The tectonics of the cultural vernacular

by David Benjamin

“I’m from Milwaukee and I oughta know
“It’s draft-brewed Blatz beer, wherever you go.
“Smoother, fresher, less filling—that’s clear!
“Blatz is Milwaukee’s finest beer!”

MADISON, Wis.—I once told my favorite barista—her name is Sam and she charts horoscopes—that she reminds me of Louise Brooks. Of course, she’d never heard of Louise Brooks, whose last film role was in Overland Stage Raiders in 1938. But Sam loves old movies, so I loaded her mobile phone with Charlie Chaplin and Paulette Goddard. I found her a photo of Theda Bara and told her about Maureen O’Sullivan’s pre-Code nude scene in Tarzan and His Mate. The other day, I warned her that if she risked watching Random Harvest, she would fall in love with Ronald Coleman and go all weepy at the end.

The irony is that I haven’t actually gone to the movies, in a theater, in a few years. But this isn’t unusual. Although people appear to be consuming lots of film, they don’t go to the movies as much as once we did. They stay home and stream.

An exception to the trend is our British friend, also a Sam, who’s been the off-and-on house-sitter in our Paris apartment. One of the secret treasures of the Latin Quarter is an abundance of small cinemas playing second-, third- and twentieth-run movies, with stars like Sterling Hayden, Marlene Dietrich, Robert Ryan and, yeah, Louise Brooks. Unlike the shuttered Main Street movie houses of the USA, these little theaters survive on modest subsidies from the French government, which treats film as a cultural eucharist. Sam has access to our library of several hundred movie DVDs, but he prefers to sit in the dark among strangers with sticky floors and a bag of popcorn.

I know the feeling. I’m pretty sure I was the first kid in my class at St. Mary’s School to go to the movies alone and parent-free. One night, in the dark solitude of the Erwin Theater, I learned about Hitler’s Final Solution. It unfolded before my eyes in a harrowing documentary called Mein Kampf, compiled by Erwin Leiser from the snuff-porn video library of Josef Paul Goebbels. I had nightmares for weeks and couldn’t tell anyone what I’d seen.

By myself, at age eleven, I watched The Mouse That Roared, Calamity Jane and Journey to the Center of the Earth—repeatedly. If a kid went to the Erwin for the first screening on a Saturday, he could watch the movie five times before midnight. When I was in high school, in Madison, I had a bonanza of movie houses, plus the Big Sky Drive-In, With friends, or by myself, I soaked up Zorba the Greek, Lilies of the Field and Black Orpheus. At the Eastwood Theater, I watched—and derided—Annette and Frankie in the Beach Party flicks and saw all the available Connery Bonds. To get into Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, which was X-rated and I was only sixteen, I hounded Mom into signing a notarized permission letter that I presented to the manager of the Capitol Theater.

But then, in the Sixties, I was partaking unconsciously in a tectonic shift of popular culture. When Chaplin and Frank Capra were directing and Louise Brooks was lifting the cinematic lid on Pandora’s Box, everyone went to the movies and absorbed its language. In one year of Hollywood’s heyday, two phrases from the movies became permanent metaphors in our vernacular:

“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

“Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”

Everyone knew (except Capt. Renault) that there was gambling at Rick’s. Everyone knew how Rita Hayworth smiled when she tossed her hair back and in which movie she did it. Everyone knew that Rosebud was a sled, that Lew Ayres died in the trenches, that Smithy’s real name was Charles Rainier, that the pellet with the poison’s in the vessel with the pestle, and that George Bailey was the richest man in town.

At midcentury, however, the cultural plates were grinding toward television. The language of casual conversation, although still dense with film references, was equally influenced by the tube. TV’s three broadcast networks had “prime time” audiences in the tens of millions. The new television season, launched in September simultaneous with the new school year, was a milestone on the calendar comparable to Thanksgiving and Election Day.

In this new era of visual media, everyone knew Lucy Ricardo and Beaver Cleaver, Jed Clampett and Rob Petrie, Marshal Dillon and Lucas McCain. There wasn’t a ten-year-old boy in America who didn’t go to bed on Saturday night regarding himself as “a knight without armor in a savage land.”

And there was barely a family in all America who didn’t watch Ed Sullivan on Sunday. Sullivan, a New York entertainment columnist turned the TV “variety show” into an art form. Thanks to him, Topo Gigio, Señor Wences, Roberta Peters and half the Borsht Belt comedians in New York became household names. The Supremes were on “Ed Sullivan” seventeen times! In Michael Stewart’s 1960 Broadway musical, Bye Bye Birdie, a song called “Hymn to a Sunday Night” included the lyrics, “Ed Sullivan, Ed Sullivan!/ We’re gonna be on Ed Sullivan!/ How could any fam’ly be/ Half as fortunate as we?/ We’ll be coast to coast,/ With our fav’rite host!/ Ed Sullivan!/ Ed Sullivan, Ed Sullivan!/ We’re gonna be on Ed Sullivan!”

The pinnacle of the culture’s tectonic shift from the movies toward TV was February 9, 1964, when the Beatles were gonna be on “Ed Sullivan.” That night, CBS, drew 73.7 million viewers—sixty percent of all the TVs in the United States.

Before the Beatles appeared on Sullivan, I knew (and disdained) them by way of my big sister Peg, who was addicted to Top Forty pop on AM radio (mainly, Dick Biondi on WLS). Fortunately, despite my aversion to Peg’s taste in music, I came around to appreciating that rock’n’ roll—in the mantra of “American Bandstand”—has “a good beat, and it’s easy to dance to.”

Pop music, however, was also subject to cultural tectonics. Just about the time when the Beatles released a thematically contiguous LP, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”—as opposed to an album that was just a bunch of songs—independent FM radio stations began popping up. FM had the freedom to program songs, or entire LPs, that exceeded the three-minute length of a 45rpm disk. This radio revolution not only diminished the influence of the BillBoard Top Forty, it began the fragmentation of pop. Where once Nancy Sinatra and Steve Lawrence coexisted with Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, there emerged separate fiefdoms with dedicated constituencies. Punk, grunge, hip hop, folk, folk-rock, glam-rock, disco, heavy metal, etc., all had their moment, claimed their niche and filled arenas with phone-glowing zealots.

There will never be another “Woo Woo Ginsberg.”

Lately, when I meet with friends, especially the ones who’ve retired, I receive an inevitable list of must-see TV series that I can stream on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Disney, Apple TV, etc. Many of these series are vastly better scripted, with far higher production quality than Casablanca in the heyday of Hollywood, or the episodes of “The Twilight Zone,” “See It Now” or “Playhouse 90” that drew tens of millions of viewers in the golden age of TV.

But missing from this new age—and probably irretrievable—is the sort of universal familiarity that derived from millions of kids in coonskin caps singing Davy Crockett’s theme song, or Ed Sullivan’s conversations with the “little Italian mouse.” People who have in common these seemingly trivial experiences share them with one another in terms that transcend politics, region, religion, race and social class. This momentary bond, superficial though it seems, opens an escape from the tribalism that marks the latest tectonic shift in our culture.

Think about it. A couple of strangers who can laugh together over the Coke machine scene in Dr. Strangelove, or launch into a spontaneous duet of the Blatz beer jingle can’t really be all that strange.