c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.)

UNDATED _ Assume it’s 20 years from now. Assume someone wants to make a film about what the 1990s were like. Assume they decided to base it on a TV series that was extremely popular in that forgotten era -“The X Files.” Let’s also assume the theme of the film is that back in the crazy `90s, everyone was like those ineffable creeps Scully and Mulder, the”X Files'”main characters.

Those of you who were alive in the nonsensical `90s would scream in protest. It was only a series, you would say. Scully and Mulder were not typical. We weren’t like them.

Protest as you may, I’m afraid people would laugh at you. Everyone knows that”The X Files”captured the paranoia, the lunacy, the superstition, the fear of the `90s. Right?

How about ridiculous _ but no more ridiculous than the case of that nasty little film”Pleasantville,”which critics are hailing as a potential Academy Award winner.

The film is based on the madcap assumption that the TV series”Father Knows Best”was the way life really was in the years immediately following World War II. Popular culture, it is argued, illuminates an era.

The `50s?”Father Knows Best,””Ozzie and Harriet,”Hula-Hoops, tail fins on Cadillacs _ that’s what they were all about. Right?

Human history does not arrange itself into neat ten-year cycles to fit the simple minds of journalistic historians. Perhaps there was an era from 1830 to 1914 which might be called the Victorian Age, or the Age of Bourgeois Liberalism, or the Age of Scientific Optimism. Then maybe there came the Great War from 1914 to 1945 with a timeout of twenty years more or less.

Now we are probably in the Post War period, characterized more than anything else by the uneven and imperfect spread of prosperity and some form of democracy to many parts of the world _ Africa clearly excepted. (In 1960 the per capita income of Koreans was $300, now it is $10,000.)

No ten-year period is greatly different from the previous ten-year period.

Moreover, to argue that the time a person lives in is”revolutionary”is to deprive that word of all meaning (read about the period from 1770 to 1830 to find out what real revolution is). Finally, the processes at work in human society are often contradictory, uneven, problematic. Thus one might argue that a major change in the last 40 years is greater respect for the privacy of the individual person and his or her moral freedom. (One is free to be open about sexual preferences.)

Yet at the same time, the all-intrusive media strive to destroy the privacy of everyone they touch from victims of personal tragedy (a child killed in gang crossfire), to sports figures (how much privacy does Michael Jordan have?), to political leaders. This makes the `90s better than the `50s? Someone has to be kidding!

The thesis of”Pleasantville”is that we who live in the 1990s are happier because we are”liberated,”which in the film means sexually liberated. But are we all that much happier?

Measures of personal, psychological well-being have not changed much in the last 40 years, nor have measures of marital happiness. Neither have the indicators of sexual fulfillment or frequency of sexual intercourse. Are we freer today than our parents and grandparents were 40 years ago?

Women are free to pursue careers, though this is in fact a continuation of a process that began in the `50s. That does give them greater control of their finances and, hence, of their lives (and the ability to dump abusive husbands). It has not made them any happier. It does, however, subject them to cross-pressures between home and family that are often agonizing.

Sexual liberation? Perhaps if liberation is the freedom to use obscene words, watch gross television programs (Maybe”Seinfeld”is the typical `90s man) and ogle semi-naked female bodies in films. But so what!

Change? Yes. Progress? Maybe in some respects. But surely not in other respects. Reality is gray, uneven, multi-directional, multi-layered, even if the critics of the past are too simple-minded to grasp the complexity of the relations between present and immediate past.

The truth is that the people who watched”Father Knows Best”or”Ozzie and Harriet”are not that much different from the people who watch”Seinfeld”or”The X Files.”

IR END GREELEY