The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties

A witty and penetrating look at the celluloid culture of the 1960s by the Village Voice's celebrated film critic.In The Dream Life, Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman turns his attention to the 1960s, the era when politics and culture became one. With wildly entertaining reinterpretations of key Hollywood movies (such as Dr. Strangelove, Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch, and Shampoo), Hoberman reconstructs the hidden political history of 1960s cinema. Meanwhile, against the pageantry of four national elections—1960 to 1972—he describes the formation of America's spectacular, image-laden political culture. In the era when the missile gap, the sexual revolution, and the Vietnam War became inseparable from the triumph of television, the development of political image-making, and the advent of Pop Art, American politics, mass media, and publicity became the new social spectacle. Through meditations on the personas of Che Guevara, John Wayne, Patty Hearst, Jane Fonda, Ronald Reagan, and Dirty Harry, Hoberman moves deftly between the political backgrounds of movies and the fantastic dimensions of politics, producing a brilliant and comic cultural history of the rise of our mass-mediated politics.

Author Biography: J. Hoberman is senior film critic at The Village Voice, and writes for the New York Times, Artforum, and other publications. His previous books include Red Atlantis; Bridge of Light; and Vulgar Modernism, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle award in criticism. He is an adjunct professor of cinema at the Cooper Union in New York.