Page 111 - A Handbook Genre Studies in Mass Media

CHAPTER 4

ever before, but the continuing prosperity of the postwar years enabled
record proportions of them to go to college. In 1955, 31 percent of all
eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds were enrolled in school; by 1965 the
proportion had climbed to 46 percent. The proportion of twenty- to
twenty-four-year-olds in school rose from just 11 percent to 41 percent
over the same period. The baby boomers overwhelmed the institutions
entrusted with their orderly socialization and control: the primary and
secondary schools in the 1950s and early 1960s, the colleges and univer-
sities over the next decade, and of course their own families throughout
the entire period. Controls inevitably weakened as the ratio of control-
lers to controllees declined. The probability that young people would
socialize one another into distinctive cultural patterns independent of
adult values and prescriptions likewise increased. In brief, “We would
not be like our parents.”
These conditions contributed to the development of an influential and
autonomous youth counterculture. Alice’s Restaurant rejects this grow-
ing youth power. In Alice’s Restaurant, released during the cultural and
political tumult of the 1960s, the moral high ground has been assumed
by a youthful counterculture seeking to build an alternative communal
order based on equality, tolerance, and love—the very values promised
but ultimately betrayed by adults during the 1950s. The single most im-
portant element uniting these values is the effort to overcome alienation.
Established institutions must be judged on the basis of their capacity
to fulfill personal needs and, if necessary, altered or swept aside. The
counterculture promised, in its turn, to unite work and play, family and
friendship, social commitment and social expression—and to reconcile
the generations by removing the artificial distinctions separating them.
Alienation from the dominant society brought Arlo and his friends to-
gether to form a community in a church that had been purchased by Ray
and Alice Brock, adults who presumably have broken away from the old
order. Living in a church symbolizes the counterculture’s quest to reclaim
an alienated God, as men and women’s own potential for good.
However, this transformative impulse is susceptible to corruption by a
residue of dishonesty, possessiveness, and “power tripping” carried into
the new order from the old one by the adults. The film also suggests that
there are significant contradictions within the youthful counterculture
itself: (1) the quest for community verses a “do your own thing” ethic
of personal freedom, and (2) egalitarian democracy verses the need for
some form of political authority. At the end of the film, Arlo is alone

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