Brian Wilson and the Memory of Patriotism

Brian Wilson’s legacy came into focus while the California riots raged. As the chief conceptualizer and composer of the California pop band the Beach Boys, Wilson put the idea of post-World War II all-American leisure and desire to music. The world recognized the group’s energy and ethereal close harmonies as the sound of youth and national identity. And the recognition stuck. Even as the United States evolved through wars, riots, and political upheaval, the musical vision that Brian Wilson borrowed from Chuck Berry shimmers as an easy, natural anthem. It provides a nostalgic anchor against today’s unmoored chaos.

Better than the uninformed corporate-media tributes repeatedly praising Wilson’s “genius” and connecting the suburban Beach Boys to surfing culture is the instinctive tribute at the heart of Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. That sci-fi film imagining an extraterrestrial invasion (Spielberg’s apocalyptic 9/11 allegory) briefly settles into a moment of quiet panic when Tom Cruise’s Ray Ferrier comforts his daughter Rachel (Dakota Fanning) by singing the Beach Boys song “Little Deuce Coupe.” Rachel asked for a lullaby, but Ray doesn’t know “Hushabye Mountain,” so he reaches back into his own childhood and recalls “Little Deuce Coupe” from 1963, when industrial America was admired, before the social fabric frayed and the home front was under attack.

When something comes up to me, he don’t even try
Cause if I had a set of wings, man I know she could fly
She’s my little deuce coupe
You don’t know what I got

Wilson’s automotive Americana was emblematic, transcending the notion of surfing. Ray internalized Wilson’s love of car culture and masculine bravado in a perfect response to his child’s need for protection. (“You don’t know what I got.”) The song’s bouncy, dreamy affection and sweet, youthful aggression could be felt from Hawthorne, Calif., to Detroit, Mich. That’s Wilson’s real genius.

Was it Spielberg’s intuition (or the aptly named Cruise’s) that the song would express New Jersey dockworker Ray’s readiness for defense alongside his sense of sovereignty? Its bridge boasts:

She’s got a competition clutch with the four on the floor
And she purrs like a kitten ’till the lake pipes roar
And if that ain’t enough to make you flip your lid
There’s one more thing, I got the pink slip, daddy

We need both Wilson’s art and Spielberg’s War of the Worlds allegory to counter the atrocious ICE riots. Wilson elaborated on his innocent, native-born pride in “Be True to Your School,” from 1963. Though designed for the adolescent market, “Be True” shows an uncynical sincerity that might feel remote for jaded Millennials. Wilson’s school pride (writing at age 19) is earnest. Though related to sports-team competition, its spirit is so genuine that it feels universal. The sheer personal advocacy brightens its encouragement:

So be true to your school now
Just like you would to your girl or guy
Be true to your school now
And let your colors fly

So the stunning contrast between last weekend’s official military parade in D.C. and the scoundrel left’s “No Kings” folly across the country gives “Be True to Your School” consequence. It’s what colleges once called a “fight song.” When we listen to it today, Mike Love’s endearing lead vocal takes us past what globalists condemn as “nationalism.” (The “Rah! Rah! Sis Boom-bah” chorus isn’t corny, just something to make the ALCU cringe.) “Be True to Your School” defends listeners against anarchy.

The B-side of the “Be True to Your School” single offered a masterpiece titled “In My Room,” a superb expression of lonely-American-kid sovereignty. Its guilelessness is the complete opposite of the conniving, scheming, unscrupulousness that now dominates political discourse among the legacy media, politicians, and even America-last artists like Springsteen.

“In My Room” showed Wilson intimately attuned to American experience — the way well-fed kids grow up and discover the means and language that fulfill their sense of self — without embarrassment. Appreciate Wilson’s technical brilliance but also the emotional generosity of his choral arrangements in which falsetto yearning is granted bass underpinning. (Such sublimity inspired Scritti Politti’s beatific approach to the human dilemma in the fearless White Bread Black Beer album.) Wilson’s sound discovered a respite from the patriarchal misunderstanding he suffered, according to the legend of his abusive father. The pain of that psychological turmoil — a different classic American myth — was honored in Paul Dano’s faultless Brian Wilson characterization in the 2015 movie Love and Mercy.

Wilson exemplified a now-lost art of American confidence — belief in one’s personal and national potential. Spielberg had it in War of the Worlds, with its sense of unapologetic nationalism. That’s why Ray’s Beach Boys homage doesn’t come out of nowhere but seems authentic to the harrowing story of an unbowed nation — America before succumbing to partisan, class-based political distress.

Since the post-Obama partisan divide, Spielberg lost track of what once made him the most unifying pop artist of the “New Hollywood.” (That was the era when “All Summer Long” closed American Graffiti and “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” closed Shampoo.) The ethnic antagonism in The Fabelmans, from 2022, suggests that Spielberg came to distrust the parochialism that the white Anglo-Saxon Beach Boys represented, along with the diversity that Americans had struggled against. Like the open-borders rioters burning Los Angeles when Brian Wilson died, Spielberg forgot what Wilson always knew: the common heritage heard in the plangent “Sloop John B” and the vivacious “I Get Around,” where the national pursuit of happiness was so undeniable that it should be described as gloriously patriotic.