And the period in question, eventful and tumultuous though it may have been, also represents a zone of safety -- if not of comfort, exactly, then at least of clarity. The notion of the Eisenhower years as a time of dullness and conformity -- a dubious revisionist legacy of the 1960s in any case -- has been replaced by a series of images and stories that emphasize both ferment and stability. When these movies deal with political and social issues, it is almost always with the optimism of hindsight. The prejudice and repression that figure in Brokeback Mountain, Kinsey and Far From Heaven will eventually be overcome, the major evidence for this progress being the existence of the movies themselves. The specter of McCarthy, whose scowling visage haunts Good Night, and Good Luck, will be expunged, as will the racism that casts its shadow over Ray.
It is interesting that all of these movies, while gesturing toward various manifestations of social change, evade or stop short of the upheaval and rebellion now commonly thought of as characterizing the 1960s. That story may be at once too thoroughly assimilated into the cultural memory and, at the same time, still too contentious to engage the imaginations of today's filmmakers. The ideological and culture fractures of the present, moreover, feed a nostalgic longing for images of consensus. It is not just that Ray Charles and Johnny Cash, mavericks in their own day, have become objects of universal admiration, but also that the stories of their ascension to stardom are, implicitly, stories about the public that has such people in common.
The greatest nostalgia these films express is for the culture that produced characters like Charles and Cash, Murrow and Capote -- all of them creations of a celebrity-driven mass media at an early phase of its dominance, and all of them distinguished, at least in retrospect, with a kind of self-invented, all-American authenticity that seems to have vanished from the cultural scene. That authenticity may not have been visible at the time, but if movies can't synthesize authenticity, what good are they? Remember when television news was a bastion of integrity? When nonfiction pieces in glossy magazines changed the way people thought about journalism and literature? When the music charts were dominated by innovators who gave traditional American forms a modern, personal spin? Neither do I. That's the point.
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