When Popular Culture Caught Up to the Way We Live Now
28th July 2012
It’s said that most Americans under the age of 30 reflexively dislike movies made before 1970, especially those that were shot in black-and-white. If this is so, I suspect it’s because such films portray an America that no longer exists. Those of us who are a couple of decades older than that well up with intense nostalgia at the sight of that reassuringly familiar place, even the uncomfortable districts that harbored desperate souls hurtling toward a rendezvous with film-noir death. After all, that’s the place where we grew up. For those under 30, though, black-and-white America is an impenetrably strange land peopled with creatures who look like human beings but live in a parallel universe of fedoras, dial telephones, three-channel TV sets and more or less nuclear families.
The key was the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy. That’s when the rot set in, and it’s been downhill ever since.
My father, WWII vet, habitually wore a hat when he went outside until well into the 70s. He bought me one when I was about 14; it sat on the ledge in our front coat closet. Don’t know what ever happened to it.
July 28th, 2012 at 18:46
I got it when he died, along with his other hats.
I gave them to my then-teenage sons, who thought it was way cool to wear a fedora–just retro enough, apparently.