Nothing is more natural than allowing memory to replace truth
with nostalgia; our first historian, Herodotus, laid the blueprint
for his descendents when he loaded his Histories with
second-hand myths in lieu of dates and facts. His desire was certainly
understandable. Why tell things as they were, when how they might
have been is so much more entertaining? The above line could well
be the catch-phrase for many Hollywood filmmakers who have time
and again given us historical epics, period pieces, and “faithful”
re-creations that more often than not adhere to a simple objective:
give ‘em what they want. The “they” in this
case is the audience, who (it is often rightly assumed) could
not care less about the world as it was, as long as they are being
entertained. This modus operandi is how we end up with
films like Gladiator, in which the women of classical
antiquity seem to have had rather liberal access to liposuction,
breast enlargements, and bikini-waxes.
This romanticizing of the past in films is not simply confined
to the visual image. Caryl Flinn, in her book Strains of Utopia:
Gender, Nostalgia, and
Hollywood Film Music, sees this systematic white-washing
occurring with frequency in the scoring of films as well; the
attendant music exists to create an aural soundscape in which
the viewer is taken back into a mythic world whose realities bear
little resemblance to the actual realities the given time period
possessed:
Film music has been handed down to us as something ethereal,
timeless, and deeply ahistorical. It is easy to see how a utopian
understanding of it can emerge – and indeed has emerged
– from this ensuing set of assumptions. The ensuing conception
of utopia, moreover, is utopian in the strictest sense of the
word, a “no-place,” an impossible, unrepresentable,
and idealized condition with little in common with the facts
of actual social and historical significance. (91)
If this is the case (and I believe it is), then no decade’s
image has been more carefully re-scored than the 1960s, as many
Hollywood films have created a reductive reality, in which the
very real socio-political carnage that occurred is often romanticized
(or completely re-configured) by the music that soundtracks these
images. Such films as Forrest Gump, The Big Chill,
Shag, and There Goes My Baby present the sex,
drugs, and social protest of the decade in a simplistic way rather
than examining the contradictions and nuances of the era.
There is no denying that the 1960s was a decade largely defined
by loosening sexual mores, staggering civil rights advances, and
groundbreaking rock and roll; there is also no denying the 1960s
was a decade defined by a devastating war in Vietnam, bloody race
riots in Los Angeles, Detroit, and Chicago, and the assassinations
of several important political icons. How then, can a film tell
a story set in the 1960s without simplifying, trivializing, or
romanticizing the time period? In the case of Shampoo (1975)
– directed by Hal Ashby, written by Warren Beatty and Robert
Towne – which takes place in the twenty-fours before Richard
Nixon is elected President in 1968 – the film chooses to
present the multi-faceted truths that accompanied the decade in
a most interesting way: through the soundtrack. In doing so, the
film takes an unerring look at the decade as it was (at least
as it was in the Beverly Hills of 1968). In the process, Flinn’s
discussion of musical utopias is presented with a dark antithesis:
aural dystopia.
Shampoo’s ambitious intentions begin as the credits rise:
a dark screen and the opening verse to the Beach Boys’ wistful
ode to 1960s youth and exuberance, “Wouldn’t It Be
Nice,” firmly establish the film’s project. Challenged
to maintain our aural equilibrium, we are presented with competing
soundscapes: besides the song, the sounds of a man and a woman
– whom we will soon realize are the film’s protagonist,
George Roundy (Warren Beatty) and Felicia (Lee Grant) in the middle
of a rather halting, struggling form of sexual intercourse. The
song, playing on the alarm radio next to the bed, goes unnoticed
by the struggling lovers. So much for music’s effects on
the masses, eh? As Brian Wilson’s achingly fragile falsetto
cries “we could be married/and then we’d be happy,”
Felicia is frustratingly demanding that George put his hand “here,”
and George responds with grunting acquiescence. Seconds later,
long before either has a chance to consummate (by the sounds of
the two, we wonder if given all night whether they would be able
to), the telephone rings, breaking whatever sexual and emotional
harmony there is between them. For a solid three or four seconds,
the viewer – the screen is nearly entirely black –
is greeted with the competing diegetic sounds of radio, voices,
and a ringing telephone. George, in one of his rare moments of
sensibility, turns off the radio before answering the telephone.
Immediately, forty-five seconds into the film, one of the most
enduring songs of the 1960s is cast in the rather unappealing
role of aural nuisance; such re-casting of popular music in unexpected
roles will continue throughout.
J. Hoberman, in his book Dream Life: Movies, Media and the
Mythology of the
Sixties, states that the bracketing of the film’s credits
with “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” (the film closes,
after George has lost both women in his life, with the latter
part of the song) is “deeply sentimental” (345). This
may be true – though we must question what it is the film
is being sentimental about – but I believe there are more
complex factors at play here. Looking at the context within which
this song is placed (the viewer doesn’t get to hear more
than two or three seconds of the song unimpeded by other diegetic
sounds) as well as the fact that we know, given a perspective
that by 1975 includes the knowledge of a fallen Saigon, the murders
of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and a crooked, exiled
ex-President – the childlike wistfulness of the song acts
instead as ironic commentary. The fact that “Wouldn’t
It Be Nice” plays during a scene of passionless, uncomfortable
intercourse, rather than during a moment of unbridled, passionate
romance, only enhances this darker reality. The lack of sentimentality
in Shampoo’s opening scene (humorously evident
in George’s decision to answer the phone, furthered moments
later when he leaves Felicia to pursue another sexual possibility)
is a stark welcome to the decade simplistically dubbed “the
era of free love.” There is no love going on between George
and Felicia; instead, we are greeted with a sexually vacant darkness,
where even the most beautiful of music is nothing more than annoying
accompaniment to uninterested intercourse. Wilson’s repeated
pleas, “then we’d be happy,” are set in strikingly
humorous contrast to George’s impromptu lie to Felicia that
he is going to visit a girl in the middle of the night because
she has a “pancreatic ulcer.” By establishing the
gap between the music we are hearing and the artificiality of
the characters we are seeing at Shampoo’s outset,
the filmakers cue the viewer as to the complex narrative power
of the soundtrack.
As we continue to watch the film, we find it necessary to reevaluate
the supposed transcendent abilities the best popular music has
been said to possess; in Shampoo, popular music’s
calls for a new world order – whether it be The Beach Boys’
wishes for marital bliss or The Jefferson Airplane’s decrying
of sexual hypocrisy – never seem to reach the ears of the
film’s main characters. This disjunction between image and
sound sets up recurring counterpoints, the meaning of which is
best articulated by Kathryn Kalinak:
Counterpoint [is] music which does not duplicate visual information.
Music which foreshadows, undercuts, provides irony, or comments
upon situation or character has been termed contrapuntal. (26)
Shampoo contains many moments of counterpoint (the
opening scene is a moment of classic counterpoint), as the passions
and desires of the songs stand in stark contrast to the superficial
concerns of the characters. In other words, hardly the concerns
of a united revolutionary generation that filmmakers as diverse
as Stone, Zemeckis, and Kasdan would later have us believe. “Some
people never took part in the revolution,” Shampoo
tells us, because “they already had other plans.”
The fact that the decade’s music is (more often than not)
falling on deaf ears in Shampoo represents the first
key step in the film’s deconstruction of monolithic constructions
of the 1960s: while there were certainly individuals who took
the music’s revolutionary calls to heart, others, like the
characters here, simply weren’t listening. Shampoo
gradually creates a dystopic atmosphere by way of its soundtrack:
while the film certainly shows the free-wheeling sexuality and
counter-cultural fashions embodied by many of the generation,
when taken in conjunction with the music, the embracing of these
elements did not automatically signify socio-political motivations.
Shampoo’s characters are interested primarily in
themselves. With the moment of moral bankruptcy that opens the
film (both George and Felicia are cheating on their significant
others), “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” highlights the
lack of domestic and social bliss that existed in much of the
country at the time, therefore re-instituting the variegated experiences
and realities that the America of the 1960s possessed, rather
than the one-note, music-and-activism strains films like Forrest
Gump and The Big Chill would have us believe existed.
This studied look back at Los Angeles in the 1960s hinges upon
the viewer’s understanding that the liberal, free-swinging
lifestyle that was at its halcyon peak in 1968 was living on borrowed
time; the film constantly reminds us of this through its repeated
use of Paul Simon’s “Night Game,” which operates
as a theme score for George Roundy. The version we hear in the
film is an instrumental, comprised of plucked arpeggios and Simon’s
plaintive, wordless humming. As melancholy as it is simple, it
is the only piece of music played throughout the film that does
not belong to the internal diegesis of the characters; likewise,
it is the only song written in the 1970s (everything else is 1968
or earlier). Shampoo uses George’s theme as a wizened
“counterpoint” to the seemingly innocuous, free-floating
sexual jaunts George partakes in, as well as to emphasize George’s
hopeless attempts at attaining financing for his salon. The song
accompanies George and Jackie as they stare reflectively into
the steamed-up bathroom mirror, their attempted tryst interrupted
mid-penetration by Lester’s (Jack Warden) unexpected arrival.
It plays again after George leaves the bank after being turned-down
for a loan, thus elevating George’s frustrated knocking
over of a trash can to a moment of despair. According to Flinn,
music creates (filmic) utopias by placing music into a theoretical
“no-place” (91) where it has no connection “to
[a] larger cultural context.” “Night Game,”
however, derives its considerable power not only from its melancholy
tones, but from the fact that it is played at moments during which
George physically expresses his frustrations. Thus, music does
not take the viewer into a nostalgic “no-place”; rather,
it grounds the viewer in an un-romanticized, conflicted “this-place”;
the music refuses to dilute the visceral impact with which the
scene is charged. As I have been arguing, Shampoo complicates
our assumptions about the 1960s, here with a theme rooted in minor-key
chord progressions and wordless moaning perfectly capturing the
confusion of the decade.
Just as Shampoo utilizes the wordless dirge of “Night
Game” to highlight George’s pending doom (and, by
extension, the doom of the sixties swinger that he represents),
the film expertly understands when not to use music as well. Whereas
films like The Big Chill, Shag, and Forrest
Gump have given modern viewers the sense that the 1960s was
a decade awash in melodic sounds, free love, and unified social
protest, Shampoo is careful to point out this was not the case
through, as we have seen, aural dystopia. One of the ways in which
the film accomplishes this effect is with the absence of music
altogether. Almost the entire middle third of the film confines
its soundtrack to diegetic noise, further jarring the viewer.
The banal, unmelodic, diegetic sound governs many of the scenes
with Lester, the calculating (if somewhat sympathetic) businessman
who is unwittingly competing with George for Jackie’s (Julie
Christie) and Felicia’s sexual attentions. Lester drives
his Mercedes, usually while moving between the principle hustles
in his life: his job and his women. During these trips, the radio
is tuned to the stock market reports. In one scene, he switches
through both a song and a news report discussing the war in Vietnam,
a particularly telling joke considering a great deal of Lester’s
activity throughout the film centers on his preparing to host
a Republican fundraiser. Though the lack of music in Lester’s
life can be seen as one of the film’s many in-jokes, given
that Lester represents one of the right-wing spenders that will
soon be running the country, we can put more interpretive pressure
on this analysis. Since George, who is the film’s embodiment
of the counter-culture – from his chrome-plated motorcycle
to his tussled hair, from his flowing scarves to his repeated
assertions that “making love to a beautiful woman makes
[him] feel like [he’s] going to live forever” –
also has no recognizable connection to the popular music that
seemingly inspired such rebels-and-swingers philosophies, then
Shampoo’s main contention becomes readily apparent:
the 1960s were not strictly the protest opera that later films
would have us believe. Rather, the era could be (and often was)
as mundane as any other decade, where the dominant walls-of-sound
came not courtesy of guitars, bass, and drums, but from a mundane
cacophony of car engines, hair dryers, and talk-radio hacks delivering
financial reports on the hour. Further, even when music is used
to soundtrack various scenes in the film, never is song able to
extend beyond the respective capabilities of the sound-system
speakers the song is playing on, a fact that strips the music
of any god-like power.
The final third of the film reminds the viewer just how resonant
and prophetic much of the decade’s best music was. In fact,
rock and roll succeeds in providing an aural landscape that re-inserts
the wild, complex, violent chaos that was the late 1960s; this
re-contextualization of music is one of the final steps in creating
the film’s dystopia. The psychedelic party that comprises
most of the film’s final half hour stands as a multi-faceted,
truthful account of the generation that was to witness the end
of the 1960s.
The site of this psychedelic party – a literal party-at-the-end-of-an-era,
occurring as it is while Nixon is about to take office –
occurs at an opulent Beverly Hills mansion owned by a character
named Sammy (who, like literature’s most famous host, Jay
Gatsby, is notable at his parties through his conspicuous absence).
While the party certainly captures the Babylonian excesses the
1960s landscape possessed in spades, we must be careful not to
see it as Hoberman does, with a blanket assertion that the scenes
(and the songs that soundtrack them) are there for “sentimentality”
(345). Watching George (who acts as the viewer’s unofficial
Virgil, leading the viewer through the various salons and the
attendant decadence they house), we come to see this microcosmic
representation of the 1960s as an invented, funhouse Eden, where
a multitude of would-be Adams and tainted Eves have one last (though,
like their biblical counterparts, unaware) blowout before the
hammer comes down, and they are thrown into the terrifying wasteland
of Nixon and the 1970s. The fact that the soundtrack is, for the
first (and only) time in the film, placed center stage, we must
consider the attendant images the music tracks, and the resultant
effects the connection of music and image leave on the viewer.
Arriving at the party after leaving Lester’s political fundraiser,
where a bunch of fat-cat investors and would-be policy makers
have been watching the voting returns, backed by a geriatric big-band
churning out soulless versions of Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers
in the Night,” and the Beatles’ “Yesterday”
(the fact that “Yesterday,” one of the decade’s
most famous songs is played alongside a veritable greatest-hits
set-list of Rat Pack era standards, Hoberman correctly postulates
as a “complex in-joke at right-wing appropriation of liberal
art” [345] as well as foreshadowing popular music’s
immersion into the safe, sanitized nostalgia-mortuaries of oldies
radio and supermarket muzak stations), any hopes of a nostalgic
trip down hippie memory lane are erased with their arrival at
Sammy’s palatial estate. It is very clear from the circular
drive, the impressive fountains, and the uniformed valets, that
Shampoo interrogates those who considered themselves
members of the free love movement, but embodied a bourgeois lifestyle
to the hilt. Sammy has obviously done his time with the white-collar
set, which immediately locates the site of the party as a corrupted,
false (and heavily financed) retreat, rather than as a nexus of
forward-thinking sexual and political discourse. This last moment
of silence Shampoo provides us with (before being greeted
by the full-throttle pulsing of the Beatles’ “Sergeant
Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” once George and
Jackie are inside) is a cutting dig at the white-collar fraudulence
of those who appropriated leftist sensibilities while never coming
down off their paid-for hills to take part in the revolutions
that were being fought, in countless ways, across the country.
Once inside, dystopia reigns as The Beatles’ song blares,
and the camera tracks the attendant revelers of Sammy’s
party: a dashiki-wearing, afro-laden Black Panther (who, rather
than talking politics, stands idly by), a bearded, pipe-smoking,
professorial thinker (who, rather than talking literature, attempts
a seduction of Jackie), and a nubile blonde (whom we first see
as Lester enters the party, breast-feeding her baby while smoking
a joint). With this sound/image montage, the film swiftly encapsulates
its distaste for the superficial, would-be leftists whose anti-establishment
lifestyles were hollow posturing. (It can certainly be argued
that Beatty, as active and passionate a political activist as
Hollywood has ever produced, was calling out so many of the bourgeois
fakers that aligned themselves with sixties ideologies such as
John Kennedy’s New Frontier.) During these early moments
inside the party, Flinn’s analysis of “utopias…possessing
a womblike haven from the world, replete with their soothing waters”
(92), has been up-ended, thus finalizing the dystopian conditions
Shampoo claims the 1960s possessed. To wit: if we are
to see the party itself, closed off as it is from the outside
world, as a type of womb, it is a womb that has been thoroughly
corrupted, given that the mother figure we encounter is high on
drugs while she is breast-feeding. With dystopia now firmly established,
Shampoo can utilize rock and roll to articulate the variegated
reasons that much of the 1960s counter-cultural leanings failed.
“Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”
is the first to call out the superficial strains that ran through
the decade.
“Sergeant Pepper’s” exposes the lack of authenticity
the revelers at Sammy’s party (and, by extension, pretenders
to the revolution everywhere) possessed. The song, which is an
attempt by the Beatles to de-mythologize themselves by performing
under a fictitious alter-ego, is a parodic form of counter-cultural
role-playing: we’re not really rebels, we just play them
on television. Thus, the party begins with a self-consciously
derisive, mocking song from a non-existent band; if the “free
love” generation was about finding the true self, Shampoo
illustrates that much of the Hollywood counter-culture was doing
just the opposite. The song that opens the soundtrack to Sammy’s
party is a song that celebrates the fake; this superficiality
is furthered with the next song, The Jefferson Airplane’s
“Plastic Fantastic Lover.”
“Plastic Fantastic Lover” not only cements the socio-political
vacancy that “Sergeant Pepper’s articulated,”
but furthers it as well: where “Sergeant Pepper’s
embraces superficiality with a tongue-in-cheek playfulness, “Plastic”
presents the very real dangers that exist when individuals have
detached themselves from their ethical mores:
Super-sealed lady, chrome-color clothes
You wear ‘cause you have no other
But I suppose no one knows
You’re my plastic fantastic lover
This truth is strengthened by the attendant image “Plastic
Fantastic Lover” tracks: George’s encounter with twin
sisters whose naked bodies would not be out of place within the
pages of Playboy magazine. As the nude siblings beg George
to “come to the Jacuzzi with [them],” the song articulates
the morally vacant (and incestuous) implications of the scene:
George considers their invitation even as he stands next to Jackie
(whom he will profess his undying love for minutes later), and
as Jill (Goldie Hawn), his current girlfriend, wanders the nearby
gardens. The violent distortion of the song, in unison with the
dark lyrics, turns the scene from one (had there been no attendant
music) of enticing, humorous sexual freedom, into a scene rife
with heartless, obsessive philandering. If “Sergeant Pepper”
was the perfect song to pull back the veil on the non-existent
revolutionary leanings of the revelers at Sammy’s, “Plastic
Fantastic Lover” does the same for the sexual mythology
they embraced:
Her neon mouth with a bleeding talk smile
Is nothing but electric sign
You could say she has an individual style
She’s a part of a colorful time
The insertion of the song – detailing as it does an illusory,
violent temptress – provides a bleak re-evaluation of the
sexual freedoms much of the love generation embodied. As the song
progresses, the film broadens the scope of this sexual corruption:
naked men and women play water sports, a woman in body-paint carries
a tray full of various drugs. The unbridled sexual philandering
that has been mythologized in several Hollywood films is deflated
here through the inclusion of various rock and roll classics.
“Plastic Fantastic Lover” is hardly an ethereal piece
meant to idealize the way of life many 1960s individuals indulged
in; rather, it is a melodic oracle, calling out the characters
for what they are: shallow, apolitical frauds.
In fact, perhaps the most important element of the party scenes
is the lack of political discourse that takes place; the next
song (The Buffalo Springfield’s “Mr. Soul”)
fittingly exposes the revelers lack of political context:
Oh, hello Mr. Soul
I dropped by to pick up a reason
For the thought that I caught in my head
Is the event of the season
Why in crowds just a trace of my face
Could seem too pleasing
I’ll cop out to the change
But a stranger is putting the tease on.
Contrary to Hollywood’s established version of counter-culture,
socio-politics, where, in films like Forrest Gump and
There Goes My Baby, hippie stoners smoked pot and talked
politics in equal measure, the scenes that accompany “Mr.
Soul” show not a stoned-but-activist population, but a well-funded
orgy. In fact, the music plays at such impressively high decibels
that the viewer is unable to hear the myriad conversations that
occur, which sets up a rather telling reality: with the election
of Nixon looming (a man who represented everything the counter-culture
was against), there is no discernible proof that the partygoers
are even aware an election is taking place. In contrast to Lester’s
party – which is decadent in its own, white-bred way –
where the entire purpose of the soiree is to follow the ballot
returns, Sammy’s party provides a disturbing illumination:
there was no revolutionary spirit behind much of the counter-culture.
What Shampoo presents us with is a genuinely deaf cross-section
of the American populace, willing to have their country’s
ethical foundation gutted (Watergate), its leaders assassinated
(the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Medger Evers), its
young men sentenced to die (Vietnam), just so long as there was
enough weed and LSD to get them through the night. While the right
wing suits watch the election returns on several televisions placed
strategically throughout the house, the only visuals at Sammy’s
are of a big screen monitor televising a repetitive, shape-shifting,
psychedelic image above the heads of the audience, morphing in
strange time to the four-four beats of “Sergeant Pepper’s”
and Jimi Hendrix’s “Manic Depression.” Therefore,
the viewer is aware that this paid-for Eden is strictly apolitical,
irrevocably doomed. And rock and roll music is the messenger of
these bleak truths.
However, for all the harsh indictments the film makes on the counter-culture’s
lack of political commitment, it also captures the bittersweet
notes of a generation’s time passing. Though Shampoo
illustrates that George Roundy is complicit in his own fate
(as well as the fate of the nation at large) through his lack
of political engagement, the film is not thick-skinned enough
to take pleasure in his imminent doom. The final two songs we
hear played at the party possess a wistful resonance that, though
they continue to further the failings that much of the generation
possessed, allows for a considerable level of sympathy towards
George and, to a lesser extent, Jackie. As George and Jackie retire
to the clubhouse (walking hand-in-hand across a vacant tennis
court) to the sounds of Jefferson Airplane’s electrified
cover of the standard, “Good Shepherd,” the viewer
is presented with a momentary eulogy for this passing world; the
song fittingly places the generation’s misguided decadence
onto a Biblical level of tragedy. “They had a chance at
Paradise,” the film seems to be saying, “but they
blew it.” Listening to the acoustic, melancholy tone of
the song, we are aware that, though juvenile in their pursuits,
even the most superficial of the love generation hardly deserve
the fate that awaits them:
If you want to get to heaven
Over on the other shore
Stay out of the way of the blood-stained bandit
Oh good shepherd
Feed my sheep
Such understated eulogy – the song competes with a cacophony
of other diegetic sounds – is short-lived, as George’s
theme re-emerges to downshift from a grand statement on the failure
of the 1960s anti-establishment to a more personal elegy for George’s
own pending failure. We hear the melancholic chords as George
makes his fruitless attempt to win Jackie’s heart by describing
a dream he had the night before:
I was fifty years old, and I was supposed to meet Jill at the
shop. Scared the hell out of me….I can’t imagine not
being with you when I’m fifty.
George, for the first time in the film, speaks honestly about
his feelings. Though he succeeds in drawing Jackie’s sympathy
enough to bed her, The Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with
Diamonds” slips through the clubhouse windows to soundtrack,
with an aching, surreal sweetness, their final kiss. The song,
which describes an impossibly surreal, uniquely fascinating woman
of hybrid mythic-urbane sensibilities, fuses with the image of
George and Jackie kissing to solemnly highlight the central flaw
at the center of the 1960s ideology: escapism is ultimately doomed.
The choice of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is not
meant to be simply wistful, but also to darken the scene. What
better song is there to state that George (and, by extension,
the free love generation) cannot win than one that describes a
world where domestic happiness, unbridled innocence, and worldly
imagination exist only in a “sky of diamonds?” Indeed,
if such a world even exists, Shampoo’s characters
will never see it. “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”
is a coda loaded with both dystopian and elegiac resonance, as
one of the final popular songs we hear in the film is one that
emphasizes the distance between the creative, imaginative work
being done by the decade’s musicians, and a country whose
government was in the process of being taken over by killers and
crooks. “Lucy,” as the second to last song to be played
at the party, understands what the viewer, in the America of 1975
also knows: the end is near for these people.
Though it may seem that the soundtrack’s unexpected moments
of elegiac tenderness towards the characters hinders the dystopian
elements the film has worked so hard to convey, the opposite is
true. Dante’s Inferno postulated that true hell
means being aware of one’s past happiness, and yet not possessing
the ability to regain it; the final songs cement this type of
hellish dystopia by eliciting sympathy on the part of the viewer.
When we watch the film’s final scene (which occurs the morning
after Sammy’s party), George stands atop a Los Angeles hill,
as Jackie (who has just turned down his proposal) drives off into
the distance with Lester. This bleak image is, one final time,
accompanied by George’s theme, eliciting a moment of pure
tragedy. Jackie, who was the closest thing to a physicalized version
of The Beatles’ Lucy, takes the last ride out of town with
Lester, the film’s symbol of establishment Republicanism.
Nixon has been elected, Cambodia and Altamont are around the corner,
and George, now aware that he has irrevocably wasted years of
his life, is left alone with his failures. In a final moment of
stark montage, the screen goes black as George’s theme ceases,
and the viewer is once again aurally confronted with “Wouldn’t
It Be Nice.” Sounding bleaker than ever, with everything
that has come since we first heard it, the song that began the
film as ironic counterpoint ends as funereal dirge, lamenting
not only what never was, but what was never to become.
In closing her review of the film, Pauline Kael wrote that “watching
Shampoo, one is amazed that [era] ever existed at all”
(606); with the film’s creative use of musical soundtrack,
we are given a fuller representation of what that time really
was: wild, beautiful, violent, superficial, confused, hellish,
wistful. By establishing a dystopian reality within one of the
most romanticized eras in America’s history, Shampoo
succeeds in complicating Hollywood’s simplified peace-and-love-and-protest
ideology, and, perhaps even more importantly, illustrates the
vast, complex narrative capabilities of a brilliantly utilized
musical soundtrack.
Works Cited
Alighierei, Dante. Inferno. Ed. Robert M. Durling. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1996.
Balin, Marty. “Plastic Fantastic Lover.” Perf. Grace
Slick, Marty Balin, Paul Katner, Jack Casady, Jorma Kaukonen.
Volunteers. RCA Records, 1969.
Biskind, Peter. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How The Sex-Drugs-And-Rock
‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1998.
Flinn, Caryl. Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, And Hollywood
Film Music.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992.
“Good Shepherd.” Perf. Grace Slick, Marty Balin, Paul
Katner, Jack Casady, Jorma Kaukonen. Volunteers. RCA
Records, 1969.
Herodotus. The Histories. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.
Hoberman, J. The Dream Life: Movies, Media And The Mythology
of the Sixties. New York: The New York Press, 2003.
Kael, Pauline. “Shampoo: Beverly Hills as a Big Bed.”
For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies. New York: Dutton Publishing,
1994. 603-609.
Kalinak, Kathryn. Settling the Score: Music and the Classical
Hollywood Film.
Wisconsin: The U of Wisconsin P, 1992.
Lennon, John and Paul McCartney. “Sergeant Pepper’s
Lonely Hearts Club Band.” Perf. John Lennon, Paul McCartney,
George Harrison, Ringo Starr. Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely
Heart’s Club Band. Capitol Records, 1967.
Lennon, John. McCartney, Paul. “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds.”
Perf. John
Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr. Sergeant
Pepper’s
Lonely Heart’s Club Band. Capitol Records, 1967.
Shampoo. Dir. Hal Ashby. Perf. Warren Beatty, Julie Christie,
Goldie Hawn. Columbia Pictures, 1975.
Simon, Paul. “Night Game.” Perf. Paul Simon. Still
Crazy after All These Years. Warner Bros., 1975.
Wilson, Brian. “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” Perf.
Brian Wilson, Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine.
Pet Sounds. Capitol, 1966.
Young, Neil. “Mr. Soul.” Perf. Neil Young, Steven
Stills, Richie Furay. Buffalo
Springfield Again. ATCO, 1967.
.