| Chapter : | Introduction |
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It is equally important to define “counterculture” as I am using it here. As noted earlier, the broad concept of workers versus the counterculture was a paradigm that fit Hollywood box office interests during this period because it provided a simple narrative for audiences from the left and the right. Although some use “counterculture” exclusively in reference to the cultural youth movement of the 1960s that rejected the mores and ethos of the 1950s, in the context of this work it also references any movement that represented a counter to the dominant culture. “Counterculture,” as used here, thus refers at times to the new left and its political arm the Students for a Democratic Society, and at other times it refers to the less political “hippie” movement. At times it refers to the civil rights movement and mainstream African American activists, and at others it references the more radical Black Panthers. It also refers to the disparate but often parallel women’s and gay rights movements. All of these “countercultures” had one thing in common—a desire to challenge and alter the dominant culture.
In A Certain Tendency of Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1980, Robert B. Ray conflates the left and counterculture in this way:
Ray’s description clearly expands the definition of the counterculture beyond a simple political left conception of it although it does not go as far as my use of the term here. My definition, however, is consistent with Ray’s explication of a significant difference between the right and left at the time. Whereas the right, as Ray notes, “countered with the values of the community” (255, my emphasis), the counterculture responded with its “new sense of community, stressing ecology, cooperation, and anticompetitiveness” (255). Through the exploration of various films from the era, it will become clear that, in the right-wing films of the period,