1973 was a most amazing year

1973: From Vietnam to the energy crisis, we're all still living with the legacy of a particularly anxious year.
By Jonathan Yardley
Review of “1973 NERVOUS BREAKDOWN
Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America” by Andreas Kille

If you're old enough to remember 1973 -- and if you aren't, consider yourself lucky -- you know one thing for sure: It was a bummer. Watergate, busing, white flight, Patty Hearst, Andy Warhol, "Deep Throat," blaxploitation flicks, "Last Tango in Paris," Gravity's Rainbow , "An American Family," Vietnam, POWs, the "Me Decade," Fear of Flying , the economy down the tube, endless gas lines, "The Exorcist" -- was there anything good about 1973? Here's what Andreas Killen has to say:

"Taken as a whole, . . . 1973 [was] a cultural watershed, a moment of major realignments and shifts in American politics, culture, and society. This year marked not just the end of the sixties but the onset of a debate, one that continues to this day, about the legacy of that turbulent decade. At the same time this year was alive with a sense of new possibilities and openings to the future, harbingers of an emerging new postmodern cultural configuration."

Depends on where you sit, doesn't it? The cultural matters about which Killen writes -- all those mentioned above, along with the decline of modernism in architecture and other disciplines and the rise of postmodernism, the "cult of celebrity," the emergence of the all-encompassing mass media -- arouse more enthusiasm in him than they do in me. At the time, I thought it was all pretty exciting -- I was in my early thirties and lapped up all those newly liberated books and movies with unbecoming pleasure -- but little of it has survived the passage of time.

Thus in 1973, Andy Warhol, for example, seemed sort of, well, neat -- all those soup cans and Marilyn Monroe and Chairman Mao. We didn't understand at the time that Warhol's only genius was for trivializing everything on which he set his hands, that Mao was a monster to rank with Hitler and Stalin, that the druggy environment in which Warhol dwelled was self-destructive rather than glamorous. To his credit, Killen, a historian at the City College of New York, understands this even as he laments Warhol's "movement away from art and his increasing absorption into the worlds of music, film, and fashion." This, obviously, is a matter of taste and judgment. If one believes, as Killen apparently does, that at least some of what Warhol did pre-1973 was "art," then one will regret what followed. If one believes, as I do, that from day one Warhol fit Samuel Goldwyn's famous malapropism to a tee -- deep down, he was shallow -- then what he did in 1973 and thereafter was merely a continuation of what he'd been doing all along.

In some respects, 1973 was a good time for American movies, a moment when the studio system went into eclipse and "a brief flowering of director-driven filmmaking" occurred, but movies that seemed adventuresome and exciting then -- "Mean Streets," "The Long Goodbye," "Sleeper," "Don't Look Now," "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" -- don't seem much of either three decades later. Unfortunately for Killen's convenience, the two best and most durable movies of that period -- "The Godfather" and "The Godfather: Part II" -- were released in 1972 and 1974, respectively, underscoring the inescapable truth that trying to pinpoint a single year (or decade) as a "watershed" has its built-in risks.

Which is to say that while a lot of stuff crested more or less in 1973, it was going on before that year and continued thereafter. My own strongest memory of the gas lines is from 1974, driving from North Carolina to Florida to take a new job and worrying about gas every mile of the way. Watergate certainly was on most people's minds in 1973, but the actual burglary and other capers occurred in 1972, and the climactic events -- the culmination of the Senate hearings, President Nixon's resignation, his pardon by Gerald R. Ford -- took place in 1974. The controversy over school busing to achieve desegregation began well before 1973, and white flight to the suburbs and private academies continued long thereafter.

This isn't to pick nits with Killen's analyses and arguments, some of which are sound, but to emphasize that history invariably, and successfully, resists pigeonholing. Just as it's almost always fallacious to separate human beings into "generations" -- "the Lost Generation," "the Greatest Generation" -- so it's risky to divide things into decades or, even more narrowly, specific years. A great many young people in the 1920s were far from lost, a lot of people in the 1940s were anything except "great," and a good deal of what Killen tries to squeeze into 1973 actually spread out over a far longer period. Just as much of what we think of as "the '60s" actually occurred in the early or mid-1970s, so much of the controversy and excitement about which Killen writes actually took place over many years.

Thus the way to read 1973 Nervous Breakdown is to ignore the attempts at pigeon-holing and concentrate on Killen's broader arguments. Two of them strike me as especially sound. One is that, during this time, "American youth was perceived as under assault, alarmingly fragile, in need of increasingly extreme forms of intervention." Killen seizes on Patricia Hearst and the emotions her abduction aroused as emblematic of this, and perhaps he's right: "This story offered itself up to the American public as the consummate account of snapping: a cautionary tale about the radical transformation of the self under the influence of a powerful cult of personality and action." Many young Americans were "vulnerable to strange belief-systems" -- Moonies, Hare Krishnas, extreme fundamentalist Christian groups -- making this a matter of great concern to parents and authorities. The astonishing popularity of the film "The Exorcist," with its nightmares of demonic possession, was evidence of both the fascination and the apprehension that this phenomenon aroused.

It's also true -- it may be clichÈ by now, but there's no getting around it -- that this was a time of deep paranoia in this country from which we show little evidence of recovering. The incredible damage that Watergate did to the presidency and to popular confidence in governmental institutions; the loss of Vietnam and the concomitant "sense that the era of Western domination [was] over"; the collapse of the economy and the coming of the OPEC-induced gas lines, still further evidence of the decline of the West -- all of this combined to produce a mood of deep self-doubt, a belief that someone out there was trying to "get" us.

The repercussions of all this are still with us. Probably not many people read Fear of Flying anymore, and it would be amazing if Gravity's Rainbow is now read anywhere outside of graduate schools or especially self-flagellating book clubs, but the sexual revolution of which Erica Jong's novel was emblematic continues apace, with ever more distressing ramifications, and the paranoia that is at the heart of Thomas Pynchon's brilliant and unreadable novel is still a central characteristic of American culture and politics.

Nineteen seventy-three is perhaps best seen as part of the '60s. Whether it was a continuation of that period or the day the music died is for the likes of Killen and other cultural commentators to debate, if not decide. In just about every respect, though, it was a lousy year, and good riddance to it. ∑

(Jonathan Yardley is The Washington Post's book critic. His e-mail address is yardleyj@washpost.com)