Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture: Envisioning the Totalitarian Enemy, 1920s–1950s.
Alpers applied the “Page 99 Test” to his newest book, Happy Days: Images of the Pre-Sixties Past in Seventies America, and reported the following:
Happy Days is about Americans in the 1970s thinking about the past as a way of processing the changes in American life that we associate with the Sixties.Learn more about Happy Days at the Rutgers University Press website.
A reader turning to page 99 of Happy Days would find themselves in the middle of Chapter 2, “Rip Van Marlowe: Seventies Noir and the Pre-Sixties Past.” As it turns out, page 99 summarizes a key part of the argument of Chapter 2, which in turn is representative of the larger project of the book.
A major figure in this chapter is Paul Schrader, who started the 1970s as a film critic, by the middle of the decade transitioned to writing screenplays, and, by decade’s end, had started to direct as well. One of Schrader’s most famous works of criticism is the essay “Notes on Film Noir” (1972). In “Notes,” Schrader predicts (accurately, it turned out) that American interest in the classic noirs of the 1940s would grow during the 1970s, as “the Forties may be to the Seventies what the Thirties were to the Sixties,” as in both cases a decade in which the “political mood harden[ed]” following the radical hopes of its predecessor. The 1970s did, indeed, see a revival of interest in noir, among audiences, critics and filmmakers, who began to make the movies that would we now call “neo-noir.”
The chief focus of Chapter 2 is the figure of the hardboiled private investigator (PI), who in many of these neo-noirs is identified as a man from the past (the chapter’s title is film director Robert Altman’s description of the version of Raymond Chandler’s famous PI Philip Marlowe that appears in Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973)). Many 1970s neo-noirs placed a PI protagonist, with his out-of-date values, in the world of the 1970s and interrogated whether his version of masculinity could still function.
Page 99 is setting up a discussion of two noir-inflected films with screenplays by Paul Schrader, The Yakuza (1974) and Rolling Thunder (1977):Both [Harry] Kilmer [the protagonist of The Yakuza] and [Charles] Rane [the protagonist of Rolling Thunder] are also presented as men whose values are rooted in the past. Kilmer is an American who believes in old Japanese values in a Seventies Japan that is rapidly rejecting them; Rane is a decorated military veteran in a Seventies America that seems only to pay lip service to honor, patriotism, and family, values to which Rane himself is deeply committed. In both cases, the past values in which the characters believe both contribute to their sense of alienation from the Seventies world in which they find themselves and lead them to the cleansing acts of violence with which they respond to this world. Both The Yakuza and Rolling Thunder, then, present stories about protagonists rooted in the past who confront Seventies social decay and successfully respond to that decay with violence. Like The Long Goodbye, they repurpose the legacy of film noir to comment on how America, and the world, have been changed by the Sixties.While page 99 would give the reader a good sense of the heart of the argument of Chapter 2, given the book’s essayistic approach, the reader wouldn’t know that its other chapters concern Fifties nostalgia, the Bicentennial, and the legacy of slavery in Alex Haley’s Roots and Octavia Butler’s Kindred. The chapters share a focus on Americans looking to the past to understand the present. But each of these excursions is distinct.
--Marshal Zeringue
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