Word: cb
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...American family spends an average of six hours per night mesmerized by a television set, passively absorbing the fictional universe of stagnant soaps and muddled mysteries. Still, this mere spectator's role cannot satisfy the modern imagination, so it is easy to understand the surging popularity of Citizens' Band (CB) radio, which solicits audience participation in electronic media. A CB operator finds the radio a suitable stage for the enactment of daydreams. Serving as an outlet for the hidden personalities of its users, CB becomes either a creative or a destructive tool for individual fantasies...
This double-edged aspect of the CB revolution is the subject of Jonathan Demme's film, Handle With Care. In this movie, Demme sketches life in a small-town American community whose inhabitants share a fascination with CB. Employed equally well by a nihilistic Nazi, a proselytizing priest and a wizened whore, the radio connects persons of different vocations and avocations. Within the framework of CB, Demme and his script writer, Paul Brickman, weave a colorful but ultimately threadbare tapestry of rural America, in which the CB substitutes for drab reality. By showing the murky side of CB broadcasts, Demme...
...Paul LeMat) too often whines his good intentions, when he plays the hero with a mission to exorcise "garbage" from the airwaves. His girlfriend Pam (Candy Clark) also pouts and gestures too conventionally to merit serious attention as a lonely, depressed women who resorts to lurid sexuality through her CB...
...camera, Demme continually focuses on emblems such as the American flag and the crucifix that Dallas Angel sports. It is clear that Demme continually focuses on emblems such as the American flag and the crucifix that Dallas Angel sports. It is clear that Demme denounces a society where the CB unavoidably becomes the vehicle of perversity, yet these issues cannot be compatibly explored within the rest of the film's comic frame. Demme reaches a formidable cul-de-sac, so he returns to highjinks, ending Handle With Care with Papa Thermodyne whooping it up by riding cattle...
Both visual and musical themes insist on stressing the contradictions of middle-American life. Through a contrast between day and night scenes, Demme unfolds the schizoid nature of CB use. Surfacing under a miasma of grays and blues, the CB becomes a sinister force in the town. Rain also showers the darkness, but it dirties as much as it cleanses, recalling Alain Resnais's evocation of the contaminated rain after a nuclear explosion in Hiroshima, Mon Amour. During the day, when the CB appropriates a docile mask, bright sunshine dominates the cinematographer's vision. The soundtrack, too, depicts both sides...