Word: vertigo
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Certainly no other movie has ever been rereleased with the kind of fanfare that 20th Century Fox and Lucasfilm Ltd. have drummed up for Star Wars' reappearance in theaters a few months in advance of its 20th anniversary (notice you didn't see Vertigo cups at Taco Bell on the occasion of that film's rerelease last year). Not only has Star Wars had its negative restored and its sound track digitally remastered--the normal course of events for such updating--but outtakes have also been added, original scenes spruced up and new elements worked into old footage to take...
...search for the perfect mate isn't seen much these days, yet the image of the ideal wife or husband was, not that long ago, a standard and frequently resurrected cultural myth. Vertigo came out in 1956--the same time that My Fair Lady was opening on Broadway. That story too was of a man who shaped a woman to fit his notion of an ideal, or highly improved, form. But over the years the impulse to idealize lovers pretty much disappeared...
Several explanations are possible for the disappearance of the idealized mate. Divorce statistics have undoubtedly helped. The main cause is probably the women's movement, which began in modern force not long after Vertigo originally came out and which, like all politically driven events, contained both smart and stupid moves. The basic thrust for equality, however, was impeccable, and it followed as the night the night, that if women were to be the equal of men they would be seen as equally flawed...
...practically no more, which may be just as well since the ideal anything is always a setup for tragedy. But what has replaced this cultural item is not much more attractive. It is, in a sense, the ideal of the unideal. The assumption behind television sitcoms contemporaneous with Vertigo was that the husbands and wives--in such shows as Father Knows Best and The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet--were perfect for each other. They had their ideal mates; that's why they were married. The assumption behind current shows like Friends and Seinfeld is that perfection is a sometime thing...
...Vertigo, a man makes too much of a woman, and he loses. In Seinfeld, a man makes too much of himself, and he loses. This is the progress of romance in the past 40 years...