This rarely-shown 1973 cop film was on at the ICA last night. It took me a while to get into it, but when I finally thought I’d got the message, the brutal ending shot completely blew me away.

It’s a strange film. No glamour, not much violence, a central figure who doesn’t achieve his dream. And coming as it did from a director who used to manage the rock band ‘Chicago’, I was expecting a cop-goes-over-to-the-new-hippy-values’ film, perhaps setting up a Punishment Park-like¬†opposition between Authority and Hippy, but fundamentally on the tie-dyed side. What I got had a message more in tune with Lord of the Flies: they’re all bastards.

All the way through the story the hippies are harassed by the police; reluctantly, in the case of the central character John Wintergreen. Then, at the end, Wintergreen becomes more lenient; and you expect that to be the message. The counterculture is the way forward, don’t bash the hippies, they’re¬†okay; and good cops¬†learn to be nice to hippies. But then it twists abruptly and brutally, and the final bleak message is¬†that hippies can be just as trigger-happy, vengeful and arbitrarily nasty as anyone else. Thus it questions the idealism of the hippies as well as examining through (literally) the ‘little guy’ the pros and cons of a rigid Establishment probity. And then finally it collapses the notional opposition between counterculture and status quo. At the level of day-to-day interaction, idealism is found everywhere, both among cops and robbers. And the villain is neither drug dealers nor the ‘System’ - it’s loneliness.

It¬†started me thinking about a number of conversations I’ve had in recent years about the ideals of the Sixties: community, autonomy, individual self-expression, kindness, a simpler life, the idea of ‘enough’, a gentler way than the rat race offers. I talk a lot with Dougald about the way in which we (the generation born into Thatcherism) are told the Sixties was a flash in the pan, that imploded into pornography and cheap international travel. Look at Branson, we’re told, and get a proper job.

But I think there are other ways of telling the story. Tablehurst Farm, a now exemplarily successful biodynamic community farm, is a case in point. Its late matriarch told me once that its principles are based squarely in the ideas explored in Sixties communes. The only difference, she said, was that these ideals stopped getting stoned and sleeping around, and refocused from lifestyle and identity to action - in this case producing food. 

The idea has stuck with me. I like to think there are lifestyle options, ideals, cultural forms beyond sex and shopping. And so I’m tempted to start a canon, begining with EGIB, of voices that trace alternate ethical pathways from the counterculture to the world we find ourselves in now.