Surviving in the 1970s

In a review of the 70s concentration camp movie Seven Beauties, psychologist and concentration camp survivor Bruno Bettelheim wrote in 1976 that the decade was guided by a sense of "empty survivorship," a desire to simply exist from moment-to-moment despite the lack of any true threat.

In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter Thompson's 1971 tale of drug excess, makes the comparision to the 60s counterculture explicit:

We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled that 60's. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "consciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously. All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped create... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody... or at least some force – is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.

It makes sense that the culture of the 70s was tuned to mere survival. If Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas accomplished nothing else, it revealed the very moment in which the 60s counterculture became as empty and ugly as the plastic/corporate culture it was meant to replace.

By the mid-70s, youth culture was stuck between two ideals of corruption. The result? A decade obsessed with themes of wandering and surviving.

Since I encountered this notion of "empty survivorship" in Griel Marcus' Lipstick Traces, it has become the key to explaining the entire decade—a time marked by:

Peak popularity of daredevils who conquer entirely invented dangers

• Evel Kneival
• the nut who decided to walk a tightrope across the World Trade Center)

Songs about aimless wandering

• Running on Empty
• Truckin'

... or the million songs about truckers trying to make it home

• Six Days on the Road
• Willin'

70s Disaster films

• The Towering Inferno
• Airport (not to be confused with the great Airplane!)

... and horror films

• Texas Chainsaw Massacre
• Halloween

Songs about being lost in space

• Major Tom
• Rocket Man (both of which use space as a metaphor for drug addiction)

Or songs literally about survival

• I Will Survive

Making it through, finding your way home, just surviving—themes of a decade afraid to go forward but not wanting to go back.