Primal screaming, flotation tanks and corrupt gurus in the 1970s
WELL BEINGS
How the Seventies lost its mind and taught us to find ourselves
JAMES RILEY 480pp. Icon. £25.
THE 1960S TEND to be mythologized rather fondly. We had the Beatles and Woodstock; we walked on the moon; there was something called “free love”, which sounded terrific. In The Bad Trip (2019), James Riley took aim at this nostalgic narrative, illustrating the extent to which violence, chaos and apocalyptic thinking characterized the whole decade: people at Woodstock thought the government had seeded the clouds with silver iodide to make it rain; the moon missions were arguably an exospheric penis-waving contest between the US and Russia; and even “Strawberry Fields Forever” turned out to have been inspired by John Lennon’s boyhood trespasses into a Salvation Army home for girls.
Well Beings, Riley’s second book, takes aim at the 1970s – immediately a more sobering task, remembered as that decade tends to be for strikes and stagflation – and the emergence of the wellness industry. As early as 1946 the UN and the World Health Organization defined health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. But the notion of individual “wellness” needed the failures of the communitarian 1960s to gain ascendancy. Now, of course, “wellness”, or “self-care”, is everywhere. Getting better after a temporary illness is like filling in a hole – you more or less know when it is done. If the goal is “an aspirational rather than a functional state of health”, however, then there is no limit to the scale or, indeed, financial cost of what a person might attempt, starting with “a little meditation here, a little Feldenkrais movement there”.
All of this is worth a critical look, and Riley, with 76 pages of notes and bibliography, is a well-read guide. The book deals with events, people, music and films from the 1970s, setting them in a longerlived cultural context that begins with segregated American swimming baths in the 1920s and ends with lifestyle cruises in the present day. We encounter primal screaming, flotation tanks and corrupt gurus. We learn that the term “rat race” comes from aviation, when a novice pilot follows a more experienced one nose to tail, and that each of the four remakes of Invasion of the Body Snatchers dramatizes a dominant cultural anxiety: communism, militarism, viruses and, for the 1978 version, fractured interpersonal relationships. Riley quotes Time magazine: “every generation gets the Body Snatchers that it deserves”. He also deploys some fine phrase-making of his own: our psychological baggage is “bound to us like shadows”; John Cheever is th
