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Did The Graduate change America?

Saturday’s One Day University event in Dallas includes a lecture called Four Films That Changed America. Yale film professor Marc Lapadula will tell us about movies that “have brought social issues to light, affected laws, forwarded ideologies both good and bad, and generally changed the course of history through their impact on society.” His quartet: The Jazz Singer, I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang, The Graduate and The China Syndrome.

It’s an intriguing list. The Jazz Singer ushered in the sound era. Chain Gang brought attention to the brutal conditions inside American prisons. The Graduate helped shake up sexual mores. The China Syndrome brought the threat of nuclear disaster to the mainstream.

What other movies might be said to have changed America? I’d put The Birth of a Nation on my list. D.W. Griffith’s silent epic helped resurrect the Ku Klux Klan for the twentieth century by wrapping white supremacy in a glossy Hollywood package. Not good, even if the movie helped invent the visual grammar of modern movies. For a more recent generation, the troika of Jaws, Rocky and especially Star Wars marked the end of American cinema’s introspective (some would say gloomy) period and paved the way glib ’80s optimism. (One could argue these movies reflected the country rather than changed it).

Here’s a better question. With today’s preponderance of media choices, niche markets and mass attractions does a movie still have the power to change the country? Can even the most inspiring, devastating, illuminating film rise above the noise? Perhaps issue-oriented documentaries can still make small dents, but even Michael Moore’s lightning rod days appear to be waning.

I think the movies still matter. They just don’t matter the same way, or to as many people.

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