From Counterculture to Anticulture

Three films circumscribe the counterculture of the last decade. These three films have as their subject the counterculture, and they themselves became cultural events. Woodstock, Easy Rider, and A Clockwork Orange: they define, warn, and predict. Woodstock (the event) and Woodstock (the film, which became the event for millions of the young) defined the counterculture of the 1960's. Of course, that definition did not begin the phenomenon of a youth culture that runs counter. Nor was Woodstock the first description of it. Anthony Burgess wrote his counterculture novel A Clockwork Orange over 10 years ago, and he has told us in a June 8, 1972, Rolling Stone article that he planned the book nearly 30 years ago. The droogs in that novel were some version of Teddy Boys or greasers or hipsters projected into an apocalyptic future: “The work merely describes certain tendencies I observed in Anglo-American society in 1961 (and even earlier).” Some of those tendencies, and several others, were exposed by the counterculture itself in Easy Rider, just before Woodstock. But Woodstock purified and refined the counterculture—and successfully made it self-conscious, mythologized it. And thus defined it.