American Graffiti

American Graffiti

My first car was a 1954 Ford that I bought for $435. It wasn’t scooped, channeled, shaved, decked, pinstriped or chopped. It didn’t have duals either, but its hubcaps were spectacular.

On weekends my friends and I would drive around downtown Urbana past the Princess Theatre, past the courthouse sometimes stopping for a dance at the youth center or a hamburger at the Steak ’n Shake (“In Sight, It Must Be Right”). And always we listened to Dick Biondi on WLS. Just two years before that it had been the Prairie Farmer Station; now it was rock all over the Midwest.

When I saw George Lucas’ “American Graffiti” that whole world a world which now seems like another star system altogether came back with such a bang of recognition that it was close to culture shock rather than nostalgia. Remembering my high school generation I can only wonder how unprepared we were for what happened to America in those years of Kennedy’s New Frontier and Johnson’s Great Society: The loss of innocence didn’t come gradually or gently; it came in a series of hammer-blows beginning with Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

The great divide was November 22nd, 1963,and nothing would ever be the same again. The teenagers in “American Graffiti” are (in a sense) like that cartoon character in the magazine ads: giving his name and address while an avalanche hurtles toward him from beyond the frame. They seemed so simple then: go to college or stay home and look for a job and cruise Main Street and make the scene.

They were simple options; so were their music tracks laid down on vinyl across this land Wolfman Jack’s nonstop disc jockey show through both sides of American Graffiti is crucial and exactly right; no one remembers today just how much the radio was (as they used to say) “on.” A character in the movie only knows his car, parked nearby, has been stolen when he hears the music stop; didn’t hear the car being driven away.

The music was as innocent as the time. Songs like “Sixteen Candles” and “Gonna Find Her” and “The Book of Love” sound touchingly naive today; nothing prepared us for how quickly we’d get from there to here there being 1962, almost an overnight hop into a new universe. The Rolling Stones of 1972 would have blown WLS off the air in 1962.

“American Graffiti” acts as a marker showing us not just how far but how tragically many have come since then. Stanley Kauffmann liked it but complained in The New Republic that Lucas had made a film less than fascinating for other generations older or younger than that now between thirty and forty which grew up with those monster motors and went on to surfboards and guitars.

But it isn’t their age that matters; it’s their time. Whole cultures and societies have passed since 1962: Our institutions have survived riots, war, political assassinations, inflation; Rock ‘n’ roll itself has emerged with its back against so many walls I’ve lost count. None of this could matter less: American Graffiti is not only great cinema but brilliant historical fiction too no sociological treatise could duplicate its success at remembering exactly what it was like to be alive in Urbana on Saturday night Aug.

31st, 1962 at about nine forty five p.m.; Chick Fritz rolled past in his premiered Deuce Coupe all glasspacks and pipes and hair-curling gouts of burning rubber and both windows down rocking’ out with Jimmy Reed’s “You Don’t Have To Go”; it was hot out so he had turned on his heater core full blast to keep the engine cool; I was at the corner of Race and Elm with my left arm out the window taking a deep drag off a Kool Filter King and trying not to crack up.

To all appearances, Lucas has made a film that is essentially artless; his teenagers cruise Main Street and stop at Mel’s Drive-In and listen to Wolfman Jack on the radio and neck and lay rubber and almost believe their moment will last forever. But the picture’s subterranean design reveals an innocence in the process of being lost, and as its symbol Lucas gives us the elusive blonde in the white Thunderbird the vision of beauty always glimpsed around the next corner, the end of the next street.

Who is she? And did she really whisper “I love you” at that last traffic signal? Fellini used Claudia Cardinale as his mysterious angel in white in “8 1/2,” and it’s one of his best images; but George Lucas knows that for one brief afternoon of American history angels drove Thunderbirds and might be found at Mel’s Drive In tonight or tomorrow night, or Sunday night.

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