ABSTRACT
This chapter provides textual analysis of the Dissent mass culture critique. William Adams, David Bromwich, Jeremy Larner, Todd Gitlin, William Adam, Nicholas Mills, George Pecker, and Marshall Berman respectively offer post-Sixties narratives in their Hollywood movie criticism. Their narratives about the 1960s counterculture include such provocative titles as “The Demise of the 1960s Political Radicalism,” “A Violent 1960s,” “Living Well Is the Best Revenge,” “The 1960s Idealism Still Prevails,” etc. Entering into the cyberculture age, critics such as Laura Bergheim, Gitlin, Josephine Hendin, Nicolaus Mills, Ross Miller, Robert B. Reich, Chole Wyma, and Ron Rosenbaum express their concern about “Culture in an Age of Money.” This was during the conservative Reagan era. They tell stories of the counterculture’s being co-opted by cyberculture. Meanwhile, writers such as Steven Kelman, Robert Lekachman, and Paul Berman see the danger of counterculture’s losing its critical edge in its accommodation with cyberculture. A tension between the post-Sixties narrative of “co-option” and that of “co-operation” thus takes form. Both of them share the same Sixties’ trope of “Bohemia,” but with different narrative logics.
