Back to the Fifties: Nostalgia, Hollywood Film, and Popular Music of the Seventies and Eighties by Michael D. Dwyer (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Back to the Fifties: Nostalgia, Hollywood Film, and Popular Music of the Seventies and Eighties by Michael D. Dwyer Christopher D. Stone Michael D. Dwyer, Back to the Fifties: Nostalgia, Hollywood Film, and Popular Music of the Seventies and Eighties (New York: Oxford, 2015). The memory of the Fifties continues to loom large. According to PRRI, a polling outfit, few matters separated Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton voters more than their view of the relationship between the Fifties and contemporary America. Whereas 70% of Clinton partisans believed American life had improved since the 1950s, 72% of Trump supporters believed the country had declined. Undoubtedly, many Trump voters see the Fifties as a time of national greatness, an era of consensus, strength, and prosperity (especially for blue-collar whites without a college degree), and as a time worth recreating. Such sentiments echo conservative rhetoric of the 1980s and 1990s, rhetoric that often drew strength from popular culture, even as popular culture contained multiple visions of the Fifties, including ones decidedly hostile to conservative aspirations. It is this fertile ground that Dwyer cultivates. Dwyer’s plow is not the first to break such ground. Daniel Marcus’ Happy Days and Wonder Years (2004) is a particularly important antecedent, but whereas Marcus privileges punditry and political oratory, Dwyer favors “pop nostalgia,” which he defines through three attributes. First, it relies on commercial media and seeks a mass audience. Second, it uses music, fashion, and other tropes to signify a coveted past, sometimes with questionable historical authenticity. Third, pop nostalgia resides not just with cultural texts and their audiences, but also within the complex, dynamic interplay that conjoins them. Dwyer applies these concepts to the Fifties, which he distinguishes from the 1950s. His Fifties is an idea, a construction that houses multiple, often competing memories. It is also chronologically more expansive than the 1950s, stretching from 1945 to 1963. In analyzing how popular culture negotiated the Fifties, Dwyer limits his attention to music and film from what he terms the Reagan Era (1973–1988). Aside from enriching our understanding of that particular period, Dwyer looks to complicate the relationship between history and nostalgia. He does not cast the two as mortal enemies and he stresses that nostalgia has its own meaningful history to chart. Moreover, Dwyer seeks to demonstrate the ways in which texts travel through time and acquire new meanings as they interface with new technologies and historical contexts. Dwyer pursues these objectives over five chapters. His approach is hardly exhaustive. He ignores or barely mentions a bevy of relevant texts (some quite noteworthy). Examples include Animal House (1978), Dirty Dancing (1987), Queen’s “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” (1979), the career of the Stray Cats, and hit covers such as “Why Do Fools Fall in Love” (1981), “La Bamba” (1987), and “Don’t Be Cruel” (1988). These omissions may irk some readers, but Dwyer’s highly selective approach allows him to develop his examples fully, which he does most successfully over two chapters dissecting Back to the Future (1985) and American Graffiti (1973). Dwyer’s chapter on George Lucas’s commercial breakthrough is particularly strong. Here, as throughout the book, he carefully dissects his text and makes good use of the work of other scholars. In this case, he uses the trajectories of Curt Henderson (Richard Dreyfuss) and John Milner (Paul Le Mat) to unlock the film’s underlying messages (be open to the new and remain wary of nostalgia’s seductive lure). What truly distinguishes this chapter, however, is its [End Page 80] success in connecting textual analysis with the book’s broader objectives, such as plotting out the shifting meaning of texts. For reviewers in 1973, American Graffiti, while giving the past its due, defined the transition from the Fifties as a moment of political and cultural maturation. After 1977, on the other hand, many commentators interpreted the film as an indirect assault on the Sixties or as an unwelcome precursor to the age of blockbusters—readings forged in a very different context, one marked by the ascendency of the New Right and the incredible success of Star Wars (1977). The final three chapters generally cast a wider net...