ABSTRACT
The conclusion of the book takes a long view of the counterculture as a historical episode, reviewing influential defenses and critiques from the period itself and using them to trace the fortunes of a set of defining motifs, which have been subjected to significant reversals in more recent years. The transformation of the charismatic hero into the figure of the celebrity has taken on a corrective feminist dimension as the experience of women has come to the fore; nevertheless, celebrity remains an ambiguous and amoral phenomenon, as recent political history demonstrates. From a contrasting perspective, although the influence of Marxism has waned, the suspicion of mystery and the critical impulse to demystify its countercultural expressions have, if anything, grown sharper, as witnessed in the exceptionally subtle film adaptation of Young Adam . Similarly, the characteristic countercultural vision of confinement within a controlling system has been eclipsed by the opposing apprehension of being shut out of economic networks, albeit with significant exceptions involving technology and race. Finally, the chapter offers examples of how political questions might be integrated into a more generous account of the experience of narrative, ending with discussions of three twenty-first-century films— Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004), Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016), and Roma (Alfonso Cuarón, 2018)—that have succeeded in reinventing some of the forms of mystery that were so important to the novelists of the postwar counterculture.
