The Films of the Fifties [antikvár]

oi lUe. The dictionary defines nostalgia as a wistful, excessively sentimental yearning for a return to some past period or irrecoverable condition. But Webster fails to explain why even the most difficult of periods later become attractive. A great American humorist once wrote that the past always looks better than the present because it "ain't here" anymore, and that touches close to the heart of the matter. Nostalgia seems to be an inherent element of the human condition. Take the fifties, that period for which everyone has grown so nostalgic in recent years. Like every other decade in our history, it did not exist in isolation but was part of the total time-continuum, as unconditionally connected to the late forties out of which it grew as it was to the early sixties which were, fundamentally, a reaction against the fifties. Just as our choice of Eisenhower marked a turning away from the Roosevelt/Truman era, so was our choice of John Kennedy one decade later a symbolic statement of our readiness to try a different approach, a different tone, a different mood. It's a basic rule of science that every force creates its equal but antithetical force; the same is true with periods of time. The relaxed, trustworthy, moderate Eisenhower represented exactly the way we wanted—and, perhaps, needed —to view ourselves in the fifties. It was reassuring to think we were mirrored in the fundamental decency of his image. But even then we knew that this was only part of the story. For if Eisenhower reflected our Dr. Jekyll face—the way we were on the surface—surely Senator Joseph McCarthy simultaneously mirrored and helped create our Mr. Hyde alter-ego, the way we feared ourselves to be down deep: rabid, ruthless, and reckless in our disillusionment with what our world had become. In the early fifties, things were so difficult that we waxed nostalgic for—amazingly enough—the thirties, that terrible period when our economy was so racked with the Great Depression that almost everyone went hungry. In the late fifties we looked back with fondness at the forties, when women and children had to make do alone while the men risked their lives in combat. A depression and a war— hardly the sort of eras it makes sense to recall with fondness. But in the thirties we had something fundamental and important; a faith in the individual, and his ability to change things for the better. Writer John Steinbeck brilliantly captured that feeling with his characterization of Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath-, a simple ex-farmer/ex-convict who becomes radicalized after experiencing firsthand the inhumanity around him and who sets out to do something about it. And in the forties, we shared some- thing very different but every bit as reassuring: a faith in "the group," in ourselves as a community of people, and the sense that we were fundamentally good and right and therefore would eventually overcome. We left World War II with the belief that, with the dragon slain, we could go on to create a wonderful and peaceful world. But that dream went sour mote quickly than anyone would have guessed possible, and we entered the fifties without either of those great faiths that had formerly seen us through. Trust either in the individual or the group was replaced by a general sense of suspicion. The growing fear that we might eventually have to fight yet another war against the newly powerful communist coimtries led to lethargy and defeatism. But that was mild compared to the hysteria that gripped us when we suddenly seized on the notion that every tenth person we passed on the street was, secretly, a communist. In many respects, the first significant event of the decade took place on February 9, 1950, when Senator McCarthy of Wisconsin addressed a presumably routine Republican Party dinner-meeting in Wheeling, West Virginia. He was catapulted onto the front pages of the nation's newspapers when he whisked out a piece of paper and announced to his shocked audience that he had in his possession a list of over 200 members of the State Department who were known to be registered members of the Communist Party. In subsequent speeches the number dwindled down to 81 and the charge was reduced from "card-carrying conspirators" to "security risks"; eventually it was disclosed that the list was a total fraud and that no clear investigation into such matters had ever been undertaken. McCarthy ultimately fell from grace in 1954, when the televised hearings of his debate with the United States Army presented an at-first amazed and then outraged nation of over twenty million home viewers with a portrait of a man who was clearly more an ambitious demagogue than a patriotic crusader. But the damage had been done. During the four years of McCarthyism, everyone in Washington— including two presidents, one a Democrat and the other a Republican—lived in constant fear of the man. The nation had become so certain we'd been, infiltrated by dangerous enemies that numerous concentration camps were actually readied, at the order of the U.S. Attorney General, in which the conspirators were to be interned. But the clearest example of the country's mood became apparent when Hollywood—which had only a few years earlier cranked out numerous propaganda pictures to aid the war cause—was accused of being pro-communist.