I’m not talking about real hippies because I never knew any.  By the time I was of an age to identify and disparage lifestyle choices, all the good hippies, the real hippies, were gone… off to their ashrams or their turnip farms or serving life sentences for murder, and all that was left was a generation of wannabes and copycats.  The hippies of which I speak are movie hippies.  You know ‘em when you see ‘em:  bell-bottomed pants, flowered shirts, beads, long hair, the occasional Old Timey add-on (a waistcoat, a bowler hat, a flapper’s tiara) and that beatific look of total bliss that you just want to slap off their smiling faces with both hands.

Very generally stated, hippies were an outgrowth of the Beat Generation, poets, novelists, musicians and fine artists who had come of age between World War II and Korea and rejected the four-square, Brylcreme and Brioschi dyspepsia of Eisenhower America, in which all traces of ethnicity, of peculiarity, of unorthodoxy were being leveled out via girdles, tract housing, loyalty oaths and various other forms of containment.  And I get the whole rebellion thing — I can dig it — but there was an appreciable demographic shift in the changeover from hipster to hippie.  While many if not most of the Beats were immigrant stock and came from working class and blue collar backgrounds, hippies were often middle class or even affluent.  Exceptions prevail, of course.  Famous hippie Jerry Rubin’s father was a bread delivery man but Rubin’s “Chicago 7” compatriot and “Yippie” (Youth International Party) founder Abbie Hoffman was a prep school brat whose enlightenment was paid for with a very expensive liberal education.  And maybe that’s what liberal educations are supposed to do but … I don’t know.  It always seemed a bit hypocritical to me.  Anyway, as I’ve said, I’m not here to grouse about actual hippies but to talk about how I hate and love to hate how that style was co-opted by popular culture and processed through the movies.

Hippies entered the radar of middle America after “The Summer of Love” in 1967.  Earlier that year, a “Human Be-In” at Golden Gate Park localized groovy in San Francisco, with the corner of Haight and Ashbury Streets established as Ground Zero for consciousness expansion and mind blowing.  Joe Sixpack and Hettie Housecoat were amused by these Bohemian longhairs, with their dippy bonhomie (comedian George Carlin even patented the “Hippie Dippy Weatherman,” whose meandering meteorological forecasts inclined towards haiku incomprehensibility) and Time magazine vulcanized the drop-outs with their July 1967 article “The Hippies: Philosophy of a Sub-Culture.”  Soon Hollywood was on the bandwagon, offering hippies as comic foils for their straight-arrow protagonists.  In I LOVE YOU, ALICE B. TOKLAS (1968), uptight attorney Peter Sellers has his buttoned-down world turned inside out when he falls for his brother’s flower child girlfriend.  There’s an “amusing” hippie vignette in Disney’s THE LOVE BUG (1969) where the assembled freaks and geeks look to be about 40 (and that’s star Dean Jones in a dual role as one of them) and hippies were otherwise trucked in as types in THE PRESIDENT’S ANALYST (1967), THE TRIP (1967), WHAT’S SO BAD ABOUT FEELING GOOD (1968), PETULIA (1968), COOGAN’S BLUFF (1968), CHARLY (1968), PSYCH-OUT (1968), JOE (1970), BUNNY O’HARE (1971), VANISHING POINT (1971) and the made-for-TV IN SEARCH OF AMERICA (1971), in which Jeff Bridges drags his family to the Woodstock Festival. In LUV (1967), Harrison Ford has an early bit role as a hippie who punches Jack Lemon in the nose.  Here we can see Hollywood’s conflicted and ill-informed thinking on hippies; Ford’s hair is strictly ROTC but his woolly vest, flamboyantly colorful shirt and pants tucked pirate-style into his boots mark him as a hippie.  Due to their association with mind-altering substances, hippies were the space age equivalent of village idiots and comical drunks.  Their child-like antics, outre fashions and unnavigable vocabulary made them easy targets for easy laughs.  All that changed in the summer of 1969.

The Tate-La Bianca murders in early August 1969 (less than a month after Apollo 11 had touched down on the Sea of Tranquility and men walked on the moon), were attributed by The Los Angeles Times to “an occult band of hippies” whose slovenly style of dress, disregard for personal hygiene, revolutionary rebop and predilection for group sex and LSD seemed straight out of Central Casting.  (It’s interesting to note that, before the killers were identified, the Times turned a judgmental eye upon the  victims, inferring that their “jet set” lifestyle was as great a deviation from the perceived norm represented by unintended victim Steven Parent.)   With the camera-ready killers mugging for TV news crews, Americans stopped thinking hippies were so silly and began to fear not only a suspected anti-Establishment bloodlust but also the movement’s Svengali hold on the nation’s children.  Moving forward, the hippie stereotype was more often than not utilized for darker purposes, as seen in such films as I DRINK YOUR BLOOD (1970), DIRTY HARRY (1971) and THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972), as well as on on scads of cop shows like DRAGNET, where LAPD detective Joe Friday took great pains to show that hippies were at best deluded and self-destructive and at worst no better than cold blooded killers.  Who could forget the episode “The Big High,” in which a pair of pot smoking parents allow their baby to drown in the bathtub?

Obviously, the characterizations contained in the entertainments discussed above are fictional and as good a job of character assassination as Der Stürmer did on the Jews.  My disdain for hippies has nothing to do with their legacy as magnets for the anxieties of middle class America.  I enjoy their tripped out capering in Milos Forman’s HAIR (1979), whose song list I could sing you by heart.   Donald Sutherland is great as a proto, WWII era hippie in KELLY’S HEROES (1970).  I even feel for the doomed hippies in Peter Watkins’ PUNISHMENT PARK (1971), even if they are a uniformly insufferable lot.  (And for the record, I like granola and think sandalwood smells good.)  Ultimately, though, I part from hippie company because there’s something about the depiction of the communal experience that bugs me.  Maybe because I grew up in the immediate post-Manson epoch I find it unnerving when people surrender their complicated, contradictory personalities for a smoothed-out simulacrum of Self and congregate around a Messiah figure promising a better life and an eternal afterlife.  I’m an atheist and have been since I was about 12, so the quasi-religious experience of hippie-dom, the patchouli-scented quest for enlightenment, all that mime and tai chi and tie-dye and endless farming analogies are wasted on me.  And all I have to do is watch 3 seconds of GODSPELL (1973) before I want to pull my own eyes out of my head:

I stage managed a production of GODSPELL in my final year of high school and brought a cassette of the movie soundtrack with me to college.  I listened to that tape a lot while lying in my freshman bunk, so I do find much of the music to be really pretty.  But the rest… yeesh.  I don’t know which one of these hippies I find the most obnoxious:  Fat Cab Driver Hippie, Hand Puppet Hippie, Land-o-Lakes Butter Hair Hippie, Toilet Brush Head Hippie or Hippie Who Plays the Recorder.  Man, don’t you hate the recorder?  That’s another thing I hate about hippies, that whole fascination with ancient crap, like drum circles and incense and face paint and woodwinds.  I know, I know, it’s hostile of me.  Here these performers are trying to be positive and beautiful and open-hearted and Jesus-like in their innocence and all I want to do is chase them down, singly or in a group, with a golf cart and my thunking stick (the rubber one).   I can’t help it.  My cultural Dutch uncles were Jack Webb and Rod Serling, so I’m inclined to be judgmental; I started balding when I was about 11, so there was never a chance in Hell of me being a hippie.  Seriously, though, even if I had a head with hair, long beautiful hair, these hippies would still creep me out worse than the cannibal family in THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (1974) who eat hippies.   And if that makes me ungroovy, well… I can dig it.