While liberal and Westernised and modernised at the outset, these art forms were tinged with the middle-class puritanism of the audiences that patronised them. In the United States the fifties and sixties had become the repository of revolution, of bohemia, of countercultural rebellion in Sri Lanka, those decades would become the repository of the formal, conservative, middle-class, and petty bourgeois culture, the culture which was seen most discernibly in the films of Lester James Peries, the songs of Amaradeva, the plays of Sarachchandra, and the ballets of Chitrasena. Led by the offspring of the upper class, these preservationists laid the bedrock for the emergence of that sphere, despite the errors they made when formalising the same culture they sought to preserve. It was in the fifties that the efforts of the likes of Devar Surya Sena led to the creation of a cultural sphere. It’s interesting, thus, to note that while Abbie Hoffman was ranting and raving about the virtues of revolutionary politics and the Beatniks were hailing the LSD and drug culture of the fifties and sixties, Sri Lanka, conversely, faced a resurgence of bourgeois values. In the hands of the masters, the middlebrow and the lowbrow is formalised: baila turns into The Moonstones, Dalreen Suby enters Such shifts are not rare, and are almost certainly reflected in the culture of a particular era. From the one to another, there was a shift, from the bohemian values of the sixties to the bourgeois values of the eighties. In 1967, The Graduate, one of that year’s most successful films, depicted its hero in the form of Benjamin Braddock, who rebelled against conformity and the sexual depravity of the WASP (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) middle-class 20 years later, its director, Mike Nichols, created a hero out of a stockbroker’s secretary who finds her way to the upper echelons of corporate America in Melanie Griffith, with Working Girl. Probably the best illustration of this shift can be found in the movies. David Brooks, in his clear accessible account of this phenomenon, Bobos in Paradise, contends that what transpired was the substitution of one way of thinking for another, a substitution that was short-lived, as the return of the corporate culture of the seventies and the eighties proved. But these were relatively prosperous years, probably the most prosperous of 20th century American life. Almost overnight, the bourgeoisie, so accustomed to their way of life, found their culture eroding with the onslaught of the bohemians, the heroes of the counterculture who found their icons in the novels of Norman Mailer and the Beat Generation and the politics of Abbie Hoffman. The fifties and sixties were clearly epoch-making decades for much of the Western world and particularly for the United States.
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