The People Vs. Milton Friedman

Flowers Won't Grow, Bells Won't Be Ringing

 

"The end of the bourgeois ego, or monad, no doubt brings with it the end of the psychopathologies of that ego -- what I have been calling the waning of affect. But it means the end of much more -- the end, for example, of style, in the sense of the unique and the personal, the end of the distinctive individual brush stroke (as symbolized by the emergent primacy of mechanical reproduction). As for expression and feelings or emotions, the liberation, in contemporary society, from the older anomie of the centered subject may also mean not merely a liberation from anxiety but a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling."

- Fredric Jameson

Soul is now a rare term of appraisal in music discourse. When discussed as a genre, it is usually as nostalgic totem, the distance travelled from Ray Charles to contemporary R'n'B, but nominally regarded as a sound of the 60s and 70s. The great labels Stax, Motown, Philadelphia etc. have long vanished into corporate takeovers, along with the local identities that defined them. Ways of life, classes and struggles that soul once inspired have formed different shapes in recent decades. Traces of gospel in Afro-American pop have all but vanished, and even the pastiches of 'neo-soul' are largely secular. Performance arts schools have overtaken the church in nurturing talent. Unlike the soul music that emerged from churches, the locus of success relies more on lyrics or production styles. Not the voice that vocalists distinguished with their cry of "please!", as they extended emotion outside the boundaries of song. Marvin Gaye was particularly distinguished in this, among other things. As an artist who bridged the era from doo-wop to MTV, his career rose, innovated and died with the genre itself. His 70s work was somewhat emblematic in its struggle with war, urban decline, sexuality, family, faith and personal expression. When the 'death of the author' rubbed against a new 'permissiveness' (creative or otherwise), he was also symptomatic of a time when the 'me generation' tentatively lumbered from the social ruptures of the 60s to the face-lifted restorations of the 80s.

As with most of Gaye's 70s work, What's Going On synthesised all the strands of post-war Afro-American music - blues, jazz, gospel, doo-wop, soul and funk (he would later make disco his own: a No. 1 hit about his fear of dancing). As a song cycle, it begins with greetings to a party and ends with a prayer. The ongoing crises of Viet Nam and economic insecurity loom large, where faith struggles with apprehensions of impending apocalypse. It plays as an extended hymn, to western society as much as God, a plea to "find peace sublime" by spiritual or secular means. The album is also a document of his struggle for autonomy in Motown's production line (he always sounded just a little too mature for 'the sound of young America'), shortly before the label abandoned Detroit ahead of heavy industry. Such assertions of "the individual brush stroke" were common in the early 70s, with many black performers attempting to transcend industrial limits. As with society in general, hard-won 'permissiveness' wasn't without its pratfalls. Without road maps, the 'dizziness of freedom' could result in unaccountable indulgence or crippling anxieties, as much as it could lead to innovations in social relations or modes of expression. It could also lead to a loneliness that the culture wouldn't absorb, a disquiet that ego, faith, or indeed 'soul' may be unable to compensate.

Deciding not to repeat What's Going On's success by recycling its subject matter, Gaye moved from The Waste Land to Eliot's dictum of: "Birth, copulation and death. That's all the facts when you get to brass tacks." Let's Get It On was a manifesto of sorts, but not as clear-cut as the liner notes suggested. Gaye was plagued by sexual neurosis, reputedly a result of his harsh fundamentalist upringing. Compared to the previous album, God is barely mentioned. This is a hymn to the body, where faith in its pleasures nevertheless remain open to question. The desperate fear of rejection is of course a common motif in soul ("please!"), but the album still aims to seduce. Along with soul, Gaye foregrounds his roots in doo-wop, arguably the prettiest of post-war pop genres, that seductive crossroads between blues, gospel, soul, rock'n'roll and the Great American Songbook crooners that Gaye longed to join (he eventually did, posthumously). Yet as with his other songs of the period, background harmonies were provided by Gaye himself. Without the camraderie of doo-wop's backing singers, it leaves his serenades sounding all the more anxious: Scared that if I close my eyes/When I get ready to wake up/I might find you gone. Desire on the verge of splintering into duality and doubt, widening the gulf between serenader and his object of seduction, but paradoxically creating more intimacy with the listener. This is also the case with its more cavernous and fragmented follow-up I Want You. For all of Let's Get It On's erotic charge as the 'luurve' album par excellence, there's an overwhelming sense of absence to it.

After its sequence of sexual and romantic longing, Let's Get It On ends on a note of sadness and regret. 'Just To Keep You Satisfied' dispenses with the funk and doo-wop; and harks back to the more desolate work of Frank Sinatra, particularly his post-Ava Gardner song cycles of the 50s. The song had several versions, originally written for second-tier Motown acts like The Originals, but here Gaye edited out the percussion and rewrote its promise of devotion into a meditation on separation and loss. The bittersweet irony is that his departing wife Anna (Berry Gordy's sister) co-wrote the original song. Appropriate to this act of erasure and reappraisal, the album closes on a far more ambivalent note than its opening anthem:

  
Now it's too late to live and love and it's too late baby
It's too late for you and me, much too late for you to cry
Ohhh it's much too late
Well, all we can do is, we can both try to be happy...

Their separation would form the basis for an entire double album in 1978. Here My Dear was a flop upon release, but its reputation has improved considerably. Made to raise money quickly (for alimony and child support), at a time when Gaye was already living beyond his means, it was intended as a "lazy, bad" album to appease both his ex-wife and Motown. With declared despondency, its stream-of-consciousness vocals and fragmented collage of moods sound strangely compelling and immediate today. It's an album of disillusion, where passion is not so much an open question as avoidable error. The ugly, perplexed emotions that divorce brings - not least its awkward sense of alienation - are arguably more au courant with our contemporary mores than the frank expressions of desire of his earlier albums (which now seem more suitable for solitary listening). The bitter humour and references to financial quarrels were also ahead of their time - few soul singers of the time would foreground money as a component of emotional heartbreak. After further disputes with Motown, another divorce and exile, the 80s brought radio-friendly success with In Our Lifetime and Midnight Love. Even with greater polish and sales, his haunted duality and anomie remained.

Baby, your life and mine is grooving on the danger

Revelation's prophecy is nearly fulfilled

We are blessed to experience a changing world

So let's love before our fate is sealed

The implications of Gaye's classically tragic fate could be the subject of a whole other chapter. After his death, soul (as genre, as affect) would fade. As with many musical genres, it survived by retreating into subculture. Something to be curated (specialist radio and nightclubs), borrowed (a badge of 'taste' for white and/or British performers, a source for samples), or rented out to other merchandise (fashion, film, advertising). There are still soul survivors of the 60s and 70s who carry on regardless. Yet despite any continued commercial appeal they may have, they are as marginal to 21st century pop as those delta blues legends revived in the 60s. It's difficult to speculate which musical path Gaye would have taken had he lived; especially when we consider how Afro-American pop has changed in the past thirty years, not least market expectations of its performers. Popular culture - and the economic circumstances informing it - now communicates in a different emotional register.

The all-consuming success of Motown baby Michael Jackson - the commercial, sexual and racial disturbance that he (dis)embodied, the face of neoliberalism - effectively put the brakes on emotional (and textural) 'authenticity' in Afro-American pop. Jackson and the dominance of video (not least MTV's racism) resulted in widespread compromises of image and attitude that still reveberate. 'Realness' was reserved for the downsized alienation of hip hop, a genre so austere it even forsakes the comfort of song.  The 'real' became acknowledgement of socioeconomic pressures, not emotion or 'soul'. That in turn influenced the timbre and temperament of R'n'B, and any number of 'urban' genres (Joe Carducci's reactionary warning that repressing live 'heat' would "come back to haunt black music" may yet prove correct). It was as though production methods became a way to establish boundaries on desire. Lyric-wise, collective and emotional aspirations congealed into an emphasis on individual wealth and fame. Mention of marriage or work became increasingly rare in pop, and 'urban' charts are dominated by hymns to callow status. Vulnerability is defeated by impervious declarations of strength, yearning by the paranoid maintenance of impregnable ego. Songs of love finally surrendered to songs about fucking. And God? He's just another celebrity to thank at the MTV Awards.

Thank You For The Party, But I Could Never Stay

One of the greatest bands of the 70s (and 60s), with one of the greatest singles to ever hit number 1. The lyrics were once considered cryptic, but they derived from a common experience, like many in London are having right now. After a show-stealing performance at Woodstock, and superstardom assured, Sly was nevertheless dragged back to earth; face to face with 'himself' as dictated by the powers that be. An ugly encounter with the LAPD on the way to the studio directly led to these lyrics:

Looking at the devil

Grinning at his gun

Fingers start shaking

I begin to run

Bullets start chasing

I begin to stop

We begin wrestling

I was on the top

Stiff in all the collar

They slugged me in the face

Chit-chat-chit a-trying

They stuffed me into place

Legend has it that Sly came under pressure from Black Panther acquaintances to write more militant material. Yet it was his own raw experience of 'Amerika' informing this masterpiece (and the bitter, paranoid unravelling of There's A Riot Goin' On). As the gospel train ground to a halt, paranoia, disillusion or bewilderment were the order of the day. Early 70s Afro-American pop reclaimed - and modernised - the blues with a series of bleak classics, from 'Backstabbers' to Back To The World. Unlike blues tributes of white contemporaries, the above lacked much affection for the past, or indeed faith in the future. However, as with 70s American cinema, there was only so much despair mass audiences could take. The disco inferno arrived to dominate the mainstream, with many a soul or funk star attempting to jump the bandwagon (while Sly jumped off). The glittering, smiley face of disco would be caught unawares by the shock of Reaganomics, AIDS and the stark, alienated appeal of hip hop - the postindustrial blues. When he stopped taking things higher, Sly was a pioneering architect of low end theory; where Everybody Is A Star with an eye towards the gutter.

Men Of Money, Women Of Steel

"But titanic, too, is the onslaught of money upon this intellectual force. Industry too, is earthbound like the yeoman. It has its station, and its materials stream up out of the earth. Only high finance is wholly free, wholly intangible. Since 1789 the banks, and with them the bourses, have developed themselves on the credit-needs of an industry growing ever more enormous, as a power on their own account, and they will (as money wills in every Civilisation) to be the only power. The ancient wrestle between the productive and the acquisitive economies intensifies now into a giant gigantomachy of intellects, fought out in the lists of the world-cities. This battle is the despairing struggle of technical thought to maintain its liberty from money-thought.

The dictature of money marches on, tending to its material peak, in the Faustian Civilisation as in every other. And now something happens that is intelligible only to one who has penetrated to the essence of money. If it were anything tangible, then its existence would be forever - but, as it is a form of thought, it fades out as soon as it has thought its economic world to finality, and has no more material upon which to feed. It thrust into the life of the yeoman’s countryside and set the earth moving; its thought transformed every sort of handicraft; today it presses victoriously upon industry to make the productive work of entrepreneur and engineer and labourer alike its spoil. The machine with its human retinue, the real queen of this century, is in danger of succumbing to a stronger power. Money, also, is beginning to lose its authority, and the last conflict is at hand in which Civilisation receives its conclusive form - the conflict between money and blood."

Oswald Spengler "The Decline Of The West"


"The dictature of money" and "material peak" are obviously the Spenglerian terms for "neoliberalism" and "late capitalism" respectively. Curiously, the birth and death of these phenomena can be dated from visits to the British Isles by teams from the Washington-based International Monetary Fund, the first to the United Kingdom in 1976, and the second to the Republic of Ireland in 2010.

The original IMF bailout to the UK, negotiated by Labour’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey, has always been something of a historical curiosity, following on as it did attacks on Sterling on the international markets based on Treasury deficit statistics that have subsequently been found to have been unduly bleak. Even the original pessimistic estimates could have been ameliorated if Britain had included her newly discovered oil reserves within her potential earnings, as Tony Benn had recommended. Although the IMF loan was rapidly paid back within three years, the monetarist incomes policies insisted on by the IMF were the first victory for finance capitalism over industrial capitalism, and the harbinger for the neoliberal decades that were to follow. I leave it to others as to outline Healey’s membership of certain elite global plutocratic groupings and to speculate as to what extent these events were genuinely accidental.

Certainly in the years since 1979 when the IMF loan was originally paid back, money in its neoliberal capitalist guise has "thought its economic world to finality" in a way that would have been beyond even Spengler’s fertile imagination. Not for nothing did Spengler call Western civilisation "Faustian", as he believed that Western man’s attempt at "expansion into infinity" via abstraction piled upon abstraction was always doomed to failure, but the inventive excesses of the money men eclipsed the achievements of the engineers and scientists many times over. Although, remarkably, the glass and steel temples to mammon are still being constructed in the City Of London, much like the last Mayan temples that were being decorated as the people starved in the fields, the deeper insolvency of the system is presenting finance capitalism with an unenviable predicament: the only way to save the system is to cancel the debts and wipe out the bondholders, and yet it is the bondholders who primarily run and benefit from the system.

In the last few weeks, the IMF have visited Dublin as part of the EU/IMF "team" who have been offering Ireland "bailout" loans of up to €85 billion on its sovereign and bank debts. Although this has been largely viewed as an archetypal neoliberal problem/reaction/solution "shock doctrine" wealth transfer from the working population to the financiers, there are unusual factors involved that give cause for consideration. Most notable is that the IMF portion of the loan is charging interest at 3.12 to 4%, as opposed to the contribution from the European Union’s European Financial Stability Facility which is reportedly being charged at 6.7%+.

The nation that has provided the greatest portion of funds to the EFSF is Germany, at 27%, and who may have requested the punitive interest rate in response to the Irish tempting the German Depfa bank to relocate to Dublin’s International Financial Services Centre, in which a special law was passed in Ireland (S.I. 470/2002) allowing it to operate as it wished. Depfa was sold to the German Hypo Real Estate bank in 2007, and subsequently brought its parent down (at a cost of €50 billion to the German taxpayer) thanks to its exposure to American municipal bonds conducted under lax Irish banking regulation. That the bailout also effectively marks the end of the Irish banking sector is a forewarning of what will happen to the Anglo-Saxon banking system as a whole, for which Ireland was an outpost.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is the first international leader who has talked of punishing bondholders of both bank and sovereign debt instead of allowing the debts to be passed onto citizens in the form of tax rises or cuts to services. That she was persuaded not to by the European Central Bank with regards to Ireland, has merely resulted in an interest rate that will ensure that Ireland has to default. The certainty that Ireland cannot in practice tolerate the terms of this bailout effectively ends the era of neoliberalism, the era of money. Where Merkel leads, sooner or later, all other world leaders will have to follow.

Gumshoe (1971)

Stephen Frears' debut feature Gumshoe is something of an oddity in British cinema - caught somewhere between kitchen sink, 70s neo-noir and the genre reflexivity of the French New Wave. Albert Finney plays Eddie Ginley - mentally ill, unemployed, but playful and charismatic enough to live out his fantasy as a Chandleresque private eye. Against a backdrop of documentary-ish realism (rare that its Liverpool locations are actually what they say they are), he finds himself drawn deeper into the world of murder and drug trafficking. Through one character, we have glimpses of the following decades' epidemic levels of mental illness, the encroaching gun/drugs trade, welfare dependence, in-family class antagonism, racial conflict (its rarity on TV apparently due to Eddie's then-common racial insults), and the consolations of mass entertainment. It's as though Arthur Seaton, estranged from industry, community and family, has sunk into mental illness, and is now attempting to recover by switching genres. Or he may just be another deluded Scouse Quixote. 

As with many a disillusioned northern male, Eddie's main defence against mental illness is fantasy, largely manufactured by Hollywood. In his fractured, disappointed life, a sense of the cinematic gives him the continuity he craves. It's fitting that Eddie, when not acting as a private eye, moonlights as a nightclub entertainer at 'The Broadway'. Whether talking to the dole, his doctor, or sister-in-law (Beckett favourite Billie Whitelaw as a lost love), the mid-Atlantic showbiz schtick rarely lets up. Those who know him accept this as part of his illness. In the criminal underworld, it's regarded as serious (like entertainment, a world where bullshit is the highest truth). 'Thriller' music (composed by Andrew Llloyd Weber!) jarringly intrudes on the environment in a manner that would make Jean-Luc Godard proud. As with Godard's Paris, or the Newcastle of Get Carter, noir photography doesn't work too hard against the natural murk of the location. It's a film of wistful regret, but holds back from reassuring nostalgia. The uneasy blend of comedy, tragedy and thriller may be why this film usually gets short shrift in considerations of Frears' ouvre. If we were to apply any 'auteurism' to his films, it's the sense of disillusion and quiet desperation shared by almost all his lead characters, not least in their pursuit of a 'game' (from Bloody Kids to the bloody Queen!). He can bounce between genres, classes, nations and centuries with such ease because the discontents of 'playing the game' can be applied to almost all situations. As for Finney, it's notable how he swung from the post-war grime of Nottingham, to the mid-Atlantic technicolour of Tom Jones and Audrey Hepburn, and back down with a graceful bump to the mean streets of Toxteth. Never as graspingly ambitious as Caine or Connery - but far more talented - he has successfully avoided institutionalisation.  

What Gumshoe captures brilliantly is the distinct peculiarity of Liverpool. Even as '2nd City of Empire' it was hardly in line with the traditional industries of northern England. By the 70s, it occupied a space that was in many ways a foretaste of the north to come. Long before Billy Elliot and The Full Monty, Liverpool attempted to transcend declining industry and its miseries through sentiments of entertainment and pop success - the gloss on an insecure service economy. Eventually branded as 'culture', it was of a piece with the self-negating idolatory of Cool Britannia. As a once-thriving port, Liverpool's early proximity to American pop culture is widely documented. Less so is the strange sense of dislocation from mainstream England this arguably led to. In the 21st century this dislocation is far more mainstream. Following WW2, American pop culture promised escape, glamour and pizzazz to a restless working class. The 70s was when America led the way to social fracture, ideological confusion and neoliberal aggression. It wasn't that Liverpool 'fell behind'. Maybe it was just waiting for the rest of the country to catch up.

Running On The Spot

"The art of Thespis developed, as its inmost nature required, as a scene of the morning and of the full sunlight. On the contrary, our Western popular and Passion plays, which originated in the sermon of allocated parts and were first produced by priests in the church, and then laymen in the open square, on the mornings of high festivals, led almost unnoticed to an art of evening and night. Already in Shakespeare’s time performances took place in late afternoon, and by Goethe’s this mystical sense of proper relation between art and light-setting had attained its object. In general, every art and every culture has its significant times of day. The music of the 18th century is a music of the darkness and the inner eye, and the plastic of Athens is an art of the cloudless day. The candle affirms and the sunlight denies space as the opposite of things. At night the universe of space triumphs over matter, at midday the surroundings assert themselves and space is repudiated."

Oswald Spengler, "The Decline Of The West"

For Oswald Spengler, the history of Western art was a constant striving to better represent an infinite sense of space, which for him was the essence of the Western "soul feeling". All the innovations of Western art were in the service of this ideal - the development of perspective on the two-dimensional canvas and the corresponding invention of new shades and textures of paint were mirrored in the perfecting of the acoustics of the concert hall and the ever-expanding range of instruments and tones of the symphony orchestra. Thus the essence of Western drama, of which "Dr. Faustus" and "Macbeth" were the earliest and most perfect representations, was to portray characters for whom time and space, interchangeable constants in Spengler’s schema, were always in mutation, most especially when both were being constricted.

There was never a more Spenglerian group than The Jam, whose music consisted of soul-dramas whose protagonists were forever meeting a receding horizon. Paul Weller instinctively understood that to run out of time is to run out of space, and to run out of space is to run out of time. The Jam’s songs were themselves projected shadows, invariably conveying the opposite of what their titles proclaimed. Therefore, for example, "Going Underground" is about selling out, "Start" is about the end of a relationship, "That’s Entertainment" is about ennui, "The Eton Rifles" is about the collapse of working-class solidarity, and "Absolute Beginners" is a rueful reflection on experience.



The impending sense of foreclosure in Weller’s songs had two sources. The first, difficult to recall nowadays, is the fact that for the pre-Thatcher era working and lower-middle classes, adolescence was the briefest moment of possibility in a life that had already been largely pre-ordained to consist of a steady job and a steady marriage. Pop music, like toys and comics, was something that you were expected to grow out of as you accepted the responsibilities (and limitations) of adulthood, and these responsibilities would closely resemble those of your parents. This sense of adolescence being a fleeting and precarious moment of freedom usually manifested itself in strongly enforced music taboos, concerning both competing contemporary genres and past musics. Although the late-70’s may appear to be a musical cornucopia to present day dilettantes, most of it was off-limits with respect to whichever cultural grouping with whom you'd thrown in your lot.

The second was the sense that the post-war consensus, and its possibilities for working class advancement, was coming to an end. Ironically, the subsequent destruction of the employment base, in conjunction with the new North Sea oil revenues, would result in the remnants of these classes entering a kind of permanent adolescence, with the blue collar working class pushed toward a lumpenised existence of benefits and casualised employment, and the white collar taking refuge in the expanded higher education sector; both groups leading oddly shapeless lives of instant gratification and trivia. It is this disconnection with the world that The Jam inhabited which gives them their curiously dated quality. Looking back from the present, it often seems difficult to understand what Weller was getting so uptight about.

The Jam’s final and finest album, "The Gift" was in many ways the last record of the post war consensus, and an open elegy for it, with Weller’s lyrical concerns reaching their fullest expression with two songs, "Running On The Spot" and "Happy Together".



"Running On The Spot" itself is the final expression of the social disillusion that began with "The Eton Rifles", with any lingering pang of youthful expectation curdling into a realisation that all they represent are "the next generation of emotional cripples". With "Happy Together", you can almost feel the walls closing in. Desperately trying to convince themselves that their only option is the best one, a couple attempt to reassure themselves that at least they have each other. It sounds like bad faith, but still represents an era when people could still look to each other for salvation, rather than be abandoned to the vagaries of "the market".

The Apocalyptic Underclass

A Boy and His Dog (1975), although never a hit, was somewhat influential in its depiction of a post-apocalyptic world. Directed by L.Q. Jones (a character actor mainly known for his Peckinpah lowlifes), it has obvious echoes in Mad Max, not least in its post- technological inversion of the western (although some 70s westerns share motifs). Featuring a young Don Johnson as Vic, who 'scouts' a post-nuclear wasteland with the help of his telepathic dog Blood, it depicts a world where young men and boys (no-one lives long here) fight a war of all against all for food and women. Guns are the only guarantor of trade, and dogs are the smartest guys in the room. 

The 70s was the decade when various apocalyptic scenarios went mainstream. The disaster movie cycle (Towering Inferno, Earthquake, The Poseidon Adventure, various Airports, and any number of films where nature strikes back) modified the premise of the previous decade's On The Beach, with superstars as elites facing overwhelming disaster, attempting to survive it assisted by professional expertise. Along with the nightmare scenarios, the basic pleasure was waiting to see who made it to the end ("Ooh Robert Vaughn's dead! Will Fred Astaire survive?"). There was also novelty in the Grim Reaper not selecting victims according to status.

However, with their use of spectacular effects and all-star casts, the 'event' disaster movie had its low budget mirror image (often the case with 70s genres). The lewder, cruder apocalyptic scenarios of George A. Romero, Roger Corman or other 'exploitation' productions rarely featured elite characters or superstar experts who could eventually save the day. This time, the stories were largely told on the level of worn-down working stiffs, or indeed a dangerous 'underclass' excluded from labour value. Mirrored in their budgetary differences, these conflicting perspectives were a matter of class. The economic relations and emotional connections of bigger budget disasters were put aside to favour raw survival. With victims played by c-list actors, individual deaths were granted less dramatic significance. With stagflation, mass lay-offs and energy crises moving many urban areas towards 'post-apocalyptic' conditions, faith in technical expertise and organisation wasn't an option at the grindhouse (like the one still open for business in A Boy and His Dog, showing porn loops and old westerns). Nor did these films affirm family bonds in their traditional sense.

A Boy and His Dog generated fierce feminist criticism for its sexual politics. 70s cinema's obsession with rape has been discussed here, and this film is no exception in its disturbing attitude to women (also present in Harlan Ellison's original stories*). The figure of 'woman' - teenage Quilla June - is posited between a suffocating, (literally) sterile social conservatism and the most brutal form of post-capitalism, with women  the ultimate commodity - producer or product. Underground, women are reproduction machines in a grotesque version of Republican ideals (anticipating The Handmaid's Tale). Outside, women hide away for their own safety - hence the need for 'his dog' to sniff them out in exchange for food. Both 'societies' being caricatures of what each fears in the other; Quilla June's 'choice' is between a patriarchal prison of automated duty, or a feral 'me' generation of violent sexual predators. Much criticism focussed on her character willingly trading on these misogynist negations. Without giving away spoilers, family and 'love' are revealed as meaningless when pit against crude, ugly necessity.

Like so much of 70s cinema, it opens up stark polarisations without easy resolution. The idea of the repressive, family-driven small town vs. the lawless post-industrial wasteland still informs American political discourse (and has increasing traction in Europe too). In their youth, both Vic and Quilla June are little more than bewildered adjuncts of their respective worlds, fuelled by illusions of power and escape. The film was released in the dying days of Fordism, and more than its explanatory nuclear war, the film's anxieties fixate on masculinity as an unruly surplus, with women as its economic and/or biological battleground. This theme is now common to 'apocalyptic' scenarios, and not just in film. Although the big budget 'event' disaster has since returned to re-affirm family values, the supposed 'underclass' despair of A Boy and His Dog  - and similar low-budget 70s catastrophes - has disseminated into popular culture more pervasively than the gentrified, containable nightmares of Irwin Allen.

*Later - unfilmed - stories of Vic and Blood feature radioactive zombies, and a lot more 'survivor guilt'. Ellison's stories, like Romero's films, were deeply influenced by Richard Matheson's I Am Legend - the urtext for innumerable novels, comics, films, TV shows and games since the 70s.