Sunday, Monday, Happy Days

Nathan C.: As you heard earlier in the Sha Na Na helped unleash a ‘50s revival in the late 1960s. But they weren’t the only ones jumping on the ‘50s bandwagon. Daniel Marcus says a ton of ‘60s counterculture rock stars were doing covers of Chuck Berry and Little Richard songs that they loved when they were kids. And although the ‘50s revival started rock music, by the 1970s movies like American Graffiti and TV shows like Happy Days cemented the ‘50s as a moment when America seemed, well, great again.

Daniel Marcus: And that’s when people throughout the country really seem to think of the ‘50s as a touchstone to evade all the problems of the ‘70s Watergate, and the post-Vietnam malaise, and the oil crisis, and the coming down of American reputation and power in the 1970s that the country seemed to experience.

Nathan C.: And in thinking about the ‘50s as a cultural moment, are there specific images, or iconography, or even ways of dress that are particularly well suited for folks to latch back onto in these later decades?

Daniel Marcus: I think the ‘50s, you have to think about, “Well, who’s ‘50s was being remembered or commemorated?” And it was a very narrow band of the essentially white middle class and working class teenagers, who are seen as the emblematic ‘50s inhabitants. So other people did not get that kind of attention. But that’s when you had the rise of this nostalgia for greaser culture, for the Fonz as a cultural icon.

Daniel Marcus: And the ‘50s did supply a lot of very specific cultural markers. You had the rise of rock and roll, which became so important in later decades. So the ‘50s as opposed to ‘20s jazz, the ‘50s seem to still be relevant because it was the origins of rock and roll according to these people. You had the rise of television as a dominant medium. So a lot of the pop culture of the ‘70s, the ‘80s, is seen as stemming from at least the early experiments of the ‘50s.

Nathan C.: So bearing down on the question of rock and roll in music specifically, I mean, what is it about rock and roll that makes it so translatable for later decades in such a point of nostalgia for folks coming afterward?

Daniel Marcus: I think a lot of it has to do with its appeal to adolescence, which is when we create our cultural identities and to a certain extent social identities as well. So because it was aimed at adolescents, because it was made by young artists for the most part, it always had this appeal to the baby boomer generation and then later generations as well, as one of the first ways to mark your territory as somebody who is now interacting with popular culture in a big way, and where you get to choose your music, your style that you identify with.

Daniel Marcus: It also always had that tinge of rebelliousness to it. So as adolescents rebel against their parents in various ways, rock and roll and associated popular music as we went along, for instance rap in the ‘80s and ‘90s became embraced as a way to articulate that kind of rebellion.

Nathan C.: And do you see similar kinds of callbacks happening in TV and film in the ‘70s looking back?

Daniel Marcus: American Graffiti was very much wrapped up with rock and roll culture. It had a very big soundtrack. And because there was already this nostalgia for the music of the ‘50s, I think it was easy for George Lucas who made the film, based roughly on his own teenage experience, it was easy for him to use the soundtrack of the ‘50s to articulate a lot of the emotions of the characters in the movie, and to make it seem like this was going to be a popular product, which it was. He could go to the studios and say, “There’s all this nostalgia for the ‘50s. I want to make a movie about the end of the ‘50s,” essentially. Even though the film took place in 1962, symbolically that was about the end of the ‘60s before the Kennedy assassination, before Vietnam, et cetera.

Daniel Marcus: So American Graffiti takes place in 1962, but it was seen as the end of the 1950s or the ‘50s as a cultural construct, with a period that was ending before with the assassination of JFK, before Vietnam, before drugs became a middle class avocation. So American Graffiti was certainly seen as part of the whole ‘50s construct. And I think Hollywood could see that there was this nostalgia for that period.

Daniel Marcus: At the same time, American Graffiti is completely about the teenagers. There are almost no adults in the film. The only authority figure really is Wolfman Jack, this weird DJ who understood the kids. There were no real parents in the film.

Daniel Marcus: What made Happy Days so important was that it brought this kind of rebellious teenage sense and the cultural specificity of the ‘50s back into the family sphere. It domesticated it. Instead of it being about kids going out all night, running around on their own in these cars, it was about kids hanging out at the malt shop and then going home, and basically getting along with their parents. The two authority figures in Happy Days where the Fonz, okay, the kind of greaser elder statesmen of the youth scene, but also Mr. Cunningham, the father. And they got along fine. They really were not at odds with each other.

Daniel Marcus: So Happy Days muted that kind of generational rebelliousness or antagonism, and brought all of that ‘50s cultural specificity back into the domestic sphere and what was seen as a healthy family life that conservatives then used to say, “This is what American families and American life were always about until those rebellious hippies of the ‘60s ruined it all.”

Nathan C.: Right. I remember as a kid in the late ‘80s growing up, there was actually a Wolfman Jack cartoon on Saturday morning, I recall. The Muppet Babies, as a cartoon that I watched growing up, was set as the Muppets were kids in the ‘50s, and the whole music and soundtrack was built around that. I find myself now caught between generations trying to talk to my own students about pop culture from the ‘80s and even the ‘70s. And they have no frame of reference for a lot of this stuff at all.

Nathan C.: And so for our current generation of millennials who might not even have grown up with Happy Days in this indication, how could you explain to them the popularity of this particular kind of nostalgia? How do you account for it being so widespread?

Daniel Marcus: I think the standard account, which I think has a lot of validity, is that the country had gone through so much tumult in the ‘60s and early ‘70s with Vietnam, with Watergate. And that’s something that millennials could perhaps understand today in the Trump era, that when people are talking about the country being so divided, we were also very divided in the late 1960s, and it seemed like the country was kind of having a nervous breakdown at that time.

Daniel Marcus: And so, television was slow in actually registering that. In the late ‘60s, TV was not that confrontational. There were a few shows that pointed to those sorts of politics, the Smothers Brothers variety show, most famously, and they got kicked off the air for it. But then in the ‘70s, TV caught up, and there was what became known as the turn to relevance, which is a little bit overstated and a little bit simplistic, but there were a lot of shows like All in the Family, that started to play out this social antagonism and division in the society, and became phenomenally popular. All in the Family was number one for many years. So the country really wanted to hear these sorts of discussions and all this antagonism played out.

Daniel Marcus: But by ’74, ’75, there were some people at least, who felt like they needed a breather. And it was Happy Days that really toppled All in the Family as the number one show in the country.

Nathan C.: Wow.

Daniel Marcus: It wasn’t that everybody who had watched All in the Family now moved over to Happy Days. I don’t think that happened. But there was a reaction against all the shouting of All in the Family, and Maude, and even the social relevance of MASH to this kind of fun escapism of, “Oh. Wasn’t it nicer and more innocent and less troublesome when we were in the 1950s?”

Daniel Marcus: And I think some of that was also based on the reruns from 1950 sitcoms, because the late 1950s family sitcoms like Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best, were also very mild-mannered and basically very conformist in their attitudes, for the most part. And these we’re seeing now as virtual historical documents of what the ‘50s were really like. So Happy Days reach back to them to say, “Wasn’t this great? Wasn’t this fun before we had Vietnam, before we had Watergate, when people trusted each other?”

Nathan C.: Right. Right. So even as people are reaching back to this earlier mainstream, middle class, white America, you can’t put the civil rights movement or a second-wave feminism back in the bottle. Right? You can’t make the anti-war movement completely disappear, or the Red Power movement. I mean, I’m curious to know if there’s any space in these nostalgic representations where women, people of color, other marginalized communities, are working themselves in at the margins in terms of popular representation.

Daniel Marcus: With Happy Days, there were certainly female characters, and they became more important as the show went on after Ron Howard left the show, Fonz actually became a mentor toward the young women in the show. And so it became more about female teenage experience after the major male actors left the show. The show was certainly anachronistic in certain ways, for instance regarding race relations. There’s one episode where a black man is on trial and he looks like he might be getting railroaded, and the Fonz is a jury member and he stands up for fairness, and justice, and equality and help us get the guy free; acquitted.

Daniel Marcus: And so, it was sort of a sense like, “We actually know better now. But looking back to the ‘50s, there were these people who meant well. And if you got the Fonz taking charge, you don’t really need the civil rights movement.”

Nathan C.: Atticus Fonz, right, on TV. Wow. That’s awesome.

Daniel Marcus: That’s a great parallel. I had not thought of that. So there was a tipping of the hat to a very mild feminism, and there was a tipping of the hat to the idea of racial fairness and equality. But those certainly were not the central parts of the show when it became really popular.

Daniel Marcus: The other show that displayed a little bit of that with Laverne & Shirley, which was a spinoff from Happy Days from the same producers, but this starred two adult working class women in their 20s in this era. And they had a certain amount of feistiness and a certain amount of, again, mild feminism in their show along with the slapstick. They were really going back to I Love Lucy as a template, and having the disruptive, unruly, uncouth woman who is disrupting the social norms.

Daniel Marcus: So I don’t think was seen as a real rebellious show, but you could see something in it if you wanted to. If you are a young woman, a girl really who had some knowledge of feminism, Laverne & Shirley might validate that or certainly wouldn’t work against your burgeoning feminism. And that became a phenomenally popular show as well.

Nathan C.: And this is one of the things that’s so incredible about your perspective on this, is that you have progressive movements in ultimately conservative movements, looking back on the ‘50s with a sense of value and nostalgia. And I’m curious how you account for that period being so available and politically useful to people across the political spectrum.

Daniel Marcus: I think it does have to do with demographics, that the baby boomers were becoming voters and they became such a huge demographic, and also the cultural specificity. It was very easy to take these markers of youth culture. But I think the other thing was that you had this stark differentiation in popular culture of how the ‘50s and the ‘60s got defined. So for the left, the ‘50s were not a touchstone, except as they’d kind of tipped their hat to the beginnings of the civil rights movement. So the left really gravitated toward the ‘60s, toward the height of the civil rights movement, to the beginnings of the Black Power movement if they wanted to embrace that, to the anti-war protest, to the youth counter-culture.

Daniel Marcus: So for the left, they based their identity really on what was going on in the ‘60s, not the ‘50s. So you had a youth counterculture that was basically left, that liked that nostalgia for the ‘50s but they didn’t want to go back to the politics of the ‘50s. That was the last thing they wanted. It was conservatives who brought up the ‘50s as a political touchstone, saying, “Let’s go back to that.”

Daniel Marcus: So you had this clear differentiation in political and popular culture between the meaning of the ‘50s and the meaning of the ‘60s. And that got then fought over. Nobody really doubted or challenged to the conservative narrative of the 1950s once they really got going by the late ‘70s early ‘80s, in saying, “The ‘50s was the height of everything great in America, and the ‘60s ruined it all.” I think that it was the ‘60s that then got fought over with competing definitions from the left and the right.

Nathan C.: And how would you characterize the consequences of this nostalgia for the ‘70s itself? Right? So in other words, all of this stuff is being brought back in pop culture, in political rhetoric, and it has to have some impact that is shaping the ‘70s and ‘80s as its own moment in time.

Daniel Marcus: The political impact of this nostalgia really got going in the late ‘70s and the 1980 political campaign. And so, it was really in the 1980s with the Reagan administration that this nostalgia became politicized in a big way.

Clip Playing: Not so long ago, we emerged from a world war. Turning home at last, we built a grand prosperity, and hoped from our own success and plenty to help others less fortunate. Our peace was a tense and bitter one.

Daniel Marcus: Conservative discourse justifying Reagan policies was often based on this nostalgia for the 1950s and attacks on ‘60s social movements, social groups.

Clip Playing: Then came the hard years, riots and assassinations, domestic strife over the Vietnam War. And in the last four years, drift and disaster in Washington. It all seems a long way from a time when politics was a national passion, and sometimes even fun.

Daniel Marcus: And so people really used their own nostalgia in different ways, but now it moved into the political sphere in very explicit ways. And Reagan himself seemed to be a kind of icon of the ‘50s. He had appeared on TV a lot in the 1950s, and he had that kind of patriarchal feel from the 1950s domestic sitcoms, even though he wasn’t actually an actor in those. But it was sort of a Father-Knows-Best idea that we had this kind of ‘50s patriarchal, gentle but stern at times, father figure coming into the political landscape.

Daniel Marcus: And this sort of feeling really dominated 1980s politics, even though it wasn’t always all that popular. And that’s what’s just as important to understand, is that while the conservatives created this dominance, I think ideologically, half the population never bought into it, but they were put on the defensive and did not really come up with a good answer to the politics of nostalgia in the 1980s. What you saw from the left, in a way, was the popular cultural response. You had cultural producers saying, “Wait a minute. There were good things about the ‘60s. We shouldn’t just flush it all the drain.”

Daniel Marcus: It wasn’t until 1992 in the Bill Clinton campaign for president that you saw the left or the Democrats mobilize politically around a sense of the 1960s as something to reclaim, to celebrate. What he celebrated was not the late ‘60s of massive anti-war protest, the Black Power movement, he celebrated the early ‘60s, the promise of the new frontier, JFK. And he used JFK as a political touchdown a lot.

Nathan C.: Is it safe to say that people often romanticize moments in time that they themselves didn’t experience as kids, or even as teenagers?

Daniel Marcus: Absolutely. Because we get these sort of public memories of these areas passed down through the generations, so that people can claim certain kind of errors or certain icons. So people can go back to all sorts of errors, but I think that what they’re taking is definitions that are passed down from them. And those initial definitions, that have a nostalgic cue that are already looking back, the primary historical memory, is often created by cultural producers in their 20s and 30s looking back to when they were five-years-old, and the life seemed simple, and easy, and innocent. So when they are defining their era of childhood, it’s imbued with this kind of golden innocence.

Daniel Marcus: We saw that with the wonder years, which was a show in the 1980s looking back on the late ‘60s, this time of incredible tumult. And they didn’t ignore the tumult, but they weren’t focused on college students or people in their 20s, they focused on 12-year-olds, and it was a show about adolescents coming into adulthood. So they had that kind of nostalgia for the late 1960s and early ‘70s that nobody had really seen before. And the Wonder Years became a way to reclaim the ‘60s for yet another younger generation.

Nathan C.: So in all of the creation of new cultures and new political movements, obviously new forms of consumerism, I mean, how do we account for nostalgia and its impact on people’s sense of crisis in a given moment? And more pointedly, is nostalgia a pretty reliable form of distraction for people to keep them engaged in mainstream institutions and practices that we don’t always pay attention to?

Daniel Marcus: I think it ebbs and flows. There are certain moments and eras that are more nostalgic than others. But at this point, I don’t think it’s ever really going to go away as a potential resource, because we have all of these cultural products. We’ve got television from different eras, music from different eras, movies from different eras, so they can always be summoned up again.

Daniel Marcus: So there are moments when we were completely bathed in nostalgia. There was a period in the ‘90s when the Beatles had the number one hit record and Star Wars was the number one movie at the Box Office, and it was just crazy how much retro there was going on. The Onion actually had an article in the 1990s in which they claimed that the US department of nostalgia or department of retro had claimed that we had run out of the past. We had used it all up. But, of course, now you’ve got that era of the ‘90s. I’m sure there are some people nostalgic for the Onion of the ‘90s. So it’s always going to be a resource.

Daniel Marcus: What we have to also understand though, is that most of these cultural products are in the hands of very few entertainment companies now; behemoths, and they are making decisions as to what to re-release, and what to highlight and what not to highlight. And they’ll certainly follow social trends, but they also have their own economic reasons for highlighting certain things over others. So again, our past now is shaped so much by popular culture, and there are actually just a few main conduits through which that culture of passes to the present.

Nathan C.: Daniel Marcus is a professor at Goucher College. He’s also the author of Happy Days and Wonder Years: The Fifties and the Sixties in Contemporary Cultural Politics.