The social concerns of The Last Picture Show are largely the concerns of teenagers in the early 1960s. Compared to the "information age" of the 1990s, the 1960s were an age of social change. Instead of seemingly flexible mores, the 1960s saw the beginning of a distancing from static, long-held beliefs to the questioning of those beliefs. The 1960s were a fairly rootless period—the threat of the Bomb, the death of Kennedy, the advent of the counterculture, the oncoming sexual revolution, the commercialization of society, the early disintegration of the "nuclear family," the fighting in Southeast Asia, all were woven into the decade. In Texas, the slow decline of the family farm or ranch, the desolation of many small towns, economic uncertainty all played a part, as well as the erosion of the mythic cowboy ethos, the reverence for the land, and the stoicism...