The first conspiracy theory I got swept up in had to do with a movie that a few of us caught on television in eighth grade. After the summer of 1968, it felt like big changes were afoot. The movie that captured our imaginations was the story of a pandemic that caused people to feel euphoric. The net effect of people feeling good 24/7 was that Capitalism collapsed. 

As fellow classmates expressed their curiosity about this simple explanation for changing the world, the movie seemed to vanish. With the grave seriousness that eighth graders bring to such missions, we collectively decided that the movie was being suppressed. As the years rolled on, I always checked for the title whenever I found anybody selling gray market VHS or DVD titles. It proved to be elusive, even there. Recently somebody at the studio that owns it decided that it was perfect viewing during our current pandemic. What’s So Bad About Feeling Good (1968) is now available on Blu-ray.

The first surprise is to realize that this movie is by a mainstream director. His work included Miracle on 34th Street, The Marx Brothers’ A Day at the Races, and Airport. He had enough clout to get New York Mayor John Lindsay to allow filming in City Hall, and various parts of New York that would require a king’s ransom to shoot in today. 

The film is a time capsule of the city in 1967. It opens with pans around various neighborhoods with a soundtrack of surly city dwellers shouting angry remarks at each other. It lands in a beatnik loft where people dressed in burlap sacks and hobo costumes wail about the futility of it all. When a toucan visits the loft, their tune changes and they are all suddenly happy. Soon they realize that this happiness is contagious and they set out to share it.

Not everybody is pleased with this state of affairs. Sales of tobacco, tranquilizers and alcohol plummet, and advertising stops scaring people into buying things. When the mayor still doesn’t see the downside, he is reminded that happy people don’t vote. With his own livelihood under threat, he calls in the Feds. Dom DeLuise arrives doing a luridly fey version of J. Edgar Hoover. The beatniks go undercover, distributing infected masks, and doing anything else they can think of to spread the infection. Once the government finds an antidote, the liquor and tobacco lobbies fund its distribution via exhaust smoke from heavy machinery. 

By the end of the movie the city is back to its angry self, with a difference. A huge portion of the population was actually immune to the disease, and just got caught up in the tidal wave of niceness. The movie ends with the alpha-beatnik couple breaking the toucan out of the facility where it had been placed for future experiments. Given our recent pandemic’s impact on capitalism, it’s interesting to see that infectious happiness is still considered just as dangerous, if not more so.