I receive unsolicited phone calls of a non-political nature
every day -- usually at what normal people consider the dinner hour, which is just
about when Susie and I are going to bed.
Ordinarily I hang up or yell at the telephone, but the evening before
last I actually lingered long enough to hear an offer from Time Warner Cable,
my feckless Internet/cable/telephone provider.
It was for a special one year discounted rate for something called EPIX,
which was promised to give me a host of movies and other shows for only $4.99 a
month. I thought, "What the
hell," and told the lady to hook me up.
Half an hour later, channels 594-599 were activated, and I began
watching what was offered. Pretty good
stuff for the price, by the way.
This afternoon, Susie and I stumbled on and watched all the
way through Star Trek: The Motion Picture
[1979] with the entire original TV cast.
I was a devoted Star Trek
viewer from 1966 to 1968, and then an equally devoted viewer of Star Trek:
The Next Generation, Star
Trek: Deep Space Nine, and even the
rather weaker Star Trek: Voyager,
along with a number of the Star Trek movies [such as Wrath of Khan with the redoubtable but somewhat long in the tooth
Ricardo Montalbán.]
Star Trek: The Motion
Picture is not exactly a great movie, as those of you who have seen it will
attest, but it affected me deeply nonetheless.
I had forgotten how much more hopeful a time that was. Despite all the terrible events -- the
assassinations of Martin and Malcolm and Bobby -- and the horror of the Viet Nam
War, there was a spirit of genuine rebellion in the country. It was possible to believe that America was
decisively embarked on a progressive journey to a new and better nation. As I watched the closing scenes of the movie,
I teared up at the thought of what then seemed possible and what has since been
lost. I know, I know, a hard-eyed
Marxist analysis would have put paid to those sentiments even then. But we do not live by economic analysis
alone, and it is necessary to have hope, even irrational hope [as Herbert
Marcuse so brilliantly explained in One-Dimensional
Man], if we are to tap into the deep pre-conscious wells of psychic energy
required to make even marginal changes in the real world.
Just as the movies of the Thirties, despite their
fascination with the doings of the toffs in their evening dresses and tails,
breathe with a faith in working-class men and women [who are not compulsively
misdescribed as "middle class"], so there are movies from the Sixties
and Seventies that capture that spirit of resistance to the old order and hope
for a new.
I really do not think I am just an old man saying "It
was better when I was young."
2 comments:
Dr. Wolff,
I think the '50s were the best of times for milk and honey and plenty in the USA. Then, I believe, everything went to the heap pile with the '60s and afterwards. That's the time, I think, the country completely lost its innocence.
Although, you've mentioned Star Trek TMP, you haven't mentioned Star Wars: A New Hope, which came out some two years before ST: The Motion Picture. That same SW's movie, I think, really helped get the American public out of their post Vietnam War syndrome.
I believe that because of the never ending War on Terror people are looking for more and more movies that bring a tale of hope and escapism at the same time, just like ST: The Motion Picture did in 1979 and still does today.
J.J. Abrams, who directed the last two Star Trek films, is working on Star Wars 7, which a lot of fans are patiently waiting for. Hopefully, that movie will bring much needed hope and happiness to an ever increasingly melancholy world.
The great movie (indeed one of the greatest) that investigates "escapist" entertainment brilliantly is "Sullivan's Travels". It is brilliant throughout, but the scene in the church, with the prisoners watching a cartoon, is one of those rare scenes that grabs the head and the heart at the same time.
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