THE FORTY-YEAR ITCH

from The New Yorker by Adam Gopnik

Is much of our culture really determined by things that happened four decades ago? In Comment this week, Adam Gopnik proposes a Golden Forty Year Rule:

When the new season of “Mad Men” began, just a few weeks ago, it carried with it an argument about whether the spell it casts is largely a product of its beautifully detailed early-sixties setting or whether, as Matthew Weiner, its creator, insisted, it’s not backward-looking at all but a product of character, story line, and theme. So it seems time to pronounce a rule about American popular culture: the Golden Forty-Year Rule. The prime site of nostalgia is always whatever happened, or is thought to have happened, in the decade between forty and fifty years past. (And the particular force of nostalgia, one should bear in mind, is not simply that it is a good setting for a story but that it is a good setting for you.)

To cases. In the nineteen-forties—the first decade in which all the major components of mass culture were up and running, even early television—the beloved focus of nostalgia was the innocent aughts of the early century, a time imagined as one of perky girls in long dresses and shy boys in straw hats. “Meet Me in St. Louis,” a film made in 1944 about a fair held in 1904, was perhaps the most lovable of the many forties entertainments set in the aughts, from “The Magnificent Ambersons” to “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” a musical made in 1948 about a song written in 1908. The nineteen-fifties saw lots of movies about the First World War—“The Seven Little Foys,” anyone?—and kicked off our Titanic romance, with “A Night to Remember.” The decade also brought the revival of the jazz of the teens, with the essentially serious music of Joe Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton recast by middle-aged white men in straw boaters and striped jackets as something softer, called Dixieland.

Twenties nostalgia ran right through the nineteen-sixties, beginning with the 1960 TV series “The Roaring 20’s.” In 1966, the very year “Mad Men” has now arrived at, the song that won the Grammy Award for best contemporary recording wasn’t “Good Vibrations” or “Paint It, Black” but the New Vaudeville Band’s twenties megaphone number “Winchester* Cathedral.” Each of the four last great Beatles albums included a twenties-pastiche number: “When I’m Sixty Four,” “Honey Pie,” “Your Mother Should Know,” “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” (Indeed, though Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was supposedly taught to play “twenty years ago today,” its look comes right out of the gazebo-and-brass-band postwar lull.)

The seventies’ affection for the thirties—“The Sting,” “Paper Moon,” and so on—was one of the tonic notes of the decade, while the eighties somehow managed to give the Second World War a golden glow (“Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Empire of the Sun,” “Hope and Glory,” “Biloxi Blues”), helped along by women working on the assembly line (“Swing Shift”). In the nineties, nostalgia for the fifties took a distinctly sumptuary turn: think of the revivalist fad for Hush Puppies and Converse All Stars, or the umpteen variations that the Gap rang on its “Kerouac Wore Khakis” campaign. In “Men in Black,” a perfect piece of nineties entertainment, Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith showed how skinny ties could help defeat even the fiercest extraterrestrials.

Our own aughts arrived with the sixties as their lost Eden, right on schedule. That meant too many sixties-pastiche rock bands to mention (think only of Alex Turner, of Arctic Monkeys, sounding exactly like John Lennon), with the plangent postmodern twist that in some cases the original article was supplying its own nostalgia: there were the Stones and the Beach Boys on long stadium tours, doing their forty-year-old hits as though they were new. With the arrival of “Mad Men,” in 2007 (based on a pilot written earlier in the decade), sixties nostalgia was raised to an appropriately self-conscious and self-adoring forty-year peak.

That takes us to the current day, and, at last, to the reasons behind the rule. What drives the cycle isn’t, in the first instance, the people watching and listening; it’s the producers who help create and nurture the preferred past and then push their work on the audience. Though pop culture is most often performed by the young, the directors and programmers and gatekeepers—the suits who control and create its conditions, who make the calls and choose the players—are, and always have been, largely forty-somethings, and the four-decade interval brings us to a period just before the forty-something was born. Forty years past is the potently fascinating time just as we arrived, when our parents were youthful and in love, the Edenic period preceding the fallen state recorded in our actual memories. Although the stars of “Meet Me in St. Louis” were young, and its audience old and young both, Vincente Minnelli, its director, was born in 1903, just a year before the World’s Fair he made into a paradise. Matthew Weiner, born in 1965, is the baby in his own series. (The key variable behind the Beatles’ fondness for the twenties was the man they were pleasing and teasing: their great producer and arranger, George Martin, born in 1926.)

The forty-year rule is, of course, not immutable, and its cycle carries epicycles within it: the twenty-year cycle, for instance, by which the forty-somethings recall their teen-age years, producing in the seventies a smaller wave of fifties nostalgia to dance demurely alongside the longing for the thirties. But it is the forty-years-on reproduction of a thing that most often proves more concentrated and powerful than the original. Dixieland gets played more than archival jazz; people think that con men listened to Scott Joplin in Cicero in the nineteen-thirties. In the sixties, nobody quite knew that people were smoking or drinking; they just smoked and drank, often miserably, if the novels of the time are to be believed.

And so, if we can hang on, it will be in the twenty-fifties that the manners and meanings of the Obama era will be truly revealed: only then will we know our own essence. A small, attentive child, in a stroller on some Brooklyn playground or Minneapolis street, is already recording the stray images and sounds of this era: Michelle’s upper arms, the baritone crooning sound of NPR, people sipping lattes (which a later decade will know as poison) at 10 A.M.—manners as strange and beautiful as smoking in restaurants and drinking Scotch at 3 P.M. seem to us. A series or a movie must already be simmering in her head, with its characters showing off their iPads and staring at their flat screens: absurdly antiquated and dated, they will seem, but so touching in their aspiration to the absolutely modern. Forty years from now, we’ll know, at last, how we looked and sounded and made love, and who we really were. It will be those stroller children’s return on our investment, and, also, of course, a revenge taken on their time. ♦