The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties [Hardcover]

J. Hoberman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2003

A witty and penetrating look at the celluloid culture of the 1960s by the Village Voice's celebrated film critic.

In The Dream Life, Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman turns his attention to the 1960s, the era when politics and culture became one. With wildly entertaining reinterpretations of key Hollywood movies (such as Dr. Strangelove, Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch, and Shampoo), Hoberman reconstructs the hidden political history of 1960s cinema. Meanwhile, against the pageantry of four national elections—1960 to 1972—he describes the formation of America's spectacular, image-laden political culture.

In the era when the missile gap, the sexual revolution, and the Vietnam War became inseparable from the triumph of television, the development of political image-making, and the advent of Pop Art, American politics, mass media, and publicity became the new social spectacle. Through meditations on the personas of Che Guevara, John Wayne, Patty Hearst, Jane Fonda, Ronald Reagan, and Dirty Harry, Hoberman moves deftly between the political backgrounds of movies and the fantastic dimensions of politics, producing a brilliant and comic cultural history of the rise of our mass-mediated politics.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

For a book that doesn't so much drive home an overarching thesis about its subject as unravel particular events that are dense with historical, political and cinematic import, this assessment of the 1960s and its aftermath by longtime Village Voice critic Hoberman packs a salient and unique wallop. Hoberman wants to remind readers that the '60s marked the first time in American history when "[m]ovies might be political events, and political events were experienced as movies." It is a lesson that by now seems fairly obvious, but the book's power lies in its assessment of how new and forceful the heady combination of politics and visual mass media was, as politicians began to stress their images in addition to their words, and the restrictive Hays Code, which had tightly governed mass media content, loosened. Although the book contains much political analysis, it's a rare history that also reveals the era's sensibilities. Hoberman does so by employing language of the time (when discussing Gordon Park Jr.'s Superfly, he describes the protagonist's "incredible pad" and his "mockery of the honky police") and by using a plethora of sources: Norman Mailer's contemporary writings, popular magazines like Life, the political news of the time, box office stats, etc. Hoberman's usual epigrammatic wit ("Easy Rider is, even in 1968, a costume movie") is on display here, making his long sections of political examinations more bearable.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

In The Magic Hour [BKL Ja 1 & 15 03], Village Voice film critic Hoberman viewed 1990s movies through the lens of the decade's politics. Politics come further to the fore as he juxtaposes the events and the movies of the 1960s. Many of his juxtapositions are obvious--certainly the agendas of The Green Berets and Easy Rider vis-a-vis contemporary events are plain--and most are insightful and revelatory. In 1960, he says, Spartacus and The Alamo symbolized the New Deal and the Cold War; Brando's ineffectual sheriff in The Chase represented the failure of the Great Society; Bonnie and Clyde presaged the counterculture and the end of nonviolence; and the phenomena that soured the era--Vietnam escalation, the Weathermen, and Charlie Manson--are encapsulated in Night of the Living Dead. The events Hoberman chooses are familiar, and his knowledgeable perception of the films makes the book noteworthy as it suggests that, when the outlandish '60s become less comprehensible as they recede in time, the era's movies will remain vital. Gordon Flagg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: New Press, The (October 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565847636
• ISBN-13: 978-1565847637
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 6.3 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #902,888 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

J. Hoberman is the senior film critic for the Village Voice, where he has worked for more than thirty years. He is the author of Bridge of Light, The Magic Hour, The Red Atlantis, Vulgar Modernism, and The Dream Life (The New Press) and the co-author, with Jonathan Rosenbaum, of Midnight Movies. He has written for Artforum, the London Review of Books, The Nation, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times, among other publications, and has taught cinema history at Cooper Union since 1990. He lives in New York.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Magical Mystery Tour of the Sixties, November 23, 2003

By 

Jonathan R. Nelson "Jon from Madison" (Madison, WI USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties (Hardcover)

This is a wonderful book (I devoured it over a weekend). It examines the relationship between American social and political life and the movies during the turbulent decade of the Sixties, although the book actually covers films well into the Seventies. The book argues that this relationship was a two-way street, with the movies being influenced by what was happening in society, but also that the movies influenced politics and society. For example, Hoberman asserts that Kennedy's fascination with James Bond and secret agents and Nixon's obsession with the movie Patton to some extent influenced the style and substance of their presidencies. Another overarching theme of the book is how the Western, that most American of movie genres, evolved almost beyond recognition through the course of the Sixties and early Seventies (from The Alamo to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid).

Among the films prominently covered in the book are Blowup, Spartacus, The Manchurian Candidate, Bonnie & Clyde, Easy Rider, The Wild Bunch, and Dirty Harry, but the book also discusses more obscure films such as Tell Them Willie Boy is Here and Wild in the Streets. That most quintessential of all Sixties films, Woodstock, is oddly absent from the book.

A couple of quibbles: Hoberman quotes Norman Mailer far too often and it would have been nice to have a true bibliography rather than having to rummage through the source notes. That aside, I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in either the social history or films of the Sixties--you will not be disappointed!

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book about 50s-70s movies and culture, January 25, 2004

By 

fml66 "fml66" (Nashville, TN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties (Hardcover)

This is a great book. It touches on an almost dizzying number of milestones, from the fifties TV show ''The Next Voice You Hear'' to Brian De Palma's movie ''Blow Out.''

The point of the book, if there is one that can be easily summarized, is that political and cultural events (especially films) first became genuinely inseparable during the 1960s (not dissimilar to the points that Marshall McLuhan made in ''Understanding Media'' and Daniel Boorstin made in ''The Image: or What Happened to the American Dream'' while history was happening; but, as Hoberman points out, that history could not have been fully understood by those prophets in the midst of it).

This is a masterfully rendered cultural history. Hoberman's style can get breathless at times, and there are a lot of films and events to keep up with, but the narrative (and the analysis) are involving, cogent, and thoughtful. Think ''The Dirty Dozen,'' ''Easy Rider,'' ''Bonnie & Clyde,'' ''Blow Up,'' ''The Wild Bunch,'' ''Shampoo'' (and songs like ''The Ballad of the Green Berets''): they're all here, along with the cultural context that they fed into and the ''dream life'' that they helped construct.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fine history evolves which uses the film world as a reflection of cultural change, October 5, 2005

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Dream Life: Movies, Media, And The Mythology Of The Sixties (Paperback)

Here's a new cultural history of the Sixties - through the eye of the camera as it considers the social and political impact of movies and theater of the times. Using key Hollywood productions from Shampoo to Bonnie and Clyde, senior film critic at the Village Voice Hoberman provides a lively reconstruction of the politics behind the films, examining with actors and subjects with a critic's eye for detail. A fine history evolves which uses the film world as a reflection of cultural change.