Upon my viewing of them, I found them to be well acted but superficial/cliche renderings of, in AB, modern suburbia, and RR, post war US, social expectations and the rebellions against these to be what you see is what you get.
Are you saying that these works are much more subtle and complex critiques than I perceived, or that if you squint your eyes and project beyond the writer/director's intent, there is much to learn.
I will have a second look, but I still do believe that in aggregate, my critique of these type of films is valid. There is a pattern here (and I wouldn't say it is conscious on the part of the film maker)...
Anyway,
Bryan
Joanna wrote:
> I won't comment on Thelma and Louise. But as for AB and RR, I think
> your comments are too general.
>
> If we look at the subversive/revolutionary content of AB, we don't
> find much. This is because AB describes a culture who cannot imagine a
> greater happiness than teenage freedom, and as we all know, teenage
> freedom is an illusion supported by endless parental patience and
> work. This is why the Marine guy and Lester conflict; the Marine guy
> is the cultural form of adulthood/authority, and Lester the bourgeois
> form of freedom (which historically cannot exceed the adolescent stage
> because it admits no communal solutions). They are both distortions,
> in different directions, of an adult human being. Lester's failure as
> a revolutionary is the failure of the culture to allow him even to be
> imagine a real revolution rather than adolescent reaction.
>
> The only solutions offered in the movie, by way of Wes, are the
> intoxication of drugs or the intoxication of art, and it is only art
> that offers any possible way of comprehending the nature of suburban
> culture...by way of its negation.... in the beauty of a plastic bag
> floating in the wind.
>
> So the failure of revolution in AB is the failure of a degraded
> revolution; and to understand that is to begin to understand what an
> actual revolution might have to offer that. It would be a lot more
> than driving a TransAm and getting high.
>
> As for RR, the revolution envisaged by Frank and April, is nothing
> more than a romantic, foreign version of their suburban mausoleum.
> Whether at home or in Paris, the main point is to avoid thinking about
> the horrors of the war, to create a new life without taking that small
> fact into account. I thought, at any rate, that the story (and the
> movie) was a marvellous expression of the deep need to forget and the
> inability, consequently to create new life (April's abortion) out of
> the barren ground of forgetting and denial.
>
> Joanna