Word: miltown
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...something about our particular historical moment. Culturally speaking, every age has its signature crack-up illness. In the 1950s, an era of postwar trauma, nuclear fear and the self-medicating three-martini lunch, it was anxiety. (In 1956, 1 in 50 Americans was regularly taking mood-numbing tranquilizers like Miltown - a chemical blunderbuss compared with today's sleep aids and antianxiety meds.) During the '60s and '70s, an age of suspicion and Watergate, schizophrenics of the One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest sort captured the imagination - mental patients as paranoid heroes. Many mental institutions were emptied...
...accidental discovery in the 1950s of the first synthetic tranquilizer, chlorpromazine (Thorazine), ushered in a gentler age of psychopharmacology. As other feel-good pills followed--Tofranil (imipramine) for depression, Miltown and Equanil (meprobamate) for psychosis, Valium (diazepam) for severe anxiety and lithium for manias--no mental illness seemed beyond their reach. Governments began emptying mental wards on the assumption that madness could be medicated--ignoring the fact that thousands of former inmates ended up living, and suffering, in the streets...
...most pressing need -- for a funny sleeper -- has been fulfilled. Wrong. Or, as Buffy says, "Does the word duh mean anything to you?" It does to director Fran Rubel Kuzui, whose frenzied mistrust of her material is almost total. Somebody should have given her a garlic necklace -- or a Miltown -- and told her to chill...
...ingenious pointlessness of it: Milton Berle and Pinky Lee, My Little Margie and American Bandstand, Gorgeous George and Johnny Ray, and Elvis televised from the waist up on the Ed Sullivan Show. Grace Metalious (Peyton Place) and Mickey Spillane were available for mildly salacious excitement; the new tranquilizers (Miltown, Thorazine) saw to the jitters of civilization; Fulton Sheen and Norman Vincent Peale attended to the soul...
...Still later, they learn to make love. For the next 20 minutes, all they do is couple, on the beach, in the mango grove, behind the bamboo hut, and everywhere. They are almost adults now. The movie end when they intentionally overdose on red berries, the Fijian equivalent of Miltown. Totally grown...