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Jewish World Review /Feb. 26, 1999 / 9 Adar, 5759
Ben and Daniel Wattenberg
L.A., D.C. try to
(JWR) --- (http://www.jewishworldreview.com) IN THE NEW COMIC MOVIE FABLE "Blast From the Past," Adam Webber (Brendan Fraser) is born in
1962 in a nuclear fallout shelter during the Cuban Missile Crisis and raised there on
traditional values and Perry Como records. Thirty-five years later he resurfaces, a courtly
and sincere man-child lost amid the squalor and moral void of contemporary Los Angeles.
The movie's premise could serve as a metaphor for Hollywood, where traditional sensibilities
went underground sometime during the Kennedy administration and have only recently begun to
reappear, however tentatively. Indeed, it may serve as a symbol of a broader cultural
reflorescence of traditional attitudes and behaviors.
The over-interpreted Lewinsky scandal is the great counter-indicator of the moment. Despite
conservative fears that Clinton's acquittal signals the belated final triumph of the
experimental, expressive-individualist values of the `60s counterculture, most measurements
indicate a broad yearning to restore much of the moral consensus shattered in the `60s.
After alarmingly steep rises in the `60s and `70s, illegitimacy, teen births, premarital sex,
abortions, divorce and crime are all headed downward in the `90s. By large and consistent
majorities, Americans cite moral decline near the top of their list of national problems in
polls.
Such trends prompted The American Enterprise magazine to ask "Is America Turning a Corner?"
on a recent cover. If Hollywood is turning a corner toward more sympathetic treatments of
traditional ideals and social roles, perhaps it began with 1994's "Forrest Gump." While
Gump's innocence permitted him to weather the convulsive social changes of the `60s, the
woman he loved immersed herself in the era's protest politics and cultural experimentalism,
and was ultimately destroyed by them.
Last year, Steven Spielberg symbolically reconciled World War II vet fathers and their
draft-deferred Boomer sons in "Saving Private Ryan." And "One True Thing," based on an Anna
Quindlen novel, offered a sympathetic reappraisal of the traditional homemaker role, a
departure from years of movies which preached that fulfillment for women lay mainly outside
the home.
Raised amid the moral confusion and family disintegration of recent decades, today's teens
and young adults seem especially tempted by the security and stability of American life
before the sexual and pharmacological experiments of the `60s. The movie that showed the
greatest awareness of this generational temptation was director Gary Ross' "Pleasantville."
This is a little odd, because "Pleasantville" warned teens against idealizing American
suburbia in the `50s, which it imagined as a superficially chipper but essentially repressive
universe peopled by ignorant sitcom characters.
"Blast From the Past," with its young stars Brendan Fraser and Alicia Silverstone, explicitly
identifies itself with this new receptivity to an older moral sense among the young. When a
plane crashes into the Webber house during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the brilliant but barmy
Calvin Webber (Christopher Walken) thinks it's the long-awaited Big One. A Cold War
paranoiac, he withdraws with his wife Helen (Sissy Spacek) into the elaborate underground
shelter he has designed and stocked with enough food and supplies to last his family 35
years, the half-life of radioactive fallout.
There, Adam is born and raised -- in isolation from the influence of peers, progressive
education and the popular culture of the last 35 years. Unlike his cohorts on the surface,
Adam is intellectually and morally shaped almost exclusively by his parents. He is
home-schooled in boxing, baseball and French by his father. His mother teaches him dancing
and manners. He grows into a guileless, emotionally unguarded adult who can't quite visualize
a force play at second base, but understands that a gentleman makes those around him feel
comfortable.
At 35, Adam is sent to the surface to bring back supplies and, if possible, a wife, from
Pasadena. Nineties L.A. is a nihilistic urban dystopia (as exaggerated in its way as
"Pleasantville"'s authoritarian `50s-era suburban dystopia), and Adam is utterly lost until
he finds his Beatrice in Eve (Silverstone), a jaded, street-wise survivor.
In a world where attachments are superficial and transitory, being cool and noncommittal is
the supreme value, whether avoiding marriage or nightclubbing. "Look unimpressed," Eve and
Troy, her gay roommate, instruct Adam on entering one club. In Adam's moral universe, in
contrast, even the outward forms of social life express a moral purpose. Manners are a way of
showing respect for others, he explains to Troy, who had assumed they were a way of "acting
superior."
In Hugh Wilson's refreshing script, being a square is not only estimable, but even seductive
to the opposite sex, especially if, like Adam, the square he is speaking perfectly the French
and dances a mean jitterbug.
On Valentine's weekend, the president himself pinned his wife -- and promised to be forever
true. Makes you wonder: Is anyone immune from the yearning to recover our lost innocence?
get back to the past
Ben Wattenberg is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and is the moderator of PBS's "Think Tank." Daniel Wattenberg, who wrote this week's column, writes regularly for The Weekly Standard and is a contributing editor for George.
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