I’ve been watching a lot of classic movies lately, mostly from the forties and fifties—the post-war period. You might think the attraction is nostalgia for a more ‘innocent’ time, but these were far from innocent years. Many post-war films wrestled with difficult social and personal issues, often rooted directly or indirectly in the experience of war. Noir, the era’s most popular genre, depicted the underside of urban society: crime-ridden cityscapes and the toll of human cruelty. Its protagonists were often returning soldiers, quietly tormented by what we now call PTSD. The war may have ended, the economy may have been booming, but many veterans didn’t feel like winners—or free.
One film I watched recently is 1959’s Gidget. Yes, that Gidget: the much-maligned CinemaScope cultural phenomenon that launched the careers of Sandra Dee and teen heartthrob James Darren, inspired a wave of 1960s beach party movies, spawned a Sally Field TV series, and brought surfing into the mainstream.
Most critics have dismissed Gidget as fluff—the story of a 16-year-old girl reluctantly discovering boys and pulling away from her loving, conventional parents. This isn’t James Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Blackboard Jungle (1955), or even Splendor in the Grass (1961). For one thing, the protagonist is a girl—bookish, nerdy, tomboyish, not particularly interested in romance. For another, her struggles are played for laughs, not tragedy. This is a feel-good movie where all turns out well in the end—which may explain why critics dismissed it. They prefer tortured characters, paying in blood or sanity for their lost innocence. Getting dunked while learning to ride a wave hardly seems dramatic enough.
But there’s more to Gidget than critics admit. At its core is a character who places the film squarely in the post-war tradition: the rugged Cliff Robertson as the “Big Kahuna.” He’s the leader of the surf bums, charismatic and unapologetic, living free in a ramshackle hut. Idolized by teenage boys, he represents the rejection of school, work, and parental authority in favor of endless horizons.
Yet Kahuna is no simple hero. We learn he chose this life after returning from the Korean War. Nothing specific is revealed, but the scars are visible. His real name—Burt Vail—hints at the tragic secrets he is keeping. His decorative “tribal” mask, supposedly a gift from a chief, is later revealed to be store-bought. By summer’s end, the fantasy collapses. The teens return to class, and Kahuna to his airline job. He is the tragic figure of the film, emblematic of both the end of the 1950s and the unrest that will erupt in the 1960s.
Inspired by Gidget—a story about a girl struggling to separate from her parents as her society struggles to emerge from its own post-war adolescence—I see a larger theme: the tension between individual freedom and the pull of social and familial attachment. This describes the dynamic of history itself. The pendulum swings: from individuality, the period from the late 19th century to the Roaring ’20s, for example, to collapse (the Great Depression and the World Wars), to conservatism (the 40s and 50s), and back again. Today’s American authoritarian turn can be read as a reaction to the social upheaval and rampant individualism of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. The pendulum swings again, from post-war liberalism and globalism to tribalism, nationalism, and isolationism.
So no, Gidget is not just beach-party fluff. It’s about the most important force in our lives: the struggle between individual freedom and attachment. Zen thinkers tell us attachment is the root of suffering, and so we should resist it. But from birth we are wired for attachment—it literally ensures survival. Alone, we perish; together, we endure. But we attach ourselves not just to other people, but also to material objects, and even to ideologies. The problem isn’t attachment itself, but what we attach ourselves to. After all, what is meaning if not a form of attachment?