[Released on May 11, 1964, “I Get Around” would go on to become the first #1 hit for The Beach Boys. To celebrate that sunny anniversary, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of beachtastic texts, leading up to a repeat Guest Post from one of our up-and-coming BeachStudiers!]
On popular
cultural images of the beach, and what we might make of them.
An alien
observer seeking to learn about America solely from its popular culture might
well think that in the early 1960s the whole nation had gone surf crazy. The
hit 1959 film Gidget (1959), starring Sandra Dee as a
rebellious 17 year old who joins the local surfer culture and Cliff Robertson as the
Korean War vet turned surf guru who shepards her along, quickly spawned two
popular sequels: 1961’s Gidget
Goes Hawaiian (with
Deborah Walley taking over the title role) and 1963’s Gidget
Goes to Rome (with Cindy Carol doing the same). One of
1962’s best-selling rock albums was Surfin’
Safari, the debut by the California group The Beach Boys; less than a
year later they released their first mega-hit, Surfin’
U.S.A. (1963).
There were of course many other popular trends in these years, but on both the
big screen and the record machine, surfing was a surefire early 1960s hit.
Trying to
make sense of why and how American
fads get started can be pretty difficult at best, but I would
argue that the surfing fad in popular culture can be analyzed in a couple
different ways. For one thing, the fad represents an interesting way to
illustrate the transition between the 1950s and 1960s—as Gidget demonstrates, surfing
culture has often been portrayed as a counter-culture, an alternative
to the more buttoned-down mainstream society, and of course the rise of
counter-cultures (and the kinds of social and cultural movements to which they
connected) is a key element to the 1960s
in America. So the popularity of these surfing texts (like the popularity
of early rock and roll more generally) could be read as an
indication that Americans were ready for such counter-culture movements, and Gidget itself could be defined as a 1959
origin point for much of what followed in next decade. Seen in that light, the
hugely popular 1966
documentary The Endless Summer
represents a high-water mark for all these trends, before the counter-culture
began to distintegrate later in the decade.
While that
specific historical context would be one way to analyze the early 1960s surfing
fad, however, I think a longstanding American narrative could offer another
option. It was three decades later that the film Point
Break (1991) overtly linked surfers to outlaws, potraying a band of
surfing bank robbers led by Patrick Swayze’s philosophical Bodhi (a
character not unlike Cliff Robertson’s in Gidget).
But to my mind, surfing culture has always contained echoes of the Wild West,
represented a new lawless frontier where rough but noble cowboys escape the
confines of civilization, battle for survival in extreme
conditions, and, if they’re lucky, ride off in Western sunsets. The Wild
West was always more of a cultural image than a historical or social reality,
of course, and an image constructed with particular clarity in a pop culture
text, the Western. That genre was famously moving toward more
revisionist films by the late 1960s—but perhaps it had already
been supplanted, or at least supplemented, in popular consciousness by surfing
stories. In any case, to quote “Surfin’ Safari”: “I tell you surfing’s mighty
wild.”
Next Beach
text tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other beachtastic texts you’d highlight?
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