If television titles were actionable, PBS’s Making Sense of the Sixties" could be sued for breach of promise. Whether the 1960s were, as the program attests, “the most tumultuous period since the Civil War,” they’ve certainly managed to defy all attempts at definitive sense making and this six-hour documentary proves no exception. Nonetheless, it is, as they used to say, a trip. Come to think of it, “Making Sense of the Sixties” very much resembles the decade it revisits: challenging, passionate, tragic, hilarious and always, even from this distance, remarkably unsettling.
There’s also one welcome dissimilarity. Unlike most of the folks who brought us the ’60s, the show’s creators planned their every move. They interviewed scores of the decade’s activists (was there ever a more verbal generation?) and unearthed lots of never-before-telecast footage from underground filmmakers (or a time that bequeathed grabbier visuals?). Then they took a major risk. The “megadoc,” which will air over three straight nights starting Jan. 21, opens with an exhaustive examination of … the ‘5Os.
It’s an inspired stroke. To re-enter an era when females and males assumed roles decreed at birth, fear of communism was employed to smother dissent, bigotry was institutionalized and the rules of adolescence were inviolate (“Obey authority, control your emotions, fit in with the group and don’t even think about having sex”) is to discern the seeds from which the counterculture sprang. In an outtake from a home-economics training film, a housewife teaches a young bride how to whip up some jellied desserts and then chirps: “Just think of setting these down in front of Bill and saying, ‘Bill, look, I made these myself!”’ Digest that one, Betty and Gloria.
The documentary is even more adept at showing how the tactics of the civil-rights movement were imitated by Vietnam War protesters, women’s libbers, environmentalists, gays, the handicapped, Hispanics, Native Americans, even counterdemonstrating hard hats (“Love it or leave it”). As for the celebrated youth rebellion, it’s all here-with long hair for its flag and rock as its anthem. Communes. Consciousness-raising groups. Love-ins and be-ins. Tie-dye bell bottoms and LSD highs. Tune in, turn on and drop out. Or as one child of the ’60s, filmmaker Oliver Stone, translated that message: “Have no fear, make no plans, test and enjoy the limits of life.” Doubtless, some viewers under 30 will come away feeling deprived.
What’s most intriguing is to watch how television itself became one of the story’s lead characters. You might say this was the first revolution to be interrupted by commercials. Whether transmitting images of Woodstock or Carnaby Street, the tube both disseminated and legitimized the do-your-thing Zeitgeist. It also was first to sound the retreat. Frithjof Bergmann, a professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan, reports that once parents had seen TV pictures of the Kent State killings, “they called all the [campus] radicals and said, ‘Now you come right home.’ You could walk through Ann Arbor and hear the snapping shut of suitcases all over town.”
Unfortunately, PBS’s decision to run two one-hour episodes each evening may prove self-defeating: this series is so densely textured that viewers may suffer informational overload. And assigning different producers and writers to each episode deprives the documentary of the kind of unifying vision Ken Burns brought to “The Civil War.” Still, coexecutive producers Ricki Green and David Hoffman know how to grab our attention. While we’re still chuckling over a bizarre fashion, an exmember of the Weathermen pops up with a chilling tale. During one of the radical group’s meetings, a lengthy debate ensued over whether all newborn white babies should be murdered to reduce the population of the “oppressive” establishment. “At that point,” he incredulously recalls, “it seemed like a relevant framing of an issue.”
The documentary arrives at a time when its subject is undergoing some revisionist debunking. (BUMMER, sneers the cover of a recent issue of The New Republic. “The grasping, bourgeois, uptight soul of the 1960s. “) The show’s own assessments of the decade’s legacy are as varied as the witnesses who deliver them. Curiously, even the most diametrically opposed ring true. “[The era] forced America to look in a mirror,” proclaims a former civil-rights worker. “The legacy was the election of Richard Nixon,” counters a conservative with equal satisfaction. It’s a debate likely to rage until the last ’60s survivor smokes his final joint. For now, few will challenge the verdict of Carl Ogelsby, once president of the Students for a Democratic Society: “We had us a time.”
