The Strawberry Statement

A cult film from 1970, loosely based on the book of the same name which was written by a 19-year-old who'd experienced campus protest activities at Columbia in '68.



Our friend Tony lent us the DVD (dubbed into German, no English option) and we watched it last night.

B said the film made a big impact in the States when it came out, but hardly any impact in Europe at the time (except among the young people who were inspired by it.)

I kept thinking my friend Mod should have been sitting in the living room watching the film with us. He and B are a few years older than me, which doesn't make much of a difference now but made a big difference in 1970. Back then, as a 12-year-old, I would have found the film interesting----What are these people doing? I wish I could have long hair... NAKED BREASTS!---etc. I thought the same thing when I saw EASY RIDER for the first time. I liked it because it exposed a different world to me, but I didn't really get it the way I might if I'd been, say, 18.

The late 60s - early 70s seem like a kind of anomaly to me. Circumstances and socio-political happenings of the time seemed to coalesce in such a way that young people felt compelled to protest a lot, and not without good reason. I think we still have a lot of reasons to protest these days, but almost nobody does it. The way we interact with other human beings these days isn't to physically gather together, it's to virtually gather together. Once in a while you get protests like what happened in Wisconsin, but for the most part things are pretty tame---even while circumstances of today would justify even greater, louder protests, in my opinion.

I watched the film as a cultural curiosity, a glimpse into a version of America 41 years past. San Francisco looked different back then, as did the clothes, as was the language, the hairstyles, and the thinking of the time.

In the movie, things got tough for the protesters during the final scene, but until then the cops were kind of benign by today's standards....I kept thinking, "If this shit was happening today, you'd have cops out in riot gear, with the SWAT team snipers on the roofs, helicopters and drones overhead. A proactive show of force out of proportion to the actual threat." It's no secret that cops are preparing for future social and civil unrest in ways they didn't bother with in the more innocent 60s. Except this time, the protesters won't be protesting a university's involvement in a war, they'll be rioting because their pensions have been cut off, or they've been summarily fired from their jobs, or they can't get enough food to eat.

It was kind of fun sitting next to B as she animatedly bounced around when the songs of the era were played.

She's sad that young people today don't see fit to hit the streets. I can see that, but they never really hit the streets before the 60s and haven't much since then.

Like I said, it was a sociological anomaly, not an historical norm.