This hipper, new Joe was, if not exactly gaining a personality, then undergoing a personalizing process. He no longer appeared so military with his new hairstyles and his "A" (for adventure) insignia, which, as Katharine Whittemore has pointed out, "looked just a bit like a peace sign." In fact, he was beginning to look suspiciously like the opposition, fading as a warrior just as he was becoming a less generic doll. By 1974, he had even gained a bit of an oriental touch with a new "kung-fu grip." In 1976, under the pressure of the increased cost of plastic, he shrank almost four inches; and soon after, he vanished from the scene. He was, according to Hasbro, "furloughed," and as far as anyone then knew, consigned to toy oblivion.
Stripping War Out of the Child's World
In this he was typical of the rest of the war story in child culture in those years. It was as if Vietnamese sappers had reached into the American homeland and blasted the war story free of its ritualistic content, as if the "Indians" of that moment had sent the cavalry into flight and unsettled the West. So many years of Vietnamese resistance had transformed the pleasures of war-play culture into atrocities, embarrassments to look at. By the 1970s, America's cultural products seemed intent either on critiquing their own mechanics and myths or on staking out ever newer frontiers of defensiveness.
Take Sgt. Rock, that heroic World War II noncom of DC Comics' Our Army at War series. Each issue of his adventures now sported a new seal that proclaimed, "make WAR no more," while his resolutely World War II-bound adventures were being undermined by a new enemy-like consciousness. The cover of a June 1971 issue, for instance, showed the intrepid but shaken sergeant stuttering "B-but they were civilians!" and pointing at the bodies of five men, none in uniform, who seemed to have been lined up against a wall and executed. Next to him, a GI, his submachine gun still smoking, exclaims, "I stopped the enemy, Rock! None of "em got away!"
Inside, an episode, "Headcount," told the "underside" of the story of one Johnny Doe, a posthumously decorated private, who shoots first and asks later. "Hold it, Johnny!" yells Rock as Private Doe is about to do in a whole room of French hostages with their Nazi captors, claiming they're all phonies, "if you're wrong" we're no better'n the nazi butchers we're fightin' against!" Of Doe, killed by Rock before he can murder the hostages, the story asked a final question that in 1971 would have been familiar to Americans of any age: "Was Johnny Doe a murderer -- or a hero? That's one question each of you will have to decide for yourselves!"
Two months later, in the August issue of Our Army at War, a reader could enter the mind of Tatsuno Sakigawa in "Kamikaze." Sakigawa, about to plunge his plane into the USS Stevens, recalls "when his mother held him close and warm! He remembered the fishing junk on which they lived" the pungent smell of sea and wind" he was at another place" in a happier time." As his plane is hit by antiaircraft fire and explodes, you see his agonized face. "FATHER" MOTHER " WHERE ARE YOU?" he screams.
The scene cuts briefly to his parents on their burning junk ("H-help us" my son" help""), and then to a final image of "the flames rising from Japan's burning cities! Houses of wood and paper" his own home." Tatsuno Sakigawa, the episode concludes, "died for the emperor" for country" for honor! But mostly" to avenge the death of his parents! The destruction of his home! The loss of his own life!" At page bottom, below DC's pacifist seal of approval, was a "historical note: 250,000 Japanese died in the fire raids" 80,000 died in the Hiroshima A-bombing."
Even in that most guarded of sanctuaries, the school textbook, the American story began to disassemble. First in its interstices, and then in its place emerged a series of previously hidden stories. In the late 1960s, textbooks rediscovered "the poor," a group in absentia since the 1930s. By the early 1970s, the black story, the story of women, the Chicano story, the Native American story -- all those previously "invisible" narratives -- were emerging from under the monolithic story of America that had previously been imposed on a nation of children. Similarly, at the college level, histories of the non-European world emerged from under the monolithic "world" story that had once taken the student from Egypt to twentieth-century America via Greece, Rome, medieval Europe, and the Renaissance.
These new "celebratory" tales of the travails and triumphs of various "minorities" arose mainly as implicit critiques of the One American Story that had preceded them or as self-encapsulated and largely self-referential ministories like that new TV form, the miniseries. In either case, they proved linkable to no larger narrative, though in the 1980s they would all be gathered up willy-nilly under the umbrella of "multi-culturalism."
Being celebratory, they needed no actual enemy, but implicitly the enemy was the very story that had until recently made them invisible. They were something like interest groups competing for a limited amount of just emptied space. The national story, which was supposed to be inclusive enough to gather in all those "huddled masses," which had only a few years earlier allowed textbook writers to craft sentences like, "We are too little astonished at the unprecedented virtuous-ness of U.S. foreign policy, and at its good sense," had now been cracked open.
By the time Saigon fell in 1975, children like adults existed in a remarkably story-less realm. The very word war had been stripped out of children's culture and childhood transformed into something like an un-American event. The subterranean haunted and haunting quality of children in the 1950s had risen to the surface. The young were now openly threatening adults. Some were challenging American power with evidence of the destruction of minority children at home or out there ("Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?"), while others, whether as political radicals, part of the counterculture, or GIs in Vietnam, seemed in the process of defecting to the Eastern enemy.
Yet, paradoxically, that victorious enemy was nowhere in sight -- not in the movies, not on TV (despite the image of Vietnam as a television war), not even in the press. Where the Vietnamese should have been, there was instead an absence. Because it was impossible to "see" who had defeated the United States and hence why Americans had lost, it was impossible to grasp what had been lost. So American victimhood, American loss -- including the loss of childhood's cultural forms -- became a subject in itself, the only subject, you might say, while the invisibility of the foe who had taken the story away lent that loss a particular aura of unfairness.
So, in a final, strange reversal in that era of reversals, American postwar "reconstruction" would begin not in Vietnam, the land in ruins, which should have been but was not the defeated country, but at home in a land almost untouched by war, which should have been but was not the victor; and the rebuilding would focus not on some devastated physical environment but on the national psyche. In this postwar passage from John Wayne to Sylvester Stallone, from Pax Americana to Pecs Americana, this attempt to rebuild a furloughed American narrative of triumph, children were to play a special role.
2. Empty Space
On the evening of May 25, 1977, a dazed 32-year-old movie director, with one success to his name, was finishing a Herculean two weeks "mixing" his latest film for European audiences. Breaking for dinner, he and his wife headed for Hamburger Hamlet, a restaurant across the street from Mann's Chinese Theater in Hollywood, only to run into heavy traffic and sizable crowds. Coming around a corner, he spied the title of his new film in giant letters on the theater marquee. It was opening day. "I said, "I don't believe this,'" he recalled. "So we sat in Hamburger Hamlet and watched the giant crowd out there, and then I went back and mixed all night" I felt it was some kind of aberration."
Director George Lucas had already celebrated his teenage years in American Graffiti ("Where were you in "62?"), the surprise hit of 1973, which sparked a wave of nostalgia for the years before Vietnam and inspired the TV series Happy Days (1974). As a moviemaker, however, he had had a desire to reach even deeper into his California boyhood, to return to those moments when he had acted out World War II scenarios with toy soldiers, or watched old Flash Gordon serials, cowboy and war films on television.
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