Do the time warp: The '70s are back
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Three Mile Island and hot pants. Watergate and "Superfly." Patty Hearst and disco, smiley faces and the Jonestown massacre, hijackings and the Hustle.
Give the '70s this: It was one mad mirrorball of a decade. In the face of crumbled idealism and rampant social madness, American culture ended up exulting in frivolity. Maybe we were so naive we thought all the troubles would just drift away if we slapped enough flower-shaped stickers on them. Or maybe we just couldn't figure out what else to do.
"It was a rough decade," says Gary Hoppenstand, a professor who teaches popular culture at Michigan State University. "Maybe that's the reason why by the end of the decade we went to pure escapism. People wanted to turn their minds off."
Now, when even presidential election results are contentious, America seems to be embracing the frothy side of the '70s once again. "Shaft" was reborn on movie screens in 2000, a movie based on the TV series "Charlie's Angels" became the year's biggest girl-power flick. Go to any high school and you'll see bell-bottoms and platform shoes walking down the halls. "That '70s Show" on the Fox network, revives the decade weekly on television. And '70s pop group ABBA is the subject of a hit musical in London soon to open on Broadway - "Mama Mia."
Clearly, an appetite for '70s culture continues unabated. The reason why is somewhat obvious.
"It makes you think of more innocent times, even if when you inspect them they weren't really that innocent," says Martin Bandyke, music director of WDET-FM in Detroit, who began college at the University of Michigan in 1972. "It's the nostalgia of lost youth."
Or, as Jerry Herron, director of American Studies at Wayne State University, puts it: "Americans have been, since the 18th century, a nostalgic culture. But we used to be nostalgic for some kind of simpler, better world."
Indeed, smack dab in the middle of the '70s there was a rash of TV hits - "Happy Days," "Laverne & Shirley," "Little House on the Prairie," "The Waltons" - that played to that kind of nostalgia. But Herron thinks Americans are now "nostalgic for the future," or in other words, for a time when the future looked full of promise.
"The future from the '70s still looked appealing," Herron says. "In the '60s and '70s people still really believed something great was lying around the corner."
A bad streak
Drawing a line between the '60s and '70s can be difficult. "People talk about the '60s and invariably most of the important events they're thinking about happened in the '70s," says Herron.
The shooting of Kent State students happened in the '70s. The Vietnam War and protests at home were in the '70s. Student bombing and riots, the deaths of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, the breakup of the Beatles, all these things happened in the early '70s. Those tumultuous times culminated in the Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Nixon.
How rocky were things?
In a period of little more than one year during 1973-74, attorney John Dean testified before the Senate in televised hearings about President Nixon's wrongdoings; heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped, brainwashed and turned into a bank-robbing fugitive terrorist; and then Nixon resigned, leaving the White House while flashing the V sign - which stood for either victory or peace, neither of which seemed particularly appropriate.
What did America do while presented with this potential chaos? It started streaking. People began shedding their clothes and running naked through public places. One guy even streaked the Oscars in 1974. There, that'll fix things.
Meanwhile, fashion lost its mind. People were wearing bell-bottom pants, ankle-breaking platform shoes and polyester suits. "It was a bad decade fashion-wise," says Melba Boyd, chair of Africana studies at Wayne State. "Polyester - probably in the future they're going to find out it will generate some kind of long-term skin disease. It probably affected my eyesight, too."
"It doesn't look that bad when everybody else has it on," says Boyd. "But I was glad when it was gone, I'll tell you that."
Hedonism
If there is one enduring image, aside from the smiley face, that seems to embody the '70s, it is the shot of a white-suited John Travolta striking a pose on the dance floor in "Saturday Night Fever." But that movie didn't come out until 1976. By that time the hippie styles of the '60s had become mainstreamed and idealism had given way to pure hedonism, exemplified by disco culture and swinging singles.
"One thing that the '70s did carry over from the '60s was sexual liberation and sexual experimentation," says Hoppenstand. "For a teen-ager, it was a great time!"
Birth-control pills lowered fears of unwanted pregnancy in the '60s and the fear of AIDS didn't yet hang over relationships.
Farrah Fawcett posters wallpapered part of the '70s. Cocaine took its toll. X-rated movie theaters were common in most big cities, and the cult of celebrity was growing with the birth of People magazine. The top movies, which had been filled with social commentary early in the decade, became feel-good action flicks like "Star Wars" and "Superman." After the social consciousness of the '60s and the disappointments of the early '70s, it was time to party.
Highs from lows
Not that valuable things didn't emerge from the '70s. The "Godfather" films, the blaxploitation movies that ironically built an acceptance of black people in film. The way "All In the Family" integrated - albeit to some controversy - social commentary into the traditionally mindless TV sitcom form, the way "Sesame Street" changed how children learn. Even disco grew over years of change into today's techno music.
"It was a very intense decade if you were paying attention, it was the culmination of a lot of things. But some people were oblivious," says Wayne State's Boyd. "It's like people became very intense and focused or they just spaced out."
Not surprisingly, it's the spaced-out part of the '70s that Americans now embrace.
"When something's 10 years old it's distant enough to where we can sort of reinvent it," says MSU's Hoppenstand. And so the giddy fashions, the wide-eyed innocence, the sense of exuberance, however desperate, are what we remember. And cling to.
"It really was kind of a crackpot decade," says Herron. But somehow it still seems fun.