American Graffiti

(1973)

It is ironic that one of the architects of blockbuster cinema should have directed one of his only other films about the minutiae of a non-event. In AMERICAN GRAFFITI, George Lucas portrays a country in the early sixties trapped in a time loop of its own making, laboring under the yoke of a pop culture worn down to the point of parody by endless cycling and repetition and fast-losing whatever innocence it could ever claim to have while fast-becoming a nostalgic retreat to a moment before a generation was mowed down in civil and international war. What may seem like a storyless screenplay is actually a masterpiece of film narration. A cast of characters are buffered throughout ever-decreasing circles of time and space to find each other where they originally found themselves, newly resigned to the inevitability of their future existences. The specter of death and violence hangs over the film, even before we learn of the characters’ fates in a proportion projection of the future for young American men. Each successive incident brings our protagonists simultaneously closer to and further away from vindication of their choices, before those choices – except escaping to Canada – are taken out of their hands by the forces of history. All period pieces exist in at least two periods, here the unravelling then and the unraveled now, but a third emerges, that of the America that even the past would like to have been a part of. During Buddy Holly’s life and before Kennedy’s death.