January 29th, 2007

Ever watched the movie, Alice's Restaurant, based somewhat loosely on the song of the same name by Arlo Guthrie? The movie even features Arlo and has a brief scene with Arlo's dad, Woody Guthrie (who was dying in hospital at that time).

It is what some people might call a "hippy movie". But how much of a hippy ideal is it really, since, at the end, the camera recedes from poor Alice who is left all alone running the restaurant ... chained to the responsibility and the hard work? It seems to say that someone is always left holding the bag (or, in this case, a spatula in one hand and a scrub brush in the other).

OK, and have you seen the movie, The Strawberry Statement, featuring a look at radical (hippy) students as they naively try to bring about change to the world (meaning all of human nature, presumably) by ... er ... overturning cars and occupying the university president's office?

It ends with the naive kids getting the crap beat out of them by naive cops. (Kim Darby's character plays Marco Polo in the police-bust melee with Bruce Davison's character as they are pulled in different directions by the police. One of them loses their glasses. Gad, what symbolism.) Anyhow, this is probably fairly labelled a hippy movie, and it shows, I think, accurately that just having a hippy movement doesn't do much except piss off the billy-club crowd.

And, like Alice in Alice's Restaurant, someone uninvolved and "innocent" is left at the end having to clean up the spilled orange juice.

Sorry, ex-hippies. You may have temporarily raised the overall left-leaning awareness a titch (like slightly raising the temperature of a bathtub full of cold water by pouring in a cup of boiling water), but I don't think you really made that much of a difference in the end. People with authority and lack of self-control (and lack of open mind) just hammered you down at the time of your attempted movement, then, in later years, everyone let you drift into obscurity through their lack of interest.

And you were naive in thinking that the life you proposed could survive for long without a supporting backbone of a much more "square" culture and decidedly uncreative infrastructure.

I mean, Easy Rider (another movie associated with the hippy lifestyle) glorified, among other things, the motorcycle, but some pretty square-headed pocket-protector engineers had to design the motorcycle before you could ride one around the countryside, eh? Pure hippy wouldn't work, unless there were some completely un-hip folks building the framework for you to be hip inside of. And being hippies left more than a bit of a mess that the non-hippies had to clean up.

Your hippy headspace may have been pure and the hippy heart full of legitimate concern for a better life for everyone, but the goal was unachievable by the means you proposed (and lived). And let's never forget that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Your revolution was based on a good idea, but your lack of sophistication meant it would never reap benefits. And, in fact, the revolution made a mess that poor Alice had to clean up. You just enraged those who weren't part of the revolution that wouldn't have worked anyway.

What a bummer, huh?

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