Times Are A-Changing
By Sarah DiMeo
This week on You Don’t Know Jack, I talked about 1967’s Hells Angels On Wheels, a starring role for Jack Nicholson. About midway through my review, I made an observation about the film which I stand by completely: this is so quintessentially 60s. It starts with the opening music. Very *mod* late ’60s, as you would call it. When I first saw Hells Angels On Wheels a couple months back, my first thought was, okay, we are officially out of the rigid, clean cut look of the late ’50s. There’s something that I wish more people would appreciate. Those of us who like to create, filmmakers, musicians, artists, etc, we’ve all known this for quite some time, but I think there’s still a large portion of the population who has yet to see it…. When ideas and practices in our society begin to shift, it’s the arts that capture this shift for future generations to look back and see. Whether or not you like a certain painting or movie or song, what pops into your mind when you think back on a certain era in our modern history? (That is, one that you weren’t there to witness firsthand) Chances are it’s a photograph, or a song, a movie…
That’s why we have the arts. The arts represent ideas, or better yet — feelings that don’t have words. Hells Angels On Wheels has several great examples of that. The long shots of the bikers riding, laughing, pulling tricks on their bikes. There’s a full scene where they’re all taking turns riding up a dramatically steep cliff, trying to see who can make it to the top. And when I say steep, I mean almost a 90 degree angle. And there’s a whole crowd congregated around, laughing, cheering them on, having a fabulous time. I said in the episode, it’s a movie that is 100% of its time. It represents freedom, getting away from the rules, the authority, all the things that were expected of a person — which were different depending on if you were a man or a woman, keep in mind. We’re getting into an era where it was about challenging all of that.
In the next SEVERAL weeks of You Don’t Know Jack, we’re going to be seeing a lot of that. Our last episode was just the tip of the iceberg. We have now entered the “New Hollywood” era — flipping the bird at all the old rules and making new ones. This was the ’60s, baby, the greatest culture shift of the 20th century!
