Jenifer’s Shelter Island Journal: Best years of our lives

This column comes out on June 5, in between Memorial Day and its parade — which both meteorologically and musically was a cut above this year — and the Island’s Fourth of July celebration. The two major national, patriotic holidays are coming at a time when the definition of “patriotism” itself has become a source of division.

As they do every year, on Memorial Day weekend, my “old movie channel,” TCM, featured a non-stop array of wartime movies, including “The Best Years of Our Lives,” directed by William Wyler and released on Christmas Day 1946.

At that time, I was just over three weeks old and, as I’ve described myself elsewhere, as one of the “last flecks of foam in the first wave of Baby Boomers,” post-war tsunami that hit the US of A that very same year. So, last weekend, almost 79 years later, I sat watching for, conservatively, the 40th time, a nearly 79-year-old movie and, as always, crying.

This time, I started crying — sobbing, really — as soon as the opening credits started to roll. It’s the music, of course, Hugo Friedhofer’s majestic, heart-rending score, that tells the whole story before the movie ever begins. Three victorious white warriors home from a sweeping global conflict, yes. But also three very human-sized men, unmoored from the intensity and camaraderie of battle, where at least they knew their name, rank, serial number and how to do their jobs. Now, they’re attempting to step back into a peacetime world where family seems almost like strangers, and nobody really knows who they are anymore, either.

I saw the film for the first time in my 40s, maybe because it only recently had qualified as an “old movie” for TCM. I recognized, like in a dream, the cars, the clothes the atmosphere of the world that those three men were trying to re-enter, one which simply didn’t exist any longer. What it takes for them to realize that fact is, of course, at the crux of the story.

These brave, good but displaced men begin to see, even in a world enmeshed in the throes of change, glimmers of a near-future that gives each of them hope and aspirations towards a promising “tomorrow.” And that’s what makes me cry

In the months after returning home, disillusioned as they may be about their own prospects, they never question the glory and greatness of the nation for which they fought. They couldn’t know, nor could anyone, that America was headed towards a tomorrow that would present its citizens with an unimaginable version of what we had believed it to be.

Wrapped in an innocence born of a kind of chronic, willful ignorance, the 1950s found a major swath of American society trying to fashion a new and improved Technicolor re-creation of the past, one that cemented men back into their rightful place as heads-of-the-house, heads-of-the-nation, while seducing women — with silver screen ideals of glamorous womanhood coupled with the lure of fancy appliances — to get back in the kitchen. 

And it was “better living through chemistry,” but, most of all technology, which became the mantra. Television, the great-grandma of social media, became not only a babysitter for all those little Boomers, but distracted us so thoroughly with its “reality” that we began to become the reflection.

Then there was the Korean war which wasn’t a “war,” apparently, and McCarthyism, and frequent lynchings down South. But the soothing balm of Father Knows Best and Davy Crockett and Donna Reed held sway. Until the 60s, of course, when the whole comforting stew of pseudo-nostalgia was slow-motion blown to smithereens.

I was a high school freshman in 1960. I wasn’t allowed to wear pants to school, there were “good” girls and “bad” girls, “necking” was the limit, “virgin pins” were in, and a good friend of mine went to Katherine Gibbs in the city. 

By graduation, beautiful JFK had been assassinated, the Beatles had invaded, four little girls had been killed in the church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, ground troops were about to be deployed in Vietnam, “The Feminine Mystique” was on the shelves, and the “pill” was in the mainstream.   

But my love of country was still based on Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (a 1939 film — my first ‘old movie’ — shown to my 4th grade class in the school auditorium), as he bravely fights against the powers of darkness from the Senate floor. I was as asleep as Jimmy Stewart and those three wonderful, earnest patriots in the Wyler film.

In the ensuing 50 years, change has become like an out-of-control roller coaster, distracting us from the true state of our nation — half heroic, half hypocritical. What we need to be is human. And equal.