small town of Modesto, California, Lucas’s film offered up a teen pic that
was light years away from the beach films and rock ’n’ roll movies that
dominated the genre. American Graffiti chronicles one night in the life of a
group of teens, two of whom will be leaving town for college in the morn-
ing. (The film was released in August, a fitting date for those viewers who
would soon leave their childhoods behind for university.) The ensemble
cast included Richard Dreyfuss, Ron Howard, Cindy Williams, Candy
Clark, Paul Le Mat, and Harrison Ford. Much of the film is spent riding
around in cars, cruising the streets, and meeting at the local drive-in, as
the youths look for something to mark the end of their last summer as
teens. Though, as Michael Dempsey notes, “It captures the humor and
verve of youth that can, at least briefly, transform pop-schlock trash into
an amusing, stylish, constellation of codes and rituals” (58), American Graf-
fiti is bittersweet, infused with an underlying tone of melancholia, as if it is
the last night on earth for the young people. The film’s tagline, “Where
were you in ’62?” is mindful of the question that would be asked in the
future about 1963, remembering the assassination of John F. Kennedy,
marking the end of Camelot and American innocence. Ironically, given the
uneasy and ambiguous tone of the movie, it would form the basis of a tele-
vision comedy, “Happy Days,” which premiered the following year, featur-
ing one of the actors from Lucas’s film, Ron Howard. Unlike its progenitor,
however, the television series capitalized on the music to create a feel-good
vibe, leaving out the film’s ominous tone to revel instead in vapid, uncrit-
ical nostalgia.
The episodic structure and use of multiple protagonists was certainly
not unique to American Graffiti; neither was the idea of characters who would
be introduced and then occupy their own little narrative segments, but who
would meet up later in the film. The film-school-trained George Lucas
could consciously work on his audience’s knowledge of multi-character
casts whose plots would eventually link them, both to satisfy and thwart
such expectations. Across the night’s action, Lucas’s teens occupy the same
general space—the town—but some intersect, while many remain separate.
Characters cross paths in important ways or only briefly; sometimes the link
between them is nothing other than the music they all hear simultaneously
in their otherwise various separate segments and stories. In this sense Lucas
is both the inheritor of classical Hollywood and the progenitor of postmod-
ern global cinema.
Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, set on the other side of the country, in
New York City’s Little Italy, seems in many ways the complete opposite of
American Graffiti. Contemporary, urban, and violent, and focusing on a
102 FRANCES GATEWARD