The seventies have always been my favourite era. I was born in 1977 so I can't claim to have any conscious experience of them. I'm not nostalgic for them in any conscious way, since I was only a baby. But I'm vicariously nostalgic for them. (Maybe I would have hated them if I'd actually lived through them. Who knows?)
I tried to write about the atmosphere of the seventies in this post, but I'm not sure how successful I was.
The funny thing is, it's the very things that other people hold against the seventies that I like about them. All the Year Zero utopianism of the Sixties was gone-- thank God! I even like the interior decoration, the clothes, the earthen colours, the grunginess.
Aside from the seventies, I love any kind of writing (or analysis) that goes deep into a subject-- beyond the surface, into that which is underlying. I'm constantly frustrated that reviews of films, books, and other works concentrate so much on the foreground (plot, characters, acting, etc.) and so little on the deeper aspects-- theme, ideas, relation to history and current affairs, and so on.
It's exciting to think that, at any moment, we are embedded in a greater drama-- even if we are standing in a supermarket queue or sitting in the barber's.
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ReplyDeleteThe seventies were my teen years, so I recall them very well - both in their superior and inferior aspects.
ReplyDeleteI have a similar nostalgia you do for the 1970s, but about the 1950s - which (again analogously) I was only alive at the tail of.
The 70s seems to me that last time when it was possible to think hard and honestly in the public domain. The 50s were superior in this regard and went deeper - but in the 70s serious "imagining" was mainstream, for a while - as a swansong of Western civilization (so it turns-out).
But there was also great comedy, and especially with a social class basis - it was class based comedy that made (e.g.) Steptoe and Son, Dad's Army, Rising Damp, Likely Lads, Fawlty Towers... and there is nothing of that kind since the 70s.
BTW: Your second link is the same as the first - i.e. the video (which I didn't want to watch) rather than your earlier post (which I did want to read).
Thanks, Bruce. It's funny how our experiences parallel each other like that! I hadn't thought about "serious imagining"--in all honesty I've rarely thought of the seventies in terms of serious debates happening, more in terms of mood and ideas-- more aesthetic than cognitive, perhaps.
DeleteCouldn't agree with you more about the comedy, though, although Dady's Army was never a favourite of my own. But Fawlty Towers, Rising Damp, Reggie Perrin, Likely Lads, and some of the best Carry On films...great stuff.
Apologies for the missing link, and thanks for letting me know, here it is: https://irishpapist.blogspot.com/2022/03/on-atmosphere-iii-seventies.html
Sorry, the above 9.59 AM anonymous was me - Bruce Charlton.
ReplyDelete