Donald Clarkeon films that idealise the 1960s
The cultural influence of the 1960s is still so suffocatingly prevalent it's easy to forget that the decade long ago receded beneath the horizon that divides current affairs from modern history. Mind you, a brief glance at the preposterously idealised images of the era found in contemporary cinema suggests that the Age of Aquarius has, after just 40 years, come to be regarded as some sort of ancient Golden Epoch solely populated by mythical beings.
Julie Taymor, director of the current Across the Universe, is old enough to remember the 1960s, but her strange musical - a creative disinterment of The Beatles' back catalogue - trades in characters and situations culled from later pastiches, parodies and simplifications.
"They're selling hippie wigs in Woolworth's," Danny, the mordant drug dealer from the priceless Withnail and I, said as 1970 hauled its unwelcome carcass into view. The characters in Across the Universe happily fling on those wigs, pull themselves into crushed velvet loons and proceed to disport themselves like extras in an ancient Two Ronnies sketch.
Danny's comments - delivered in a film with a conflicted attitude towards the 1960s - confirms that the idealisation was under way before the era had properly ended. Indeed, films such as Blow Up, What's New Pussycat? and The Knack all swung into a universe as yet untroubled by Sergeant Pepper.
Most citizens of the western world managed to get by without red vinyl raincoats or pop art miniskirts, but the cultural commissars had already decided that everything the 1960s brushed against was, henceforth, to remain forever groovy. The discontented factory workers of Macclesfield and the depressed hairdressers of Preston had had their hour in the kitchen sink dramas at the turn of the decade. From now on representations of the Arcadian years were to radiate chemical fluorescence.
Since the second World War, gung-ho films such as The Dam Busters gradually gave way to the more realistic eviscerations of Elem Klimov's Come and See and Sam Fuller's The Big Red One. Yet, as the 1960s drift into the penumbra, the reverse process seems to be at work.
Quadrophenia, made in 1978, a little over a decade after the events it represents, allowed some grime and disappointment into its depiction of life among London's mods. Subsequent decades gave us increasingly unrealistic fantasies such as The Doors, Mr Holland's Opus, Dream Girls and, now, Across the Universe. Austin Powers is, of course, meant as a pastiche, but its dancing beefeaters and gyrating go-go girls would be right at home in Taymor's film.
A modest proposal: Any film-maker seeking to address the 1960s should have his or her eyelids prised open and be forced to watch a loop of The Magdalene Sisters for a week. Not everybody was, it is true, beaten by nuns and molested by priests during the decade Norman Tebbit described as "third-rate". But more suffered that ordeal than danced across Piccadilly with Julie Christie.
