Word: revelators
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Latin Olympics revel in gender and case
This latest in a long line of movies about mental institutions is chiefly distinguished by what it does not do. It does not revel in too many lurid scenes of zany inmates being violent or bestial (though it has its share, enough to earn it an R rating). It does not idealize the mental institution as a citadel of scientific wisdom and compassion, nor caricature it as a latter-day Bedlam administered by sadists. It does not explain away its protagonist's schizophrenia with some unearthed childhood trauma, as if the condition were a sort of Freudian acrostic...
...they promise to do; oth er states are rated on their deeds. The de nial of freedom in Communist-dominated Peru, for example, is excused by many leftists as a historical necessity on the road to the socialist paradise. The same behavior in Chile is denounced as fascist repression. Revel makes the pro vocative point that while many fascist regimes have come and gone, and a few have even been liberalized, not a single orthodox Communist regime has disappeared in this century...
Murky Impulse. For all of his close analyses of geopolitics, Revel offers a kind of sociobiological conclusion: people may prate of doing good for man kind but deep down they crave power. Others have an "unacknowledged desire to live under Stalinism, not in spite of what it is, but because of what it is." In other words, some need to rule, others to be ruled - a "murky impulse from which none of us is free...
Nevertheless, Revel is free enough to be a champion of pluralism. It is the co piousness of choice, the diversity of life in America that he held up as a model in his seminal Without Marx or Jesus. Stalinism is just the opposite: a retreat from modernity into a hard shell of suspicion and ignorance. Despite its grim tone, Revel's ebulliently argued book is meant to be a reminder of how best to combat Stalinism: with at least two - if not three - cheers for democracy...