Writer Paul Goodman was forever being labelled: pacifist and anarchist, bisexualist and "poverty cultist." The latter was according to conservative William F. Buckley Jr. on an old, black-and-white episode of the TV talk show Firing Line. Appearing on the program, Goodman denied "poverty cultist."
Yet, as the documentary Paul Goodman Changed My Life shows, Goodman never completely matched any of the tags pinned to him. A leading intellectual of the U.S. anti-conformism, anti-military protest movement of the 1950s and 1960s, Goodman's influence was profound, even if he never got much recognition for that at the time.
As this clear-eyed, straight-ahead documentary shows through interviews with those touched by his work, Goodman's bluntness and free-thinking often did him in.
Goodman looked the part of a bookish intellectual sent from central casting, with his thick and unruly hair, perpetually dishevelled and his pipe constantly in hand. As portrayed by those who knew him, he was also a self-exiler who couldn't join fully with any one movement.
Goodman, who died in 1972, came to prominence as a leading post-war intellectual with his 1960 bestseller Growing Up Absurd. The book – a staple of college dorm rooms at the time – was supposed to be about juvenile delinquency. It wound up being a treatise on the stranglehold Goodman felt that social systems had on the growing, disaffected younger population.
Yet he wasn't part of that emerging, baby boom counter-culture. He was older, a product of 1930s academia in New York and Chicago and had been expected to drift, perhaps, into communism like his peers. The fact that he moved instead toward New York's younger, pacifist movement prevented him being dated too quickly and kept him in the public eye as a social commentator.
Goodman encouraged, as writer and literary executor Taylor Stoehr says in the film, a family of ideas. (Most all of Goodman's friends and past acquaintances speak of his ideas with a rush of glee. Even if he wasn't universally liked as a person, his memory seems to bring a smile to everyone.) Those within Goodman's circle of friends could agree with some views, disagree with others. The discussion was free flowing. Debate was encouraged.
"He wrote this: Anarchism – which is one word [or]label he would give to what he represented – is not a set of principles. It's not a dogma. It's not a position. It's an attitude," Stoehr notes.
What makes him such an interesting biographic sketch for a film, however, is the way Goodman undercut his own successes. A family man, he nevertheless regularly walked New York's streets and riverfronts cruising for gay men. He spent a career believing he was woefully underappreciated as a writer, even though admirers say he rarely wrote a wrong sentence. He helped develop the psychology field of Gestalt therapy, even though he did it in large part for his own self-health and grew disinterested in it after a few years.
All of this made Goodman difficult to define, just as the Vietnam War polarized the protest movement and defining yourself clearly into one group or another became everything. Rigorous debate went out of style. An aging intellectual like Goodman was an easy mark for young radicalism. ("If there hadn't been the Vietnam War," says writer and editor Neil Heims in the documentary, "there might have been more revolutionary change…because the Vietnam War allowed people to become stupid.")
You were either part of the establishment or part of the youth movement. Goodman was neither. And today, Goodman would have likely been a presence within the Occupy Movement, but he would have never joined in completely. He was his own person.
Paul Goodman Changed My Life
- Directed by Jonathan Lee
- Classification: PG