Word: visional
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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This was what the crowds had come to witness. Jules Verne had the vision more than a century ago. When Western man finally launched himself into space, he foresaw, it would be from Florida's midsection. Men with less foresight saw only a forbidding stretch of sand, scrub and fetid marshland that was bypassed even during the land boom of the 1920s. In the 1950s, recalls Space Reporter Al Volker of the Miami News, the space program was so hushed up that the only way to find out that a shot had taken place was to have a Cocoa...
...myopic judgment of Philosopher Thomas Hobbes that life in a state of nature was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Primitive peoples were construed as somewhat stupid living fossils, stalled in the path of progress. Today, though, experts seem more inclined to endorse Jean Jacques Rousseau's vision of the noble savage living in a Golden Age. And they go so far as to suggest that present civilization, despite its vast artistic and material advances, is in some ways no real improvement on the past. "It is still an open question whether man will be able to survive...
...Easy Rider are as remote as the freedom they are seeking. Wyatt (Peter Fonda) is a vague, unshaven pothead who likes to refer to himself as "Captain America." His manic sidekick Billy (Dennis Hopper) has a droopy Stephen Crane mustache and shiny eyes fixed on some wild interior vision. Flush from the profits of dope selling, the cyclists symbolically cast off their wristwatches and head for that persistent American symbol of adventure, The Road...
...main irony of the film that the men who so desperately try to establish an identity through their collective action become overwhelmed by it. Peckinpah's vision of battle is total chaos. Uncompleted zooms are followed by cuts to entirely unrelated images. Pursurers are confused with pursued. At the end we are left with nothing but a sense of the beauty...
Whether Harrington's hotly held bootstrap faith in salvation through medical engineering is conceived as atheistic Im-mortalism or accommodated under the umbrella of God's will is a matter of choice. Even world-weary skeptics, though, should find comfort in the vision of a future in which man's most fitting epitaph will be "Enough Is Enough...