Word: rousseau
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Tsuga's Children works well as an adventure fantasy. But the author is not content with writing a rousing tale. He must moralize from Rousseau's creaky premise that culture corrupts mankind. His hunter-gatherers live in an idealized balance with nature; the Chigai are brutal villains because they keep animals as prisoners to be eaten. There are echoes here of William Golding's The Inheritors, in which Homo sapiens wipes out the noble Neanderthal. Golding's text was suited for the grim '50s. Williams' happier ending is blended for the granola...
...mostly middle-class audiences. Given the subject matter, the show is relentlessly high-minded. Before curtain time, Lowndes moves among the audience with the professional warmth of a good nurse, offering to supply one man with the names of effective therapists and sexologists, pointing out to another that Gladstone, Rousseau and Aristotle were good men -and masochists...
...Rousseau had lifelong fantasies of being beaten and Gladstone practiced self-flagellation. There is a legend, but no evidence, that Aristotle was masochistic...
...group's failure is probably predictable from the opening shots of the film, when the camera pans a statue of Rousseau--himself a utopian dreamer and a resident of Geneva--and an omniscient voice quotes him to the effect that man is always enchained in his social institutions. And at the end, as Mathieu returns to his factory, the camera returns to the philosopher's statue, suggesting that little has changed, that these idealists will never put their dreams into effect. Only their hope for a future world will sustain them. And a shot of Jonah in 1980, a small...
...difficult to imagine that Reich's lonely years and late-blooming sex life have not affected the way he looks at the world. This, however, is not a critical issue. Attempting a vision, Reich has only come up with a rosy view-as if Rod McKuen had turned Rousseau's Social Contract into a TV special...