The Narcissist Generation Hits the Screen
Yale & Kramer, Rita
call upon all their witting and unwitting allies in the West to forestall commitment to the program (while they of course plunge full speed ahead with their own). And they will at the...
...As anybody who has had occasion to study adolescents knows, there is a powerful and complex psychological relationship between one's moral sense and one's attitude toward reality--an inextricable tangle made up of threads of duty, responsibility, and guilt which is often manifested in the need of young people to flee from both moral considerations and considerations of reality...
...SARAH: Anti-feminist propaganda put out by the psychoanalytic establishment...
...And Sarah, perfect mother that she is, cannot let one of her symbolic children remain unhappy because of an unsatisfied wish, and so, as though having a real baby were the equivalent of buying a Cabbage Patch Kid, she approaches Harold and in the first show of unambivalent affection we have seen from her, with real pleasure and excitement, she asks if he loves her, and will he do something for her...
...The point of this scene is to show that even though this is a sexual act it is not an erotic or passionate one, i.e., it is not an immoral act but, on the contrary, a moral one...
...The microcosm of the film, the time and the place, remains sealed off from the outer world and the values of the group as a whole emerge with great clarity...
...better generation than we were"-Lillian Hellman...
...and Mr...
...But perhaps the least opaque character is the lawyer, Meg, who knows when and why she sold out (she gave up being a public defender when she discovered the criminals she was defending were--well, sleazy types), what has disappointed her most (men), and what she wants most (a child...
...A third reason for thinking the Russians may well agree to joint development of a BMD is one that Richard Nixon pointed to in a recent Wall Street Journal interview: "They are awfully afraid of China, or some Third World country, getting hold of a few nuclear weapons, and we should be too...
...We just have to take it on faith that the pair of them, the doctor and the tycoon, are authentic...
...ticular combination of characters, setting, and circumstance...
...the little children who were to lead us cannot keep our houses warm in the wintertime, even though they are pure in heart, and the meek, although they may inherit the earth, don't seem to know how to wrest oil from it...
...HAROLD: Well, what about the kid...
...He is a patient man, accepting of his wife's demands (about which more later) and forgiving of the imperfections of those around him...
...some, religious ideals misplaced (the meek will inherit the earth...
...In the best spirit of mindless journalism Brook Farm was equated with The Hog Farm, a California commune described in the words of one of its members as "an expanded family, a mobile hallucination, a sociological experiment, an army of clowns...
...What the sixties was about and what this movie enshrines is a world free of struggle and effort, because they involve activities like competition and failure, and put one in close touch with guilt and shame...
...The trading-in of reality for illusion was extraordinarily extensive, especially in our coastal culture, and varied in expression from the symbolic--in psychedelic art and music ("Why don't we sing this song all together?/Open our heads, let the pictures come/And if we close all our eyes together/Then we will see where we all come from TM) - - t o the most primitive enactments allowing individuals to become only loosely tethered to reality: consciousness-altering drugs, other-worldly religions, the creation of private religion, and primitive communal life...
...Sarah too is only nearly perfect...
...It's different i f a parent dies...
...The Bicycle Thief, alas, changed all that...
...Sarah is a doctor the way Lana Turner was a philosophy professor and Harold is a tycoon...
...Didn't I read that it's bad for 'em...
...And seeing this, we should understand what follows, a perversion of a universal fantasy presented as though it were charming humorous sitcom material...
...This is not the case in The Big Chill, because Kasdan is not quite as interested in telling a story and revealing character as in instructing his audience in the nature of the good life...
...Nobody owes anything to anybody...
...Adultery is okay...
...Truffaut in appearance and reality...
...Because the symbolic meaning of Alex's suicide is that Alex was good, not sick, and that the world was bad and killed him, not that Alex couldn't cope with the world...
...This is not the lesson of The Big Chill...
...Not very convincing as the charismatic individual around whom this group of seven crystallized into an undergraduate revolutionary group...
...It is a great relief to all when, party-pooper that he is, he turns his back on his romantic wife's clever friends to go back home to his job and keep an eye on the kids...
...In the old days things were different in Hollywood...
...When children are naughty or cranky or obstreperous or impossible all parents, however perfect, eventually reach their level of intolerance and institute various forms of sanctioned aggression and punishment...
...Good old Harold seems to have accepted Sarah, her little peccadillo with Alex and all, another example of his greatness of heart...
...HAROLD: Then what's the point, if she doesn't take care of it...
...Harold is a saint...
...a senior at the Coastal Culture School, a private school on the upper east side of Manhattan, asked us...
...She's a beautiful person--so warm and loving...
...Yale and Rita Kramer THE NARCISSIST GENERATION HITS THE SCREEN From beads t o n e o - B a b b i t t r y , the 1960s crowd ages...
...Poor Kevin Kline earns his money in this one...
...Why not...
...He's in advertising, devoted not only to his children but to the country club, business, and home improvements...
...Is it good for the kid, I mean, to be raised that way without a father...
...For them, the big chill is the experience of being outside the commune, facing alone the painful existential realities of self-limitation, the limitations of those we love, and the limitations that life imposes on us...
...After all, it'll be my kid...
...He had read all of Nietzsche by the time he was sixteen, fascinated by the idea of Superticulated on screen, but we thought the dialogue might have gone something like this: HAROLD: What...
...If not quite insisting that the "golden doors" be opened to all comers, they nonetheless invoke the doctrine of universal "human rights" as an authority which, in given instances of distress, supersedes all naturalization laws--especially those of prosperous countries where a majority of the population is white--and thus demand a more and more inclusive "amnesty" provision as a part of Simpson-Mazzoli, a conversion of seven or eight million illegal inhabitants of the United States into a special class: criminals rewarded for having committed a crime in violation of our integrity as a sovereign political entity...
...Somewhere along the line Sarah has had an affair with the dead man, Alex, about which she is neither remorseful nor ashamed but only rueful...
...Rueful is also the word for the cynical, disillusioned veteran, part drug-addict, part drug-dealer, played by William Hurt...
...An~l the prospect is that this amnesty,, covering covert and unauthorized immigrants arriving in this country before January 31, 1982, will be only the first in a series of similar acts, each legitimizing the status as legal permanent or legal temporary residents of the United States of another group of illegal aliens, making them candidates for membership in our body politic, and thus defrauding those who seek to become fellow citizens among us according to our laws...
...Nowhere more than on the campuses of America was reality--the realities of nature, and of human nature--and its intellectual institutions more betrayed...
...Films became art...
...Happily, until recently the most important American directors felt under no compulsion to take themselves so seriously...
...It is a world in which there is no blame, no fault, no responsibility, no consequences...
...SARAH: Oh, it wouldn't really be your child...
...And by the same token, it would be as well for us to share a BMD with them as it would be to gain what could only be a shortlived advantage in having it first--at the risk of precipitating a Soviet preemptive strike...
...HAROLD: What about an Old English Sheepdog or a parrot maybe...
...He accepts him...
...They knew that their audiences wanted to be titillated with a little sex and violence and that the whole point of the exercise, the trick of the thing, was for the viewer to experience sin and end up feeling virtuous...
...They've given up their political illusions with little apparent difficulty...
...Only, who'll take care of the kid--my kid...
...But I rather think that our sensations in contemplating prospects to come are more complex and can be better compared to those engendered by some of the worst plays of the last three hundred years...
...Alex, brilliant, a promising young scientist, somehow cast adrift in a cruel world, was, one of the characters says, "too good for the world...
...Nature, and human nature, being what they are, we may as well accept the implication that both of them, untamed, are unmitigated evils, and civilized man's unpleasant lot is to struggle against them with the imperfect institutions he has and somehow, in the long run, triumph a little...
...And human nature hasn't changed...
...After the funeral they stay on together for a kind of house-party at the home of two of the group who are married...
...With the right amount of good looks, cynicism, wit, and ruefulness we are led into the willing suspension of our disapproval...
...For a variety of reasons, psychological, economic, and cultural, America, or at least middle-class urban America, has the most prolonged and voluptuous adolescence in Western civilization...
...Or, better still, as our eighth-grade teacher would have asked, "What is the moral of this story...
...Of perhaps greater importance in the parable are Harold and Sarah...
...A good deed, kind of like changing her flat tire...
...Ed, like Alex, was brilliant and promising...
...Poor Ed was just screwed up...
...It's not true that it's only entertaining...
...as~there is no struggle or effort in it, there is no sense of triumph or achievement...
...No wonder his wife can't wait to roll on the grass with the first old college chum who asks her...
...Illegal cheating is okay...
...It to pack the real kids off to a G-rated screenplay...
...This is because what we call adolescence is a complicated interaction between biological and social factors--essentially between the onset of sexual maturity at puberty and the realistic demands by society on that sexually mature individual, i.e., demands for the production of goods and services, including childbearing and homemaking...
...SARAH: I said I'd like you to sleep with Meg tonight...
...The Right Stuff is also about a group of men and women, but it represents another set of values, another world...
...And from the facts--rave reviews, months to packed houses across the country, third best at the box office in '83--the message may be getting across...
...It would be hers...
...And as you would expect, he is the one thoroughly unsympathetic character at the party...
...You're destroying yourself...
...The United States is the most adolescent of all nations...
...When a movie opens with a death or a funeral, like Citizen Kane or The Third Man, one expects that the central character will turn out to be the dead one and that the development of the story will reveal that central character and the events that led up to his death...
...HAROLD: Oh, I see...
...There is of course much talk about Alex's suicide during the weekend and what emerges is that somehow each of them in his own way, but more importantly the world, failed Alex, and that is the reason why, after sleeping with his best friend's wife and accepting his best friend's hospitality, he cuts his wrists in his best friend's bathroom...
...In those far-off innocent days, movies had no moral pretensions...
...A lesson with remarkable staying power...
...While the conversation does not occur in the film, the moment of insemination does, and its depiction on screen is clearly the symbolic climax of the film...
...It is easier to have certain feelings and engage in certain activities when one knows that others do the same...
...Professors, some on every campus (to be sure, mostly in the softer disciplines--the less quantitative of the social sciences, and the less scholarly of the humanities) donned bluejeans and turned in their conventional wisdom for the new truth...
...But much of the lobbying and contemporary emotion in favor of this amnesty has its source in something more worthy than a plan to assemble and then vote a class of perpetual dependents...
...I speak now of our honorable disposition to be a THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1984 19...
...Fellini in fantasy and the grotesque, Resnais in epistemology-philosophers, moralists, all...
...It's their cleverness, the funny things they say, how attractive and appealing they are, that makes this such a corrupt film...
...There was Ed, and Sue and June and Eric and Malcolm and Helen and one or two others...
...It is hermetically sealed from shame and guilt...
...Melvin E. Bradford SENTIMENT AND THE U.S...
...As the Congress lumbers with all the hesitancy of an elephant surrounded by mice toward final consideration of S. 529/H.R...
...Unfortunately, in disavowing reality what was also disavowed were the instruments of reality--the intellectual institutions by which reality is understood and mastered--reason, the authority of experience, the recognition of complexity, and faith in the method of trial and error...
...The passions of greed, jealousy, envy, and venge~'nce are still with us and will always be with us unless someone can think of a. way to get rid of the first 18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1984 six years of life, in which these passions have their origin...
...The only thing that's not okay is where the world impinges: the interface between each of the characters and the real world...
...You can't warp a child's life this way...
...Men don't have feelings...
...The world they create or wish to create is a morally drab world...
...Assuming an unregenerate missionary-tycoon position over his lawyer-donee, Harold performs his manly duty...
...His earlier movie Body Heat, released in .* 1981, was a neat little thriller with a twist in the tradition of Double Indemnity...
...One of the universal characteristics of adolescence is group formation, a phenomenon that serves a number of important psychological functions...
...The illusions that were fostered became song lyrics and slogans...
...None of the characters has really changed...
...One has to suffer the exigencies of life, but this is premeditated...
...some, moral idiocy (aggression of any sort is an unmitigated evil, and therefore no value is worth fighting 'From "All Together" by Mick Jagger and Keith Richard...
...The sleek fat old boys who ran the studios in those days Rita Kramer's most recent book is In Defense of the Family (Basic Books...
...The common denominators in all of this theatrical history are unearned moralistic posturing, wooden plotting, pompous set speeches, and a failure to render as action issues potentially at stake in a parMelvin E. Bradford is professor of English at the University of Dallas, a member of the Board o f Foreign Scholarships, and vice-president of the Philadelphia Society...
...Any principle that might result in the exclusion or expulsion of any persons not citizens who desire to reside in our midst they find repugnant...
...In fact, two of the most important repetitive themes of adolescence are seduction and communion, and indeed with some people, such as the characters portrayed in The Big Chill, these are never transcended...
...This is not a negligible consideration for any of us, but especially not for the men in the Kremlin with their obsessive fear of the Chinese behemoth...
...And as far as taking care of it goes, she can find a good housekeeper or put it in a daycare center...
...Why does no one mention that Alex's suicide was the act of a sick man...
...She wants a baby--she has a right to have a baby...
...Bean and Bloomingdale's), generous (offers her whole house for the weekend to several friends--and that's not all), infinitely understanding, tolerant, and a doctor to boot...
...Bleary-eyed from three hours of a double feature and stuffed with a Mounds bar and a box of Raisinets, one could leave the theater after a movie like The Life o f Emile Zola with a sense of moral uplift instead of just a lot of extra calories...
...I t is Meg, however, and her search for impregnation that provides the climactic moment of the film and the m o r a l . . , thrust, shall we say...
...It represents the ebb and flow of real family life...
...The Big Chill is in another league...
...We didn't think for a moment that he was too good for the world...
...Love cannot conquer cancer (or even AIDS...
...You can't do that to a child...
...No doubt both nations would continue to seek ways to regain the strategic edge that each once held for a few years...
...To complicate matters, Harold and Sarah would be in a contradictory fix trying to function as parents to their natural children while being perfect parents to their symbolic children, the guests in their house...
...They reminisce about--and in some cases renew--old rivalries and old romances...
...She doesn't seem at all concerned about any critically ill patients...
...No need to censor it, only to see it for what it is, and expose its lies about life...
...But barring a Democratic landslide in the '84 elections, neither strategy seems likely to succeed...
...HAROLD: You mean a n d . . , do it...
...She wants to get pregnant...
...HAROLD: I was only . . . . you're the doctor--you know best...
...Of course, as the forthcoming debate of the Congress predictably degenerates into lofty generalizations concerning the "rights of man" or the narrowness of nationalism and the familiar allegorical conflict between the wicked "haves" and certain rhetorically selected and well-scrubbed representatives of that intrinsically "noble" multitude who have not, the citizen, and interloper...
...Don't believe it...
...By turns he seems to have been too good for physics, social work, construction work, or work of any sort...
...When values appeared in the old studio productions they were there more to lift the moral tone of the studio than that of the audience...
...This they understood well, the studio bosses...
...Ed, unlike Alex, was no saint, he was just a sick man...
...The kind of man who wears a collar and tie during the day and pajamas at night...
...SARAH: Nonsense...
...some, mindless nonsense (if only everyone "made love" then war would disappear...
...No big deal...
...In that same summer, on July 20, men walked on the moon, probably one of the preeminent spiritual climaxes of modern civilization, compelling wonder and jubilation everywhere (even Gina Lollobrigida remarked, "Nothing in show business will ever top what I saw on television today...
...Yet they held the stage--and, in their modern versions, continue to find an audience wherever propaganda stands in the place of art...
...That's the difference between feeling the big chill and having the right stuff...
...therefore no one has to feel guilty about anything or be ashamed of what he does...
...Those who understand what is at stake in these proposals would be amused by the spectacle were the matter of it less serious...
...Besides, she's a lawyer...
...It'll have my genes, be my flesh and blood, look like me...
...And deserve their fate...
...Just as there is no shame in it, there is no pride...
...With something to say about the Human Condition...
...The amnesty provision is of course the worst feature of Simpson-Mazzoli, and was included there in part to attract the supporting votes of legislators who can imagine importing a docile majority to foster their ambitions, presently frustrated by the good sense of the American people...
...We thought we were only being entertained...
...the superego is soluble in groups...
...Wouldn't you mind...
...And as anybody who has ever been an adolescent knows, guilt does strange things to people...
...some, daffy misreadings of scripture (that a little child should lead them...
...It's true, it is entertaining...
...So what's all the fuss...
...Now when Hollywood sends a bigbudget movie out into the world of the 12-to-25-year-olds, studded with attractive stars like Kevin Kline, Glenn Close, and William Hurt, and with very little hitting in it, we can assume that someone out there in the West is trying to tell them something...
...SARAH: It's not the quantity of time, silly, it's the quality...
...He has been through the war and been wounded and now he is impotent and Nam has done this to him...
...The difference is that The Big Chill lies and "The Three Little Pigs" told the truth...
...Beneath their charm, wit, beauty, and rue The Big Chill people are a strikingly smuff, self-satisfied group, impervious to external influences except for mutual support from one another...
...One wondered at first why Dr...
...Yale Kramer, M.D...
...And Eric was clever and cynical and drunk half the time and ended up a drifting failure haunting the cafes of Paris, an expatriate from life, without purpose or meaning...
...What was unique and special about the sixties was not only its disavowal of conventional moral values but its wholesale flight from those realities and the mutual seduction that took place between the young and the old into a refuge of communal illusions...
...The gap between the onset of the one and the onset of the other is what we call adolescence and in each culture it has a different average length and a somewhat different quality...
...Nature is still cold and impersonal...
...Lawrence Kasdan is not quite as interested in telling a story and revealing character as in instructing his audience in the nature of the good life...
...A mother of two, beautiful, intelligent, handsomely dressed (L.L...
...they had hopes for themselves and the world (unspecified...
...1510---two versions of the Simpson-Mazzoli bill--we come closer and closer to a drastic redefinition of the immigration policy of the United States...
...She has a right to find fulfillment as a lawyer, doesn't she...
...And then there was Ed...
...For where there is no connection but in appetite there can be no limit upon it...
...SARAn: Quit law...
...It was' clever, skillfully directed, cinematic...
...Boys start playing with pocketbooks and wearing garter belts and girls end up daydreaming and wondering why their dads deserted them...
...we didn't know we were being taught a lesson about life...
...They talk about their lives--mostly in terms of disappointments and disillusionments--and about their dead friend...
...Nobody said it was going to be fun, he adds...
...That's the trouble...
...A group of friends, separated since the end of their college days, meet for the funeral of the leader of their old campus group, a one-time radical activist who has l~illed himself...
...And what was also disavowed was the recognition that the essential regulating principle of social organization, especially in a democracy, is compromise...
...Loosen up...
...the epidemic of schizoid behavior became translated into " . . . more meaningful ways of living with nature and one another...
...The only way to ensure their parental perfection for both sets of children is With wryly self-deprecatory humor the characters in The Big Chill define themselves in terms of what they have lost, what they regret, in an Arcadian past only dimly outlined for us: They had ideals (what were they...
...And they are clever, these young men and women remembering how great it was when they were all students, marching, making love, demonstrating, talking--well, studying, for God's sake...
...is a psychoanalyst and Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Rutgers Medical School were shrewd psychologists and therefore pragmatic moralists...
...or having received the news that his own brand of running shoes manufactured in Hong Kong will be two months late in arriving for the new season and that his chief competitors thereby will be able to cream off the best of the market...
...The time we've come to call the sixties has assumed a special place in the national consciousness, but nowhere has this period received a more impressive--a more persuasive, and therefore ultimately corrupting-treatment than in The Big Chill...
...I am thinking in particular of the English "heroic drama" of the seventeenth century, of eighteenthcentury "weeping comedy," and of nineteenth-century American melodrama, the standard fare of showboat entertainment more recently revived and made familiar to us in television documentaries and "biographies" of the heroes o f the Left...
...No need to make a fuss about it, though...
...We felt sorry for him, but we didn't transform his suffering into a philosophical lesson...
...And this suggests what the revolution of the late sixties was really about...
...And the best way of avoiding guilt and shame, and effort and struggle and competition and failure, is tQ create a world without responsibility, without individual THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1984 17 choice...
...That's about all we know about Alex...
...Go and get some help...
...Except for a little black bag prop, she doesn't think, talk, or act any more like a doctor than your grandma...
...As to the character and judgment of politicians who would create a proletariat where at present not much of one exists I can add little to the verdict of history upon all their kind...
...June was pretty and merry and flaky and an artist and now lives in a state hospital in Michigan...
...SARAH: Of course not...
...as in socially sanctioned goal-oriented groups like athletic teams or school clubs...
...Is she going to quit being a lawyer...
...Eventually they are all devoured by monsters they have made...
...Then she won't hilve to worry a b o u t . . . man, the Ubermensch...
...HAROLD: But it takes more than l o v e . . , it takes a lot of thought and time, and bathing--a lot more bathing than you think...
...Contemptible...
...Then we dragged him to a psychiatrist but the treatment didn't work or didn't work fast enough and none of us was really surprised when Ed finally wrapped himself around a telephone pole at 60 miles an hour...
...we too were innocent and even had witty friends...
...One gets no sense that tycoon Harold would know what to do in the face of a cost-profit squeeze...
...Madness was transmogrified into sanity...
...That's what the revolution of the sixties was really about: the disavowal of moral values...
...Radicalism they could give up, but not moral narcissism...
...What's not okay is being successful in the real world as a lawyer or a journalist or an actor or a businessman...
...He bathes the kids in the evenings and is not only an equal partner in housekeeping chores, but a business tycoon as well, the owner of a chain of stores that sell running gear--although it is true that there is very little to suggest that this is so except for the' fact that he is seen jogging in several scenes...
...Now this dippy idea is never arSARAH: Don't be silly...
...Before he leaves us and the movie forever, he proves his inability to comprehend either the meaning of Alex's life and the moral of his taking it or the special qualities of Alex's friends...
...and Mrs...
...We are fifty people on a perpetual trip, citizens of E a r t h . . . fixing u p . . . our bodies and brains, trying to get it together . . . . "Communal madness of all sorts, renamed "alternate life styles...
...It makes one think that Plato was right about the poets...
...Or has ever faced a situation like his fivemillion-dollar loan coming due next week and having to be turned over at a full percentage point higher rate...
...It stood for man's everlasting struggle to tame nature and himself and come out just a little bit triumphant...
...Only fanatics, poseurs, and Puritans deepest interests of the Republic will be neglected and, to its very grave peril, set aside for the sake of an opportunity of moralistic (i.e., selfrighteous) self-congratulation...
...So who can blame him for his addiction, for his drug dealing, for the fact that his life is ruined and that he colludes in the ruination of others...
...The fact that she knows her husband will always be faithful to her is her idea of something to make jokes about...
...Suicide is okay...
...But reality would betray one of the false gods of the sixties still worshiped by Hollywood visionaries--the Perfect Parents who provide all, understand all, and forgive all...
...No, on the contrary, Sarah just listens and accepts the idea, and finally becomes the chief organizer of it...
...All over the world, even in Russia, men took pride in the achievement, because Neff Armstrong stood for all mankind and the struggle and triumph of the astronauts stood for something more than the conquest of space...
...Now we must confess there was a time, many years ago, when we too 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1984 were young and had ideals...
...The great problem with the people both inside and outside of government whose efforts make fair to ruin the proposed immigration law revisions is that they deny the validity of distinctions separating as categories guest, ever really liked these plays--such as confuse the aesthetic satisfactions of verisimilitude with the confirmation of prejudice which comes of reducing all human history to a Manichean struggle between a special definition of the darkness and the light...
...There is one character, an outsider to the group, who is made to speak for the ordinary life of the middle class, for the traditional values of working to get ahead, establishing a home for one's children, nurturing the young...
...SARAH: Of course do it--that's the point...
...Profit with an f, principal with an a, they told their directors and writers...
...The movie re-creates the earlier world of the group, only without the politics...
...She needs something to love and take care of...
...One can't see the faintest hint of concern over such matters as just having learned, let's say, that three of his stores have proved to be unprofitable over the last six months, confronting him with the disagreeable choice of spending a hundred thousand dollars in advertising or closing down the stores and losing two hundred and fifty thousand in a long-term lease...
...We are invited to see her, warmhearted, generous, laughing through the tears, as she is seen by her friend the doctor, den mother to them all...
...What/s the meaning of this work, as we used to ask in undergraduate Humanities class...
...to this day brick remains the building material of choice...
...In the summer of 1969 almost half a million young people spent a weekend at Woodstock, making love not war, and experiencing a symbolic climax of one of the primary spiritual values of the sixties--escape from the pinch of reality and scruples into the refuge of communion...
...Some of them were romantic cliches (love conquers all...
...Isn't that what students do...
...The trouble was he couldn't seem to get it all together in college...
...Adolescents are perpetually "hanging out" together--just as often in spontaneous informal groups at the candy store or head shop or Pac-man arcade for...
...It's entertaining the way "The Three Little Pigs" was entertaining when we were kids...
...We watch him snorting cocaine, passing out 'ludes, being handsomely detached...
...Sitting at the kitchen table, spreading mayonnaise over white bread, looked down on by the more sensitive types, he tells them that when you have kids you have to provide for them and that life can't always be what you'd want it to be, but you just have to be the best person you can...
...Gee--I don't want my kid to grow up like that...
...But of course Harold's finest hour is still to come-and we use the verb advisedly...
...Count on Hollywood these days to provide the cutting edge of American morality...
...Another big movie was released around the same time as The Big Chill...
...European directors became auteurs and as such became specialists in high seriousness: Bergman in the darker side of human nature...
...HAROLD: Pregnant...
...Women have a right to realize their life ambitions, right...
...Doctor-mother-wife asks her husband (the ideaist turned businessman) to make it possible for Meg to have that baby she's been wanting so badly...
...that sappy smile as he looks down on her will live forever in film annals...
...Thus Alex, the suicide, although he is mentioned constantly throughout the film, never materializes as a real character...
...As arbiters of right and wrong, good and bad, permissible and impermissible, they accept a weekend full of polymorphous perverse activities--from cocaine and quaaludes to mix-and-match adultery--as perfect parents to their friends...
...You set your priorities, he tells them...
...And she has so much love to g i v e . . , be a good tycoon and do it for me...
...The studios were not in the morals business...
...It is a special world of special people to whom ordinary rules don't apply...
...IMMIGRATION POLICY The case against amnesty...
...But then I'd be the father...
...dawned, then, that for one thing it would shatter one of the basic illusions of the film to have real children presenting real problems as children naturally do...
...Closet adolescents, they allowed themselves not only to be seduced by the young, but to become seducers of the young...
...The Big Chill--it's only entertainment...
...I mean, I don't mind,cheating the SEC but I draw the line at crimes against persons...
...Alas, no matter what anybody says, contrary wishes and dreams notwithstanding, those are the unalterable facts of social life in every culture from the most primitive to the most complex, with only minor .variations...
...Okay...
...A lot of young professionals are doing that...
...Eventually he moved in with Harold and Sarah, to whom he showed his gratitude by making this terrible bloody mess in their bathtub...
...In The Big Chill Alex's suicide becomes an act of martyrdom and because of it he becomes an exemplary figure...
...And particularly Americans who, like the writer, reside in one of the states along the southern border of their country...
...A dead giveaway to where he's at...
...HAROLD: Oh, in that c a s e . . . SARAH: She has so much love...
...HAROLD: Well . . . o k a y . . , but 1 feel . . . well, like an object...
...Add to these ingredients a little weeping on cue when unlikely conversions occur or problems resolve as pundits require and you have a composite analogy to the sober proceedings of the world's greatest legislature on the subject of the rights of citizenship and the integrity of our national borders...
...and some, just plain foolishness (youth confers virtue: " . . . they're a What the sixties was about and what The Big Chill enshrines is a world free of struggle and effort...
...It deserved a two-Moundsbars-rating...
...Check fnto a hospital or something...
...To combine the gentleness and generosity of spirit that he displays to his friends and family and to be a tycoon effortlessly at 35 is about as credible as the films of the forties which starred some dish like Lana Turner as a philosophy professor...
...Not the least important purpose of such groups is guilt reduction, and since puberty hits youngsters with different degrees of severity, the kinds of groups that are formed tend to be more or less pathological in character and more or less "therapeutic" in function...
...What was new was the widespread acceptance of these ideas not only as normative principles but as descriptions of reality...
...Harold is indeed something of an economic and psychological miracle...
...The media helped in turning reality inside out and upside down...
...As noted earlier, a space-based BMD can defend cities as well as missile silos--and against Chinese or Libyan missiles as well as against Soviet or American...
...It was clearly meant to be a big movie...
...Good Parent...
...What he does think about are his friends, to whom he is not above giving illegal insider stock tips so they can make a little extra bread...
...Despite the foolishness and wishful thinking of the sixties, the realities of life have not gone away...
...Harold, for example, doesn't ever say to his friend, "Look, you're stoned out of your mind most o f the time...
...That's what their friend Alex couldn't see...
...a movie out of the golden past...
...But how could they expose their real kids to all this hanky-panky...
...She has made a Basic Life Decision...
...We were sorry and we missed him but we didn't feel that we had failed him or life had failed him or the world had failed him...
...The only thing that matters is how you feel and the gratification of desire...
...I'd think about it all the time...
...No, Harold doesn't seem to think about his business much...
...She has decided to get one of her old school chums to impregnate her as a favor--no strings attached...
...They understood that they were there not to preach but to comfort...
...I think I ' d . . . kind o f . . . feel attached to i t . . . know what I mean...
...But surely the chances of achieving genuine arms reduction, rather than some illusory form of arms control, would be greatly enhanced in a world in which no one's finger rested nervously on the nuclear button...
...As in allegory, then, it is not necessary THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1984 15 to have real characters but only characters that suggest types...
...Well, you're the doctor, but--I feel funny about it...
...an affable, easygoing, handsome, modest saint...
...and mindless passivity and detachment are a form of morality: "There is something about the temper and quality of these people, a gentleness, a quietness, an interest-something good"--Bishop James Pike...
...Lawrence Kasdan, however, a relatively new directorial talent, has made the transition from entertainer to moralist in one quantum leap...
...You're a man...
...as there is no guilt in it, there is no innocence or discovery or tragedy...
...The seduction of the young goes on...
...Where the others unpack such totems as a copy of The Basic Kafka, he places a snapshot of his sons on his night table alongside his bottle of Maalox...
...Sarah never says to her friend who confides her moral impregnation fantasy, "That's a crazy idea...
...One gets vague and indistinct references to him, fragmented parts of a disembodied spirit...
...All told, the incentives for the Soviets to accept our offer seem to me to far outweigh any reasons they might have to reject it...
...All of those are depicted as disagreeable, shameful, representing some fall from earlier grace when ideals were pure...
...There is and should be only mutual acceptance, understanding, and forgiveness...
...And they will at the same time put on a diplomatic full-courtpress at least as determined as the one they mounted to prevent deployment of Pershing II and cruise missiles in Western Europe...
...He just read and played chess and got drunk and we all worried about him until finally he stuck his head in an oven and turned on the gas...
...The plot of The Big Chill is a variation on the class-reunion situation...
...You're destroying other people's lives too...
...Well, what can you expect...
...she never gets any phone calls from patients or from the hospital...
...You remember--warm, loving, adorable, but somehow unable to find or keep a man, she has decided to get pregnant and have a baby even if she doesn't have a husband...
...The Big Chill is a literally shameless movie...
...Significant...
...Now there's hospitality for you...
...A film that made just about everybody's list of the Ten Best of 1983, and nominated for several Academy Awards including best picture and best original screenplay, it is a wistful look back at the sixties from the vantage point of the eighties...
...Although movies in those days had a moral point of view, their intention was not to be morally visionary but only morally comforting, so that pleasure was possible without guilt...
...Perfect Parents had to ship their kids off from this huge, comfortable house that sleeps at least twenty...
...One more thing about Sarah and Harold...
...It wasn't that these notions were wrong as ideals...
...Only women's feelings are important...
Vol. 17 • April 1984 • No. 4
