Word: psychopaths
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There once was an age of reason, Harrington believes, in which Western civilization subscribed to the bourgeois standards - work hard, seek virtue - and it naturally condemned the psychopath as a madman (the Marquis de Sade) or an outlaw (Billy the Kid). But throughout most of this century, he argues, the psychopaths have been gaining - first tolerated, now triumphant as dictators of the contemporary style of life...
...psychopath, as Harrington defines him, is not just an exaggerated version of the neurotic, afraid to walk under a ladder. He is the new man, free from either anxiety or remorse, cold, bored, self-isolated, adventurous, seductive when he wants to be. Or as Harrington lists some types: "Drunkards and forgers, addicts, flower children . . . Mafia loan shark battering his victim, charming actor, murderer, nomadic guitarist, hustling politician, the saint who lies down in front of tractors, icily dominating Nobel Prize winner stealing credit from laboratory assistants . . . all, all doing their thing...
...superman and his sado-masochistic pleasures. The hero is Clint Eastwood, a tough cop who carries a Magnum .44, "the most powerful handgun in the world," and brandishes it at a world which is so cowardly, stupid, and slow as to be beneath contempt. His quarry is a sniggering psychopath, a blank-faced embodiment of evil who personifies all that the American tough mentality despises: long-haired, pacifistic, whiny, effeminate. Harry tracks the killer into a stadium, and there publicly enacts the audience's fantasies by stomping of his wounded arm until he tells where he has hidden his victim...
...plot is like a Freudian case history rewritten for the Reader's Digest -The Most Unforgettable Psychopath I Ever Met. After that trauma on the staircase, young Jimmy Graham's father Harry (Robert Mitchum) is eventually convicted of his wife's murder and sent to the state pen. Jimmy is dispatched to an orphanage. Fifteen years later, Jimmy (Jan-Michael Vincent) goes looking for his father. He has been paroled, and is now scratching out a living as a mechanic in a small town on the New Jersey shore, sustained by his girl friend (Brenda Vaccaro). Vengeance...
...much for dialogue. Jennifer on My Mind is the saga of the ill-fated relationship born at this moment. Hero Marcus (Michael Brandon) is a footloose heir with a wallet and a head full of dough. Heroine Jennifer (Tippy Walker) is a flighty little psychopath with a couple of nasty habits-bitchiness and dope. After leading Marcus a merry chase from Venice to New York City and back again, she gives him the slip. He returns to the U.S. and settles down in an apartment in New Jersey, of all places, to try to forget. Jenny, by now badly strung...