Word: moralize
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...make moral sense of how America treats its local dictators? We ease "Baby Doc" Duvalier out of power in Haiti and into a chateau in southern France, and we send the Haitian generals to a comfortable retirement in Panama. Manuel Noriega, Panama's onetime strongman, languishes in a Florida prison. The other thugs remain free. Why does Noriega rot while the others bask...
...United States, a nation born of rules and law--its Constitution written and revered--is forever perplexed by the jungle beyond the seas. We Americans are always looking for moral order abroad to parallel the moral order at home. Alas, we never find...
Amid this moral chaos, the arrest of Pinochet is a triumph of arbitrariness. Well, no. There is one rule that emerges from this case. The moralists, so jubilant at Pinochet's comeuppance, might ponder its perversity: rulers with blood on their hands are advised to remain in power. For any tyrant, the best protection from the kind of justice being visited upon Pinochet is to continue to tyrannize...
After all, Pinochet never would have been arrested if he had not done the right thing: giving up power in 1990 to a democratic government, after holding a free election. His reward? Pursuit by moral preeners up and down Europe who think they have established some new international norm of morality...
Indeed, the whole film is in a style we'll call contempo-retro. It is beautifully shot by Christopher Doyle, who turns the puky green of motel lighting into a circle of Hell, and it features a busy sound track of rattlesnakes and buzzing flies--moral decay in the desert. Everything else is defiantly same-old. This Psycho is radical because it has not only the dialogue but also the tempo of a film almost 40 years...