At the same time, Morrissey’s refusal to recognize dominant conceptualizations of sexuality produces enigma that further fuels audience identification and desire, both queer4 and straight. Morrissey’s own fan relationship with Dean thus provides a blueprint for his ambiguous intimacy with his own fans. Morrissey’s connection with Dean, both personally and incorporated as a part of his own star text, was longstanding. He published a poem about Dean in a Scottish fanzine in 1979, and penned his own Dean biography, James Dean is Not Dead, in 1983. The links between the two stars were, in many ways, the product of concerted public effort. In 1984, Morrissey toldSmash Hits magazine:

I saw Rebel Without A Cause quite by accident when I was about six. I was entirely enveloped. His entire life seemed so magnificently perfect. What he did on film didn’t stir me that much but as a person he was immensely valuable … At school it was an absolute drawback because nobody really cared about him. If they did, it was only in a synthetic rock and roll way. Nobody had a passion for him as I did. (Birch, “The Morrissey Collection” 40)

Aside from his dismissal of “synthetic rock and roll” appropriations of Dean (here one imagines Moz is referencing the gestures toward Dean by performers like John Cougar), Morrissey’s articulation of sameness (“I was entirely enveloped”) with Dean and difference from mainstream audiences (“Nobody had a passion for him as I did”) squares with DeAngelis’s account of Dean’s crossover appeal: “The gay spectator’s choice of Dean as a figure of self-representation is often based on a likeness, a perception that Dean’s unanchored rebel status mirrors the spectator’s own un-anchored sense of place in the world” (12). Audiences’ fascination and identification with Dean drives them to take part in the revision of Dean’s star text, by engaging in melodramatic fashion in the fantasy of imagining what Dean would be like, “if only” he had lived beyond the Fifties. DeAngelis argues of this rewriting:

Although the star persona functions as the catalyst that initiates the fantasy, the pleasure here is that of the participant, guided not exclusively by the series of primary narrative texts (there are, after all, only three and no more) but also by extra-cinematic discourses that extrapolate from the onscreen persona. (89) 166 Back to the Fifties

Dean watches over Morrissey in “Suedehead.”

While Footloose and “Jack & Diane” use Dean imagery to affirm patriarchal values, Morrissey’s use of Dean is more ambiguous and complex in its gender/sexual politics. The music video for Morrissey’s “Suedehead,” for example, works not only to recover cultural values ascribed to Dean, but also to extend those cultural values into the future by positioning Morrissey as the inheritor to Dean’s star legacy. “Suedehead” was the first single from Viva Hate, Morrissey’s debut solo album after his acrimonious 1987 departure from The Smiths. The sense of “enigma” is fueled by the explicit references to James Dean in the “Suedehead” music video, which reveals a depth of familiarity with Dean iconography and extra-filmic materials that rivals many Fifties film scholars. The video’s opening presents Morrissey’s interest in Dean as an intimate one—the first shot depicts Morrissey sitting in the bathtub with an enormous portrait of Dean hanging on the wall behind him. In the video’s first half, Morrissey’s sexual ambiguity and his Dean fandom are presented as intertwined, positioning Dean as the object of Morrissey’s (fan) desire. The references to Dean in the video are never filmic but are rather symbols of Dean’s childhood and family life in Fairmount, Indiana. These often-obscure nods to minute details of “the real James Dean” in the video serve to authenticate Morrissey’s status as a “true fan” and demonstrate his dedication to, knowledge of, and passion for Dean. For example, the book of Byron’s poems that lies on the table in the video’s opening scene is a reference to Dean’s middle name (and the story that his mother gave Star Legacies 167 him the middle name in honor of the poet). The video regularly draws on deep knowledge of Dean’s life. In a later scene, it depicts a boy arriving at Morrissey’s flat to deliver a brown package that includes a copy of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince. Passionate fans of Dean recognize the book as Dean’s favorite, and the delivery boy bears a resemblance to Dean’s cousin Markie, who Dean treated as a kid brother. Still further, the video features an Indian Motorcycles shop (the one where a teenaged Dean spent afternoons) and has Morrissey carry a medium format camera (of the same style that Dean carried around New York City). As Goodwin teaches us, these associations with Dean extend beyond the narrative frame of the video and into the realm of Morrissey’s star text. In the video’s narrative, Morrissey relaxes at home among his Dean memorabilia until the delivery boy sends him a book. The delivery prompts Moz to travel to Fairmount, Dean’s birthplace and the “point of origin” for his “heartland-infused” star text. Once in Fairmount, the video’s narrative trajectory follows the traditional arc established in Dean’s biographies, emphasizing the small-town qualities of Main Street, his idyllic life on his aunt and uncle’s farm, his dramatic awakening at Fairmount High School, his ultimately tragic fascination with cars and motorcycles, and his final return to Indiana to be buried. The structure of the video’s narrative aligns with Linda Williams’s and Steven Neale’s description of melodrama as organized around an impossible pursuit of unity and for points of origin. In the video, Dean works as a lost object of desire that, in DeAngelis’s terms, must be recovered “with the spectator regulating and negotiating the distance between himself and this object of his own desire … While ultimate access to the object may be unattainable, the ability to imagine this access is what produces pleasure and sustains desire” (12). The video presents Morrissey as a Fairmount outsider, carrying a camera and wearing a chic black trench coat in the empty winter streets. The video thus likens Morrissey to the thousands of tourists who flock to the small town every year on the anniversary of Dean’s death, acting out their fan devotion by returning to the star’s place of origin. On the lyrical level, the song appears to be about a one-night stand that turns into an obsession, and the video adds a layer of meaning that suggests that the bond between fan and star is akin to a dysfunctional relationship between lovers. The sexual ambiguity of Dean’s star text, coupled with Morrissey’s sexual ambiguity, allows queer audiences to claim Dean for their own purposes. Because Dean is “as emerging yet never fully revealed … consistently ‘neither here nor there,’ ” DeAngelis maintains that “the promise that he might yet be revealed as a full presence responds to the needs and desires of his audience” (68). This allows gay spectators to claim the quintessential American rebel as a queer icon, thereby 168 Back to the Fifties invoking his legacy as part of their individual and collective subjectivity. If, as Steve Neale argues, melodramas obstruct the return to the fantasy of origin of self, in which audiences are helpless in the interplay of “if only” and “too late,” Dean’s death provides the ultimate obstacle. As the video reveals while panning over a chalkboard at Fairmount High School, “you can’t go home again.” The feeling that melodrama produces in these moments is akin to the affective condition of nostalgia. Dean works in this video as both the object of desire and an object revitalized by Morrissey. Dean is brought to life in the figure of a new star who is perpetually “emerging yet never fully revealed” and inherits Dean’s sexually ambiguous legacy. Though the video’s narrative arc represents Morrissey engaging in a melodramatic pursuit of and identification with James Dean, the video’s mise en scène creates a series of images that depict Morrissey becoming James Dean, or at the very least embodying Dean’s cultural legacy. The video does this in several registers, none more fascinating than its use of iconic photographs of James Dean’s return trip to Fairmount with photographer Dennis Stock in 1955. No less than seven still images from Stock’s famous photo session are recreated in Morrissey’s video—walking down a Fairmount street, sitting in the theater, reading “Hoosier Poet” James Whitcomb Riley in the barn loft, playing bon- gos in the cattle pen, carrying a dog out of the barn, and staring away from a

Moz recreates famous Dean photos in “Suedehead”. Star Legacies 169 headstone marked “Cal Dean” in the town’s graveyard. The careful reconstruction of these images, with Morrissey in Dean’s place, simply cannot be a mistake.5 As the video ends, Morrissey sits next to Dean’s grave while Dean’s image is superimposed on the scene. For DeAngelis, this image could be read as the specter of Dean haunting the subsequent viewer. However, an alternative reading might position Morrissey as embodiment of the spirit of Dean, the inheritor of his star legacy as the sexually ambiguous outsider for a new generation. In this way of reading the video, the title of the Dean biography Morrissey penned, James Dean is not Dead, comes true.

Looking at Sandra Dee The constant posthumous appropriations of James Dean’s star text have resulted in a proliferation of new “James Deans,” as various populations have laid claim to his legacy, writing and rewriting stories of “what might have been.” An inver- sion of this process, I argue, can be found in the star text of Sandra Dee, who was among Fifties Hollywood’s biggest teenage stars. The comparison between Dean and Dee is an important one. As Dean has been elevated to the status of cultural icon whose meaning is under constant revision, Dee’s legacy in both popular and critical consciousness has largely been reduced to the unproblematic figure of the innocent—Blue Velvet, for example, evokes Dee by naming its teenage blonde girl-next-door character Sandy. The new meanings appended to Dee in films, press, and popular discourses are negational ones, replacing the considerable tensions present in Dee’s original star text with a fantasy of Fifties virtue, or Fifties conform- ism. Sandra Dee, in other words, has been transformed from a polysemous “text” in which cultural values can be resolved into an uncomplicated “type.” This is at least partially due to the reorientation of teenage rebellion from the province of teenage girls to that of teenage boys. If Dean in the Reagan Era was omnipresent but “never quite knowable,” Dee was (and continues to be) largely understood as completely knowable but not particularly worth knowing. While even today Dean’s star text continually reappears in popular culture, Dee seems only to serve as a sort of negative example, either a symbol of an age of conformity and repression or an icon of a fresh-faced innocence destroyed by the sexual revolution. The significance and complexity of her star text is thus covered over, but without the critical uproar that accompanied Back to the Future’s vision of the Fifties, or Footloose’s use of Dean. I pursue this point neither to recover a supposedly “true” meaning of Dee’s star text nor to rescue Dee from the arguments that have taken her as a symbol of cultural values 170 Back to the Fifties worth critique. Rather, in examining the deployment of Dee in pop-nostalgia texts of the Re-Generation, I not only illustrate how Fifties femininity was retrospectively articulated through the star text of Sandra Dee, but also demonstrate that the strategic manipulation of Fifties stars in this period was a practice of the sociopolitical left as well as the right. It is a testament to the effectiveness of the Reagan-Era transformation of Dee’s star text that the ensuing biographical sketch is even necessary. To a greater extent than Dean, Dee was a significant movie star in the 1950s, with considerable cultural resonance. Her career began at age ten, as an advertising and magazine model in New York (making up to $75,000 a year). In 1958, after starring roles in The Reluctant Debutante and The Restless Years, Dee won a Golden Globe for Most Promising Female Newcomer and was named by the Motion Picture Herald as the “Number One Star of Tomorrow.” After two more successful appearances in 1959 (Gidget and Imitation of Life) and her marriage to teen idol Bobby Darin in 1960, Dee was a household name. From 1960 to 1963, Dee was named among the top ten money-making stars in Hollywood, ranking #6 in 1961, just behind Cary Grant and above Jerry Lewis, William Holden, Tony Curtis, and Elvis Presley (Quigley Publishing Company). Fan magazines brimmed with articles about Dee, most often about her dieting strategies; her fashion sense; her relationship with her mother; her dates with other teen idols; and her opinions on dating, family, and independence. Despite all that, Dee is little more than an afterthought in most critical and scholarly reflections on Fifties cinema and culture, and her star legacy went virtu- ally unclaimed by the Re-Generation. If she appears at all in television retrospectives or popular histories of Hollywood in the Fifties, it is most often as an aside or a footnote. Even academic histories of the Hollywood youth film published in the last thirty years give Dee short shrift. Thomas Doherty’s invaluable teen film history Teenagers and Teenpics dismisses her films and star image as “conformist” in two brief pages. David Considine’s exhaustive The Cinema of Adolescence gives slightly more attention to Dee, but even that is mostly confined to a section titled “Movies’ Monstrous Moms” and only offered as a point of comparison to the depiction of the family in Rebel Without a Cause. Dee’s image graced no T-shirts, merchandise, posters, or advertisements in the 1980s, and she was scarcely referenced in pop music (exceptions include brief mentions in Waylon Jennings’ “Ain’t Living Long Like This” and Lita Ford’s “Can’t Catch Me,” which both figure Dee as a naïve innocent to be left behind). A television series, The New Gidget, did briefly air in syn- dication in 1985, but even that show excluded Dee from production and was fairly dismissive of her legacy. In an interview with the Associated Press, new star Caryn Richman assured audiences that the new Gidget would not be the same as those Star Legacies 171 that came before: “I can’t make it Shakespeare or Gone with the Wind, but I tried very hard not to make it Susie Creamcheese. I fought for her to play the intimate moments intimately and play the pain with pain. Not as the old Gidget” (Buck 14). In what appears to be her only major press appearance of the 1980s, Dee spoke to The Washington Post about her career and seemed haunted by her “good-girl” image: “I can’t lose it. People say, ‘You were in all those beach movies.’ But really I was only in the first Gidget” (Goldfarb B7). Whether Dee was held up as a paragon of traditional feminine virtues or condemned as a symbol of the repression and enforced conformity of the Fifties, discussions of Dee in the Re-Generation positioned her as an absence, a figure that was (for better or for worse) lost forever. This is certainly the argument made within the song “Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee” from the Fifties-nostalgia musical (and eventually movie-musical) Grease (1978). Today, Dee’s place in the popular imagination of the United States is best articulated by this song, which became a staple for Broadway compilation albums and karaoke catalogues. The relation to Dee is explicitly rendered in the character of Grease’s uber-blonde female protagonist Sandy Olsson (Olivia Newton-John), who suggests Dee’s star text both in name and in appearance. On the other side of the good-girl/bad-girl dyad, Grease offers the ethnicized Betty Rizzo (Stockard Channing), a sexually uninhibited, yet emotionally vulnerable, female juvenile delinquent. In “Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee,” Rizzo ridicules Sandy’s goody two-shoes persona and morality, sneering in the opening lines, “Look at me, I’m Sandra Dee / Lousy with virginity / Won’t go to bed ’til I’m legally wed / For I am Sandra Dee.” For the sarcastic performance, Rizzo and her fellow “Pink Ladies” don blonde wigs and assume snooty voices and mannerisms. The emphasis on falsity or inauthentic- ity in this performance suggests that the morality for which Sandy stands (and, of course, the codes of white femininity that it signifies) are not natural but a put-on that the Pink Ladies explicitly reject. With lines like “As for you, Troy Donahue / I know what you wanna do,” and “Elvis, Elvis, let me be / Keep that pelvis far from me,” Grease positions Dee as the out-of-date virginal bourgeois “good girl” who is better left in the dustbin of history. Rizzo’s number uses Sandra Dee to invoke restrictions—on girls drinking, smoking, or engaging in premarital sex—that would be made obsolete by the sexual revolution. Rizzo delights in breaking the taboos that her version of Dee would rigidly abide by, sarcastically braying “I’m no object of lust” while flaunting her “silky drawers.” In Grease, Sandy’s eventual sexual liberation can only be accomplished by transforming herself in the film’s conclusion into a blonde version of Rizzo, as if the Dee image is of a piece with Fifties sexual repression—both, inGrease ’s view, are to be rejected. The irony, of course, is that Dee’s teen characters in the Fifties rarely prized 172 Back to the Fifties

Grease: “I’m Sandra Dee!”. their virginity, and in most cases lost it enthusiastically. As Georgeann Scheiner has argued, “although she has become synonymous with sexual prudery, in fact Dee’s film characterizations are often quite erotic … Dee actually became a recognizable new ‘type’ in the late Fifties, a teenage girl conflicted about her emerging sexuality” (90). A short review of some of Dee’s most prominent roles reveals the degree to which Dee’s “clean teen” star text was generated in opposition to her actual on-screen roles. In her screen debut in Until They Sail (1957), Dee plays the youngest of four sisters in New Zealand who experience romantic and sexual relationships with American servicemen during World War II. The trailer for the film announces that, for Dee’s character Evelyn, “flirting was a teenager’s prerogative.” The promotional poster for Dee’s next film, The Reluctant Debutante (1958), suggests very little reluctance indeed—Dee seductively sits on the lap of a drummer (John Saxon) as her parents (Rex Harrison and Kay Kendall) look on in shock. In Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959), Dee’s character, supposed “good-girl” Susie, attempts to seduce her mother’s fiance. Even at this young age (either twelve or fourteen years old6), Dee was playing characters that were precociously, even worryingly, sexual. In A Summer Place (1959), the film that Scheiner argues “helped define sexuality for adolescents of the period” (97), Dee plays Molly Jorgenson, a self-made million- aire’s young teenage daughter who accompanies her parents on a summer vacation. Despite Universal’s efforts to construct an entirely wholesome image for Dee in the fan magazines, Molly is a fully mature erotic figure in the film. She confesses to undressing in front of opened windows so the neighbor boy can see and sneaking away to make out with the class president during school. Further, Molly battles with her conservative mother about sexual mores throughout the film, and even chafes against her parents’ control over her body in arguments about the constraining underwear she is forced to wear (this has a special resonance with Dee’s personal life, Star Legacies 173 as her own mother bound her early developing breasts before she was ten years old). In the illicit relationship between Molly and the neighbor boy Johnny (Donohue), Molly is the sexual aggressor, and she maintains an independence over her sexual and personal life throughout the film’s melodramatic narrative. Dee’s Molly asserts her prerogative to express her sexuality on her own, more honest terms, refusing to be constricted by the sexual mores of her parents, social stigma, her cross-class liai- son with Johnny, or even her underwear. In perhaps her most famous role—as the titular Gidget (1959)—Dee joins a band of quasi-Beatnik beach bums, rejecting the passive position of “beach bunny” and gaining access to the homosocial community of rebel boys. Gidget’s “tomboy-ness,” according to Medovoi, registers a profound dissatisfaction with, if not a direct challenge to, the possibilities of patriarchal gender relations. The potential union of the bohemian Kahuna and tomboy surfer presents the opportunity that Gidget could be both eroticized subject and girl surfer, that her rebellion or rejection of bourgeois gender codes need not be “just a phase” but an alternative position that resists or perhaps even disrupts the passive girl/active boy binary. In this respect, Dee’s star text functioned, like the more celebrated Marilyn Monroe, “as a metaphor for the cultural schizophrenia surrounding female sexuality … both sexy and innocent, demure yet vivacious, fearful yet sensual” (Scheiner 91). Interestingly, the only critic, scholar, artist, or performer that I found in my research who acknowledged this reading of Dee before 1991 was Charles Busch, the playwright and drag performer who produced the play Psycho Beach Party in 1987—which was originally titled Gidget Goes Psychotic. When Spy magazine asked Busch if the Gidget fascination was “a presexual thing,” Busch insisted, “The movie Gidget, with Sandra Dee, is all about sex! She’s this really nubile thing, and she thinks she’s a freak because she doesn’t want to go on dates. Then she falls in love with Moondoggie and then it’s all, ‘How far am I going to let him go?’ ” (Handy 14). Part of the camp appeal of Psycho Beach Party, I think, is revealing the sexual fascination that has been part of the Gidget/ Dee figure all along in the context of a culture that refuses to recognize them. The forms of cultural resistance that Dee represented, however domesticated, were transformed (the odd Psycho Beach Party aside) by the Re-Generation into either naïve innocence or facile and inauthentic performance. Cultural narratives that indexed Dee allowed for little else. If James Dean’s rebellion has been romanticized and canonized, Dee’s resistance to hegemonic codes of gender and sexuality has been diminished and dismissed. The notion of Dee as the ultimate clean teen, icon of conservative Hollywood’s recuperation of the teenpic genre, is not just a product of popular memory but the effect of critical discourse as well. As I noted, Doherty gives short shrift to Dee’s films, dismissing them as “conformist” and “clean teen pics.” Considine calls Gidget a “retreat to the circa-forties family” and casts Dee as “succumbing” to her 174 Back to the Fifties desires in A Summer Place rather than actively pursuing them. And Timothy Shary, in his Wallflower volume Teen Films, mentions Dee only as a costar of John Saxon, whose status as “teen sensation” was short-lived and far less remarkable than Dee’s. As these examples illustrate, even among accomplished scholars who specialize in the teen film, Dee’s legacy has been that of an innocent conformist, an image that may have been consistent with studio-generated publicity but as a legacy is very much at odds with her actual screen output. The persistent dismissals of Dee’s symbolic value in both popular culture and academic criticism fail to acknowledge the impulses of sexual liberation in Dee’s ponytailed characters and assign to her values of Fifties con- formism that her on-screen characters never reflected. Throughout the Reagan Era, occasional “Where Are They Now?” columns in newspapers would gesture toward personal demons that followed Dee in the wake of her divorce in 1967 and Darin’s death in 1973. A Los Angeles Times column about her short-lived comeback on television noted her “unnatural slimness” that accompanied “a generous portion of ups and downs” (Willens 68). The Chicago Tribune described Dee as “retired” in 1981 (“TV Mailbag”). Goldfarb’s 1982 profile of Dee in The Washington Post noted that she was “reticent” to discuss her personal life, and by 1987, columnists could only report that “Ms. Dee insists on a life of privacy these days” (Cuthbert T26). Later, with the encouragement of her son Dodd, Dee emerged to reveal elements of her personal life that run counter to her squeaky-clean reputation. A publicity offensive featuring an Associated Press profile, a cover story in People magazine, and a televised interview with Sally Jesse Raphael revealed (and to some degree, reveled in) a darker side to Dee’s sunny image. These revelations did not, however, force a reconsideration of the validity of her goody two-shoes image. Instead, they spurred retrospective discussion regarding the potential dangers of the performance of Fifties values. ThePeople magazine cover story itself works as a narrative retelling of the Sandra Dee star text. The story’s opening paragraphs draw on the fantasy aspects of Dee’s stardom with lines like “During the late 1950s and early ’60s, Dee was the teen ideal, Hollywood style,” and “In 1960 she eloped at 18 with crooner Bobby Darin … her storybook life seemed complete” (Gold 90). In other words, the story positions her as the embodiment of Fifties ideals. But in the story, Dee recounts the sexual assault her stepfather perpetrated upon her as a child and her lifelong battles with depression, anorexia, addiction, and alcoholism. When Dee’s traumatic experiences and struggles with addiction are revealed, however, People does not conclude that the Fifties was not in fact an innocent time but posits these demons as the result of the era’s impossible-to-meet standards. “The reality was nothing that the America of that time could imagine, or that Hollywood would have wanted to know,” it claims (Gold 87)—as if sexual assault, incest, anorexia, or alcoholism were unheard of in Star Legacies 175 the 1950s, and despite the fact that Dee’s anorexia and substance abuse were well known and to some degree facilitated by the entertainment industry. In the televised interview with Sally Jesse Raphael, Dee discussed these challenges and subtly revealed that she was actually two years younger than her story claimed—meaning that she was sexually assaulted beginning at five years old, became her family’s primary breadwinner by working as a model at eight, started appearing in screen nym- phet roles at age twelve, developed bulimia at thirteen, and married a teen idol at age sixteen, all the while manifesting signs of drug and alcohol addiction. And yet, many retrospectives on Dee’s career cast her as “trapped in her Fifties image” or “unable to transition to adult roles” rather than acknowledge that the abuse and enabling behavior from both her family and the film industry had immense costs on Dee as a performer as well as a human being. The press appearances that Dee made discussing her addiction and abuse focused on the psychic and emotional costs she had paid to maintain her image. In these appearances, Dee is portrayed as a victim of history (rather than of malevolent individuals or indifferent institutions), and the Fifties is cast as the villain. People, Sally, and the Associated Press present the Fifties as a time that was too naïve, too repressive, or too invested in quietism to understand the trauma Dee faced. While the popular press has long covered the salacious and scandalous secrets of Hollywood, the 1980s stories about Dee frame her experiences as a referendum on the Fifties. This suggests that, at the close of the Reagan Era, Americans had become suspicious of the “fantasy Fifties” that seemed so appealing when Marty McFly went back in time. In these stories, the impossible ideal of femininity represented by Sandra Dee (one that she never actually embodied, on screen or off) was under fire, for its hyper- visibility as much as for its impossibility. The popular refrain from Grease, “Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee,” takes on special significance in this light. Whether it was the erotic gazing at Dee in A Summer Place, the mockery and critique in Grease, the camp celebration in Psycho Beach Party, or the somber reflection in People, the American public was compelled to “look at” Sandra Dee. What they saw when they looked, however, were vastly different images of both femininity and the Fifties. As with the song, the People cover presumes that Dee’s star persona was a cal- culated and outdated performance driven—either by her mother’s insistence or her own compulsion—to be seen (“Look at me!”). In this retelling of the story, “Sandra Dee” stands in for a set of morals and expectations imposed upon young women by the Fifties’ form of repressive patriarchy. The strategy of many engaged in the culture wars was to reveal the damaging human consequences of living in a society of compulsory “family values,” and highlight the impossible ideals that young women in the United States continuously face, and Sandra Dee served as a convenient illustration in both respects. To be clear, my aim is not to defend 176 Back to the Fifties

Dee in People. Author’s personal collection. symbols of repressive patriarchy but to highlight how Dee’s status as a symbol of the “Fifties good girl” is one that owes more to Grease than Gidget. Responding to the People article, Camille Paglia told The Washington Post, “In the ’50s, you know, it was the blond sorority queens and cheerleaders, it was the era of Debbie Reynolds, Doris Day and Sandra Dee … and now, Sandra Dee comes out of hiding 20 years later to reveal she was abused by her stepfather, she was a drug addict, she Star Legacies 177 was anorexic … Sandra Dee to us was a model of what we should be!” (Allen 1). Stars like Dee became associated with the “good-girl” values that the New Right would champion as the cure for society’s moral shortcomings. For critics on the left, Dee’s personal struggles are presented as a false feminine ideal to be rejected and, indeed, scorned. As Paglia’s comments suggest, this rejection was not simply about Dee but about an entire culture represented by “cheerleaders” and “sorority queens.” Similarly, in Grease’s “Look at Me,” Annette Funicello and Doris Day take their place alongside Dee on Rizzo’s hit list, with lines like “Hey, I’m Doris Day / I was not brought up that way” and “Would you try that crap with Annette?” Rizzo adopts the intonations and mannerisms of Day and Funicello, linking the song’s critique of Dee’s perceived “innocence” to other Fifties girl-icons, and perhaps to girlhood itself. While mascu- linized forms of Fifties nostalgia (rock and roll, juvenile delinquent narratives, car culture) were often celebrated, forms associated with femininity (pop music, teen romance, or forms of Fifties courtship) were dismissed as restrictive and retrograde.

Recovering Lost Legacies Academia in the Reagan Era also had a deeply ambivalent relationship with girls and girls’ culture. Mary Celeste Kearney explains that throughout the 1970s and 1980s, girls were largely ignored by most strains of Birmingham-inspired cultural studies (which mostly relied upon a masculinist understanding of “cultural resistance”) and by emerging forms of feminist analysis and activism (which privileged the woman as the liberated subject against the immature or subjugated figure of the girl). The peripheral status of girls in “youth studies” in the tradition of Stuart Hall was noted at its very origins. Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber’s essay “Girls and Subcultures” appeared in the seminal collection Resistance through Rituals in 1976. The essay begins by noting that “very little seems to have been written about the role of girls in youth cultural groupings. They are absent from the classic subcultural ethnographic studies, the pop histories, the personal accounts and the journalis- tic surveys of the field” (12). As scholars undertook work that would celebrate (and validate) forms of youth style and culture that took James Dean as their spiritual ancestor, the culture of teenage girls was largely ignored. This led to a situation that Christine Griffin described as one in which “young men’s experiences have been presented as the norm against which young women must be judged” (24). Girls’ cultural participation was understood to be confined to “bedroom cultures” of consumption. Often, girls were associated with the consumption of commodities centered on the pursuit of heterosexual romance, including the films that starred “daddy’s girls” in the mold of Sandra Dee. 178 Back to the Fifties Many feminist critics have challenged the notion of girls as uncritical consumers of popular culture and highlighted the reading strategies girls develop for the texts they encounter. Despite that, many cultural studies scholars maintained an uneasy relationship with girls and their forms of “bedroom culture.” Even when scholars attempted to tease out a politics of resistance from girls’ consumer practices, “the search for autonomous female cultural forms in the bedroom hideaways of teenage girls has been consistently dogged by nagging doubts as to the creative, productive and potentially subversive power of this mode of femininity” (Carter 110). These “nagging doubts” predate feminist cultural studies by decades and point to a hesi- tancy in twentieth-century feminism to embrace the figure of the girl. Writing about Sandra Dee and Molly Ringwald (the 1980s performer that in some ways inherited Dee’s legacy as Hollywood’s teen queen), Christina Lee has discussed the way that girls in Hollywood cinema are often consigned to the past, standing in for “an impossible vision of social order that had already begun to crack” (96) even when that historical period is over. Lee draws on Roland Barthes’s concept of “myth,” which she defines as “the naturalisation of history through the distortion (not concealment) of the meaning of a sign” (95). Dee’s retrospective Reagan-Era transformation (or “distortion”) made her into either the ultimate “clean teen” or a tragic victim of the enforced performance of Fifties values. This transformation was so successful, in fact, that even Lee casts Dee’s image as “a myth of the way things never really were,” ignoring the way that Dee’s screen output explicitly challenged “traditional” models of female sexuality. Clearly, this “mythologized” version of Dee’s star text, and the Fifties social types for which she stands, has gained the status of “official” or “historical” truth in the national popular. But as Dyer reminds us, star texts are polysemous, incorporating diverse and competing ideological and affective meanings. Nostalgic engagements with Dee’s films, or with Dee’s star text as a whole, is one way of challenging the narratives that have become dominant. As Lee argues, engagements with popular culture “can expand the possibilities of (re)thinking about the past, and contribute to a collective process that can be described as the ‘social production of memory’ where everyone is a potential historian. Cinema provides one such implement for recording (and later recalling) events that may otherwise be ignored. […] More importantly, it is the affective threads in cinema—its ability to spark certain corporeal responses—that reconnects the past to the present tense” (91). In this way, nostalgia can actually work to correct the historical record, giving future generations access to the feelings of the Fifties, whether those feelings are the anxieties and frustrations of James Dean, or the rebelliousness and sexuality of Sandra Dee. EPILOGUE

The Futures of Nostalgia

Like their Boomer parents, the Re-Generation has responded to their middle age by reflecting back on the popular culture of their youth. Since I began researching this project in 2006, American movie screens have seen the reappearance of Reagan-Era popular culture in films like Miami Vice (2006), Rocky Balboa (2006), Live Free or Die Hard (2007), Transformers (2007), Hairspray (2007), Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), Rambo (2008), Fame (2009), Friday the 13th (2009), The A-Team (2010), The Karate Kid (2010), A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010), Footloose (2011), Red Dawn (2012), and Robocop (2014), among others. Film is not the only site of this new pop nostalgia: video streaming sites offer 1980s programming like Cheers, The Facts of Life, and Diff’rent Strokes, while “Alex Keaton for President” T-shirts abound on websites like Snorgtees.com. Popular culture of the 1970s and 1980s is the focus of online communities like RetroJunk, NostalgiaCritic, and Perpetual Kid. Not to be left out, cable television channel VH1’s contemporary series “I Love the Eighties” delights in ironic enjoyment of 1980s pop culture. In popular music, Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, and Madonna have not only seen resurgences in album sales, but have spawned a series of artists like Justin Timberlake, The Gaslight Anthem, and Lady Gaga, who compete to claim their star legacies. Among political conservatives in the United States, nostalgia for the Reagan Era, and the myth of Reagan himself, has only intensified since the former president’s

179 180 Back to the Fifties death in 2004. Legislative bodies at all levels have appended Reagan’s name to air- ports, highways, elementary schools, government buildings, and even mountains, while proposals have been made to add Reagan’s image to everything from the ten-dollar bill to Mount Rushmore. As Gil Troy puts it, “a quarter of a century after Ronald Reagan’s 1981 inauguration, more than a decade after he withdrew from public view, and years after his death, Ronald Reagan seemed to be one of America’s most popular politicians” (xii). Indeed, despite the grave challenges facing the country—two protracted wars; economic calamity; climate change; public health and education in decline; and flagging confidence at home and abroad due to the policies of torture, domestic spying, and corporate deregulation—early in the 2008 presidential election, candidates seemed to be focused on Reagan above all else. In January of 2008 the contenders for the Republican nomination held their final debate at the site of the Reagan Presidential Library, which is also the former president’s burial place. There the candidates were welcomed by Reagan’s widow, were asked whether Reagan would have endorsed them, and desperately attempted to establish their connections to Saint Ronnie. As Will Bunch points out, in this debate Reagan’s image provided the visual backdrop to the proceedings (in the form of his library and his Air Force One positioned behind the stage), as well as the conceptual background to the discussion (18). Not to be left out, Democratic challenger Senator Barack Obama praised Reagan in a 2008 interview, saying that Reagan “tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing” (“In Their Own Words”). Such signals would seem to suggest that if the Reagan Era did indeed end, many in our society are currently in the grips of some intense Reagan-Era nostalgia. Reagan hagiographies have filled bookstores, only to be accompanied by books aiming to correct the historical record, offering counternarratives of Reagan’s political and cultural legacy. Perhaps the most interesting illustration of this nostalgic ambivalence of the Re-Generation comes from the peculiarly named MGM/United Artists release Hot Tub Time Machine (2010). The film tells the story of Nick (Craig Robinson), Lou (Rob Corddry), and Adam (John Cusack), three middle-aged friends deeply dissat- isfied with their adult lives. Reunited by Lou’s attempted suicide, the three friends seek to recapture their glory days on a weekend vacation to their old stomping grounds, the Kodiak Valley Ski Resort with Adam’s latchkey nephew Jacob (Clark Duke) in tow. Although it is never mentioned by name, Back to the Future is a crucial intertext for Hot Tub Time Machine. The conceit of unintentional time travel facilitated by a time machine built into a consumer device is pure Zemeckis (early drafts of the Back Epilogue: The Future of Nostalgia 181 to the Future script had Doc Brown build a time machine out of a refrigerator). The film also features several direct allusions to Back to the Future—the scene in which the group realizes they are in the 1980s is a parallel to the Hill Valley town square scene, right down to the isolation of a Reagan image at the moment of the protagonists’ realization of their predicament. Just as Marty begins to disappear when his intervention into the past threatens his existence, Jacob begins to flicker and fade after the group begins to alter history. Additionally, Nick gets to “invent” a new musical form in a scene similar to the “Johnny B. Goode” performance in Back to the Future. Even the original George McFly, Crispin Glover, appears as a bellhop in the before and after versions of Kodiak Valley. Most tellingly,Hot Tub Time Machine’s heroes can only resolve their present-day regrets by returning to a crucial moment in the past. This might suggest that for contemporary America, the Reagan Era has become the new Fifties. However, the protagonists’ responses to their time travel speak to the tension between retro and nostalgia, as well as the vexed relationship contemporary America has with the Reagan Era. Jacob, representative of the audience of Millenials who were not even alive during Reagan’s first term, responds to 1986 with a mixture of confusion (at the lack of wireless Internet) and abject horror (at his mother’s cocaine use). Lou and Nick enthusiastically enjoy the opportunity to recapture their youth—Lou by engaging in hedonistic sex and drug use, Nick in renewing his passion for music. Adam, in contrast, has no interest in giving the Reagan Era a second chance. “I’m trapped in the Eighties and I hate this fucking decade,” he tells his companions, adding, “We had Reagan and AIDS, that’s it! Let’s get the fuck out of here!”

Back to the eighties in Hot Tub Time Machine. 182 Back to the Fifties Adam’s rejection of Reagan-Era nostalgia is particularly meaningful coming from the mouth of Cusack, as he made his career on the teen comedies that Hot Tub Time Machine so often references: the ski resort itself, for example, recalls the setting of Cusack’s Better Off Dead … (1985), and the film makes several satirical references to Cusack’s 1980s films. In press for Hot Tub Time Machine, Cusack distanced himself from any longing for the Reagan Era that might be ascribed to the film: “I hoped that I would be out of the ’80s in 2010 … I didn’t have a very nostalgic view of the ’80s. They frightened me, and I remain in fear” (Itzkoff, “I Loathe the 80s”). Cusack also drew irate coverage from conservative news outlets after saying that his memory of the 1980s was of “a kind of forced Prozac happy-time without the Prozac,” and “there was this militant patriotism, nationalism, faux spirituality to it. I look back on it as an intense, dark decade” (Patterson 17). Though Cusack’s 1980s star text always included a strain of punk subcultural resistance, interviewers on Access Hollywood appeared shocked to hear him say that he has no nostalgia for the 1980s, or that he has no particular affinity for the films of John Hughes. Cusack’s resistance to 1980s nostalgia in promoting Hot Tub Time Machine prompts viewers to engage with his film with a similarly critical eye. The characters’ response to the Reagan Era—ironic amusement, emotional rec- onciliation, and political rejection—represent a range of responses to pop nostalgia that do not simply lionize the conditions of a bygone era. A New York Times review points out that while “Nick, Lou and Adam are miserable in 2010 … one thing that becomes clear pretty quickly is that they weren’t all that happy in 1986 either” (Scott). For Scott, and other reviewers, the enduring message of Hot Tub Time Machine is that there were no happy days or wonder years, no “simpler times” to which we may return. In this way, Hot Tub Time Machine reframes and rewrites Back to the Future, producing new meanings for the film and the nostalgic vision of American progress that it offers. However, we must bear in mind that a staunch “anti-nostalgia” of the sort Cusack endorses enacts the very kinds of historical transformations that the critics of nostalgia lament. Those that share Cusack’s political or cultural outlook may wish to reject instances of pop nostalgia that lionize the social or political order of the Reagan Era, but if the supposed problem with nostalgia is the simplification and erasure of history, then surely the rejection of nostalgic impulses can cause the same issues. There was much more to the politics of the period than Reagan and AIDS, and much more to the culture than John Hughes films and novelty pop music. The years 1973–1988 saw the development of post-punk and hip-hop; demonstrations against nuclear proliferation and the wage gap; the emergence of filmmakers like Joel and Ethan Coen, Amy Heckerling, David Lynch, and Spike Lee; and the formation of organizations like Greenpeace, Food Not Bombs, and ACT UP. As Bradford Martin outlines Epilogue: The Future of Nostalgia 183 in The Other Eighties, there were many organizations, institutions, and individuals who worked against the dominant trends of Reagan Era society, and “to fail to tell their story would be to obscure the value of their commitment, their diligent labors, and their painstaking toil at times when the outlook appeared bleak for those who shared their values” (192). The purpose of this book has been to challenge dismissive attitudes toward the social and political value of nostalgia, and to complicate reductive notions of the cultural and aesthetic value of pop music and Hollywood films of the Reagan Era. That does not mean lionizing nostalgia or glossing over some of the developments in American political and cultural life from 1973 to 1988 that merit rigorous critique. But it does mean thinking—really thinking—about how cultural attitudes toward the past structure our engagements with the present, and how the historical conditions of the present structure our affective engagements with the past. In this book, I have attempted to contribute to a reconsideration of our existing, and too often limited, conceptualizations of nostalgia. I have tried to show the various and sometimes contradictory ways that pop nostalgia operated in the Reagan Era, because I believe this period is both underexamined by media studies scholars and enormously influential on our current political and social debates. But it is important to say, by way of closing, that the assessments and analyses I offer here may not apply to the future (or futures?) of nostalgia. When Johannes Hofer first diagnosed nostalgia in the late seventeenth century, his subjects were living through a period of significant political, social, and technological changes that radically reoriented humans’ relationships with the spatial concept of “home.” This is to say, specifically, that the nature of nostalgic affect is always framed by the specific historical conditions from which it emerges. The years 1973–1988 saw radical transformations in media technologies (audio cassette decks, VCRs), media distribution methods (cable television, VHS, record reissues), and creative practices (sampling in hip-hop, bricolage in punk subculture). The existence of the rewind, reset, and record buttons on Camcorders and Walkmans, in other words, were more than technological features on consumer electronics—they represented transformations in the concept of time. As a result, members of the Re-Generation experienced new forms of nostalgic affect, forms that brought with them new aesthetic and political functions for nostalgia. As new representational practices, industrial strategies, and technological features emerge in popular culture, so too will emerge new forms of pop nostalgia. This sort of retrospective revisioning is not only the privilege of major media conglomerates. The mashup video “Brokeback to the Future,” produced by the Emerson College comedy troupe Chocolate Cake City in 2005, represents the way that the retrospective and referential practices and principles of the Re-Generation have 184 Back to the Fifties been adapted for what Henry Jenkins calls “participatory culture.” Online communities like YouTube have fostered an environment in which film and media can be recontextualized and reformulated in ways never intended—or even imagined—by their producers. “Though this new participatory culture has its roots in practices that have occurred just below the radar of the media industry throughout the twentieth century,” Jenkins argues, “the Web has pushed that hidden layer of cultural activity into the foreground, forcing the media industries to confront its implications” (Convergence Culture 137). To put the increasing cultural relevance of viral video into perspective, consider that “Brokeback to the Future” has received over six million hits on YouTube—roughly the same number of viewers who paid to see Hot Tub Time Machine in theaters. The video’s formal qualities suggest a more complex relationship with its source texts than might be expected from an online trailer spoof. “Brokeback to the Future” intersperses footage from Back to the Future (along with 1990 Old West sequel, Back to the Future Part III) and title cards underscored by Gustavo Santaolalla’s plaintive guitar theme from Brokeback Mountain (2005). The music, titles, and pacing of the mashup all approximate the form of the original Brokeback Mountain trailer, and the spoof trailer relies on viewers to have a fairly intimate knowledge of Brokeback’s narrative in order to fully appreciate its humor. While the mashup is clearly played for laughs, it opens up new interpretive possibilities for both films. Seen in the light of Back to the Future, Brokeback becomes legible as a parallel narrative of two men traveling through time from the Fifties to the Reagan Era—a story for which the Hill Valley version of history simply does not allow. The scenes and images from Back to the Future that the video employs often, in this new context, suggest connections to iconic moments from the 2005 film. As opposed to the appropriations of found footage by avant-garde artists of the 1970s, who sought to disrupt the grammar and syntax of dominant filmic codes, trailer remixes like “Brokeback to the Future” remain formally close to the texts that they appropriate. Cinematic language and narrative structure are “only rarely the site of transformation in the works of digital remixers—instead these elements are replicated and the content, context and meaning become the site of revision” (Horwatt 93). As Hot Tub Time Machine borrows scenes from Back to the Future while simultaneously inflecting them with different affective power, so too does “Brokeback to the Future” cast images from the 1985 time travel film in a wholly new light. Mashups and other forms of digital remixing hold out the promise for new methods of revision and critique for media consumers and audiences, allowing for what Eli Horwatt calls “the possibility of bottom-up media distribution and an open dialogue between individuals and an increasingly concentrated mass media machine” (89). While the critical potential of fan remixes is easy to overstate, they Epilogue: The Future of Nostalgia 185

The mashup video “Brokeback to the Future” left( ) visually recalls iconic images from Brokeback Mountain (right). do at least signal that audiences take pleasure in recognizing the “constructed-ness” of media narratives, and harbor enthusiasm for the prospect of investing old texts with new meanings. In his earlier work on fandom, Jenkins argues that practices like online mashups allow fans to “actively struggle with and against the meanings imposed upon them by their borrowed materials” (Textual Poachers 33). Clearly, “Brokeback to the Future” restructures Back to the Future in order to highlight the erotic tension in the Marty/Doc relationship. The enjoyment in lampooning their homosocial relationship comes not just from the video’s skillful editing but also from the notion that “any Hollywood narrative can be made queer with a light nudge and some very cheap technology” (Clover and Nealon 63). For a generation of Millennials accustomed to cultural practices of remix, mashup, viral distribution, and crowd financing, these practices can be applied beyond “slash” fiction, and become more generalized cultural and aesthetic principles. Remixes like “Brokeback to the Future” do not simply alter our understanding of its source texts; they open up new interpretations and reading practices for the genres or eras from which the originals emerged. Additionally, remixes leave a record of their revisions that can be found by anyone searching for clips of Back to the Future or Brokeback Mountain, positioning themselves as “adjacent texts” for new viewers. YouTube, in other words, becomes an unstable but highly participatory public archive that “introduces a new model of media access and amateur historiography” (Hilderbrand 54) and “invites exploration of the archive, contested notions of public memory, and debates over the meaning of the past” (Uricchio 36). By aligning the Fifties-to-Eighties relationship of Doc and Marty to the Fifties-to-Eighties relationship of Brokeback’s Ennis and Jack, the “Brokeback to the Future” draws attention to subtexts that readers could tease out of Back to the Future’s vision of the Fifties. In this way, fans and remixers participate in a form of do-it-yourself historiography, assigning and revising meanings that are attached to the Fifties, the Reagan Era, or any other period that is contingent upon their historical moment, and collectively developing cultural memories of the way we were.

Notes

Introduction

1. Scholars have begun to re-examine functions of nostalgia that extend beyond Jameson’s characterization of it in Postmodernism. Linda Hutcheon famously sparred with Jameson over his characterization of postmodernist aesthetics as fundamentally ahistorical, resulting in a debate that largely defined the critical conversation on nostalgia throughout the 1990s. However, as Christine Sprengler points out, this discussion did not significantly reconceptu- alize the nature of nostalgia itself. Rather, their discussion hinged on what particular forms should nor should not be included in the reviled category of “nostalgia.” The possibility for nostalgia to function in a more complicated historical way was, in many ways, foreclosed by the terms of debate between Jameson and Hutcheon. These limits have been a feature in much of the (often valuable) subsequent work on nostalgia by scholarly like David Lowenthal (1980), George Lipsitz (1990), Leslie Speed (1998), and David Shumway (1999). In this body of work, the “nostalgia film” is seriously investigated, but the essential understanding of nostalgia as inherently retrograde remains relatively stable. Some more recent work has begun a critical reconsideration of the function of nostalgia, as the scholarship of Paul Grainge (2002), Svetlana Boym (2002), Vera Dika (2003), Marcus (2004), Caputi (2005), and Sprengler (2009). Grainge and Boym, under the influence of trauma and memory studies, began to reconsider the role of nostalgia in the definition of a society’s historical consciousness. Both sought to distinguish between varying types of nostalgia. Boym describes “restorative nostalgia” as that which advocates a return to a prior order, and “reflective nostalgia” as a rumination upon times gone by. Grainge separates the “nostalgia mode” (a visual style) from the “nostalgia mood” (the emotional impact) in an analysis of how cultural memory is often assembled through circulation of established aesthetic tropes. Grainge and Boym’s work informs Caputi, who analyzes Fifties nostalgia as a symptom

187 188 Notes of late twentieth-century social melancholia and in terms of its influence across the political spectrum in the United States. Somewhat similarly, Marcus examines the often competing political uses that nostalgia has served since the 1970s, but does little to interrogate the nature of nostalgia itself. Dika and Springler explore the relationship between codes of representation designed to evoke nostalgia and the crucial potentials of affective audience responses. Back to the Fifties is indebted to all of these works, and more. But it differs in its specific focus on the historical and cultural context that shaped Fifties nostalgia in the Reagan Era, as well as its location of nostalgia outside the realm of texts and within the networks of text, audience, and broader sociopolitical context. 2. It is not my intention, in making this distinction, to dismiss retro out of hand but only to say that it is a separate phenomenon from nostalgia. For more on retro and its cultural implications, see Elizabeth Guffey’s Retro: The Culture of Revival. 3. By the New Right, I mean the conservative political coalition of old-guard anticommu- nists influenced by William F. Buckley, populist conservatives inspired by Barry Goldwater, free-market advocates in the tradition of the Heritage Foundation, and religious conservatives energized by groups like the Christian Voice and Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority that rose to immense power in the United States through the 1970s and 1980s. 4. Bradford Martin’s The Other Eighties: A Secret History of America in the Age of Reagan is an invaluable resource that provides an overview for many social, cultural, and political movements that are elided by an over-emphasis on Reagan and Reaganism in American cultural history and popular memory. 5. Jonathan Gray, in his book Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts, argues for the centrality of what he—borrowing a term from Gerard Genette—calls “paratexts” to “off-screen” media studies. As I argue in Back to the Fifties that the nostalgic affect generated from our engagement with popular culture is shaped by extra-textual and contextual factors, Gray’s work (along with that from Barbara Klinger, Henry Jenkins, and Katheryn Wright) serves as an important influence. However, I don’t find the term “paratext” to be altogether satisfactory for describing the types of intertextual relationships I am interested in exploring. In Show Sold Separately, Gray focuses largely on professional and promotional materials (as the subtitle of his book illustrates), whereas the “adjacent texts” I am interested in (political speeches, radio formats, star texts, unrelated music videos, etc.) are often not officially affili- ated with the texts with which they come in contact. While the Greek prefix para-does literally translate to “beside” or “next to,” in practice in US English it suggests, to me at least, a more or less natural or designed relationship between objects (as in parasite or paralegal). This generally aligns with the metaphor of the paratext as “airlock” that Gray cites from Genette. While this is a useful concept for certain kinds of intertextual relationships (with album packaging, film trailers, official or unofficial merchandise, etc.), I am often more interested in the ongoing- cul tural process of positioning or arranging unrelated texts than I am in the pre-designed “passage- ways” or “thresholds” prepared for films or pop music. I am interested in the ways that certain texts (and the nostalgic affects that they might prompt) areplaced into relationships with others (so that, for example, the values and discourses of Golden Oldies are read onto the star text of Buddy Holly retrospectively, or the way that Stand By Me might generate new nostalgic meanings for American Graffiti). In this respect I find the spatial and relational qualities suggested by the term “adjacent text” more appropriate for my study. Notes 189 6. See R. Serge Denisoff and George Plasketes, “Synergy in 1980s Film and Music: Formula for Success or Industry Mythology?” 7. Popular music scholars, perhaps more than film scholars, have acknowledged the multiplicity of ends that nostalgia can be directed toward, and accounted for the complexity of moti- vations for the increasing importance of nostalgia to media industries, from the commercial imperative to move back-catalogue properties to the place of media consumption in our psychosocial development. Much of this research has been valuable to me in the writing of this book. Robert Snyder’s Music and Memory, and Schulkind, Hennis, and Rubin’s “Music, Emotion, and Autobiographical Memory” focus on the cognitive relations between music and psycho-social processes of remembering. Tia DeNora (Music in Everyday Life), José van Dijck (“Remembering Songs through Telling Stories”), and Simon Frith (“Music and Identity”) focus on the role of nostalgia in identity formation, centering their analysis on the individual or group forms of nostalgia and (in van Dijck’s case) the aggregation of those narratives of personal memory to form collective nostalgic experiences. Valuable work by scholars like William Howland Kenney (Recorded Music in American Life) and Michael Bull ( “Auditory Nostalgia”) consider broad-ranging cultural trends but focus specifically on the role of recording and listening technologies in the formation of cultural memory. Back to the Fifties differs from these investigations not only in its broad-ranging scale (focusing on “pop nostalgia” rather than individual or subcultural memory) but also its investigation of the interrelation of the recording and film industries. 8. Throughout this book, I use the adjective “Black” rather than “African-American,” “of color,” or “minority.” I have chosen to use this adjective in an attempt for precision, specificity, and inclusion. In using the term “Black,” I am referring to the culture and traditions of a specific subset of structurally marginalized people and cultures that is distinct from, though of course not unrelated to, other racialized populations (among others: Native, indigenous, or First peoples; South Asians, Hispanic, or Latin populations) in Western society. Though this sense of “Blackness” is of course enormously influenced by the legacies of chattel slavery in the United States, it exceeds racial identity or ethnic heritage and does not perfectly align with African ancestry (Africa being a diverse and complicated place). By the same token, I mean to include elements of cultural identity and traditions that are shared across the Caribbean, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere—something that is not literally acknowledged in the term “African-American.” I capitalize the term “Black” in order to distinguish the sense of cultural identity and belonging from a description of color—Michael Jackson was always Black, even after his skin color lightened. I do not capitalize the term “white” because, as scholars like Ian Haney Lopez have elucidated, whiteness does not operate as a coherent cultural identity so much as a legal construction or presumed norm. Of course, one must always be cognizant and respectful of the preferences and rationales of individuals who may, for their own reasons, prefer terms like “African-American” or “person of color” to describe them or their cultural identity. My use of the term “Black” for the purposes of identifying broad cultural phenomena in this particular book makes no claim for its universal applicability or propriety.

Chapter 1

1. Back to the Future does to some small extent acknowledge that racism existed in the 1950s. In one scene a shop owner scoffs at the notion of “a colored mayor,” while in another scene a teenaged tough uses a racial slur. But these scenes are largely played for laughs, and the violent 190 Notes realities of structural racism are avoided. Similarly, though Lorraine does exhibit sexual agency in the film’s Fifties depictions, the film’s representations of her in the 1980s portray her youthful sexuality as a vice, and the film certainly allows no space for exploring feminism as a collective political movement. 2. See Garry Wills, Reagan’s America 231; Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime 8; Alan Nadel, Flatlining on the Field of Dreams 8. 3. The value of active masculinity, and the anxieties over asserting it, repeatedly appears in Back to the Future, as well as its sequels and spin-offs. Marty is continually accused of being “chicken” or “yellow,” and his compulsion to refute those accusations both evidences his anxiety over the passivity he detects in his father and (in the sequels, at least) illustrates the destructive potentials of living with the constant need to prove one’s self. 4. For more on the McFlys and Back to the Future’s treatment of economic class, see Elizabeth McCarthy, “Back to the Fifties!” 5. See Lance Morrow, “Yankee Doodle Magic.” 6. See Kenneth Holden, Making of the Great Communicator, and J. Hoberman, Vulgar Modernism. 7. The alignment of Reagan with Fifties ideas is a point that comes up in Reagan scholarship and commentary from across the political and methodological spectrum. See James Combs, The Reagan Range; Daniel Marcus, Happy Days and Wonder Years; Jim Mann, The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan; Michael Rogin, Ronald Reagan: The Movie; David Sirota, Back to Our Future; and Gil Troy, The Reagan Revolution. 8. Pun intended! 9. Graham Thompson points to this imperfect rendering of Hill Valley 1955 as a kind of resistance to the New Right’s idealization of the Fifties (105). In my view, however, Back to the Future isn’t so much critiquing the neoconservative forms of pop nostalgia as it is reproducing them. Neoconservatives of the Reagan Era fully understood that the 1950s were not perfect—that is why “the Fifties,” as a symbol, was so valuable—it represented a perfected version of a historical period that could be rhetorically mobilized in contemporary debates. 10. There are a few historical inaccuracies in this scene. TheHoneymooners episode in question actually aired on December 31, 1955, not November 5, 1955, the day Marty travels back in time. In addition, the practice of rerunning shows was already established by 1955. With all that said, the notion of the “Fifties” on which the film relies has, as I’ve argued, little to do with the historical realities of 1955 and more to do with the historical perspective of the era that produced the film. 11. Marty’s band in 1985, The Pinheads, play in a hard rock/heavy-metal style reminiscent of early 1980s Van Halen, with synth keyboards backing frenetic electric guitar solos. The band is thus both “of the moment” and perhaps a bit “ahead of its time” in mainstream Reagan-Era society. This is suggested by the scene when Marty and the band audition for the school talent show. The judge (played by mainstream pop-rock star Huey Lewis, who also lent a hit song to the film’s soundtrack) tells The Pinheads, “I’m sorry, I’m afraid you’re just too loud.”

Chapter 2

1. This interview is, for the moment, available on the web athttps://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=FNsPt5T4aZE. Historian Daniel McClure’s analysis of the interview offers valuable insight on the cultural politics of the era. See McClure, Daniel R. “ ‘Have You Understood Notes 191 Anything I’ve Said?’: The Dick Cavett Show, Jimi Hendrix, and the Framing of the Black Counterculture in 1969.” The Sixties 5, no. 1 (June 2012): 23–46. 2. See Junker, Howard. “The Fifties.” Rolling Stone 18 Oct. 1969: 24–26; “The Nifty Fifties.” Life 18 June 1972: 38–51; Rodgers, Jonathan. “Back to the 50s.” Newsweek 16 Oct. 1972: 78–82. 3. Staiger, Janet. Interpreting Films. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992; Klinger, Barbara. “Film History Terminable and Interminable: Recovering the Past in Reception Studies.” Screen 38, no. 2 (1997): 107–28. 4. Happy Days is probably the most famous pop-culture product to come in American Graffiti’s wake. The ABC sitcom focuses on the life of clean-cut suburban teenager Richie Cunningham (Ron Howard) and (increasingly, as the show evolved) local “greaser” Arthur “The Fonz” Fonzarelli (Henry Winkler). Though there was no official connection between American Graffiti and Happy Days, they were immediately understood as part of the same cultural phenomenon. ABC promoted the series as an effort to recapture “those bygone, happy, innocent days,” but as Marcus points out, critics weren’t buying it. The New York Times called it a “dishonest” product of the “duplication factory” (O’Connor 79) and Time similarly called it an “American Graffiti rip-off … with none of the sensitivity and sensibility that made the film memorable” (Schickel). The similarity between the film and television show was impossible to ignore—beyond sharing the same star (Howard), they had an almost identical title sequence, with neon sign-style title cards and the same theme song (Bill Haley and his Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock”). Despite the harsh critical reception, the series soon became a breakout hit that helped ABC gain ground on its network competitors. Happy Days reveled in the imagery of an emergent youth culture simultaneously invoked and sanitized in the image of “The Fonz,” always contained within the safe, patriarchal familial structure of the Cunningham household. As Marcus argues, “Happy Days presages the revaluation of Fifties family life that would mark conservative rhetoric in ensuing decades” (25). But Happy Days and American Graffiti are wholly different projects, and the conflation between the two (as happens so often in the wholesale rejection of pop nostalgia) is both reductive and misleading. 5. See Maltby, 21–44, and Wyatt. 6. For more on border blaster stations and their influence on American broadcasting and American popular music, see Fowler, Gene. Border Radio: Quacks, Yodelers, Pitchmen, Psychics, and Other Amazing Broadcasters of the American Airwaves. Revised edition. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002.

Chapter 3

1. For a fuller understanding of the structure and operation of the music industry in the twentieth century, the work of Simon Frith is invaluable. His essay “The Industrialization of Music” in Music for Pleasure (New York: Routledge, 1988) is as good a starting point as any to understand the production and distribution of popular music in the last century. 2. Despite punk rock’s reputation of being dismissive or disinterested in the past, The Ramones at least rather consistently mined the history of rock and roll in the 1950s and early 1960s. See Jason Heller’s “The Ramones Pirated the Past.” Many punk rockers, from the 1970s to today, have also embraced rockabilly; ’50s greaser iconography; figures like Bettie Page; and artists like Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and Del Shannon. 192 Notes 3. Later in the song, Seger insists that he “won’t go to hear ‘em play a Tango,” which is likely yet another reference to/rejection of disco—the “tango hustle” was prominently featured in Saturday Night Fever, and as a result was probably the most famous bit of disco choreography in the world. 4. The disco backlash reached a fever pitch in Chicago in 1979, when a radio station promotion called “Disco Demolition Night” cooked up by WLUP-FM DJ Steve Dahl resulted in a full-scale riot. Dahl had lost his previous job as a DJ at WDAI when his “Rude Awakening” morning show scored low ratings, and the station converted to a disco format. Dahl responded by declaring war on disco, organizing a group of listeners into the “Insane Coho Lips Anti-Disco Army” and releasing a parody song, “Do Ya Think I’m Disco?,” that briefly charted in Billboard after receiving some national airplay. Dahl’s Disco Demolition Night, staged during a Chicago White Sox doubleheader with the Detroit Tigers, became infamous. The event drew over ninety thousand fans to Comiskey Park, which only held fifty thousand spectators. Thousands of fans scaled fences to enter the stadium after the gates were closed, and police shut down ramps on the Dan Ryan Expressway to prevent more fans from entering. When Dahl exploded a crate full of disco records between the games, fans stormed the field, setting fires, destroying more records, tearing down the batting cages, and brawling with riot police, all while incessantly chanting “disco sucks.” See Behrens, “Disco Demolition: Bell-Bottoms Be Gone!,” and LaPointe, “The Night Disco Went Up in Smoke.” 5. Since writing this chapter, I have discovered Osvaldo Oyola’s essay “Ain’t Got the Same Soul,” which makes similar observations regarding the connections between Seger, disco, masculinity, and Risky Business, though it is largely dismissive of the discourses of nostalgia that I find most interesting in these connections. Oyola distinguishes between the listening practices articulated in the song (at the disco or sitting at home) and claims that in response to the threat of disco, Seger performs a kind of “racial erasure” (a point on which I would mostly agree) and “strips [rock] of its sex,” which I would dispute. To my mind, Seger’s song isn’t eradicating sex in popular music so much as he is straightening it—he’s claiming the authenticity, sexual power, and cultural relevance of the Fifties blues or rock star for the “Heartland” white male. 6. For more on the connections and divergences between karaoke and ventriloquism, see Kessler, Sarah, and Karen Tongson. “Karaoke and Ventriloquism: Echoes and Divergences.” Sounding Out! http://soundstudiesblog.com/2014/05/12/karaoke-and-ventriloquism-echoes-and- divergences/. 7. The TRAX name is almost certainly a reference to Wax Trax!, a Chicago record store and recording label that gained national influence in new wave, punk, and industrial music. Wax Trax! released music by Brian Eno, Strike Under, KMFDM, Ministry, and My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult, among others. 8. The sense of vulnerability is important to this scene, as Sam’s singalong puts him in mor- tal danger. The volume of the music prevents him from noticing that his partially vampirized brother is looming outside the door and is ready to pounce. Sam’s vulnerability is underscored by his childish ignorance, his nudity, and the fact that he is home alone (he ain’t got no one!). 9. This was not the original intention of the filmmakers, however—the original script had Motown hits in the place of Belafonte’s music. 10. Belafonte’s star text is, of course, missed by the Deetz family entirely. Belafonte was not only an activist and advocate for anti-racist causes in the United States. He posted the bail for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that allowed his release from a Birmingham jail, spoke at the Notes 193 March on Washington in 1963, and financially supported the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, but he was also active in anti-colonialist and humanitarian efforts in the Caribbean and Africa. In fact, his participation in USA for Africa (the organization responsible for “We are the World”) and his anti-apartheid activism in the 1980s landed him back on EMI, which likely influenced his appearance on the Beetlejuice soundtrack. Not just a novelty artist, he. 11. One might argue that this transformation began much earlier than Blue Velvet (Kenneth Anger’s 1963 short Scorpio Rising featured the song), and continued long after the film (Lana Del Rey released a cover of the song as part of an H&M ad campaign in 2012). Still, Lynch’s film made “Blue Velvet” central to its narrative and popular image, and as a Hollywood feature that has firmly established itself in the critical and academic canon it registers more broadly than Anger’s piece of art cinema.

Chapter 4

1. For more on crossover, see the section “To Cross Over or Not to Cross Over” in The Pop, Rock, and Soul Reader, 388–94. 2. To be sure, music videos existed before MTV. Television shows that featured music videos before MTV include the BBC’s Top of the Pops, the Australian Broadcasting Company’s Countdown, USA Network’s Video Concert Hall, and Nickelodeon’s PopClips. For more background on the history of music video before MTV, see Denisoff, Tarnished Gold and Inside MTV. Still, it cannot be disputed that MTV fundamentally transformed the cultural status and industrial function of music videos. 3. Henceforth I default to using the surname “Jackson” to refer to the performer Michael Jackson, except in cases when I need to distinguish him from his immediate family members and use his full name. I use the first name “Michael” only to refer to the characters he plays in the music videos for “Thriller” and “Smooth Criminal.” 4. To be clear, I am not claiming that race in and of itself directly determined any individual viewer’s reading of Jackson’s music videos, but rather that, to the extent that demographic categories like race became central to the marketing and development strategies of the recording and broadcasting industries, Jackson’s videos were strategically designed and packaged to make distinct but simultaneous appeals to audiences defined by racialized categories like “Rock,” “Pop,” “Disco,” “R&B,” etc. To paraphrase the King of Pop, when you’re talking about pop music, it does matter if you’re Black or white. 5. See, for example, Michael Awkward “ ‘A Slave to the Rhythm”; Susan Fast “Michael Jackson’s Queer Musical Belongings”; Victoria Johnson “The Politics of Morphing”; Sylvia Martin “Moonwalking Between Contradictions”; Kobena Mercer “Monster Metaphors: Notes on Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ ”; and Michele Wallace “Michael Jackson, Black Modernisms, and ‘The Ecstasy of Communication.’ ” 6. There are many valuable histories of the rise of free-form and progressive radio on FM: Susan J. Douglas’s Listening In, Mark Fisher’s Something in the Air, Michael C. Keith’s Voices in the Purple Haze, and Jesse Walker’s Rebels on the Air. All informed my thinking in this chapter. 7. Denisoff’s book is heavily referenced in this chapter, but its influence on my writing goes beyond the direct citations—the story chronicled in Inside MTV was a guide in my investigation into the trade and popular press coverage of the founding of MTV, and informed my thinking in this chapter as a whole. 194 Notes 8. In fairness, the videos weren’t entirely “free” to MTV, as they needed to pay processing fees for each video to prepare it for television broadcast, as well as expend the labor to cut and identify each one. But the costs were minimal, especially compared to the costs of actually producing the video. See Denisoff,Inside MTV, 37. 9. Jackson consistently used the cinematic term “short film” rather than the MTV term “music video” afterThriller . 10. This interview is excerpted in Spike Lee’s 2013 documentary Bad 25.

Chapter 5

1. The artist now known as John Mellencamp used the stage names “Johnny Cougar” for his debut album Chestnut Street Incident (1976), “John Cougar” from 1977 to 1982, and “John Cougar Mellencamp” from 1983 to 1990, finally eschewing the “Cougar” with the 1991 album Whenever We Wanted. In this chapter, I use the name “John Mellencamp” to refer to the artist over the scope of his career, and the name “John Cougar” to specifically refer to his star text from 1977 to 1982. 2. See Murray Pomerance’s “Stark Performance” for an extended discussion of the relevance of the chickie run’s staging. 3. Men’s gymnastics experienced a renaissance in the United States after the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. With the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and East Germany all boycotting, American men won a bevy of medals, several gold. Four years later, with the Soviets, East Germans, and Hungarians back in the competition, the US men won no medals. 4. I’m using “queer” to signal what Alex Doty calls “all aspects of non- (anti-, contra-) straight cultural production and reception” (3) in his book Making Things Perfectly Queer. 5. In fact, in preparation for his 1995 Boxers tour, Morrissey commissioned a series of photographs of himself at the Griffith Observatory in Hollywood, where pivotal scenes of Rebel were filmed. Again, these photos recreated famous images with Morrissey in place of Dean. The images were reproduced on T-shirts, posters, and promotional materials for the tour. 6. It is unclear whether Dee’s actual birth year was 1942 (as it is listed on her gravestone, studio contracts, government documents, and personal interviews up until 1991), or 1944, as her son Dodd claims in his 1994 book Dream Lovers and Dee herself intimated in a televised interview with Sally Jesse Raphael in 1991. Works Cited and Consulted

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Abrams, Lee: 118–119, 123, 126 Astaire, Fred: 143–146 adjacent texts: 12, 14–15, 45, 79, 185, 188n5 “At the Hop” (Danny & the Juniors Adventures in Babysitting: 16, 92, 94–96, 103 song): 48, 68 affiliating identifications: 91, 95, 100 authenticity: 17, 87–88, 95, 99, 129, 133–134, “Ain’t Got No Home” (Clarence “Frogman” 138–142, 145, 148, 149, 152–153, 157, Henry song): 93–94 162, 192n5 album-oriented rock (AOR): 113, 118–124, 126–127, 131, 136 The B-52’s: 11 “All Summer Long” (Beach Boys song): 76 baby boomers: 13, 20, 37, 56, 86, 91, 160, 179 American Graffiti: 3, 11, 15, 51–79, 83, 103–104, Back to the Future: 3, 7, 14–15, 50, 51, 52, 110, 188n5, 191n4 68, 69, 109, 169, 189n1, 190n2, 190n3, association with blockbusters: 52–53, 56–57, 190n4, 190n9 association with ‘New Hollywood’: 51, 55, 57, and the cultural fantasy of returning to the making of: 58–59, Fifties: 19–22 original reception: 59–60, 62–64 and the ‘double fixing’ of the Fifties: pastiche in: 51, 71–74 22–28, 42–44 soundtrack: 64–65, 77–79, 83, and the dystopian 1980s: 37–38 theatrical poster: 66–67 music in: 19, 23, 40–41, 79, 86, 181 trailer: 66, 68 and Re-Generation superiority: 38–41 video packaging: 69–71 re-mixed as “Brokeback to the Future”: “American Pie” (Don MacLean song): 3, 50 180–185) American Werewolf in London: 128, 131 Bacon, Kevin: 149, 151, 153, 154, 155 American Zoetrope: 15, 57–58 Bad (album): 113, 136, 139, 140, 141, 142 AM radio: 82, 118 “Bad” (song): 139, 140, 145 Anderson, Martin: 28–29 The Band Wagon: 16, 143, 144, 145, 146 Animal House: 85, 131 Bates, Toby Glenn: 29, 33–34

211 212 Index Baxter-Birney, Meredith: 36–37 Clift, Montgomery: 147 The Beach Boys: 73, 76 Cohan, Steven: 145, 154 The Beastie Boys: 164 Columbia Records: 81, 113 “Beat It”: 126, 128, 142 Coppola, Francis Ford: 57–58 Beatles, The: 73, 79, 84, 95, 97, 138 Counterculture: 3, 29, 47, 49, 58, 75, 117–118, 156 Beetlejuice: 16, 92, 95–96, 98, 192n10 critical signification: 16, 116, 127, 131, 137, Belafonte, Harry: 96, 192n9, 192n10 144, 146 Benson-Allott, Caetlin: 109–110 crossover (radio strategy): 112, 113–17, 125, 126, Berry, Chuck: 40–41, 50, 79, 123 127, 129, 134, 136–139, 144, 146 blockbuster: Cruise, Tom: 89–90 economics: 10–11, Cusack, John: 180–182 era in Hollywood: 15, 52–53, 55–57, 164, in popular music: 113, 124 Daley, Mike: 46–47 Blue Velvet (film): 3, 11–12, 16, 98–103, 107, Daniel, Jeffrey: 142 169, 193n11 Darin, Bobby: 82, 170, 174 “Blue Velvet” (Bobby Vinton song): 12, 100–103 Davis, Fred: 6, 51 Body Heat: 21, 140 Davis Jr., Sammy: 142, 144 Bonnie and Clyde: 51, 57 “Day-O” (Harry Belafonte song): 96 border blaster radio stations: 65, 70, 191 Dean, James: 16–17, 147–169, 170, 173, Boulevard of Broken Dreams (Gottfried 177–178, 194 Helnwein artwork): 12, 148 Deanager: 148, 153–162 Brackett, David: 112, 125–126 DeAngelis, Michael: 156, 163, 165, 167, 169 Branca, John: 128, 135 Dee, Sandra: 16–17, 147–170, 173, 177–178, 194 Brando, Marlon: 149, 156, 163 Denisoff, R. Serge: 78, 120–123, 126, 189n6, “Brokeback to the Future” (mashup video): 17, 193n2, 193n7, 194n8 183–185 Depp, Johnny: 153 Brown, James: 107, 124–125, 127, 130, 135, Dika, Vera: 13, 37, 187n1 142, 144 Dillon, Matt: 153 Buckley, William F.: 31, 36, 188n3 Diner: 3, 85, 153 Buddy Dean Show, The: 103, 109, 131 Dirty Dancing: 3 Buddy Holly Story, The: 85, 147 disco: 15, 80, 88–89, 97, 113, 116, 120, 125, 130, Burkhart, Kent: 118–119 192n3, 192n4, 192n5, 193n4 Donahue, Tom: 118–119 cable television: 3, 12, 16, 65, 78, 83, 118, 120–123, doo-wop: 3, 39–40, 64, 82 146–147, 153, 179, 183 double fixing: 14–15, 22–23, 27, 34–35, 42–43, Cannon, Lou: 29, 190n2 55, 63, 98, 102–103, 109, 162 Caputi, Mary: 3, 5, 187n1 Dreyfuss, Richard: 52, 54 Cateforis, Theo: 88, 93, 119 Drucker, Mort: 66–67 Cattle Queen of Montana: 23–24 Dyer, Richard: 51–52, 71–72, 74, 134, 152, Cavett, Dick: 47, 190n1 154–155, 178 CBS Records: 112–113, 120, 122, 124–129, 140 Charles, Ray: 97, 107 “Earth Angel” (The Penguins song): 39 Chedwick, Porky: 82, 97 East of Eden: 149, 152, 163 Chinatown: 5, 21 Ebert, Roger: 63–64 Chitlin’ Circuit: 124–125 Echols, Alice: 88 Christgau, Robert: 128, 136 Civil Rights movements: 4, 8, 21, 29, 34–35, 63, Family Ties: 23, 36–37, 179 104, 106, 109 Fast, Susan: 125, 193n5 Clash, The: 11, 147 Fat Boys, The: 110 Index 213 femininity: 156, 170–171, 175, 177–178 Holly, Buddy: 3, 50, 73, 147, 188n5 Ferris Bueller’s Day Off: 92, 94–98, 104, 106, 111 home video: 1, 3, 7, 51, 128–129 Feuer, Jane: 53, 144 Honeymooners, The: 38–39, 190n10 “the Fifties” (retrospective cultural concept): Hot Tub Time Machine: 17, 180–182, 184 2–3, 5–8, 11–12, 18–21, 41, 59, 104, 109, 115, 131, 169, 174–175, 185 “I Only Have Eyes for You” (The Flamingos double fixing of; 22–23, 42–43 song): 78 Reagan’s use of: 28–31, 33–34 Imitation of Life: 170, 172 reclamation of personal memories of: 49–50, “In Dreams” (Roy Orbison song): 98–100 52–54, 59, 63 innocence: 59, 62, 64, 72, 97, 99, 109, 169, Five Easy Pieces: 51, 57 173, 177 Flash Cadillac and the Continental Kids: 50, 68 insider rebellion: 89–91, 97 FM broadcasting: 83, 112–113, 117–120, 193n6 Footloose: 17, 20, 78, 149–153, 154–155, 162, 169 “Jack & Diane” (John Mellencamp song): format segregation: 111, 113, 117–123, 131 148–149, 153, 164 Fosse, Bob: 142–144 Jackson, Michael: 11, 16, 113–117, 124–146, 147, Fox, Michael J.: 18, 23, 36–37 164, 179, 189n7, 193n3, 193n4, 194n9 Frith, Simon: 13, 84, 111, 138–139, 189n7, 191n1 James, Rick: 123, 126, 129–130 Jameson, Fredric: 6, 8–9, 20–21, 53–54, 70, 71, Garland, Les: 120, 123 72, 110, 187n1 Gates, Henry Louis: 116, 131, 137 Jeffords, Susan: 26, 28, 154–155 George, Nelson: 113, 124–125 Jenkins, Henry: 184–185, 188n5 Giant: 149 “Johnny B. Goode”: 40–41, 79, 86, 92, 181 Gidget: 170–171, 173, 176 Jones, Quincy: 124, 125, 128, 140 girl studies: 17, 177–178 jukebox: 3, 81–82, 111 Golden Oldies (radio format): 3, 6, 13, 15, 40, 65, Wurlitzer 1015, 69–70 80, 82–84, 110, 112, 117, 119, 188n5 “Jump in the Line” (Harry Belafonte song): 96 Goodwin, Andrew: 138, 164, 167 Grease: 3, 12, 49, 51, 78, 171–172, 175–177 Kael, Pauline: 53–54, 56–57, 72, 74 greaser: 3, 48–49, 127, 191, 191 Kakutani, Michiko: 20, 151–152 “Gravy” (Dee Dee Sharp song): 110 karaoke: 92–93, 98, 171, 192n6 Grossberg, Lawrence: 4, 20, 86–87, 91, 97 Kassabian, Anahid: 91, 100 Guffey, Elizabeth: 47, 49, 69, 188n2 Keightley, Emily: 10, 22, 43 Kelly, Gene: 142, 144 Hairspray: 3, 16, 103–110, 112, 179 Kennedy assassination: 3, 5, 30, 59, 62, 64 Hall, Stuart: 53, 177 Klinger, Barbara: 51, 188n5 Happy Days: 12, 54, 70, 148, 191n4 Harvard Report, The: 113 La Bamba: 85, 147 Heathers: 17, 157, 160–162 Lack, John: 120–121 Hendrix, Jimi: 41, 45–48, 49–50, 55, 58, Landis, John: 128–129, 131–132 118, 190n1 The Last Picture Show: 3, 50 “Hide ’n Go Seek” (Bunker Hill Song): Lipsitz, George: 97, 187n1 107–108 lip-synch: 16, 89, 93–99, 105 historicity “The Loco-Motion” (dance): 92, 110 crisis of: 8, 21, 54 “Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee” (song from of nostalgia: 12, 20, 52 Grease): 17, 171–172, 175, 177 HIV/AIDS: 156, 181, 182 Lost Boys, The: 92, 93–94, 96 Hoberman, J.: 29, 101, 190n6 Lucas, George: 15, 51–53, 57–59, 62–63, 69, Hofer, Johannes: 9–10, 13, 183 72, 110 214 Index Lymon, Frankie: 64, 125, 127, 142 as productive: 15–16, 22–23, 69 Lynch, David: 12, 16, 99–100, 182, 193n11 Reagan’s rhetorical use of: 15, 21–22, 29, 33–34 Madison, The (dance): 105–106, 107 scholarship on: 187n1 Madonna : 1, 3, 11, 110, 147, 155, 163–164, 179 Marcus, Daniel: 1–2, 30, 47, 49, 187n1, O’Neal, Tatum: 124, 130 190n7, 191n4 Obama, Barack: 180 Marcus, Greil: 46, 136 Off the Wall (album): 113, 124, 142 market research: 82–83, 113, 118, 120, 121 oldies: masculinity: 16, 23–28, 87–88, 93–94, 98, 115, on film soundtracks: 16, 79, 80, 85–86, 127, 130, 137, 140, 144–46, 149, 153–56, 91–98, 99–110 161–162, 190n3, 192n5 as genre: 40 “Material Girl” (Madonna song): 3, 147, 164 history of the term: 81–84 Mazullo, Mark: 99, 103 on the radio: 1, 65, 80, 82–84 see Golden McRobbie, Angela: 177 Oldies (radio format) Medovoi, Leerom: 6, 159–162, 173 “Old Time Rock and Roll” (Bob Seger song): Mellencamp, John: 16–17, 148–149, 153, 162, 3, 87–91 164, 194n1 Orbison, Roy: 98–100 melodrama: 98, 154, 158, 163, 165, 168, 173 Outsiders, The: 20, 80, 153 Mercer, Kobena: 115–116, 129, 131, 193n5 Monroe, Marilyn: 1, 147, 155, 164, 173 pastiche: 8, 21, 51, 71–74, 146 More American Graffiti: 69, 77 Penn, Sean: 153 Morrissey: 3, 17, 164–169, 194n5 Perry, Luke: 153 Motown Records: 84, 113, 123, 124–125, 127, Phoenix, River: 153 134–135, 192n9 Pittman, Bob: 120–123, 127 “Mister Sandman” (Four Aces song): 19, 23 pop nostalgia: MTV: 13, 16, 78, 85, 93, 111, 113, 117, in Back to the Future: 22–29, 190n9 119–124, 126–129, 136, 138, 164, 193n2, critical reflexivity of: 100–104, 109–110, 193n7, 194n8 114–116 Murphy, Eddie: 137 definition: 4, 189n7 heterogeneity of: 8, 13–14, 17, 49–53, 179, Nadel, Alan: 6, 159, 190n2 182–183 Nader, Richard: 83 in the music industries: 80–91, 114–116 (see national popular: 6, 20–21, 23, 29, 178 also Golden Oldies, oldies) Neal, Marc Anthony: 124–125 and the New Right: 34 New Hollywood: 15, 53, 55–57, 63, 70, 77–78 and stardom: 146, 152, 156, 170 New Right: 1, 5, 11, 17, 19, 21–23, 26, 28–30, treatment of history: 20–22, 43, 72, 74–75, 34–35, 37, 43, 45, 50, 53, 54, 177, 109–110, 182–183 188n3, 190n9 Porky’s: 3, 80 Nick at Nite: 12 postmodernism: 6, 20, 53–54, 71, 187n1 nostalgia: Presley, Elvis: 22, 48, 138, 146, 147, 149, 170 as affective response: 10, 13, 146, 188n1 Pretty in Pink: 16, 92–93, 96, 106 as amnesia: 22–23 Price, Vincent: 130, 132–133 for the Eighties: 179–181 Priestley, Jason: 153 for eras other than the Fifties: 5–6 Prince: 113, 130, 136, 164 historicity of: 22, 45, 51, 53, 71, 183–184 progressive radio: 118–119, 123, 193n6 history of: 8–10 Psycho Beach Party: 173 and Jameson, Frederic: 20–21, 70 punk: 3, 11, 15, 50, 84, 97, 120, 182, 183, and nostalgia films: 3, 8, 13, 21, 53–34 191n2, 192n7 Index 215 Quinn, Aidan: 157–160 Smith, Jeff: 64–65, 78–79 “Smooth Criminal”: 16, 117, 139–145, 193 radio formats: 3, 82–83, 112, 113, 118, 121 soundtrack album: 3, 15, 65, 70, 77–79, 83, Ramones, The: 7, 84, 191n2 111–112 Rampage: 12 Spector, Phil: 84, 99 Raphael, Sally Jesse: 174–175, 194n6 Sprengler, Christine: 12, 13, 187n1 Ray, Ola: 114, 130 Springsteen, Bruce: 100, 136, 138, 145, 148, 179 Reagan, Ronald: 1–2, 5, 14, 21, 23, 28–36, 38, Staiger, Janet: 51, 191n3 41–43, 45, 54, 56, 63 Stand By Me: 54, 66, 80, 85, 188n5 Reagan Era, the: 5, 6, 10–11, 12, 19, 22–23, 26, 30, Stanwyck, Barbara: 23–24 37, 39–41, 53, 55, 56, 76, 78, 80, 85, 91, 100, Staples, Mavis: 87, 142 113, 130, 157, 179 star legacies: 16, 153, 155–156, 160, 164, 166, Reaganism: 8, 11, 17, 19, 22, 37, 53, 154 169–170, 179 Rebel Without a Cause: 20, 148, 150–152, “Star-Spangled Banner, The”: 46, 49 158–159, 165, 170 star text: 13–14, 16–17, 23, 37, 134, 142, 144, 146, Reckless: 17, 157–160 148–149, 152–157, 163–165, 167, 169–174, Re-Generation: 6–7, 11–14, 16–17, 21, 23–24, 26, 178, 182, 188, 192, 194 28, 35–36, 39, 63, 76–80, 85–86, 89, 91–93, Star Wars: 5, 8, 39, 54, 57, 63 102, 114, 117, 130, 147, 149, 152–153, 155–157, Stax Records: 113 163–164, 170–171, 173, 179–180, 183 Stock, Dennis: 168 Reluctant Debutante, The: 170, 172 Stoltz, Eric: 37 remix: 12, 17, 37, 184 Storz, Todd: 82 rerun: 1, 21, 38–39, 131, 153, 190 Stray Cats: 3, 11, 122 Restless Years, The: 170 "Suedehead" (Morrissey song): 3, 166–169 retro: 9–10, 49, 53, 69, 71, 104, 188n2 A Summer Place: 172–175 rhythm and blues: 3, 16, 94, 110, 119 Sweatin’ to the Oldies: 13 Risky Business: 16, 87, 89–91, 98, 106, 192 Sykes, John: 120, 122, 127 rock: 15–16, 21, 40–41, 50, 64–65, 79–80, synergy: 13, 78, 146, 189 82–89, 91–92, 95, 97, 103–107, 118–120, 123, 136–138; (see also AOR, punk) teen film: 16, 17, 20, 26, 78, 80, 85–86, 89, 91, 93, “Rock and Roll Never Forgets” (Bob Seger 97–98, 108, 148, 170, 174 song): 87–88 teen rebel: 6, 20, 74, 148, 149, 151–154, 156–163, “Rock Around the Clock” (Bill Haley and his 165, 167, 169, 173, 178 Comets song): 40, 60, 69, 191n4 Teen Wolf: 85 Rogin, Michael: 31–32, 190n7 teenager: 2, 6–7, 13, 16, 18, 21, 23, 35–36, 39, 41, Rourke, Mickey: 153 52, 62, 85, 89, 92, 95, 98, 103, 105–106, Run-DMC: 138, 145 109–110, 114, 149, 151–152, 158, 172, 191 Ryder, Winona: 160–162 That Thing You Do!: 5 “Then He Kissed Me” (Crystals song): 94–95 Saturday Night Fever: 78, 192n3 Thriller (album): 113, 124–128, 134–135, 137–139 Schatz, Thomas: 55–56 “Thriller” (song): 128–130, 132, 140 Schlock: 131–132 “Thriller” (video): 16, 114, 116–117, 128–133, 137, “See You in September” (The Tempos song): 61 193n3 194n9 Seger, Bob: 3, 87–89, 91, 97, 106, 111–112, 123, “Time for Choosing” (Ronald Reagan 192, 192 speech): 30–33 Sha Na Na: 15, 48–50, 53, 55, 58, 83 “Time to Recapture our Destiny” (Ronald Shales, Tom: 1, 7 Reagan speech): 30, 33–34, 41 Shumway, David: 69, 84, 87, 187n1 Top 40 radio: 82–83, 93, 113, 117–118, 136 Slater, Christian: 153, 160–162 Townshend, Pete: 41 216 Index Traveling Wilburys, The: 100 Williams, Linda: 115, 167 “Try a Little Tenderness” (Otis Redding Wilson, Jackie: 125, 127, 130, 142, 144, 146 song): 93 Winter, Johnny: 50 “Twist and Shout” (Beatles song): 95, 97 Wiz, The: 113, 124 Wolfman Jack: 61–62, 64–66, 68 Until They Sail: 172 Wood, Natalie: 154 Woodstock: 15, 45–47, 49–50, 53, 55, 198 Van Halen: 39, 40, 41, 126, 190n11 Wurlitzer 1015: see jukebox ventriloquism: 80, 92–93, 96, 97, 192n6 Vestron Video: 128 XERB-FM: 61, 65, 70 Victory Tour: 134–136, 142 Vietnam: 5, 12, 29, 30, 59, 62 “Yakety Yak” (The Coasters song): 48–49 Yankovic, “Weird” Al: 147 Warner Amex / Wamex/ WACC: 120–121, 123 Yetnikoff, Walter: 127–128 Warner Bros.: 57, 122, 163 Young, Angus: 41 Watergate: 5, 29, 30, 59, 60, 62 Youth: 162 Waters, John: 16, 103–110 and Reaganism, 35–36, “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” (Frankie Lymon as affective category 86 see( also teenager) and the Teenagers song): 64, 125 yuppie: 27, 36, 95 West Side Story: 128, 143 Will, George: 157, 160 Zemeckis, Robert: 29, 37–38, 49, 180