Some thoughts on American Graffiti (spoilers)

[The Mollusk]

Saw this for the first time last night and enjoyed it a great deal. Moreover, though, maybe it was the beer and hot weather bringing it out of me, but I couldn't help getting sucked into what I viewed as a (perhaps unintentionally) ghostly emptiness almost akin to a dreamlike state that felt not dissimilar from the work of David Lynch.

On the surface, it works wonderfully as a coming of age film (to which "Dazed and Confused" knowingly owes a great deal), but there's a sort of "beyond" vibe to it which definitely stems in part from the classic teenage tropes of not quite knowing who you are or who you should become as you mature into adulthood, but even outside of that, the direction of the film adds to this feeling. It's almost entirely shot at night, outdoors in sparse or dim lighting, and there's a constant background noise of either car engines or haunting doo-wop/very bizarre radio DJ patter or both at once, which altogether creates an atmosphere which is fuzzy, hard to get the full picture, not knowing precisely where people are... it's surreal and a times almost a little bewildering.

Unlike "Dazed and Confused" which is very directly funny and sentimental, "American Graffiti" chooses to hold back on that stuff, and where "Dazed" makes the viewer feel as though they want to be in the cars with those kids ans experiencing the night with them, "Graffiti" feels more like you're hovering over the top of those cars but with no way of looking around and observing any of the surroundings.

The scene where Toad and Debbie have parked the car off in the trees somewhere felt almost like a film noir, like "Night of the Hunter", how the camera woozily pans into the car from the trees and we see an unknown figure walk past the window when they're in the back seat. It's fucking weird.

At the end of the film, after the sun comes up and Harrison Ford crashes his car (a scene which genuinely gave me the impression that I'd been awake all night, it was quite a startlingly bleary-eyed feeling) and Curt fucks off on the plane, the weirdest bit of the whole film is the inclusion of the text summaries on screen of what became of the four leading men in later life. OH YEAH JOHN DIED BY THE WAY. This got a big laugh and a "what the fuck" out of me. Really strange.

Great film but I can't help thinking I enjoyed it for some of the wrong reasons. Am I alone in having these reactions to this?

[Avril Lavigne]

Great post and you're not alone in feeling that way about the movie, although I've never articulated those same thoughts quite as well, because when recommending it to people I usually talk about the focus on low-key character interaction over plot, something you really don't expect from George Lucas.

It's one of my all-time favourites and it's thick with a haunting atmosphere in a way that makes it something more than just a good 'nostalgia' or 'hangout' movie.  I first saw it when I was a kid due to my Mom being a fan, and since then I've never been able to separate 'I Only Have Eyes For You' by The Flamingos from the weird witching-hour vibe of the aforementioned Toad and Debbie scene where everything's bathed in that dreamlike blue light, which I think was just natural moonlight because they shot everything real fast, guerilla style, without permits.  In fact that song can immediately put me in the headspace of all the quieter parts of the movie, such as Curt meeting

Spoiler alert

Wolfman Jack

[close]

.

When I screened it to a friend on a summer night probably 10 years ago, I remember both of us agreeing afterwards that it left us wanting to take a walk and just listen to the sounds of the city at midnight, though we didn't because we live in a total shithole.

Don't watch 'More American Grafitti', it's an absolute mess that jumps back & forth in a non-linear chronology across different years in different locations and doesn't even attempt to capture the same tone. It also retcons at least one of the characters' fates from the end of the original.

[kalowski]

The original much better than the special edition, where Lucas added CGI creatures in the background and deleted Toad's bottle of Old Harper.

[mothman]

OK, it's the Guardian, sorry, but this raises some interesting points (but which failed to change my opinion of the film).

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/jul/05/hear-me-out-more-american-graffiti-isnt-a-bad-movie

Was AG the first big fifties/sixties nostalgia movie? Which makes it all the more odd - it's a 1973 film harking back to the halcyon days of *checks notes* eleven years before. It'd be like a 2021 film getting all dewy-eyed about 2010 (though now I say that, I just know one of you will come up with an example).

[Avril Lavigne]

OK, it's the Guardian, sorry, but this raises some interesting points (but which failed to change my opinion of the film).

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/jul/05/hear-me-out-more-american-graffiti-isnt-a-bad-movie

Was AG the first big fifties/sixties nostalgia movie? Which makes it all the more odd - it's a 1973 film harking back to the halcyon days of *checks notes* eleven years before. It'd be like a 2021 film getting all dewy-eyed about 2010 (though now I say that, I just know one of you will come up with an example).

Thanks for the link mothman, it looks like an interesting read.  The first movie that comes to mind re: the surprisingly short gap for nostalgia, would be 1998's The Wedding Singer which came out only 13 years after its setting of 1985.  So the 2021 equivalent would be set in 2008 and have the lead character singing now-retro hits such as Viva La Vida and Poker Face.

[Shit Good Nose]

Was AG the first big fifties/sixties nostalgia movie? Which makes it all the more odd - it's a 1973 film harking back to the halcyon days of *checks notes* eleven years before. It'd be like a 2021 film getting all dewy-eyed about 2010 (though now I say that, I just know one of you will come up with an example).

You have to remember that a LOT changed in America over a very short time pretty much from the minute they went to Vietnam, even moreso than in the rest of the Western world - films, music, fashion, cars all changed drastically in the course of a few years, as did the country's entire cultural and political landscape.  The whole film is alluding to America completely losing its "innocence" by 1969/70 and it's VERY interesting if you compare American films made in 1964 with some of those made just two years later (even before Bonnie and Clyde) - absolutely universes apart in many cases.  Compare two films made in 2010 and this year and nothing really looks or sounds that different.

[mothman]

Good point. And yet, it's a period that shows no signs of dropping out of popular culture. Even now there are movies and TV still lionising that late fifties/early sixties golden age. 22/11/63 being one that springs to mind.

Recently, I read a SF/fantasy book called Replay in which a man dies - and finds himself reliving his life from his early 20s when he was a student. In the early sixties. "Because of course he fucking does," I thought. It's become such a cliche. "Oh, the ate fifties/early sixties was such a golden age for America, before the Kennedy assassination robbed us of our innocence..." they say. "OK boomer" says everyone else. In fact the book in question turned out to have been published in 1988, but still...

[The Mollusk]

Great post and you're not alone in feeling that way about the movie, although I've never articulated those same thoughts quite as well, because when recommending it to people I usually talk about the focus on low-key character interaction over plot, something you really don't expect from George Lucas.

It's one of my all-time favourites and it's thick with a haunting atmosphere in a way that makes it something more than just a good 'nostalgia' or 'hangout' movie.  I first saw it when I was a kid due to my Mom being a fan, and since then I've never been able to separate 'I Only Have Eyes For You' by The Flamingos from the weird witching-hour vibe of the aforementioned Toad and Debbie scene where everything's bathed in that dreamlike blue light, which I think was just natural moonlight because they shot everything real fast, guerilla style, without permits.  In fact that song can immediately put me in the headspace of all the quieter parts of the movie, such as Curt meeting

Spoiler alert

Wolfman Jack

[close]

.

When I screened it to a friend on a summer night probably 10 years ago, I remember both of us agreeing afterwards that it left us wanting to take a walk and just listen to the sounds of the city at midnight, though we didn't because we live in a total shithole.

Don't watch 'More American Grafitti', it's an absolute mess that jumps back & forth in a non-linear chronology across different years in different locations and doesn't even attempt to capture the same tone. It also retcons at least one of the characters' fates from the end of the original.

Nice one! Very much appreciate this reply, it has scratched an itch in my brain.

[Chedney Honks]

You have to remember that a LOT changed in America over a very short time pretty much from the minute they went to Vietnam, even moreso than in the rest of the Western world - films, music, fashion, cars all changed drastically in the course of a few years, as did the country's entire cultural and political landscape.  The whole film is alluding to America completely losing its "innocence" by 1969/70 and it's VERY interesting if you compare American films made in 1964 with some of those made just two years later (even before Bonnie and Clyde) - absolutely universes apart in many cases.  Compare two films made in 2010 and this year and nothing really looks or sounds that different.

Great post.

[Smeraldina Rima]

I had watched this way back when I was too young and just rewatched it on 'flix. Probably still a bit high on it, but I loved every minute. This Roger Ebert review from the time is a good time capsule of how 1962 was seen in 1973:

My first car was a '54 Ford and I bought it for $435. It wasn't scooped, channeled, shaved, decked, pinstriped, or chopped, and it didn't have duals, but its hubcaps were a wonder to behold.

On weekends my friends and I drove around downtown Urbana -- past the Princess Theater, past the courthouse -- sometimes stopping for a dance at the youth center or a hamburger at the Steak 'n' Shake ("In Sight, It Must Be Right"). And always we listened to Dick Biondi on WLS. Only two years earlier, WLS had been the Prairie Farmer Station; now it was the voice of rock all over the Midwest.

When I went to see George Lucas's "American Graffiti" that whole world -- a world that now seems incomparably distant and innocent -- was brought back with a rush of feeling that wasn't so much nostalgia as culture shock. Remembering my high school generation, I can only wonder at how unprepared we were for the loss of innocence that took place in America with the series of hammer blows beginning with the assassination of President Kennedy.

The great divide was November 22, 1963,and nothing was ever the same again. The teenagers in "American Graffiti" are, in a sense, like that cartoon character in the magazine ads: the one who gives the name of his insurance company, unaware that an avalanche is about to land on him. The options seemed so simple then: to go to college, or to stay home and look for a job and cruise Main Street and make the scene.

The options were simple, and so was the music that formed so much of the way we saw ourselves. "American Graffiti"'s sound track is papered from one end to the other with Wolfman Jack's nonstop disc jockey show, that's crucial and absolutely right. The radio was on every waking moment. A character in the movie only realizes his car, parked nearby, has been stolen when he hears the music stop: He didn't hear the car being driven away.

The music was as innocent as the time. Songs like "Sixteen Candles" and "Gonna Find Her" and "The Book of Love" sound touchingly naive today; nothing prepared us for the decadence and the aggression of rock only a handful of years later. The Rolling Stones of 1972 would have blown WLS off the air in 1962.

"American Graffiti" acts almost as a milestone to show us how far (and in many cases how tragically) we have come. Stanley Kauffmann, who liked it, complained in the New Republic that Lucas had made a film more fascinating to the generation now between thirty and forty than it could be for other generations, older or younger.

But it isn't the age of the characters that matters; it's the time they inhabited. Whole cultures and societies have passed since 1962. "American Graffiti" is not only a great movie but a brilliant work of historical fiction; no sociological treatise could duplicate the movie's success in remembering exactly how it was to be alive at that cultural instant.

On the surface, Lucas has made a film that seems almost artless; his teenagers cruise Main Street and stop at Mel's Drive-In and listen to Wolfman Jack on the radio and neck and lay rubber and almost convince themselves their moment will last forever. But the film's buried structure shows an innocence in the process of being lost, and as its symbol Lucas provides the elusive blonde in the white Thunderbird -- the vision of beauty always glimpsed at the next intersection, the end of the next street.

Who is she? And did she really whisper "I love you" at the last traffic signal? In "8 1/2," Fellini used Claudia Cardinale as his mysterious angel in white, and the image remains one of his best; but George Lucas knows that for one brief afternoon of American history angels drove Thunderbirds and could possibly be found at Mel's Drive-In tonight... or maybe tomorrow night, or the night after.

I wondered whether you had more to say about this:

Great film but I can't help thinking I enjoyed it for some of the wrong reasons. Am I alone in having these reactions to this?

Or if that just goes back to being unsure if you were meant to find it so dreamlike. I had similar feelings. Probably a bit because of the recent thread about Don't Look Now where water and reflections are everywhere I was preoccupied with the blurs and reflective lights here, and the mirrors in bathrooms, sweat glistening on faces etc. Roger Ebert's review suggests he recognised of a lot of what goes on as being fairly realistic for the period, but it also seemed hyper-realistic, like a toy town road where everyone can swap cars or passengers (and then get trapped with their choices) and talk to each other and where the traffic cop stopping John's car seems more like a school teacher stopping a student in the corridor.

I thought the car windows were like mini-movie screens, and Curt and Toad saw their movie stars through them and wanted the girls to come to life. Debbie doesn't respond until she appreciates being compared to Connie Stevens, then sticks her head through the window and compares herself to Sandra Dee, then later sees John as just like the Lone Ranger.

The music is good as a period snapshot and soundtrack, sometimes really pointed but not limited to defining or adding irony to every scene. It seemed to float from the real car radios into a less real background music sometimes - becoming most dreamlike when Curt gets kicked out of the car and The Regents' "Barbara Ann" goes quieter and louder as he's running in the street between bright lights and cars.

I liked how John's youth is already slipping away, with Carol liking the newer surf music of The Beach Boys and old John there feeling like Rock n Roll died with Buddy Holly a couple of years earlier. Those cultural references marking a few years made me think of Five Easy Pieces. It was made in 1970 and a lot of the soundtrack is based around Tammy Wynette's D-I-V-O-R-C-E album and the next single "Stand By Your Man" from 1968, with the waitress character Rayette being a big fan and dreaming of being a country music star. It's hard to imagine a film made now finding such a landmark musical reference point from 1 or 2 years earlier to create meaning around.

There were a lot of moments that gave me strong emotional reactions since everything feels like it's equally close to danger and joy. Laurie's relationship with remembering got to me. Early on she keeps track of Steve's conversation/dictation, then when she tells him about their first kiss she says "Oh boy you don't remember anything do you!" then starts to cry but also clings on to him physically.

Other sudden mood changes I liked: the liquor store gunshot; the water balloon and then spraying the car; Curt being threatened.

I'm in the mood now to watch other films in a similar ballpark: The Richard Linklater films mentioned; the Barry Levinson Baltimore films set in the recent past decades, especially Diner; and the 1983 Francis Ford Coppola films based on Susan Eliose Hinton's 60s set novels: The Outsiders and Rumble Fish. Fast Times at Ridgemont High was made in 1982, based on Cameron Crowe's 1981 novel that is apparently based on his observations from 1979:

In the fall of 1979 Cameron Crowe at 22 years of age walked into the office of Principal William Gray's office and asked permission to attend classes for the full length of the school year to research a book he was to write of his experiences inside the walls of Ridgemont High and Redondo Beach, California. This is the day-by-day journal of horny and wasted semi-blank adults who don't know a thing about their future.

Small thing: I didn't think it was clear that John was really losing his race. Seemed like it would be a more usual reading that Toad was naive about John winning and John knew that he wasn't, but it was pretty close and I didn't think Bob Falfa took the lead. So I took it more as John becoming too down on himself and all out of confidence by the end.

Anyway, thanks for starting this thread.

[bgmnts]

The loss of American innocence after dropping nukes on Japan, numerous wars and an ongoing cold wars.

Mad.

[Shit Good Nose]

The loss of American innocence after dropping nukes on Japan, numerous wars and an ongoing cold wars.

Mad.

You have to look back at it in the context of the time and you can't retrospectively apply current opinion to it - bombing Japan was seen (by the Americans) as finishing the second world war, whilst the cold wars with Korea and Russia were keeping the reds well away from the door.   Back home you had an enormous post-war boom where kids could own their own cars and look forward to doing something other than being sent to a foreign country to get killed (remember the Vietnam war hasn't started yet), crime is at an all-time low, employment is at an all-time high, the great depression is a long distant memory and the US of A doesn't have to rely on any other country.  Things start to go down the shitter in 63 and just get worse and worse, and by The time you get to 66/67/68 pretty much every American with an ounce of brain matter can see that the Vietnam war is an epic wrongdoing.  And then all that comes back home and infects the rest of the country and you get Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy seen off, the DNC riots in Chicago, Altamont, the Kent State shootings, successive recessions etc etc, so by 1970 the whole country is fucked in one way or another (sound familiar?).  And then Nixon comes along to seal the deal.

[The Culture Bunker]

You have to look back at it in the context of the time and you can't retrospectively apply current opinion to it - bombing Japan was seen (by the Americans) as finishing the second world war, whilst the cold wars with Korea and Russia were keeping the reds well away from the door.   Back home you had an enormous post-war boom where kids could own their own cars and look forward to doing something other than being sent to a foreign country to get killed (remember the Vietnam war hasn't started yet)

Between WWII and Vietnam, there was still the proper war in Korea, though - 36,000 US dead, according to Wiki.

[Shit Good Nose]

Between WWII and Vietnam, there was still the proper war in Korea, though - 36,000 US dead, according to Wiki.

Yep, but still seen by most Americans as the right thing to do to keep them safe.  Remember people still generally trusted their government at that point where even the Bay of Pigs business didn't seem like much of a thing (in relative terms [a key phrase here] at the time).  After WW2, Korea seemed like a mere skirmish.

[greenman]

OK, it's the Guardian, sorry, but this raises some interesting points (but which failed to change my opinion of the film).

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/jul/05/hear-me-out-more-american-graffiti-isnt-a-bad-movie

Was AG the first big fifties/sixties nostalgia movie? Which makes it all the more odd - it's a 1973 film harking back to the halcyon days of *checks notes* eleven years before. It'd be like a 2021 film getting all dewy-eyed about 2010 (though now I say that, I just know one of you will come up with an example).

A period of much more rapid cultural shift I spose, I mean nostalgia for rock and roll in music had been around since the late 60's with bands doing beef up hard rock Little Richard and Elvis covers.

[The Culture Bunker]

Yep, but still seen by most Americans as the right thing to do to keep them safe.  Remember people still generally trusted their government at that point where even the Bay of Pigs business didn't seem like much of a thing (in relative terms [a key phrase here] at the time).  After WW2, Korea seemed like a mere skirmish.

I was thinking more that it was a pretty short window of time where young American lads didn't have to worry about being drafted and packed off to Asia, from when the US left Korea to Vietnam beginning. MASH aside, you never used to hear much about Korea, maybe still don't - I think I'm right in saying, however, like Clint Eastwood's character in 'Gran Torino' is (even in old age) haunted by his memories of fighting there.

Perhaps if you were going to do a British version of American Graffiti, it would be set around the time the dream ended over there - the mid/late 60s. My dad (born 1953) once said the change as he saw it was that his was the first generation where you got to a certain age and didn't automatically start dressing exactly as your old man did.

[mothman]

Picking up on bgmnts's post, there was a fuck of a lot wrong with the world in 1963. All of which your average American was ignorant, and prefers to stay to this day. They're hung up on this "loss of innocence" thing. The most pampered generation in human history, who then revolted against everything their parents had stood for and done (for them)... only to then try their hardest ever since to deny subsequent generations any modicum iof what they'd had. The whole lot of them can rot in hell as far as I'm concerned, and so I'll always roll my eyes a bit at media set during this period, however good (AG, Stand By Me, It...).

I don't think there's any comparable period since that matches this idealised golden age they cling to, or event to bookmark its ending. Some talk about the 1990s, "from the fall of the Wall to the fall of the towers" as Iain Banks put it. But we all knew about, were aware of, the Rwandan Genocide, the Yugoslav wars. We knew the end of the Cold War had t really changed anything.

[13 schoolyards]

Even at the time this whole "golden age" thing was pretty selective memory - teaching kids to duck and cover under their desks because the Commies might nuke your cities at any moment wasn't exactly part of an idyllic childhood. There was a lot of talk even at the time about the oppressive conformity of the 50s as well. The 60s was as much about a repressive cultural pressure cooker finally exploding as it was the horrors of Vietnam messing with everyone's brains

It's been ages since I last saw it, but I remember thinking that American Graffiti was pretty clearly tapping into 70s nostalgia, not presenting a nuanced take on the actual American culture of the actual 50s.