January 17, 2002

6:07 PM

Fantasy Space...a laughable pseudointellectual discussion of an old, weird movie I first saw in high school when HBO was still Home Box Office.
posted by Slagman (9 comments total)

Here's another oldie but goodie discussed in this film course....

http://www.geocities.com/virtual_cinema/westworld.html
posted by Slagman at 6:10 PM on January 17, 2002

Sorry - what am I supposed to be looking at?
posted by obiwanwasabi at 6:45 PM on January 17, 2002

yes, and -- excuse my ignorance -- what does HBO stand for now?
posted by zerolucid at 7:00 PM on January 17, 2002

Can you elaborate on what makes this laughable or pseudointellectual (as opposed to truly intellectual according to your high standards)? Because otherwise, I might mistake an excellent post for one that that amounts to nothing more than a sneer.
posted by rodii at 7:11 PM on January 17, 2002

HBO isn't Home Box Office anymore?
posted by internook at 4:56 AM on January 18, 2002

Hungry Bleeding Ostrich?
posted by internook at 4:57 AM on January 18, 2002

Hoods, Boobs and Oz?
posted by dodgygeezer at 6:04 AM on January 18, 2002

This seems like a very typical, and wholly unobjectionable, undergraduate film studies course cheat-sheet, and a fairly useful one for the discussion of the film.

He doesn't really address what, to my mind, is most fascinating about TSW looking back from more than a quarter of a century: TSW shows the inflection point where "women's liberation" was (predominantly) a movement of educated women who had become homemakers, and who were being "liberated" into greater self-awareness, self-actualization, and so forth, while retaining the basic economic role of homemaker dependent upon male husband / salary-earner.

When this moment of inflection passed, educated women divided into three, rather distinct, groups: those who continued or returned to full-time professional careers while retaining the basic model of early marriage and parenthood, those who pursued career to the exclusion of marriage (or parenting marriage at least) until their 30's, and those who remained in the homemaker role, without any particular emphasis on a parallel, politically conscious, liberation.

(Although evolving reactions to feminism may have played a role in those development, I think, they can better attributed to the "stagflation" of the mid to late 1970s and the succeeding transformation of American business to its "lean, mean" model in the late 1970's and early to mid 1980's. Those two things combined to permanently reduce both the economic standard of living and the economic security that a one-career family could enjoy.
posted by MattD at 9:14 AM on January 18, 2002

OK, so I'm guilty of sneering. It was the "fantasy space" bit that got me. And I endorse Matt D's analysis of how we've come a long way, baby. And it's not Home Box Office anymore, it's just HBO. It doesn't stand for anything. They never say the words anymore.
posted by Slagman at 6:36 PM on January 18, 2002