The New Sentimentality: The Original "Vibe Shift" of 1964

There is a New Sentimentality, but nobody knows it exists.

These words—a kind of koan, really—kick off an article that ran in Esquire in July 1964, an article that’s been largely forgotten, but which has been on my mind lately. Vibe shift discourse seems to have died down, blessedly (was there a “vibe shift?” I’ll leave that to the John Ganzes of the world to sort out), but of course the vibes are always shifting, and of course, in 1964, they were shifting a little more aggressively than ever. The two guys who wrote the article, Robert Benton and David Newman, were the sort of people—smart, talented, perhaps a little showoffy but for good reason—who today might be writing for The Drift or N+1, but because they lived in a time when the mainstream media ecosystem had not yet collapsed, they both had staff jobs at Esquire. For the last few years I’ve had a picture of them tacked above my desk.

I love this image, which sums up their personalities just so: Newman (that’s him on the left) has that sharp, sardonic look of a Lenny Bruce or a Richard Farina—a guy who could just as easily have dropped a folk-rock record that would’ve gotten him tagged as a New Dylan and led to an inevitable flameout—where Benton looks mild but sharp, the sort of person who could put you down so subtly you wouldn’t even know it until the party was over and you’d already gone home. There’s something about these two, a kind of Frick and Frack quality. It’s possible they were total assholes. But they knew what was up.

“The New Sentimentality,” as they define it in the article, isn’t quite what it sounds like. It wasn’t some bend towards kitsch or extreme doses of exaggerated emotion, a call for a Sirk/Montovani revival. No, the New Sentimentality according to Benton and Newman was something else: a clearing away of bullshit, a Don Draper-coded sharpness that existed on the other side of the ginned-up pieties of the 1950s (“the Old Sentimentality,” as they put it). New Sentimental? The Beatles, Antonioni, Jean Shrimpton, Jeanne Moreau. Old Sentimental? Eisenhower, Grace Kelly, the Rat Pack. It seems simple enough on the face of it— “Old Sentimental” means square, right? —but it turns out . . . not so much. Nikita Khrushchev? New Sentimental. James Baldwin? Old. Proust? New Sentimental. Kerouac? Old. The determination seems to have more to do with a kind of sharpness and moral flexibility, a hint of aggression (Baldwin? Old, sure, but Malcolm X? New) that has to be the right kind of aggression (John Wayne? Pfft, Old). “Old Sentimental” isn’t even a pejorative, particularly (Jackie Robinson? Old), but Benton and Newman were sussing out a cultural change, one they were themselves going to have a hand in making.

This image, too, is pinned above my desk: an image of Faye Dunaway from Bonnie and Clyde, which was written by Benton and Newman while they were still employed at Esquire. Their futzing around with the New Sentimentality was a kind of prelude for them, a way to sound out a set of ideas they would shortly encode more fully in their first screenplay, which they banged out on weekends as a lark. These days, that very notion—the idea of writing a spec script, naively, romantically believing it stands a hope in hell of ever getting made—feels pretty Old Sentimental, but still they did it. It must’ve been quite a ride for Benton, who came from Waxahatchee, Texas, in particular. One minute he was watching Godard and Truffaut films at the Lyric Theater on the Upper West Side—just another audience member, enraptured by the European New Wave—and the next he was meeting with Godard and Truffaut themselves, as each director expressed an interest in Bonnie and Clyde (although neither would ultimately be the one to make it, of course). They wanted the picture to be raw, and real, to cut through the phoniness that dominated Hollywood (‘63 was Cleopatra, The Great Escape, Bye Bye Birdie and so on) by infusing it with New Wave style. And so they did. Bonnie and Clyde is a great film, of course, but these days I’m still more struck by that article, which seems far more modern—closer to the sort of discourse-bait you see on Twitter (or, ahem, here on Substack)—and which is filled with determinations that get weirder the more you squint at them (San Francisco? Old Sentimental, of course, but Manhattan? That’s . . . also Old, apparently) and which treads a peculiar line between libertarian self-focus (“Personal interest is the abiding motivation . . . your primary objective is to make your life fit your style”) and a kind of acute, and appealing, anti-romanticism. “A minor character who happens to excite us in a personal way is a real celebrity,” they say, using Timothy Carey as an example. If you’ve ever paid even the slightest attention to Carey (my friends and I whipped ourselves into a full froth obsession in our twenties after watching him in The Killing and in Minnie and Moskowitz), you’ll know exactly what it’s all about. “The New Sentimentality is about “what goes on in your head, really, and what goes on in your heart, really.” It’s striking, somehow, to realize that sixty years ago folks were already busy sorting things into these kinds of buckets: Old Vibes and New Vibes, what was Brat and what was Cringe.

Benton and Newman make an appearance in The Golden Hour, by the way. We take a fateful walk with Benton, one spring afternoon in 1963, while he’s still chewing on the ideas that will make their way into this article. Speaking of which—hooray! —my book is out in three short weeks! The pre-pub indicators have all been thrillingly positive: Kirkus gave it a starred review, as did Publishers Weekly. The New York Times featured it prominently in their spring nonfiction preview, and the mighty Jonathan Lethem, who knows what’s up, says of it: “The Golden Hour is sheerly a marvel: blink, and this study of the sunset of the cinema century turns into a memoir, or a non-fiction novel, or a lyric fugue on memory and loss – and all with a breath-held suspense that confirms Matthew Specktor as a narrative wizard.” There’s a bunch of other exciting stuff in the wings there, and now would be a great time to preorder it, which you can do via an indie store while receiving a better discount than you would via Am*zon if you smash this button here:

(You’ll get it for 25% off if you use a code—”GOLDEN”—and 50%, apparently, if you do the whole sign-up-for-a-free-trial-and-cancel thing, which I know we all do these days more than we should, but it’s worth doing just this one more time because the hardcover is gorgeous and you can get it for the cost of a paperback if you want it, which you do, you do, you do.)

I’ll be reminding you of these dates, of course, but if you’re in LA, the launch is happening on pub day itself—April 22nd—at Diesel Books, where I’ll be joined by the estimable Tom Bissell. In New York, I’ll be at Powerhouse Arena on May 1st with our man Jason Diamond. In the Bay Area, I’ll be hitting up Book Passage with the excellent, excellent Sterling Holywhitemountain on May 8th, and I’ll be at Exile in Bookville in Chicago with the rad novelist and editor of B-side Editions Deborah Shapiro on May 15th. I’m very, very excited for these things too—it’s been a minute since I got to do real world events, as my last book came out smack dab in the middle of the pandemic—and I’ll hope to see many of you out there. But first, though, the book itself. It whips, I promise.

I’ll leave you with Timothy Carey chewing some scenery alongside Marlon Brando in One-Eyed Jacks, and with the delightful discovery that “The New Sentimentality”—paywalled on the Esquire site—can be snagged as a PDF right here.

Until soon,

Matthew

p.s. there’s a great Brando story that appears in The Golden Hour too, but that I ain’t telling. Read and find out 🙊