Gang Narcissism

The wild-throated, oat-sowing young prophets of the 1960s were, in their boom days, famous for publicly parading their parts—-ideological, moral, and physical—-up and down the highways and the byways of America, singing a song of themselves. Presently, however, they are suffering their Diaspora; they have had little opportunity of late for massive self-celebration, so when I noticed that the New York Film Festival was showing a film of 195 minutes called Milestones, a fictional documentary about these lost and wit-lessly illusioned people slogging about in the badlands of the 1970s, I felt the muscles of my typing forefingers go taut with expectation. The kids would do it all over again for me, I knew.

And they did: for a good third of those three and a quarter hours, I was in a sort of three-ring heaven, though after that I began to tire of the old acts. First, one of the directors, one of the producers, and one of the actresses came onto the stage at Alice Tully Hall and regurgitated the articulations they had swallowed before the audience could catch the words: these “words” turned out to be mainly primitive noises, and there was a lot of body language to conceal that fact and to substitute for vocal projection. So far, so good: I stirred pleasantly. But then: ah, then, the lights went out, and pretty soon the screen was bulging and wriggling and grunting in three dimensions, just as the campi and other radical watering holes had writhed in the palmy days of the Revolution; here was a plethora of all the old icons, slogans, costumes, railroad apartments, Vermont shacks, tokes, fags, roaches, natural births, boobs, crotches, hairs, jalopies, rolled together and patted into one reeking Gesamtkunstwerk, one great autoerotic paean-commercial sponsored by the makers of Hemp Cigarettes. Sing Hey! for Grace Paley (never a prolific writer, and now she’s got Hollywood pretensions) making a movie about Vietnam and sporting a ring cut from the barrel of a GI’s M-15; sing Hey! for the valiant lady lawyer, counseling in prison a woman who bashed in the head of a rapist, her husband, who tried to assert his boughten rights in his marriage bed; sing Hey, lacka-day! for the albumesque inserts of Harriet Tubman, strung-up Negroes, TV clips of Geronimo fighting off cavalry officers. All this is Amerika to some people, still. “I like to look out the window,” says one guy, driving across the country: “So much history, so many crimes.”

CW

About the Author

Chilton Williamson Jr.

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The wild-throated, oat-sowing young prophets of the 1960s were, in their boom days, famous for publicly parading their parts—-ideological, moral, and physical—-up and down the highways and the byways of America, singing a song of themselves. Presently, however, they are suffering their Diaspora; they have had little opportunity of late for massive self-celebration, so when I noticed that the New York Film Festival was showing a film of 195 minutes called Milestones, a fictional documentary about these lost and wit-lessly illusioned people slogging about in the badlands of the 1970s, I felt the muscles of my typing forefingers go taut with expectation. The kids would do it all over again for me, I knew.

And they did: for a good third of those three and a quarter hours, I was in a sort of three-ring heaven, though after that I began to tire of the old acts. First, one of the directors, one of the producers, and one of the actresses came onto the stage at Alice Tully Hall and regurgitated the articulations they had swallowed before the audience could catch the words: these “words” turned out to be mainly primitive noises, and there was a lot of body language to conceal that fact and to substitute for vocal projection. So far, so good: I stirred pleasantly. But then: ah, then, the lights went out, and pretty soon the screen was bulging and wriggling and grunting in three dimensions, just as the campi and other radical watering holes had writhed in the palmy days of the Revolution; here was a plethora of all the old icons, slogans, costumes, railroad apartments, Vermont shacks, tokes, fags, roaches, natural births, boobs, crotches, hairs, jalopies, rolled together and patted into one reeking Gesamtkunstwerk, one great autoerotic paean-commercial sponsored by the makers of Hemp Cigarettes. Sing Hey! for Grace Paley (never a prolific writer, and now she’s got Hollywood pretensions) making a movie about Vietnam and sporting a ring cut from the barrel of a GI’s M-15; sing Hey! for the valiant lady lawyer, counseling in prison a woman who bashed in the head of a rapist, her husband, who tried to assert his boughten rights in his marriage bed; sing Hey, lacka-day! for the albumesque inserts of Harriet Tubman, strung-up Negroes, TV clips of Geronimo fighting off cavalry officers. All this is Amerika to some people, still. “I like to look out the window,” says one guy, driving across the country: “So much history, so many crimes.”