The hippie revolution and counterculture of the 1960s

Hippie Revolution

Over the course of the 1960s, the United States saw great social and political upheaval, as countless young people revolted against a system that was fundamentally incapable of effectively representing them or their desires. Though the decade saw the development of a number of important social and political efforts, such as the civil rights movement, the hippie movement has come to define the era, and for good reason. Hippies not only opposed the Vietnam War, but they also formed a counter-culture, opposing repressive standards of dress, behavior, and even thought, and, ultimately, they ended up forcing the entire country to undergo a dramatic ideological shift. The films Head, Skidoo, and Psych-Out represent three different reactions to the social conflict that gave rise to the hippie movement, and each films' implicit or explicit treatment of psychedelic drugs, as well as its representation of preexisting entertainment genres, reveals its particular ideological position.

Head embraces the ideals of hippie movement whole-heartedly, adapting a dizzying array of styles and genres in order to make its point about free will, all the while metaphorically participating in the kind of visual and auditory consciousness-expansion that formed a crucial part of the hippie movement. Skidoo, meanwhile, attempts to make these aspects of the hippie movement palatable for a wider audience, and thus presents a shallow, if well-intentioned view of the hippie movement that ultimately fails to challenge authority or reveal something essential about the social crisis facing the American consciousness. Finally, Psych-Out represents the conservative reaction to the hippie movement, because it treatment of drug use and insistence on creating a kind of "hippie horror" reveal its utter contempt for the hippie movement, which it portrays as immoral, hypocritical, and destructive. By reviewing each film individually and then considering the spectrum of reaction they represent, it will be possible to appreciate the degree to which the rise of the hippie movement represented one of the most important social and political crises of the twentieth-century.

Before analyzing the aforementioned films in greater detail, it will be necessary to outline the methodology by which one can determine whether or not these films are good representatives of the hippie movement and its challenge to the larger society. Firstly, it is important to note that the hippie movement was a true revolution, and as such it cannot be boiled down to a specific set of ideals; that is to say, it gets its meaning from rejecting something preexisting, and not necessarily through the proposition of something new. While this rejection of the old presents itself in a wide variety of phenomenon, for the purposes of this study, each film's use or rejection of film and television tropes and genres reveals the extent to which it is willing to challenge authority, and as a such, it is one of the most important metrics upon which to judge said film. Part of the hippie movement's vitality came from the way it mixed and matched styles of dress, belief systems, and political ideologies, and so it is only natural that films purporting to represent the hippie revolution would mix and match their own filmic equivalent in the form of genre.

While part of the hippie movement undoubtedly depended upon the proposition of new modes of dress and behavior, the true work of the movement was creating the space for these new modes to arise.

This is what Tywonkiak (2010) means when he says that in many ways, the core philosophies and ideologies of general semantics was at the cornerstone of the cultural reform movement of the 1960s, including a call for greater clarity of understanding, a search for prime causation as opposed to hegemonic causes, and a deeper exploration of the interior world of the mind at that moment of sensorial manifestation. (p. 290)

This exploration of the deeper world of the mind was frequently aided by the consumption of consciousness-altering drugs, and indeed, all three of the films under discussion here have some connection to the popularity of hallucinogens within the hippie movement, a connection that is not always explicit but which nevertheless plays a crucial role in expressing each film's position. Recognizing this allows one to formulate another metric for evaluating Head, Skidoo, and Psych-Out. The hippie movement represented a search for meaning unencumbered by the arbitrarily-established regulations of the past, and as such determining whether the aforementioned films are representative of the movement will depend upon whether or not the films themselves follow this same line. In other words, for them to be truly representative of the movement, they must not simply portray hippie characters and themes, but also participate in the same revolutionary rejection of preexisting forms and modes of thought. As will be seen, a key marker as to whether or not the film in question is participating in the same kind of consciousness-expanding work as the hippie movement will be how the film incorporates drug use, and particularly hallucinogens, into its larger message.

Of the three films discussed here, Head is the one most explicitly in line with the consciousness-raising efforts of the hippie movement, likely because it stars the Monkees, whose existence as fictional boy-band made up of real people was itself a kind of revolutionary approach to mass media. The film represents a kind of apex of the Monkees' consideration of their own fictional existence, because although their television show can be viewed as deconstructive television, it was not until Head that they directly and repeatedly confronted the apparent division between reality and scripted scenes, and furthermore, determined that this division was either nonexistent or at least irrelevant (Goostree, 1988, p. 50). The film has no concern for the audiences' expectations, frequently showing the director shooting scenes as the Monkees make a number of attempts at escaping their scripted lives, only to find their every action has been predetermined. Thus, in a way, the Monkees' journey over the course of the film, and the films avant-garde character, is representative of the hippie movement's chafing under the arbitrary moral, social, and political standards of the old hegemonic order.

In 1968, the Monkees released the feature film Head, directed by one of their co-creators, Bob Rafelson. Taken as a whole, the film represents a kind of artistic triumph, in that it brought the same kind of meta-textual questioning of reality that made the Monkees famous to the big screen, and in doing so helped in predicting the future of popular entertainment. The surreal, disjointed nature of Head is indicative of a serious cultural shift underway in the 1960s, as the immediacy of popular television made reality that much more attractive, while making its representation that much easier to manufacture and control. Head reveals these methods of control, as well as the seeming impossibility of ever escaping them (although some hope remains for expanding or reconfiguring them)

Before considering Head in greater detail, it is first necessary to understand the Monkees. The Monkees were first conceived in 1965 by Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, who pitched them as "a young band having wacky, surreal, intertextual adventures that would trade on and draw its inspiration from Richard Lester's 1964 Beatles film A Hard Day's Night" (Stahl, 2002, p. 310). The members of the Monkees were chosen from over four hundred applicants, and were determined after an interview, screen tests, and "audience response sessions" (Goostree, 1988, p. 50). The show was made by people with relatively little experience in film production, and the actors/bandmates were largely improvisers, meaning that any given episode was at least partially constructed on the fly (Goostree, 1988, p. 50). Nevertheless, the show a hit for multiple seasons, even winning an Emmy award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement.

By 1968, the Monkees' popularity had already begun to wane, but their commitment to bizarre, counter cultural media had not. Head simply refuses to follow any sort of filmic conventions, breaking narrative standards left and right. The plot is circular, bringing the story all the way back to the beginning of the film just as it climaxes, while the scenes in between this return defy popular logic about what constitutes reality, filmic and otherwise. As the Monkees make their way through the movie, it appears as if they are making their way through the world of filmmaking itself, because Head is a pastiche of different film genres and styles. The only central theme running throughout the whole film is the Monkees' inability to escape their fate as fictional, scripted characters, because every time they attempt to break free from this overwhelming contextual control, they merely find themselves in a new scene.

Head did not perform well at the box office, nor was it received well by critics. Though it received some decent reviews -- the Los Angeles Times said it was a film that is "not trying to tell us anything new about modern life but rather is heightening our awareness of the how the media condition our perception of it" -- the overall response was negative (Thomas, 1968, p. G18). The film was attacked on nearly every level, but nowhere more so than its particular narrative and stylistic choices, which upset some reviewers for either being too much or not enough. The Washington Post said that the film "has no sense of pace and its intentional formlessness is only a cover for a lack of imagination" (Rice, 1968, p. C12). The Post went on to say that "it is all flat and as prefabricated as the four young men in the spotlight," and it is this criticism that reveals the essential argument of Head (Rice, 1968, p. C12).

The Post's statement that Head is "as prefabricated as the four young men in the spotlight" actually identifies the film's central theme while failing to recognize it as such (Rice, 1968, p. C12). The conflict of the film is that the Monkees actually realize the extent of their artificiality, to the point that they actually try to commit suicide. The Post's critique (only natural for the newspaper that serves the seat of hegemonic power) seems unwilling to comprehend this fact, because doing so would require an acknowledgment that the film's critique of media control and manipulation necessarily implicates all media. Nevertheless, the fact remains that Head focuses almost exclusively on the diminishing boundary between reality and manufacture, and seems to suggest that the oppressive nature of modern media means that one is rapidly becoming the other.

While the Monkees' existential crisis in Head is ostensibly brought on by the stresses of fame, the film actual predicts the future of media and its relationship to individual lives, because it demonstrates the totalizing power of audiovisual recording. As cameras and distribution methods become cheaper and cheaper, more and more people can effectively narrate their lives via media, to the point that the conceptual line between "real life" and someone's persona or life in the media are one and the same. An example of this is the concept of reality television shows, which begin by purporting to show the normal life of an individual but then change so that the show itself becomes a normal part of their life, inextricably blending reality with scripted production.

As celebrities, the Monkees felt the all-seeing eye of media well before the general public, because their fame meant that were constantly being confronted with the reality of their manufactured existence. This allowed them to make the argument they make in Head, which revolves around the question of free will in the face of totalizing control. While they eventually come to the conclusion that "it doesn't matter if we're in the box," meaning that it does not matter if free will exists or not, because humans could not really tell the difference anyways. Rather than shut down inquiry, however, this observation only makes the Monkees' attempts to escape their filmic restraints more energetic; if they have free will, then they can use it to escape, but if they do not, then they are already scripted anyways and might as well participate in full force.

Head seems to end with a rather bleak view of existence, with the Monkees suspended in a tank after their failed suicide attempt, being wheeled away into a movie studio warehouse. Although the tone is light, it nevertheless seems to suggest that there is ultimately no escape from the totalizing control of mass media, and no matter what attempts at escape are made, the omnipresent script of the world will always intervene to keep the individual encased and surrounded. This being true, in the sense that human beings can never hope to think outside some form of ideology, but the way the film handles it says something especially condemning about the entire popular culture industry. The Monkees should be applauded for attempting to escape their boxed-in existence, and the film seems to argue that the very same industry that created the Monkees, serves to destroy them and others like them, forcing them to live in a state of quasi-reality, while allowing ostensibly independent action only when it serves the larger media purpose. In a sense, the film is saying that it is popular media itself that maintains and perpetuates oppressive ideologies, because it keeps individuals from ever escaping their ideological and epistemological limits.

Though Head does not feature drug use as a major part of its narrative, the film's metaphorical adoption of hallucinogens' potential for expanding the boundaries of consciousness (and thus ideology) is evident throughout. The cascading scenes of increasingly arbitrary and abstract situations are in many ways visual and auditory approximations of psychedelic experiences that expand one's consciousness beyond the usual, and the film's decision to highlight its own expansive, free-flowing nature is an essential part of its relation to the larger hippie revolution. While Head does not really bother to feature any literal drugs, its aesthetic choices demonstrate a deep understanding of the role played by psychedelics and other consciousness-expanding drugs.

Head is a crucial text for understanding the kind of crisis of consciousness faced by America during that time period, because the film breaks down narrative and filmic conventions in order to challenge the media landscape that was rapidly emerging. In the film, the Monkees attempt to escape from their scripted reality, and in doing so reveal how the rise of mass media and cheaper production methods means that the line between reality and what is captured on film is rapidly diminishing, to the point that one cannot effectively distinguish between the two. Understanding this allows one to appreciate how Head predicted the rise of reality television over the last decade, which gets its success precisely from the ability to seamlessly blend fiction and reality in a single text, such that scripts end up becoming a part of the subject's natural behavior. Though the film ends on a somewhat bleak note, ultimately its argument is one of hope, the hope that individuals will be able to at least recognize the totalizing structures which surround them and organize their lives, even if they can never truly escape them. The film's free-wheeling treatment of genre and metaphorical embodiment of the psychedelic experience suggest that even if ideology can never be avoided or escaped from, it can be expanded and reconfigured according to more useful or ethical guidelines.

Skidoo is arguably the most shallow representation of the hippie revolution and everything it stood for, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. Instead, Skidoo effectively takes on the role of an interested third party, concerned with bridging the almost inevitable age, social, and cultural gaps that emerged during the 1960s. The representations of hippies are generally stereotypical, and the film favors broad comedy over truly insightful commentary, although as will be seen, certain elements of the script feel somewhat inspired. Mostly, Skidoo is an example of what can go wrong when one attempts to straddle a cultural and ideological divide, and in the process ends up doing neither side justice.

Skidoo's connection to the hippie movement is evident right from the start, as the film opens with an animated and live-action sequence satirizing television commercials, in what might be the most well-constructed scene of the whole film. Though the initial sequence has relatively little connection to the rest of the film except for setting up the theme of organized crime, it sets the stage for the subsequent antics by demonstrating in sometime vicious clarity the kind of socio-political rules and standards of behavior hippies were rebelling against. Fake commercials mock advertisements that attempt to make women insecure so that they will buy more, or encourage men to purchase cigarettes in order to attract women, and also make a pointed statement about America's culture of violence. Though the film would not necessarily be called "experimental" when compared to, for example, Head, its amalgamation of a variety of genres and tropes demonstrates that Skidoo participates in the same kind of cultural expansion that was essential to the hippie movement.

For example, much of the action in Skidoo revolves around escaping from the prison island Alcatraz. While the film was undoubtedly set in San Francisco because the city served as the unofficial (and may been sometimes official) locus of hippie culture and thought, the choice to center it around Alcatraz stems from the fact that in many ways, Skidoo is simply an old-fashioned, slapstick farce with hippies inserted. This focus on genre films, including slapstick, farce, and mob movies corresponds to the hippie movement's larger interest in reconfiguring existing classifications and structures without actually contributing much to this process. The audience does not really learn anything new or insightful about slapstick, farce, or mob movies from Skidoo's adaptation of them, and its major attempt at comedic legitimacy actually reveals just how superficial the film's commitment to the hippie revolution.

Easily the biggest star of Skidoo is Groucho Marx, who plays the mob boss "God." If Skidoo is the mostly-harmless attempt to portray the hippie movement without getting into too much detail about the uncomfortable realities about the movement's ethical and political view regarding Skidoo's likely audience, then Groucho Marx represents the harmless, lovable authority figure at whose expense jokes are made but whose denigration never actually says anything bad about true authority. Groucho simultaneously serves to soften the criticisms both sides of the cultural divide might have; for example, Groucho's character serves as a kind of barely-villainous villain, but by the end of the film he is dressed as a member of the Hare Krishna movement, without any real commentary on the transition.

However, although Skidoo's treatment of genre and authority in the form of Groucho Marx leaves something to be desired, one must recognize the fact that it attempts to portray hallucinogenic drugs in a potentially positive light, although even then it does so in the shallowest fashion possible. Where Head recognized the importance of consciousness-expanding drugs to the hippie movement's social and political goals, and subsequently attempted to pay homage to them through its creative and avant-garde filmmaking, Skidoo merely sets out to show its audience that taking psychedelics is not all bad, like a child attempting to tell its parents how to act cool. Disregarding the fact that the final prison break is successful because the entire prison is having a bad acid trip, Skidoo does actually manage to show how psychedelics can lead to a better understanding of one's self and the world, as evidenced by Tony's experience on LSD. Tony, played by Jackie Gleason, accidentally ingests LSD, and while he is coming down from the drug, his cellmate talks to him and helps him come to terms with his life. While the film seemingly hedges by making Tony's ingestion of the drug accidental, it nevertheless should get some credit for bothering to present a psychedelic experience in a potentially positive light.

Skidoo was a flop, and although the film has a number of flaws, it seems likely that the flaw which damned it was its inability to effectively choose a side in a social, political, and ideological conflict that encompassed the entirety of the American consciousness. By attempting to represent the hippie movement while making safe any of its more revolutionary elements, Skidoo merely succeeded in making a fairly boring film that never manages to shake the feeling that it is trying too hard. In a way, Skidoo retains the kind of uptight rigidity embodied by the audience it seemingly wants to educate about hippies, and as a result the film's humor and insight falls flat.

Psych-Out is the most problematic of the films considered here, because more than anything it represents a kind of "hippie horror film," in line with other exploitation films that rose to prominence over the course of the 1960s and 70s (Becker, 2006, p. 42). However, this does not mean that the film does not effectively represent the hippie movement; instead, it means that the film essentially represents the conservative reaction to the hippie movement, and thus must be considered as a kind of reactionary approach to a phenomenon that, from the outside, appears mystifying and terrible. If Head represents one end of the spectrum, then Psych-Out is its extreme opposite (with Skidoo sitting uncomfortably in the middle). Psych-Out is not so much a film about the hippie movement as it is a horror film starring hippies as both monster and victim, and its strict adherence to its genre as well as its representation of drug use reveals it to be a reactionary, conservative response to a revolutionary, progressive movement.

If "the horror film [is] society's 'collective nightmare,'" then Psych-Out represents the conservative nightmare of young people on psychedelic drugs, freely having sex while destroying themselves (Becker, 2006, p. 43). That Psych-Out fully embraces its existences as a cheap genre film is evidenced by the fact that its name was actually changed to make it seem more frightening; while it was originally called The Love Children, the name was changed after a re-release of Psycho did well at the theater (Becker, 2006, p. 42). Psych-Out does not have any interest in challenging or considering the tropes of its genre, and the circumstances of its production seem to permeate the entire film. Instead, it simply takes whatever popular stereotypes about hippies are available and transforms them into their most nightmarish, terrifying form, such that the film truly is a movie wherein hippies and everything the represent is turned in a monstrous, destructive collective.