Mystique of the 1970's
No time for realism. Forget about having issues, god help you if you're ugly. This is not the era to be ugly
The 1970's were a time when the average person could be ugly and have issues. People could blame society for their crappy life. Everybody was doing it.
And everything was so awful nobody had time for realism.
This is why a TV show like Barney Miller could pass for a cop show. Barney Miller was a show about a bunch of middle-aged men with paunches, bald spots, bifocals, heart-burn, standing around grumbling about the system. These crime-fighters were packing. Packing Tums. One roll in the shirt pocket and another in desk drawer.
And every cop on the show had issues. The Asian cop, the black cop, the Polish cop who played the slow white guy, they all had issues.
The Polish guy had a bunch of issues. One being, why did the black guy and the Asian guy think he shouldn't have any issues because he was the white guy. These guys were fighting for crumbs.
Nowadays, forget about blaming society. Screw you if you can't afford therapy to clear up your internal dialogue. Perhaps, all you really need is a plasma TV?
Four out of five doctors recommend pills and bending over to accommodate Big Biz. If you don't like vulture capitalism move to north Korea. So just forget about having issues.
And God help you if you are ugly. This is not the era to be ugly. However, there are makeover shows on TV, the internet, that will teach you how to cope with a society that will not tolerate ugliness.
Nowadays, watching cop shows on TV, it's pretty easy to pick out the good guys from the bad guys. The good guys are good looking and the bad guys are bad looking.
Some cop shows have become quite realistic, maybe even hyper realistic, as the plot pivots around molecular DNA samples, electron microscopes and state-of-the-art forensics.
With all the crazy camera angles some of these crime shows have broken through the fourth wall and guess what? I don't know whose story it is. Camera angles take the viewer everywhere.
First, I'm the killer looking through the cross-hairs. I spot the victim, bang! Suddenly, I'm the bullet zooming through the air. Splat! Now I'm the victim, I'm go down right away. There’s a slow pan out, because I’m the first kill just before the first commercial break. Everything goes dark.
Fade up.
Wow! Where are we? Outer space!?
No, we're on the scene of the crime, on the level of the hair follicle.
What happened to the motive? How can I put this story into larger more meaningful perspective when there's a giant hair follicle in the scene?!
We're trying to solve this one crime. We're not here to put things into perspective.
And that’s the thing. In the 1970s crime fighters were from another planet called earth. Like, detective Colombo who was a cross-eyed good guy.
He used to shift back and forth on his feet all the time, like he had to go pee. So he was a cross-eyed, shifty good guy.
He used to hide behind doors and around corners and jump out just in time to catch the bad guy red-handed. This made him a cross-eyed, shifty, sneaky good guy.
As as kid, I was afraid of Colombo in syndication.
And this brings us back to the title, the mystique of the 1970's. An age teaming with anti-heroes.
One of the most famous anti-heroes was a doctor named Hawkeye. He was a general surgeon in the middle of a war zone. He drank from a chemistry set and what whatever he was drinking was one molecule away from Aqua Velva. He also had problems with women. It happens.
Every time, he heard choppers, he would take a swig from the chemistry set, toss back his greasy hair and head for the operating tent where he would reunite young soldiers with their own internal organs. He would remove shrapnel from the strangest places and grow an little more insane each time.
The mystical 1970's, when the bad guys wore pinstripes, and the good guys were haggard, because the morbid criminality of the system was taking its toll.
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Is this realistic?
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Image Below: New York Police circa 1910
Image Below: New York Police circa 1970
Image Below: New York Police circa 2020
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There are times, Sumwoman, when I think of the media as anticulture. Yet in this piece you make the statement that mankind has failed, failed to rise to a higher level, and followed the inevitable alternative, to become the reality it struggled against, and the media illustrates this in an almost effortless unconsciousness...
I think you have, through careful observation, created a compelling narrative.
Love this !