The fifties’ revolt, not the sixties’ counterculture, is the truly dangerous force.

Evidence

What is interesting about that composition is that it first of all gives us the sixties seen, as it were, through the fifties (or the eighties?): alcohol rather than drugs. The schizophrenic, drug-cultural side of the sixties is here systematically excluded along with its politics. What is dangerous, in other words, is not Lulu at her most frenzied but rather Ray; not the sixties and its countercultures and “life-styles” but the fifties and its revolts. Yet the continuity between the fifties and the sixties lay in what was being revolted against, in what life-style the “new” lifestyles were alternatives to. It is, however, difficult to find any content in Lulu’s stimulating behavior, which seems organized around sheer caprice; that is to say, around the supreme value of remaining unpredictable and immune to reification and categorization. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 638