Word: thoreauvian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Peckinpah, in his previous films, has emphasized something quite different: a Thoreauvian belief in a one-to-one accounting of man to man and to his territory. But love, and all personal relationships, are just as tragic as they are in Bergman--if in more idealized ways, and in ways which echo a deeper social disillusionment. Love comes at the purgative ending of The Wild Bunch, when gunslinger Pike Bishop tries to save Mexican rebel Angel from the torture of the Federales--only to be slaughtered in a suicidal attack both epic and glorious. It becomes muted, perhaps sadder...
...thing, sure, but it's also more than that. Rags's call to revolution is really more of a nostalgic attempt to return to the nineteenth century. It's a clarion call reverberating with notes of simplistic iconoclasm, Emersonian self-reliance, a Thoreauvian communion with the land, and, ironically enough, a championship of the small businessman. Spelt out in those terms, it's just not that revolutionary. More like Consciousness I in bell-bottoms. Which means that where Rags is at may be just about midway between the late Herbert Hoover and the early Yves St. Laurent...
...California, the Stones-aren't too far from the standard fare. What he does manage to do is capture those peculiar historical moments and insights which drove him and his friends (Bloom's Band, they called it) first to their frantic enterprise in Washington and finally to their Thoreauvian existence in Vermont...
...enjoying it is camping. Last week, from Maryland and Virginia's Assateague Island to California's Yosemite Valley, the national parks were in something like a state of siege-and they were still a month away from the season peak. Unhappily. Americans in their massive, neo-Thoreauvian urge threaten to create precisely the environment they are trying to escape. A haven like Yosemite, once celebrated by naturalists and the National Geographic, offers roughly the solitude of Central Park on a weekday. Says one Interior Department official: "Visiting Glacier National Park is like going to a Safeway parking...
...alone a Republican of Nixon's background and character, to raise such a doubt about traditionally defined economic growth. The idea of almost infinite expansion has always been a part of the national faith. Now, even in the White House, there is a disposition to heed the Thoreauvian advice: "Simplify...