American Commune

My parents were hippies living in New Hampshire when the Farm thrived in Tennessee. Members of the Farm community lived with us for a time at our own little farm up north. No, we were not affiliated with Gaskin's farm, but my folks had great admiration the Farm's ideas.

In one scene, the Gaskin's daughter recalls how she once found a gum wrapper and savored its scent for a week.

Welcome to being a hippie kid. I saw in the film how the Farm children loved the freedom of frolicking in the fields and woods. I saw the intimacy, the love, and the hope.

Yet, Ms. Gaskin's story of the gum wrapper, and the comments about the children removing the guns from their Stars Wars action figures, struck a familiar chord.

We were hippie children, but we were still children. The more the grownups sowed us with dogma against plastic toys, sugary junk foods, and the evils of television, the more we jonesed for these things.

We wanted to do the things other kids got to do. When the other kids were still in their pajamas, watching Saturday Morning Cartoons, and eating Capn' Crunch, I had to go stack wood. Never mind how it's ten degrees Fahrenheit.

In contrast to the Cheech & Chong image in which the pop culture likes to portray hippies, intellectuals such as Stephen Gaskin, and my Dad, had different ideas when it came to children.

Mr. Gaskin declared post-war suburban kids were "paddy-asses" raised on Dr. Spock and phony bourgeois values. He thought children were better off raised like pioneer kids: Bare essentials, vigorous work, vigorous play, and a sound spanking for bad behavior. Dad agreed wholeheartedly when our barn-dwelling Gaskinites shared this bit of wisdom.

American Commune presents home movies on the Farm. You see the homespun clothes, the live folk music, and the dining tables rich with a bounty of vegan muck. It probably appeals to you far more than it does to me. I think to myself, "Yeesh, not all this BS again!"

Marijuana and psychedelics brought Mr. Gaskin a great many insights about human behavior and community. However, you notice he based much of his applied philosophy on Biblical principles. Why? Because they work.

There were thousands of communes based on hedonism and a pastiche of philosophies and mysticism designed to rationalize hedonism. Hollywood spoofs these communes to this day because they failed spectacularly.

Nope, to make a community work, you gotta have discipline and work ethic. Mr. Gaskin understood this. He inculcated these principles into his extended family. At its best, that's what the Farm was.

The other pitfall the Gaskins avoided was messianic cultism. The most horrible examples of messiah complex are Rev. Jim Jones and Charles Manson.

Mr. Gaskin allowed people to come and go as they pleased. If people didn't dig they way they did things on the Farm, they were free to go and seek the life they wanted.

Ina May Gaskin's midwifery techniques continue to help people with natural childbirth today. The Gaskins also pioneered the use of soybeans for nutrition. As the documentary shows, the Farm practiced what they preached. I don't know if anyone can verify the quotation, but my Dad said Stephen said, "Don't take over the government, take over the government's job." Whether Mr. Gaskin said this or not, it is a good summation of the Farm policy. They fed the hungry and treated the sick both at home and abroad.

The truth is, self-sufficiency apart from capitalism makes capitalists feel threatened. Hence, the FBI spying, the shock-and-awe pot raid, and the banks bullying the Farm. I shall refrain from spoilers.

As a veteran of a hippie childhood, I wish the documentary had expanded on more of the interpersonal problems that arise from experimental living conditions.

Mr. Gaskin's beliefs were lofty as sermons to his followers. They were difficult when applied. Such as the jealousy and fighting that emerged from polygamous partnering. Such as members having to petition the collective for a toothbrush, while Mr. Gaskin and company purchased high-tech gadgets and spent all kinds of money of relief missions.

Experimental living, no matter how well-intentioned, is often less than salubrious for children.

I grew to despise hippie culture in my youth because I saw so many grownups bickering about how things are supposed to be. I saw so much confusion among the adults. The point I wanted to see the documentary drive home is that folks is folks. As the community grew, it faced the same pitfalls as the established community of squares! I saw the same thing happen in our own hippie community, and I wished they would stop railing against the establishment because the hippies were making the same mistakes.

Well, perhaps I need to make my own documentary!

I recommend "American Commune," but sometimes the story of the vegan Farm doesn't get to the meat of the matter.

The 2 young women that produced this documentary did a fantastic job of putting together their own opinions, talents, memories, grief, and history with interviews and archive footage to show us and explain to us this attempt at utopia in the 70s.

It might be awesome if people could actually live like the leader desired, but it's asking a lot to require vows of poverty, and rules about divisions of labor, contribution, housing and diet that defy human nature.

Since this video is from 2013, I'd love to see a follow-up to explore how these young peoples opinions may or may not have changed through the years about their experience.

I love documentaries that take me back to places, events and people I remember, this is one of those films that does just that.

Because I lived in San Francisco in the 1970's I could relate to these folks, although I was not part of this group, but knew of them. They had departed just prior to my arrival, but they didn't take all of the "free love" young revolutionaries. The look of these young people was so much a part of the Haight scene, I remember the look, the styles, the faces so very well. The Farm hippies could have been any of us, and they were.

I was worried this was going to be a sour sort of trash the Farm kinda of film, it wasn't. Were there problem, of course, but it was a much better place to be than New York City or Chicago, that's for sure.

I was also worried the leader Stephan Gaskin was going to turn out like so many "spiritual" leaders of the day did. He had all the draw, power etc. to uproot young people and take them off to distant places, so what happens? Well we all know the Farm was not Guyana, thank the universe, but you really do need to watch the film to find out what happens.

It is worth your time.

I don't want to have spoilers because this documentary will surprise you and that is a nice benefit to experience along with the large amount of information it provides.

What my wife, daughter and I liked was that the documentary shared the personal experiences of the two sisters and their parents and of a few others. That helped draw you in. It also did a good job outlining the hopes, aspirations and motives of the people who established the commune. Let me just say that they had good intentions in establishing this commune.

Having some knowledge of this commune I think the Mundo sisters left out some important details such as sanitation and hygiene problems, health and disease issues related to sanitation and to the huge consumption of soybeans and other plant material. They failed to mention the numerous wives their leader had and they skimmed over the underlying religious/spiritual tenets that led to hypocrisy.

I wanted to give the documentary a 10 out of 10 but I think in just an additional 15 minutes the sisters could have given a more thorough presentation. Still, it was a very captivating and very well directed and written documentary.

I highly recommend it.

This is a privileged view inside an oft-critiqued but little studied historical movement, the "60s commune". (Most of which actually happened in the 70s, but "60s" is shorthand for hippy counterculture. Most of which also happened in the 70s.)

The angle is unique: two children of America's largest and most successful commune return to the scene of the crime as adults to revisit their early years, reconnect with happy memories, and make peace with some of the resentment they still feel about their unorthodox childhood. This is a rare, balanced treatment of the subject, from the perspective of younger participants not caught up in the ideology of their parents' generation, but who took the same wild ride all the same.

That alone makes this a valuable document. Most of what's available about communes was either produced by Baby Boomers on a nostalgia (or vengeance) kick, or by academics who take a cool, remote stance. This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to get real authority on the subject, both factual and emotional, from filmmakers who are simultaneously insiders and outsiders.

I'm from that era -- not a Baby Boomer, but a member of the next generation (X). I knew both the Boomers in their still-hip phase, and the criticism of them from my parent's 50s generation and the culture at large. (A view I somewhat held myself, at the time.) I was a teenager during the heyday of the commune, and had school friends who lived in communal circumstances. Much of what I saw in this movie reminded me of what I experienced of their home lives, positive and negative.

Now that I'm old I've become an armchair scholar of the commune movement, inspired partly by those memories of my youth, and never pass up source material on it. American Commune is the best commune doc I've seen. Given its unique origins, it's unlikely to be excelled.