The father is gay, the mother wants a real job, the little girl is dating a black man, the boy on the right smokes weed, the boy on the left listens to rock and roll, and the baby is a communist. But for God's sake don't say anything!
"The world was beige and the music was crap... then Heartbreak Hotel came along and saved us all."
Billy Connolly
The Fifties: An era of identical pink pressboard suburban houses filled with smiling, apron-clad housewives. All of the men wear slippers and fedoras and smoke pipes, all of the girls are teenaged and wear poodle skirts, and all of the boys are cute, freckle faced scamps with slingshots in their pockets. Parents sleep in separate beds and only kiss each other on the cheek.
Anyone who isn't any of these characters are either greasers, Beatniks, gas-station attendants, or Elvis (who, in this era, wouldn't be caught dead in a rhinestone jumpsuit). With the possible exception of the gas station attendants, everyone on that list is a direct threat to the upright morals and values of the era and will not be afforded a spot in the local bomb shelter. Meanwhile, Martin Luther King and the burgeoning civil rights movement stride across America, slowed down only by the occasional
Corrupt Hick.
The birth of rock 'n' roll took place in this era, to the horror of
Moral Guardians, which also showed a resurgence in popularity.
There are really three versions of The Fifties. The first is the Fifties Fifties, i.e. how the time was portrayed in many works that were actually made then. In this version, The Fifties were a suburban paradise where everyone was always happy and there were no problems except for all those
juvenile delinquents running around. Unless the local college had some
commies spreading un-American values or
the flying saucers are landing. The fifties uptightness was linked to real world social anxiety and atom-bomb jitters, after all. Don't expect the civil rights movement to show up. Hell, seeing actual black people is a bit of a crapshoot. The Fifties Fifties are now a popular subject of
The Parody.
The next version is the Nostalgic Fifties of
The Seventies and
The Eighties. By that time, there were a huge number of adults nostalgic for the "simple times" of their youth and Hollywood obliged. The biggest difference between this version and the Fifties Fifties is that the rebellious teenagers are now the heroes. We learn that all the teenagers back then liked to hang out at the local
Malt Shop, where a jukebox played
Nothing But Hits. The girls were only
Seemingly Wholesome and both sexes were experiencing their own
Coming Of Age Stories while necking down at the drive-in movie theatre and watching
Robot Monster.
Finally, there are the Historical Fifties of
The Nineties and the
Present Day. The Nostalgic Fifties are now starting to die out, as there are becoming fewer and fewer writers in Hollywood who remember the Fifties. Therefore, the time period, as portrayed by Hollywood, is becoming more the textbook version. Films about The Fifties today tend more to deal with the political issues of that era (civil rights, McCarthyism, etc.) and less with its teen culture. Which is not to say it is
necessarily any more accurate of course, merely that the decade is now filtered more through a political/ideological lens than a nostalgic one and teenagers aren't the only people that matter.
For a glimpse of what (some) Americans actually living in the Fifties thought of their world, read the
Time Travel stories of Jack Finney. His heroes are generally lonely, frustrated, unhappy bachelors eager to escape from their conformist gray-flannel-suited world, usually into
The Gay Nineties.
Note that
Film Noir was a major genre during the Fifties (though more so in the late 40s/early 50s) that doesn't easily fit in with any of the mainstream versions of the decade listed above. This includes modern noir
set during the Fifties like
L.A. Confidential or
The Black Dahlia.
One of the longest cultural "decades"- in many ways its tropes cover the period from V-J Day to the Kennedy assassination, 1945-63, with a shift in trappings in about 1955-57 as TV ownership reached a tipping point, tailfin cars got REALLY wild, rock and roll started getting serious radio play and the first wave of
Baby Boomers reached
Junior High.
Fifties slang. If you want to talk like it's the Fifties, be sure to use these words:
- "Swell" - Say this a lot, especially if you're a teenage girl and you're talking about something you like (usually a boy). Be sure to say it in an extra cutesy and/or sweet way. The more affected it sounds, the better. ("Oh, that's just swell!")
- If you get tired of "swell" try "keen" or "neat" instead, but don't say "neat-o" or "cool" unless you're a beatnik.
- "Gee whiz" - Be sure to say this every two seconds if you're a boy under twelve. It can be used in any situation since it doesn't really mean anything.
- "Square" - Someone dull, out of it or otherwise not "in". Usually used to refer to a nerd, since the Fifties were before Nerds Became Sexy and long before nerds were hardcore.
- "Dreamboat" - If you're a girl, use this word to refer to your crush.
- "Baby" - If you're a guy, this is what you call your girlfriend. Be sure to add the word "hey" before it whenever you address her, or start with "hello", but the second syllable should be of much lower tone. This is a great way to cover up if you can't remember her name (after all, all girls back then seemed to have names like Peggy Sue or Mary Lou, so it's easy to get them mixed up). If that doesn't work, call her the name of a candy, confection or anything else that tastes sweet. Fifties girls like to think that they remind you of what causes cavities.
- "Dolls/Dames" - Girls/women collectively. If you happen to be a private detective, use it whenever you can justify it.
- "Get with it, kid" - What you say to a square.
Popular tropes from this time period are:
Examples of the Fifties Fifties:
Examples of the Nostalgic Fifties:
- American Graffiti (though technically set in 1962)
- American Pie, the song written by Don Mc Lean in 1971, is in part a nostalgic look back at the more innocence music and culture of his youth in the 1950s.
- The version of 1955 seen in the Back To The Future films has elements of both the Nostalgic Fifties and the Historical Fifties, but seems to generally lean more in the direction of the Nostalgic Fifties.
- Grease
- Peggy Sue Got Married
- The Last Picture Show is bit more complicated than some on this list, in that it is both a rather bittersweet version of the period and one set unusually early (in 1951) which means it predates a lot of the standard decade tropes like rock 'n' roll or B-Movies. It's also set in a dying town in rural Texas, placing it at some remove from the middle-class "mainstream" of the era. (The teen characters listen to country and western songs and watch cowboy flicks!)
- Happy Days
- Sha Na Na
- The Porky's movies were a particularly sex-crazed version or maybe just riding the coattails of a trend.
- Bye Bye Birdie
Examples of the Historical Fifties:
Examples which don't easily fit into any of the above:
- It could be said that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has elements of all three.
- Destroy All Humans
- Stubbs The Zombie
- Bill Bryson's The Life And Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, an autobiographical and historical account of 1950s and early 1960s America, when he was a child.
- Bob & Ray, who themselves fit into the Historical Fifties as a result of spoofing the media conventions inherent in the Fifties Fifties.
- The Fallout series not only is a throwback to 1950's sci-fi, it also have many parodies of that time period - such as a virtual reality 50's simulator with kids and adults repeating those same phrases at the beginning of the page.
- The Iron Giant is mainly a deconstruction of Fifties alien invasion movies, but it also has large dollops of nostalgia (the director was born in 1957, the year the movie was set) and delves into some of the issues of the day, particularly Cold War paranoia, as personified by Kent Mansley.
- The Godfather (set 1945 to 1955) and The Godfather Part II (mostly set 1958 to 1959) are set in the Fifties and are rich with period detail, but the focus is so removed from convential depections of the decade that is difficult to pigeonhole them.
- Film Noir in general (see above).
- The Honeymooners was made in the fifties, but it's far from "suburban paradise": it features a married couple, who live in a crappy, cold-water walk-up apartment, can't afford a TV or a vacuum cleaner, and fight all the time.
- Heavenly Creatures is based the outrageous-for-its-time 1950s murder of a mother by her daughter and the girl's best friend, but (in my opinion) it doesn't seem make a huge deal about the era aside from the "homosexuality is just a phase/mental illness" thing.
