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<\/a>.<\/p>\n“The Forgotten Fifties”<\/p>\n
If it wasn\u2019t punishing enough to hear yet another dim standup offer an absurdly uninformed summation of an experience he never had, it was even more galling to read, in Slate, Patton Oswalt\u2019s crack about the \u201ccultural neck brace\u201d that was the 1950s. As that seems to be an impression widely shared by the ADD generation, consider this a public service announcement.<\/span><\/p>\nMost decades don\u2019t begin to take shape until three or four years in. The \u201860s, for example, didn\u2019t begin to erupt (or become unhinged, depending on your point-of-view), until the JFK assassination, the arrival of the Beatles, and the increasingly bad notice of the war in Vietnam. Let\u2019s say \u201963-\u201864.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The \u201850s arguably began in the mid-to-late \u201840s, with the end of World War II and the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt. As The New Yorker theater critic and biographer John Lahr notes in his upcoming biography of playwright Tennessee Williams, \u201cFueled by longing and loss, the republic, which had deferred its dreams through fifteen years of Depression and five years of war assumed, seemingly overnight, a new momentum, a glorious and guilt-ridden race for its own survival\u2026In the next decade, American per-capita income would triple, the greatest growth in the history of Western civilization.\u201d<\/span><\/div>\n\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\nLahr also notes a mutation of American consciousness. \u201cThe axis of concentration,\u201d he quotes playwright Arthur Miller, \u201cturned violently and very quickly away from society to the self.\u201d Social Realism to Abstract Expressionism, Marxism to Freudianism. These are among the cultural signposts of what Lahr calls \u201cthe journey to the interior.\u201d<\/span><\/div>\n\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\nIt was an eventful trip. Yes, there was the Legion of Decency, the House Un-American Activities Committee, The Cold War and the Red Scare, cookie-cutter suburbia, the rise of the corporate state and Big Business, and a general unease over sex, race, and nuclear annihilation sufficient to cloud the era under the term, the Age of Anxiety. Conformity was the word you heard back then. But it wasn\u2019t quite the conformity of an anesthetized populace marching in lockstep to a Soviet style workday. It was the combination of world-weary survivors of the bloodiest century on record trying to make a safe new world for their kids; and teens\u2014adolescence first came into the vernacular then\u2014trying to come to terms with what Ezra Pound called \u201ca botched civilization.\u201d<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
So here\u2019s a few of the things you had just about everywhere you looked in art and entertainment and the world of ideas:<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0 —In a scene that lasted all of ten seconds in 1950\u2019s \u201cThe Men,\u201d Marlon Brando trashed a veterans\u2019 hospital day room with a stunning fury that changed American film acting forever, introducing a whole new Stanislavskian attitude and approach to performance. The \u201850s also brought us the films of DeSica, Visconti, Rossellini and Fellini, as well of La Nouvelle Vague of Trauffaut, Godard and Antonioni.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0 —Samuel Beckett\u2019s \u201cWaiting for Godot\u201d mystified everyone until, in 1957, The Actors Workshop out of San Francisco staged it at San Quentin prison, where it made perfect sense, thereby introducing a powerful new canon author Martin Esslin called Theatre of the Absurd. The well-made play went the way of the well-made world.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0 —Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Nichols & May and Chicago\u2019s Second City brought a whole new level of satirical self-examination to American society and politics.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0 –The Beat writers, Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs, along with Bellow, Mailer, Vidal, Salinger, Dorothy Parker, Baldwin and Barth, helped shape what was essentially a literary decade, as did sociologists C. Wright Mills and David Reisman, who articulated the powerful reaction to looming corporatocracy (\u201cThe shits are killing us,\u201d Mailer said). Rheinhold Niebuhr was to 20th<\/sup> century religious philosophy what Soren Kierkegaard was to the 19th<\/sup>.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u00a0 –Live network TV brought us a primetime menu of symphonic music, TV drama that spawned Sidney Lumet, Paddy Chayefsky and John Frankenheimer, and on Saturday<\/span><\/span> nights, convulsed the nation with The Jackie Gleason Show and the madcap Sid Caesar crew at \u201cYour Show of Shows.\u201d<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0 —And let\u2019s not forget how Elvis Presley got us all shook up.<\/span><\/div>\n\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\n\u00a0\u00a0 This is just a pathetically small sampling. Where can I put Leonard Bernstein, Balanchine, Coltrane? <\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0 For further contrast, we need go no further than the spectacular and elegant 1956 wedding between Grace Kelly and the Prince of Morocco, the closest thing we had to republican America\u2019s nostalgia, if not for royalty, then a benign manifestation of class. <\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0 Compare that with the nuptials of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, an estimated $3 million spectacle staged in a fake chateau adjoining a sewage treatment plant, whose noxious fumes they\u2019ve hoped to dispel with generous gusts of perfume.\u00a0 Is this perfect satire, or not? And why can\u2019t we say so?<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0 Makes you wonder if the wingnuts of the right aren\u2019t on to something in their refutation of the theory of evolution. Maybe they\u2019re just using the wrong arguments.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
— Lawrence Christon, Guest Columnist<\/strong><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[contextly_auto_sidebar id=”FSBn2DLrnWZBS8DufCMUcy7PwGEjKVRO”] DO we misread our cultural past, especially the 1950s? Today marks the debut of CultureCrash guest columnist Lawrence Christon, a veteran arts and entertainment journalist in LA, author of a book about South Coast Repertory, and a longtime friend. Larry will be weighing in on various topics about the past, present and future […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[145,163,607,97],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1677","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-50s","7":"category-60s","8":"category-lawrence-christon-guest-column","9":"category-theater","10":"entry","11":"has-post-thumbnail"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1677"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1677\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Pepsi](\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/Pepsi-Cola-Ads-1950s-2.png\")
<\/a>.<\/p>\n