Winner of the 2018 Book Award from the American Studies Division of
the National Communication Association.Ongoing interest in the
turmoil of the 1960s clearly demonstrates how these social
conflicts continue to affect contemporary politics. In The Bad
Sixties: Hollywood Memories of the Counterculture, Antiwar, and
Black Power Movements, Kristen Hoerl focuses on fictionalized
portrayals of 1960s activism in popular television and film. Hoerl
shows how Hollywood has perpetuated politics deploring the
detrimental consequences of the 1960s on traditional American
values. During the decade, people collectively raised fundamental
questions about the limits of democracy under capitalism. But
Hollywood has proved dismissive, if not adversarial, to the role of
dissent in fostering progressive social change. Film and television
are salient resources of shared understanding for Audiences born
after the 1960s because movies and television programs are the most
accessible visual medium for observing the decade's social
movements. Hoerl indicates that a variety of television programs,
such as Family Ties, The Wonder Years, and Law and Order, along
with Hollywood films, including Forrest Gump, have reinforced
images of the "bad sixties." These stories portray a period in
which urban riots, antiwar protests, sexual experimentation, drug
abuse, and feminism led to national division and moral decay.
According to Hoerl, these messages supply distorted civics lessons
about what we should value and how we might legitimately
participate in our democracy. These warped messages contribute to
"selective amnesia," a term that stresses how popular media renders
radical ideas and political projects null or nonexistent. Selective
amnesia removes the spectacular events and figures that define the
late-1960s from their motives and context, flattening their meaning
into reductive stereotypes. Despite popular television and film,
Hoerl explains, memory of 1960s activism still offers a potent
resource for imagining how we can strive collectively to achieve
social justice and equality.
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