The Decade Spends Down Its Last Currency

The final three years of the decade don't get remembered with anything like the gravity of Watergate or the moral seriousness of Chinatown, and there's a reason for that, one worth being honest about rather than smoothing over for the sake of a tidy narrative. By 1977, the country had, in a real sense, finished the hardest work of the reckoning this series has spent its whole account tracing. Nixon was gone. Vietnam was over. Carter was in the White House promising, and mostly delivering, a more honest relationship between the government and the governed. The accountability machine had done its job. And what you get, in the years right after any exhausting reckoning finally concludes, is not more reckoning — it's release. The decade's final act is the sound of a country that had spent seven straight years in genuine institutional crisis finally exhaling, and the culture it produced in that exhale is stranger, giddier, and in some ways more purely joyful than almost anything that came before it, even as new and different kinds of trouble were already gathering just off camera.

Star Wars opened in May of 1977 and changed the economics of the entire film industry more completely than any single movie before or since. George Lucas, working from a script steeped in Joseph Campbell's mythology and old Flash Gordon serials, built something that had almost nothing in common with the morally ambiguous, adult-oriented filmmaking we spent seven parts celebrating — a clean, uncomplicated story of good against evil, farm boy against empire, delivered with special effects so far beyond anything audiences had seen that it essentially forced the entire industry to reconsider what a blockbuster could look like. It became the highest-grossing film in history, unseated Jaws, and its success, combined with Jaws two years earlier, taught every studio in Hollywood the exact commercial lesson that would reshape the business for the following four decades — spectacle sells better than ambiguity, franchises sell better than one-off character studies, and the audience that had shown up in droves for Chinatown and The Godfather would show up in even larger droves for a pure, uncomplicated fantasy about a farm boy discovering he mattered. That's not a criticism of Star Wars itself, which remains a genuinely brilliant piece of popcorn filmmaking. It's an observation about timing, about a country that had just spent the hardest years of its modern history demanding moral complexity from its art, finally getting to a place where it could afford, again, to simply have fun.

Meanwhile, that December, Saturday Night Fever gave disco its defining cultural moment, John Travolta's Tony Manero strutting through a Brooklyn dance floor to the Bee Gees' falsetto in a film that turned what had started as an underground Black and gay and Latino club scene into the single dominant sound of mainstream American popular culture almost overnight. Disco gets dismissed, still, by plenty of rock critics who never forgave it for outselling their own preferred genre, but there's a real argument, and I think it's the correct one, that disco represented something genuinely democratic and joyful arriving at the exact right moment — a purely physical, communal, celebratory music built by and for communities that had spent the earlier parts of the decade fighting for basic recognition, its sudden mainstream explosion a kind of populist victory lap after years of struggle that gets too easily flattened into a punchline about polyester and mirror balls.

And in London, that same year, punk finally, fully detonated in public. The Sex Pistols released "God Save the Queen" that May, timed with deliberate, gleeful provocation to coincide with Queen Elizabeth's Silver Jubilee, a song so openly contemptuous of the monarchy and the British establishment that the BBC banned it outright, which of course only drove it further up the actual sales charts through word of mouth and outrage alone. Never Mind the Bollocks followed the next year, and the Clash's self-titled debut arrived that same year too, giving punk's raw fury an explicitly political conscience that the Sex Pistols' pure nihilism had mostly lacked. This is the scene that had been quietly assembling itself in CBGB's back rooms since 1974 and 1975, finally exploding into full public view, on both sides of the Atlantic, exactly the way we predicted a few chapters back — rock and roll, stripped back down to its rawest, angriest essentials, in direct rebellion against everything the decade's first half had built toward.

We will close the series tomorrow, covering 1979 — the year everything this decade had achieved got its final, complicated test, as a revolution in Iran took American hostages and reminded the country, one more time before the calendar turned, exactly how fragile even a hard-won peace can be.