takseng

Altman's Brewster McCloud is somewhere between allegory and surreal, a whole trash can full of symbols,which are offered as untrue, with an urbane cynicism like Mephisto in Goethe's Faust. There's something inauthentic about everything, the color of falseness in our world, in our eyes, in our dreams. Altman is always exploring the inauthentic. There are so many levels to Brewster McCloud. I think we should begin that it's about innocence. Our hero is a pure innocent boy who has a guardian angel, and she guides him and protects him. The boy has a very pure aspiration. "through difficulty to the stars:" "Per aspera ad astra," as the Latin motto often reads. Like any good guardian angel, Brewster's keeps him from going astray. Central imagery is the fact that "Astrodome" means "dome of the stars," Of course, the name of the Astrodome refers to the Houston Space Center, but in the language of dream, it is very recognizably the Celestial Sphere(s), Heaven. This is all very good stuff. We also might find room for the Aeschylus symbol of a young man who put on wings his father made him and aspired to fly. Having flown too high, Aeschylus's wings melted and he crashed to Earth. Fortunately, within the gates of Surrealism, one can use symbols for unrelated purposes and never have to resolve the conflict, although it's likely that these Christian and Greek symbols aren't at all in conflict.

Standing in Brewster's way are the police/guards, each of whom manifests, I suspect, one of the Seven Deadly Sins. The Gremlin (a car offered here for the value of its name), the vanity of the contact lenses, and the sloth of the morbidly obese guard waddling around, all making it clear that the forces against McCloud are evil, not in a grand way, but with a tongue in cheek, with an urbane wit, and an urbane doubt. They aren't terror but banality, a failure to hit the mark.

The way these elements play out is tinny and false as we expect everyday life to be. There is no grand evil nor does innocence seem very heroic. Are we supposed to believe this is true, somehow expressing something? Is it only a mockery? Well, probably both, like the mock "suicide" scene staged with and for the dentist everyone knows as "Painless" in Altman's "M.A.S.H."

I've not touched on the birds, but they make sense in the tradition of Greek epic and tragedy, that the fates speak through birds; somehow birds are closer to fate than we. And what connection does an angel have to do with birds? the pure freedom of the skies, I suppose, and angel's wings always have feathers, whereas the denizens of the dark realms usually have leathery wings.

Our Lecturer is some kind of seer, a Tiresias, who expresses his sensitivity to the fates by his affinity to the birds. He is so fascinated with all things avian, he seems to be morphing into one of them.

Having been recommended the (then) new film of Phillip K Dick's "Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep," I saw and loved Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner" when it was new. When I finally read "Androids" about two years ago and discovered that Blade Runner is obviously a jumping off point, but it's really a different story. Part "1984" and part "Children of Men," "Androids" is about a seriously dysfunctional, probably dieing society dominated by a pervasive propaganda effort.

While it's not clear that the world of "Blade Runner," is any less dysfunctional, the political elements seem very ordinary for a big city. Its focus is on the characters, which are very nearly human, as are we all. The focus is not on the times but on the experience of humanity that defines us and fails to draw a clear line between human and "replicant." Scott puts the question in the mouth of a replicant, to wonder whether our detective is himself human, at which point we may begin to remember what may be clues about this, but the question is never again raised. But they both seem to pass the tests we would make of their being human.

Where Dick is caught up in his own cynicism, Ridley Scott seems to have given us an anthem, especially with his dark and decadent future LA, but just magnificent, the last great non-CGI set, along with a dense and powerful Vangelis soundtrack.

"That Was the Week That Was" first appeared in the US in a special edition that was a memorial to John F Kennedy after his assassination. I believe that was the original British cast, but the show stimulated an enormous amount of interest in what they were doing over there, so an American version appeared the next year.

It was topical. It didn't pull its punches. It was sly, most Americans' introduction to "British Humor," more than a step up from Jerry Lewis, and it moved quickly. Its was urbane, a style that David Frost came to symbolize, although the conspicuous consumption lifestyle he developed was really something else. Perhaps he became what he started out to mock.

It's surprising it's gotten so little attention, as it was widely regarded a direct inspiration for "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In," and it is surely not chance that the decades old American comedy show's weekly announced name isn't "Saturday Night Live," but "Saturday Night." Surely a tip of the hat to TW3's original name.