Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 A Drive-in Theatre of the Mind: Nostalgic Populism and the Déclassé Video Object
- 2 42nd Street Forever? Constructing ‘Grindhouse Cinema’ from Exhibition to Genre to Transmedia Concept
- 3 Paratexts, Pastiche and the Direct-to-video Aesthetic: Towards a Retrosploitation Mediascape
- 4 Dressed to Regress? The Retributive Politics of the Retrosploitation Pastiche
- Conclusion
- Appendix: Selected Filmography and Videography of Retrosploitation Media
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
1 - A Drive-in Theatre of the Mind: Nostalgic Populism and the Déclassé Video Object
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 A Drive-in Theatre of the Mind: Nostalgic Populism and the Déclassé Video Object
- 2 42nd Street Forever? Constructing ‘Grindhouse Cinema’ from Exhibition to Genre to Transmedia Concept
- 3 Paratexts, Pastiche and the Direct-to-video Aesthetic: Towards a Retrosploitation Mediascape
- 4 Dressed to Regress? The Retributive Politics of the Retrosploitation Pastiche
- Conclusion
- Appendix: Selected Filmography and Videography of Retrosploitation Media
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
Summary
[T]he revaluing of space is correlative to the revaluing of more restricted entities (groups, ‘tribes’). Symbolic and spatial proxemics encourage the desire to leave one's mark, that is, to bear witness to one's durability. This is the true aesthetic dimension of a given spatial affiliation: to serve the collective memory that defined it.
Michel Maffesoli, The Time of the TribesWe are drive-in mutants.
We are not like other people.
We are sick.
We are disgusting.
We believe in blood,
In breasts,
And in beasts.
We believe in Kung Fu City.
If life had a Vomit Meter,
We'd be off the scale.
As long as one single drive-in
Remains on the planet Earth,
We will party like jungle animals,
We will boogie till we puke.
Heads will roll.
The drive-in will never die.
Amen.
Joe Bob Briggs, ‘The Drive-In Oath’Though its number of screens continues to dwindle across the American landscape, the drive-in theatre has retained a place of particular celebration in the annals of popular Americana, often associated with the postwar ‘baby boom’ generation that came of age in the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, it would probably be hard for white, middle-class Americans of a certain age to imagine a nostalgically prelapsarian 1950s without picturing the drive-in as a mythic site for teenage pleasures outside the home. Recently equipped with cars for their nocturnal excursions, hormonal adolescents were temporarily freed from parental oversight, and perhaps afforded the opportunity for couplings in their coupés. Yet, this selective nostalgia, linked to visions of a relatively innocent past, overlaps with another popular (if less prevalent) mythology of the drive-in: as a notorious site for the exhibition of exploitation films, especially as post-1950s censorship erosion allowed content to veer sharply towards the violent, sexual, and sleazy. Meanwhile, cheap admission and the populist appeal of these films drew in many working-class viewers of various ages, not just middle-class teenagers, commingling multiple class strata within the shared viewing experience of the cheap genre fare that eventually became dubbed ‘drive-in movies’.
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- Information
- Grindhouse NostalgiaMemory, Home Video and Exploitation Film Fandom, pp. 29 - 72Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2015