Word: psychics
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...going public. For this film's enormous success clearly has little to do with its cinematic merits, which are not all that numerous, and everything to do with the morose message it manages to transmit. Five Easy Pieces is about emotionally handicapped people trying desperately to ward off terminal psychic disaster-and, accordingly, its phenomenal appeal seems very much a symptom of a national mood bordering on emotional collapse...
...years-with the important difference that a considerable amount of energy was expended to demonstrate how these monsters were created, usually through the excesses of modern science. The new freak comics work with a new kind of causality. A beautiful girl is transformed into a princess phone through the psychic projections of rejected lovers. Retributive justice is a persistent theme, but it is never confronted and articulated. Rather the new causality operates as an instantaneous wish-fulfillment never clearly associated with specific characters. It's all more frightening than conventional comics, in part because it seems so close to psychopathology...
civilization and its discontents. Nor are they self-indulgence for psychic escape artists. Rituals...
...myths. But it is precisely man's collective mythmaking that has supplied the symbols embodied in religious rituals. Religious institutions are now disintegrating, the two researchers believe, because religion has cut itself off from its "principal sources of nourishment-the soul, the symbolic and mythogenic process, the psychic energy resources." It is an irony of the past decade, they point out, that mystical experience has again become a beneficent, transforming reality for great numbers of people-but it has been happening outside the major religious institutions. The most potent new "religious" movements of the decade have been...
...Malice. Unlike Hal Hoi brook in his Mark Twain Tonight, Whitmore does not attempt to achieve a flesh-tinted, bone-perfect reproduction of Rogers, nor does he even speak with Rogers' casual, careless Oklahoma drawl. What he tries for, and succeeds in evoking, is a psychic affinity with the wit of the Western corral, a man whose comic spirit always had a visible edge but no sting of malice, a man who could toss off a one-liner like, "I could have gone to West Point, but I was too proud to talk to a Congressman...