Word: life
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...lavish meals off of older men, then tricking their benefactors onto departing trains. Much of the film documents the Marys' coming and going between expensive restaurants and expensive ladies rooms. But they become bored with being successful parasites; they lie, they steal, seeking new excitement, "a worse kind of life." Finally they stumble upon an unattended banquet, which they utterly destroy. Here the film stops; they are seen drowning, calling for help against filmic extinction. The filmmaker, arbiter of their future, types out a message on the screen: "Even if they were given a chance, things would, at best, turn...
Violence emerges as a primordal force, edging most of the men on and trapping the three principals. It brings us closer to blood which, after all, is the fundamental element of life. It is not, as the final track to a high angle demonstrates, a liberating force. This force of beauty is one which will not let go. At the end of the film Holden and Borgnine are dead and Ryan is left to become part of a revolution which has no meaning...
...borders between science and science-fiction grow steadily less precise. Biophysics and medical engineering, as Alan Harrington notes, have begun to grope for the secrets of extending life. Organ transplants and artificial parts are already promising realities. The author also cites such wildly remote possibilities as quick-freezing incurables until cures can be found, administering rejuvenating shots of DNA and even duplicating an entire human body from genetically coded snippets. To exclamations that immortality achieved by such means is an impossible dream or a presumptuous nightmare, Harrington asserts that man is capable of anything...
...fringe benefit but a gut issue. Death, says Harrington, is an unacceptable imposition on the human race. Having already invoked science to support his faith, Harrington lays hands on human irrationality and violence for the same purpose. Fear of extinction, he suggests, combined with the frustrated lust for eternal life, underlies the disturbed behavior that threatens humanity with madness and self-destruction. Had men only "world enough and time," he argues, they could explore the endless varieties of love, work and play. The resulting fulfilled, relaxed race would be safe from itself once...
This is why Shaw asserted that the one thing all intelligent men are interested in is religion. This is why Harrington, a novelist and social critic (Life in the Crystal Palace), claims attention. Presenting Immortalism as the new salvation, he is at his most provocative when he evaluates the forces that play upon humanity...