The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties

by J. Hoberman

In what the New York Times 's A.O. Scott called a "suave, scholarly tour de force," J. Hoberman delivers a brilliant and witty look at the decade when politics and pop culture became one. This was the era of the Missile Gap and the Space Race, the Black and Sexual Revolutions, the Vietnam War and Watergate―as well as the tele-saturation of the American market and the advent of Pop art. In "elegant, epigrammatic prose," as Scott put it, Hoberman moves from the political histories of movies to the theater of wars, national political campaigns, and pop culture events. With entertaining reinterpretations of key Hollywood movies (such as Bonnie and Clyde , The Wild Bunch , and Shampoo ), and meditations on personages from Che Guevara, John Wayne, and Patty Hearst to Jane Fonda, Ronald Reagan, and Dirty Harry, Hoberman reconstructs the hidden political history of 1960s cinema and the formation of America's mass-mediated politics.

Genres: Film, History, Nonfiction, Media Tie In, Politics, United States, Cultural Studies

400 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Author bio from Verso Press:

J. Hoberman served as the senior film critic at The Village Voice from 1988-2012. He has taught at Harvard, NYU, and Cooper Union, and is the author of ten books, including Bridge of Light, The Red Atlantis, and The Dream Life.

Reviews

[Craig Werner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mixed bag. On one hand, this is as good a book as I've been able to find about the relationship between film and what was happening during America during the Sixties. Hoberman tracks the historical arc from the Kennedy years through Vietnam, the counterculture and Black Power to the sad collapse of the Nixon years. I like his typology of film archetypes that come into play as the story unfolds: The Hollywood Freedom Fighter (represented in different forms by Spartacus and John Wayne in The Alamo); the Secret Agent of History (the Manchurian Candidate refracting Lee Harvey Oswald); The Righteous Outlaw (the Easy Riders, Bonnie and Clyde); the Legal Vigilante (Dirty Harry, Joe); and The Sixties Survivor (Shampoo). The book's filled with interesting juxtapositions between movie production, release and what was happening politically.

Despite the strengths, I found the book slightly unsatisfying. Part of it has to do with Hoberman relentless American (and to an extent, English) focus. While it's true that the logics of American moviemaking and politics were locked in a strange dance with Hollywood and a few independent films, there's now way to make sense of cinema in the Sixties without paying attention to Bergman, Godard, Fellini, and Kurosawa, to mention only the most obvious cases. And there are some huge gaps even in Hoberman's American filmography. He glosses over The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy, MASH, They Shoot Horses Don't They, several of which would seem to work well with his typology. In addition, he's obsessed with westerns--treating almost every release as an important political event--and some movies that don't, to my mind, deserve the extended attention, particularly Shampoo.

Worth the read, but not definitive.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

My kind of apocalyptic politi-tainment paranoia as cultural criticism concerning my favorite era of American history, but often selective in its analyzed texts and clustered and confused heading into the home stretch (the Ford and Carter administrations are barely alluded to). Also, the long passages detailing the production histories of films like Myra Breckinridge and Pat Garett and Billy the Kid are largely unnecessary.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hoberman puts an interesting spin on American history, showing how the movies influenced politics and politics influenced the movies over the course of the thirteen years he considers the sixties to have been. Hoberman's film criticism was always something I liked to read in the Village Voice's classic period, and it's great to have found a book by him, even if it's some weird amalgamation of cultural criticism and history.
Running from the opposition of Spartacus and the Alamo in 1960 to what Hoberman calls the last 60s movie, Blow-Out in 1981, he describes the differences in spirit between the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon presidencies not just through their actions, but through the movies of their time. Kennedy loved James Bond, Johnson epitomized the changing face of westerns, and Nixon worshipped Patton. Hoberman's prose is playful, albeit ready to slip into the darkness that haunts so much of the story he tells.

[Alex Abbott · Rating 5 out of 5]

pretty much scratches every itch I’ve had for the past year

[Korey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Never have I ever read the word "Orgy" so many times in an academic context.

[Bryan Cebulski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent and entertaining. Love the idea of telling history through pop culture representation. Unfortunately saturated with unneeded footnotes, but at least they're easy to skip.

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first volume in J. Hoberman's trilogy about the symbiotic relationship between Hollywood filmmaking and political image-making in post-WWII 20th Century America, The Dream Life focuses on the 1960s. Like the final volume, Make My Day, which was about the '80s but began in 1975 and ended with the early days of the Trump administration, The Dream Life's scope extends beyond the decade in question, beginning in the waning days of the Eisenhower presidency and ending with an analysis of Brian De Palma's 1981 film Blow Out as a postmodern summation/deflation of '60s idealism and paranoia condensed and transformed for the self-centered '80s. Hoberman is a great film critic, but he's also a damn good historian, essayist, and psychogeographer of the American image, presenting a methodical, chronological account of major and minor historical events, presidential politics, elections and campaigns, and social and pop cultural trends and their reflection and manufacture in Hollywood during the JFK, LBJ, and Nixon administrations, with a particular emphasis on paranoid political thrillers, revisionist and reactionary Westerns, and youth culture movies like Easy Rider. Hoberman's key film texts include Spartacus, The Alamo, Dr. Strangelove, The Manchurian Candidate, The Magnificent Seven, The Chase, The Dirty Dozen, Bonnie and Clyde, Patton (Nixon was obsessed with the film), McClintock, The Wild Bunch, The Green Berets, Easy Rider, Myra Breckinridge, Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, Dirty Harry, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and Shampoo, among many others. Like I said in my review of Make My Day, Hoberman's subject here is the USA of imagination, mythology, fantasy, and nostalgia manifested as real-world ideology.

[Brad B · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. The Dream Life is very much as described, a cultural history through the prism of the film industry, rather than a conventional film history. One result is that many "important" films of the 1960s are not discussed, because they do not apply to Hoberman's mission statement. However, if you are interested in how movies both reflected and influenced politics and the national (U.S.) thinking during the Cold War, then this is the book to read. A couple of nitpicks. The references section is awkwardly structured, so sources can be a bit of a pain to identify. Also, Hoberman seems to lose his mind a bit in the final chapter and drops names, events, and movie titles more breathlessly than Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire." More significantly, Hoberman implies at one point that counterculture violence against police was a serious threat, when in fact law enforcement throughout the country nearly always instigated violence against peaceful demonstrators. (Read the America in the King Years series by Taylor Branch or Set the Night on Fire by Mike Davis and Jon Wiener for a good introduction to the subject.) All in all, however, this movie buff found The Dream Life fascinating, and I look forward to reading the next two volumes in Hoberman's Found Illusions trilogy.

[Landen Celano · Rating 5 out of 5]

Albeit a little narrow in its focus at times – there has to be more influence and influenced than paranoid thrillers and westerns, right? – this intermingling of history and cinema is a fantastic exploration of how we contextualize and have conversations between society and the powers that be. Can’t wait to dive into the next book in this “trilogy” with Army of Phantoms. Hopefully it’ll expand beyond quoting Norman Mailer as much as this one did.

[Cian · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is why Hoberman is unmatched. A delerious ride through the long sixties and its longer hangover, which casts the movies of the era as America's dreaming subconscious. Beautiful passage where Kennedy watches Spartacus, then taking the world by storm, its slave rebellion a not-so-cloaked critique of McCarthyism. He declares it "fine," and the following day he finalises plans for the Bay of Pigs.

[GwenViolet · Rating 4 out of 5]

Listened to an interview with Hoberman where exhibited a kind of retrospective epiphany that the protagonist of his trilogy is Reagan, and honestly once read from that standpoint, he, like an Old Hollywood b-movie villian, becomes sort of inevitable.

[G Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a must-read for any person who considers themselves a cinaste. It's scope is wide and very detailed.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[J. Fakename · Rating 5 out of 5]

I eat these Hoberman histories like cake.

[Todd Stockslager · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review title: Parallel timeline of movies and politics
This is essentially an extended critical review of a selection of movies roughly bracketed by the 1960s, wherein J. Hoberman attempts to show how movies mirrored (or drove; the cause/effect linkage is never clearly defined) the politics of the time. Hoberman anchors the time in the latter part of the 1950s, citing a few movies to show the normalcy of the era, and the abruptness and sharpness of the transition to the 1960 election--and the explosive change in movies that would occur starting then and continuing throughout the decade.

This decade is a propitious choice. Politics were literally explosive--Vietnam abroad, civil rights rallies and anti-Vietnam riots at home, assassinations of the Kennedys and King, violence in the street, generational violence in the home, sit-ins and shutdowns in the schools. And the changes in movies were also explosive--the end of the star system, the rise of the anti-hero, the increase in violence, sex, and realism (to some; vulgarity to others) on the screen.

So Hoberman tracks the parallel timelines, with the awkward and frequently annoying attempt to relate every significant date on one track to an event in the other. We get the point, and in fact a graphical timeline showing rough synchronicity would have been a better device to prove his point, instead of forced comparisons of events at specific dates.

Because the other issue I have here is that Hoberman merely presents his data, but makes no attempt to identify key linkages. Did movies drive politics, or merely reflect them? What were the specific mechanisms? What was the chronology? I found myself confused that at times, to maintain his chapter organization Hoberman had to refer to movies out of release order, which was confusing as I thought that Hoberman had been trying to show how the movies built on one another along with the political events they tracked, and losing that sequence completely befuddles any cause/effect relationship that Hoberman might have established.

The idea is an interesting one, and the connections between the movies and the politics are unquestionable (and indeed no longer even unquestioned by us now living 50 years into the media age). And there sure were some bad movies made in that decade, perhaps because movie makers (directors, actors, writers) were working with political purposes--although Hoberman never really argues that clearly. He's more interested in the movies as a critic of the art of movies, not as a historian of either movies or politics.

If you are a fan of movie criticism, particularly of movies from the 1960s, this might be of interest to you. Otherwise, this is probably a pass.

[Graham Carter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cinematically in the sixties the action was happening overseas with the French, Italians and Polish, and later the Germans and Czechs... but J Hoberman reminds me that in the United States the gold was rare, but what gold there was was extraordinary, such as 'Medium Cool.' But more interesting, it puts a new light on a stodgy studio film like 'McClintock!' (exclamation mark part of title).

Hoberman is interesting to me as he is more historian than film critic, and when writing about a chaotic decade such as the sixties it is helpful to place the movies in their era. Broadly the book covers history from the election of Kennedy through to the deposing of Nixon... a time of rebellion, violence and nihilism. Warren Beatty features large in the narrative, largely through the fact that 'Bonnie & Clyde,' 'The Parallax View' and 'Shampoo' comfortably track the political mood as it happened. The focus on Westerns I initially found surprising, but it ended up illustrating very well Americas bi-polar rebelliousness / conservatism; and finally helped me understand the love of guns as political belief.

Interestingly I started reading Norman Mailer's 1973 'Marilyn' (he pops up in The Dream Life a few times), and his story contains the passage "...what a jolt to the dream life of the nation that their angel died of an overdose..." interesting because I hadn't really come across the phrase The Dream Life before. Highly recommended.

[Chris Marston · Rating 4 out of 5]

Comprehensive history. Equal parts political history and media history. But I guess that's the point. This is when the line between politics and entertainment blurred, and Hoberman does a great job charting the feedback loop that started to form around the time JFK came to power. Does that line even exist today? The book covers the period of 1960-1974. It's at times a dizzying collection of dates, places, people and events. But it creates the necessary impression that nothing that happened during that tumultuous time occurred in a vacuum. I'd love to read an updated version of this for the Trump era. Here Hoberman lays out a clear history that allows the reader to see how a figure like Trump becoming president was not only possible, but perhaps inevitable.

[Noah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simply put, the best book I have ever read about the US in the '60's-early 70's. I will go into greater detail in the near future, but I want to gather my thoughts so I can do justice to this amazing book. One thing I can say: this book will terrify you & destroy any ideas you may of had about what the US is as a nation & an idea.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

"This is the way the the 1960s end. December 1969 reeks of blood and the memory of blood."

"Who controls the Reality Studio? Whose fantasy is projected onto the screen? What does the nation decide to remember and what shall it agree to forget?"

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

I need to come back to this one in a less busy time... interesting examination of the history & politics of the 1960s through the lens of the films of the period.

I got about halfway through before it needed to go back to the library.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating look at "the decade when politics and pop culture became one," by one of the greatest film critics writing today.

[Nora]

Fairly interesting, but also hard to follow because the chronology skips around, even within chapters. I'll just keep reading Hoberman's reviews.

[Rupert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Despite the interesting subject a bit of a snooze.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating cultural and politcal history.