Exploitation director Barry Shear, an exact contemporary of Norman Mailer and Paul Fussell, evidently shared their faith in the revolutionary potential of the generation born just before the Boomers.

Like Mailer’s The Armies of the Night (1968), Shear’s AIP sci-fi flick Wild in the Streets (1968) dramatizes the alienation and contempt that led the Boomers’ immediate elders to organize an epic anarcho-pacifist march on Washington in October 1967; and like Fussell’s Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (1983) it celebrates the psycho-emotional space (Fussell’s “category X”) occupied by teenage mutant refugees from Cold War bourgeois status anxiety.

In the scene shown here, Shelley Winters (who brilliantly portrays an avatar of bourgeois status anxiety) struggles to close the generation gap between herself and her son, rock star and future president Max Frost. The scene’s blocking tells us that Max (Christopher Jones, second from left) has embraced a new, tribal paradigm that doesn’t include her; he’s shoulder-to-shoulder with his band/family, an Argonaut Folly who will later serve as his Cabinet.

Wild in the Streets is often described as dystopian, but it isn’t; instead, it’s anti-anti-utopian. Though Max ultimately cannot escape his parents’ (and culture’s) malign influence, his initial vision of an eroticized, peaceful and non-repressive America mustn’t be lightly dismissed.