Back to the Future

JQ: By contrast, the 1950s in Australia are pretty much a blank for me – there was plenty happening before and after, but nothing then that made an impact

As always, I’d blame Menzies.

I vote for personal ideosyncrasy.

My personal recollection of the ’50’s runs to things like Mighty Mouse and Crusader Rabbit and many things Disney.

I tend now to think of it as the time that modernism ran into a wall and stopped, stunned. Too many people had died, and the remnants of the original vitality of the twentieth century withered in the cold war.

In my private history of the imagination, both France and America have multiple epochs for me.

Prerevolutionary France is an epoch, created for me entirely by Dumas’s Musketeers.

For both France and America, the revolutionary period looms large — men in powdered wigs, fine philosophy, political progress, and murderous violence sit cheek-by-jowl. Oddly enough, this period was drawn in my mind by Britons; Adam Smith (Moral Sentiments), Tom Paine, and Burke are key.
Dumas looms large as well, both in fiction and in actuality.

The “revolutionary epoch” for the France in my mind stretches from the actual revolution all the way through 1848. The Communist Manifesto marks the end of that epoch for me, and the start of the industrial age. France does not situate the industrial age of my imagination, though; Britain (Dickens), Germany (Max Stirner), and America (the great robber barons like Carnegie and Vanderbilt) are where the dark satanic mills of my dreams are built.

In America, we have the Wild West, whose imagery was created for me largely by Sergio Leone. Philosophically, it’s the afterbirth of the American Civil War, which is the end of America’s revolutionary period — the argument about the equality of all men is settled with the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

France has the fin-de-siecle period. It was made for me by Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, and Victor Hugo (yes, Hugo; the history of my imagination is not entirely faithful to real history).

America has the jazz age and the hard boiled detective, which was created for me by Dashiel Hammet and the French filmmakers who invented film noir.

Interwar France is overshadowed by Weimar Germany, but for fifties France, I share much with John Quiggin, though for me there is more Camus than Sartre.

Fifties America has no special hold in my dreams. The civil rights movement first caught fire then, of course, but in my dreams it belongs to the sixties thing — and the ‘1960s’ are a distinct epoch, which lacks specific place except for the West, generically. Depending on my mood the sixties end either with the moon landing or with the riots of sixty-eight.

As an epoch, my dream America also has the dot-com years, when the Singularity seemed just around the corner, and friendly, too.

For me, cultural eras that I didn’t actually live through are defined primarily by musical styles. The 30s was swing, the 60s was rock, the 70s was the Age of Zeppelin, etc. The 50s was the early days of rock and roll. All other associations (tailfins, Mickey Mouse) are ancillary.

By this reckoning, France barely registers for me. It blips into existence for awhile during the 1930s and 40s because I’m a big Django Reinhardt fan, but then quietly slips away.

“France quarrels with America not because the pair are so different but because they are so alike”

That’s a good one! – one almost wonders if they wanted to gall anyone, and if so, who the most: the French or the Americans?

I quit my ‘Economist’ subscription a long time ago.

Response to hirvi #12…Obviously part of the fun of making a statement like that is the opportunity to piss off everyone; nevertheless, I thought the linked article identified some valid parallels between American and French political culture–specifically in the way that both nations have their modern origins in 18th century Enlightenment revolutions that may have left both with a weakness for a particular brand of exceptionalism. What about the article struck you as specious?

Bob McManus : –
“I don’t remember many expatriates of self-exiles(jazz musicians) moving to London or Melbourne”

In the case of London this was not a case of there being no public, but the result of a recalcitrant and self-destructive Musicians’ Union. And a racist establishment fighting an early war on some drugs.
No American musicians came to London, but a shitload of South Africans did.
I think there were a lot of expat artists in England in the 50s, too. Mostly from Australia and Africa, plus people like Koestler and Canetti who’d come before the war & stayed.
And some refugees from McCarthy, too.

david weman:

I think everyone should be able to spell idiosync3rasy any way they damn well please.

My way has a silent 3.

It may or may not be significant that Australia never made it into mainstream American (or European) film until the early 60s. Maybe we just don’t have any visual images of the country or its culture until that point.