ABSTRACT
This volume seeks to illuminate the remarkable range of cultural production from the American 1970s. That anyone would want or feel the need to do this might seem curious since, from the standpoint of the 1990s, the seventies won't go away. One need only look at the revival of the seventies as it has permeated the work of Martin Scorsese (Casino, 1995) and QuentinTarantino (Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown, 1994 and 1997, respectively) or provided for the resurrection of Robert Altman (The Player, 1992) to see the influence in film. One need only note the covers of seventies songs and their use in sampling to see a pervasive influence in popular music. One need only marvel at Nick at Night's reverence for the seventies sitcom (The Bob Newhart Show) or dramatic series (The White Shadow) as gems of a bygone era to understand the importance of this earlier decade to ours today. It is in the seventies that the cultural Zeitgeist of the nineties seems to locate itself, and it is not only nostalgia or generational demographics that powers this reexamination. What, for instance, does the revival of the disaster movie say about nineties anxieties? Though they may seem to be unrelated, Boogie Nights and The Ice Storm, both released in 1997, suggest complementary answers to this question. In the former, members of the porn industry on the West Coast attempt to act as an extended family while reproducing the outlines of suburbia; in the latter, actual suburban families on the East Coast feel the pressure to act out in their everyday lives what they imagine to be the appropriate sexuality of a porn film. The Ice Storm was described by its director as "a disaster movie. Except the disaster hits home." 1 Both movies suggest ways in which the seeds of nineties problems and paradigms may well be located in cultural changes that took place twenty—rather than, say, thirty—years ago. That is, the sixties no longer seem to be the inevitable moment of crisis in the century—hence, the starting point of any discussion of the decades that have come after it. Rather, the seventies have now become a key part of the equation of our millennial anxiety—the place to look to for the answer to the question: Who have we become at the century's end? Whether in "high" art or in mass culture, the seventies were a time when the use of technology and self-referential popular culture began to evidence the full postmodern effect of the rise of late capitalism. The clue to our own present seems mysteriously locked somewhere in that slippery decade.
