Beat and Zen aesthetics signaled American culture regaining humor

Evidence

Mekas had recently praised Jean Vigo’s 1933 Zero de Conduite, showing at the Bleecker Street Cinema “complete and uncensored” for the first time in New York, and he considered The Flower Thief a kindred poem of liberation as well as social satire. “With the coming of beat and Zen, America began to regain its sense of humor,” he declared in June, citing happenings, Pull My Daisy, and The Flower Thief. For what, if not reasonable behavior, patriotism, good filmmaking, adult responsibility, and authority itself, was The Flower Thief mocking? — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 370

Categorization

• DEFINE: Mekas offers a period definition of the beat-Zen sensibility as the recovery of humor against authority — a working vocabulary for how the scene saw itself.
• XREF: The Flower Thief as ‘unreasonable’ film retroactively frames the rubric’s note about unfilmable projects — Hoberman later argues such works found a medium in the scene.