American Graffiti’s posters asked “Where were you in ‘62?” That date, only eleven years before, felt like something out of the distant past. The “fifties” didn’t really end until the assassination of JFK, and George Lucas’ film promised to bring the viewer back to that bygone age in its dusk, complete with sock hops and street races. It was a low-budget affair by a new director without a traditional plot or stars, yet it was a massive hit in large part because it connected straight to the Zeitgeist. In 1973 the future looked like Soylent Green; the past looked like the place to be.
American Graffiti is the most enduring cultural artifact of the 1970s nostalgia wave, but that period’s infatuation with conjuring ideal pasts had political ramifications as well. At the end of the decade, Ronald Reagan promised restoration with his all-too familiar campaign slogan “Let’s Make America Great Again.” While some in the 70s used the past as a standpoint of critique, almost all the nostalgic roads led to the Reagan Dawn.
Even American Graffiti tried to impart a more critical look at the past, but if there’s anyone who ought to be aware of the death of the author, it’s George Lucas. The film ends with little biographical sketches of the main characters that are a sharp contrast to the adolescent hijinks of the film. The stories are not always happy. Milner the hot rodder is killed by a drunk driver. Curt fulfills his dream of becoming a writer, but has to move to Canada to avoid the Vietnam draft. Terry the Toad, the fun-loving nerdy guy, goes missing in action in battle in Vietnam. That’s the last image of the movie. For those in the audience who had fought or lost loved ones in the war, I imagine it hit like a sledgehammer.
Lucas was very much against the Vietnam War, and ending the film this way meant to proclaim the waste and futility of that conflict. However, it would be just as easy for white, middle Americans in the audience to see themselves as the victims of the upheavals of the 1960s, and to long for an idealized time before that not so coincidentally pre-dated movements for racial, gender, and LGBT equality. That’s the message that Reagan delivered in 1980, and the one that propelled Trump to the White House in 2016. For that reason, it is almost impossible to disentangle nostalgia for the 1950s from political reaction.
