Word: retrospective
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Isabel is self-aware enough to draw parallels between her father's ideal and her own anachronistic choice to become a "saint" by sacrificing her youth to the care of a cripple. She questions the purity of her motives--makes her saintliness appear sinful and her vices sacremental. In retrospect she sees her decision to lose her virginity, for instance, as nothing but an attempt to shock her father into attention. Incestuous lovehate fro him made her sleep with his (only) disciple; perhaps she even intended to trigger her father's heart attack a few months later...
Crews' penchant for the bizarre has been subdued in A Childhood. His father, whom he could not remember, becomes in retrospect a heroic if desolate figure, "fond of lying out with dry cattle" - that is, women who had never given birth. The minor characters are equally memorable: Willalee Bookatee and his family, their black neighbors; the Jew, a peddler whose wagon was crammed with exciting goods; Mr. Willis, the stoic hired hand, who "moved as slow as grass growing" and once extracted a tooth from his own mouth with a pair of pliers. Even the animals - Daisy the mare...
...situation is not much better on campus. He somehow remembers a pusher going door to door in Kirkland House selling heroin--curious, in retrospect, considering you can't even bum a cigarette in Kirkland House nowadays. During punching season, he is shocked by a conversation with Porcellian Club members, who tell him he must learn to party if he joins. He declines. He bemoans the decadence symbolized by Linda Lovelace's 1974 visit to Harvard...
...story of Robert Altman's dramatic rise from obscurity seems interesting primarily as an apparent confirmation of the old meritocratic myth--as a demonstration of American society's receptiveness to new, independent ideas and recognition of talent--hindsight suggests the story has a rather different, ironic significance. In retrospect, Altman's decision to make M*A*S*H* can be seen as typical of the approach to American culture that characterizes his film career to date. In making M*A*S*H*, Altman was not confirming the old American mythology at all; he was attacking...
...appropriate note on which to end an appreciation of Robert Altman's work; Altman couldn't have made this lucid, subtle film--which altogether ignores American movie myths--without first shattering those myths in films like M*A*S*H*, McCabe and The Long Goodbye. In retrospect, it's clear that Altman has helped American movies move beyond the stifling conventions of the genre to focus on ordinary people whose lives are important in their own right. He's given American movies room to breathe...