The Woodstock festival, like the era that spawned it,
eventually became something far more significant than it seemed at the time. For a
while after the event, as Vietnam dragged on, Woodstock seemed to mark the
divide between generations of Americans. If a baby boomer spoke of the
event with high regard in those days, he could bond instantly with fellow
members of his generation. Band of Brothers. Woodstock was a noun, but it
was an adjective as well. We were the Woodstock Nation. If a boomer
disparaged the event, he was a dumb-ass redneck out of touch with the
zeitgeist, or as we called it then, the "vibe." As more time passed, and
Vietnam became a fading memory, Woodstock ceased to be an event altogether
and became a symbol. The very word "Woodstock" summed up everything about
the ideals of my generation, and that word summoned up bittersweet
memories of our youthful aspirations, many of which lay and still lie
unfulfilled.
Sure, I know that a lot of that era was just hype which was used to
sell candles and Pepsi. And many people were just posturing then, posing
as gentle hippies to get high, to get laid, or to get rich. But underneath
it all, if one could have scratched off the crass veneer, one would have
found a heart beating true. Through a combination of anti-establishment
politics, baby boomer empowerment, and instant liberation from an era of
repression, a generation coalesced with a unique common identity. We were
for sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll ... and peace.
The "peace" factor is what made it unique, and the subsequent abolition
of the draft assured that no future generations could ever come together
as we had. The intellectual urban and suburban friends I made in college
had something in common with the working class guys and the farm boys I
knew in my elementary school. Every single one of them, or rather of "us,"
because there was no "them" to speak of, was in danger of going to
Vietnam, and therefore in danger of returning shell-shocked, drug-addicted
or physically impaired. Many returned to hibernate in their parents'
houses until they were ready to face the world again. Some never could.
And the parents of those guys were envied by the moms and dads whose sons
would never return to their bedrooms at all. We were all in the same boat.
Without the draft, such disparate groups within a generation will
probably never come together again. With the self-interest component
stripped away, the children of liberals will be likely to oppose wars, as
they always have, and the children of conservatives will most likely
support America's leaders, as they usually do. Not so in our day. We all
pretty much just wanted to grow old and die of natural causes. That meant
we had to oppose the war. We would never again experience that special
feeling of community after the two bugbears of our existence, the draft
and Mr. Nixon, were removed. When those enemies had been vanquished, we
lost the feeling of community which was summed up by the Woodstock
Festival where all of us came together to share our music and other parts
of our existence.
Everyone in my generation seems to have a Woodstock story. Mine is that
I was almost there. I was in college. Actually I was home in Rochester,
New York for the summer between junior and senior year. My friend and I
wanted to go to Woodstock, and actually started down in that general
direction on Route 15, which heads south out of Rochester until it weaves
into Route 17, which leads pretty much straight to the site of the
festival. We soon heard on the radio that the roads down there were backed
up for miles. A bit later we heard that a massive stretch of the NY
Thruway was closed altogether. We decided the whole scene would be a zoo,
and we blew it off. We got off Route 15 at Bath and headed to Keuka Lake,
where we knew some people with a cottage. We stayed there and mellowed
out. We swam, boated, and drank away the weekend, thus casting ourselves
forever as outsiders and might-have-beens, and in the future holding our
manhoods cheap while others spoke who really were there, on our
generation's answer to Crispin's Day. That list of people with a "I was
there at Woodstock" story, by the way, now seems to include every baby boomer
but me. The particular Woodstock story in this film has been spun by an
insider, Elliot Tiber,
who played a role in getting the festival to the Bethel area, and whose
family's motel became the control center of the festival's organizers.
There are those who say that Mr Tiber did not play quite so important a
role as he claimed in his 2007 memoir, but that doesn't affect your
appreciation of the film either way. Even if his self-portrait is
self-aggrandizing, it still serves as a fond remembrance of the time, an
insider's backstage look at how the festival got assembled in the first
place, and a bit of insight into how the locals viewed it in their sleepy
farming community. Whether Tiber's account is accurate or not, Ang
Lee chose to use it as the basis for this laid-back, personal film about
the gentle spirit of that time.
Did Ang Lee get it all right? Maybe not. I'm convinced that he got the
trees in focus, but he may have missed the forest. After all, Woodstock
was in many ways the death of "the movement" as grassroots populism and
its rebirth as a Pepsi commercial, and the film doesn't address that at
all, preferring to let Woodstock retain all of its conventional and
revered cultural status. But let me say this. If the film occasionally
failed to see the way we were, it did sum up what we wanted to be. Given
the iconic status of the subject matter and the tone of the specific
source material, that was probably them most reasonable way
to go. And Ang Lee is a very talented man, so the film has a compelling
narrative, a lot of heart, and a great look. I'm thrilled that such a
talented filmmaker chose to tell this modest story. The two-hour film is
probably a hair too long because it does have two problems in its final
half-hour. There is a acid trip scene which goes on much too long, in the
true filmmaking tradition of the sixties, and there is also some trite
"wrap it all up neatly" dialogue in the finale, much of which would have
been better left unsaid. Apart from that fairly minor quibbling, I
found it a much better film than I had been led to believe by the tepid
reviews and disappointing box office.
Before watching this film, I had never regretted missing the festival
in that August of my 20th year, but now I kind of wish I had been there.
