Sean
Farrell grew up in a very unusual environment.
He lived with his parents, Johnny and Susie, in
the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in
the 1960s, the center of what has come to be
labeled as the “hippie” counterculture. In 1969,
Sean, then four-years-old, was the subject of a
fourteen-minute documentary directed by Ralph
Arlyck, a film student at San Francisco State,
who lived in the apartment below Sean's. The
film, simply called Sean, shows a funny and very
bright young boy talking spontaneously about
things four-year-olds do not normally talk
about: eating grass, speed freaks, turning on,
and being “busted” by the “pigs.”
Although by the time of the interview, many of
the original hippies had moved away from the
area as the drug dealers and their hard drugs
came in, enough “flower children” remained to
provide Sean with an immersion into what the
movement may have been like in its hey day, even
though, by that time, it was reduced to beggars
in the streets and users overdosing daily. The
documentary played at Film Festivals and won
praise from prominent filmmakers such as
Francois Truffaut, but drew negative responses
from Middle America and was shown in the White
House as a warning about the dangerous path in
which young people were headed.
Though the director lived in the area, he was
more of an observer than a participant and did
not hide his disdain for the lack of work ethic
and family responsibility that he had seen in
the neighborhood, a way of life contrary to the
values he had been taught by his leftist East
Coast parents. He admits that his favorite
bumper sticker at the time read, "Hate cops?
Next time you're in trouble trying calling a
hippie.” Arlyck moved back to New York but
decided to return to San Francisco thirty years
later to search for Sean and find out what had
happened to him and his family (who separated
soon after the film was made) and whether he had
“became a drug addict or a stockbroker” (as if
they were the only two choices available).
The result is the follow-up documentary
Following Sean, an 87-minute film that spans
three generations and several decades, moving
through the passage of time to reflect the
realities of life - love, children,
marriage, family, for both Sean and his family
and that of his own. Consisting of home movies,
photo essays of life in the 60s (including
“Be-Ins” and drugged-out hippies), and
interviews, the film offers a compelling journey
through the process of understanding the choices
we make in life, their consequences, and the
unexpected direction in which they often take
us. Arlyck is non-judgmental, examining life as
it is, not always as we want it to be, and the
main theme of the film could be said to be the
struggle to maintain a balance between freedom
and responsibility.
Showing how his own growth paralleled the lives
of Sean and his family also adds an element of
depth to the film that otherwise may have been
missing. Following Sean is an intelligent and
often moving documentary that spends
considerable time with the grown-up Sean (how he
turned out is better left for the viewer to
discover), but never gets close enough to its
subject to probe any difficult questions such as
what his experience growing up in the Haight was
really like for him and how it affected his
formative years. To its credit, the film
provides a new generation with a look at the
counterculture, one of the seminal events of the
sixties, but fails to offer any perspective or
explore what it was really about, beyond the
fact that eighty people stayed in the upstairs
apartment at various times.
What is not discussed is that beneath the
outward “hippie” revolt against the
establishment that often went to bizarre
extremes and gave the media the excuse to call
it a “freak show,” there was a profound longing
to begin to shatter the spiritual and social
straightjacket of the fifties with its empty
materialistic values and to explore, through
psychotropic drugs and other means, a larger
vision of ourselves and the nature of reality
beyond the limited perspective of our five
senses. While the film pays lip service to
anti-establishment ideas, it does not provide
what it claims to be its primary purpose - an
intimate examination of the legacy of the
sixties and its counterculture as it affected
one young man.
