Word: alienation
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Coop is a family no longer. The whir of modernization has transformed the store in ways Knox scarcely could have imagined when she entered the operation in 1925--and, what's more, in ways that would have appeared utterly alien to the cooperative's motley founders some 50 years earlier. It has grown from "a shelf or two in what was chiefly a fruit store" (as one historian puts it) to a multi-million dollar diversified retail business with six branches around the Boston area. Throughout the school year and summer, students, alumni and faculty of Harvard...
...earth. He was innocent, wise and altogether gentle, but just about everyone who knew he had landed misunderstood him and conspired to get rid of him. Only a few young people saw his true benevolence, and they and the creature became inseparable. In return for their faith, the alien established a strange and powerful bond with his earthling disciples: they suffered together--even when they were miles apart--and he healed their wounds with a touch of his other-worldly finger...
...heavens to point at a human finger reaching up from the earth. Remind you of any famous creation scenes on chapel ceilings? One wonders: since E. T. 's last-minute Easter-like recovery conveniently leaves the door open for a sequel, can we expect to see the little alien in his next adventure merrily waddling along the surface of some suburban swimming pool, or turning Elliot's bedtime glass of water into something with a little more punch...
...scientists in "E. T." are cast in the most insidious roles of all. For most of the movie, they are shown only as disembodied legs, striding conspiratorially about as they seek out the little alien. When they arrive at Elliot's house, marching en masse in their spacesuits, it is nothing less than an enemy invasion. And it is in their custody that E. T. suffers his near-fatal relapse--they do not realize, as the movie's three children do, that what ails the creature is a deep-felt need to communicate with his home-star...
Beaver however, was different from the extended televison family of Rustys, Juniors, Buds and Kittens: he seemed real. The world of Beaver, notes Mathers, "was seen through the eyes of a child." To the Beav, adults were an alien and slightly comical species whose rituals could be observed and mimicked. Other television children were passive; problems happened to them. Beaver actively courted trouble. He brought home live snakes, fell into a steaming billboard soup bowl, and cut his own hair so that he resembled a precursor of punkdom. Beaver was not streetwise, he was backyard-wise. He was good...