Kill Fee

Originally published in Bookforum, Apr/May 2006.

In 1973 Americans watched the spectacular unraveling of the Nixon administration, a result of an “extensive bugging operation” of the president’s paranoid devising. They read about the “zipless fuck,” watched the Loud family disintegrate on public television, wore POW bracelets, and learned of the Stockholm syndrome. By the end of the year, fifteen million Americans had reported seeing UFOs. It is not surprising, then, that in his collection of essays about this “deeply schizophrenic moment,” historian Andreas Killen frequently uses the word “convulse.”

Killen’s study is the latest in what appears to be a new genre, landing midway between Mark Kurlansky’s 1968: The Year that Rocked the World and Jonathan Mahler’s Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City. For an era that defied then-familiar narratives, Killen promises a “psychogram of a country that was dealing with the consequences of Vietnam, Watergate, and economic meltdown.” His essays cover the new jet age, the staged homecoming of the POWs, and the nostalgic impulse behind George Lucas’s film American Graffiti. A chapter exploring the Warholian taping of the Loud household and its parallels in the Orwellian taping of the White House is especially fine. Throughout, the author touches on the “schizoid awareness that institutions were toppling and yet remained more firmly in place than ever.”

In 1973, if you were gay, you were suddenly “all better,” according to the American Psychological Association, which dropped homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. If you were a woman, you were able to obtain a legal abortion. If you were a member of the general population, you turned out in record numbers to watch a “teenage girl jam a crucifix into her vagina” in The Exorcist and a grown woman climax by giving blow jobs in Deep Throat. If you were the president, you read op-ed articles about the public’s right to know whether you were having a nervous breakdown.

Killen has researched and scoured, citing Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Julia Phillips, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, Marshall McLuhan, Richard Slotkin, Daniel Boorstin, Frederic Jameson, and Shana Alexander. The book’s title is borrowed from one of Lester Bangs’s music reviews. For all his effort, though, Killen doesn’t bring new analysis to this moment so much as remind us that we should be reading the savvy, watchful writers who were there. Why pluck one year out of history and magnify it, if not to see the light—or shadow—it casts? Killen’s references to the present are minimal, with glancing mentions of The Osbornes and the 2004 campaign spin of John Kerry’s war record. His view of 1973 is only one-way, and questions about the year’s implications today rarely surface. What of the fact that in 1973, the embattled head of the Republican National Committee facing the Watergate firestorm was George H.W. Bush (and that during this upheaval, Bush asked a new aide, Karl Rove, to pick up his oldest son from the train station)? How did the fevers of 1973 prepare our leaders for the firestorms of the present? And if the collective psyche is not convulsing today, what is it doing?

—Liz Brown