The Spirit of ’76

Abstract

In this chapter the legendary New York film critic J Hoberman revisits the Bicentennial, 1976, a year characterized by a longing for rebirth and a search for new heroes, in Hollywood and in politics. The nihilistic Taxi Driver, opened in February 1976; it featured the decade’s most compelling anti-hero Travis Bickle, who can be seen as the ultimate expression of the New Hollywood (not least in its critical and popular success). Bickle’s antipode arrived in the person of Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky, protagonist of an even more successful movie that, retrograde in every way, was the first major expression of a reborn Hollywood—a narrative paralleled in the political realm by Jimmy Carter’s “Cinderella” ascension to the White House.