A wonderful fulfillment would be possible, if only. Political ideologues have catered to and encouraged the daydreamer in Western man, offering a magnificent future in which present limitations have been overcome and human beings can realize their fondest hopes. The imagination has tended to wander from tasks and opportunities actually at hand to visions of the human condition transformed. The desire for sexual excitement and freedom has been pervasive. Novels, paintings, compositions, movies, and popular songs have depicted the depredation and pain of a narrow-minded, cramped, routinized, boring, oppressive society, and the thrill of a hoped-for liberation. Instead of giving our actual lives our best effort, we moan because dreamt-of possibilities are out of reach. A longing for human existence to turn into something quite different and glorious has produced a tendency to disparage the possibilities of ordinary life. We should accept it and make the most of it.īut for over two centuries Western culture has generated the sentiment that the life in which we find ourselves is nothing compared to what might be. We must not forget that this, not some imaginary utopian alternative, is the life we have to live. We have to learn to deal with the consequences. The reason why we cannot look forward to a vastly improved worldly existence is that human beings-we ourselves in particular-are flawed creatures. Producers Finola Dwyer and Amanda Posey.Ĭhristianity and the classical heritage taught men and women to strive for a better life but to have modest hopes. His problem is that, after a while, he begins to miss them.Published Humanitas, Volume XXII, Nos. A Baton Rouge, Louisiana native, Barry Seal was eventually forced to move his drug smuggling operation.
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Given a choice between the lives of his companions and the lives of Earth's last surviving firs and pines, oaks and elms, and creepers and cantaloupes, he decides for the growing things. Barry Seal's smuggling operation began in Louisiana, and like in the American Made movie, he sometimes pushed packed duffel bags full of drugs out of his plane and into the Atchafalaya basin, to be collected by associates on the ground. (If it had, it could have been a pretentious disaster.) It is about a basically uncomplicated man faced with an awesome, but uncomplicated, situation. "Silent running" isn't, in the last analysis, a very profound movie, nor does it try to be. They're OK with a trowel but no good at playing poker, as their human boss discovers during a period of boredom.ĭern is a very good, subtle actor, who was about the best thing in Jack Nicholson's directing debut, " Drive, He Said." Dern played a basketball coach as a man obsessed with the notion of winning - and the deep-space ecologist this time is a quieter variation on the theme. His only companions are Huey, Louie, and Dewey, who are small and uncannily human robots who help with the gardening.
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The weight of the movie falls on the shoulders of Bruce Dern, who plays the only man in sight during most of the picture. Out of Ordinary Out of Ordinary Switzerland, September 2020 Expanded Cinema, 9 min. "Silent Running," which has deep space effects every bit the equal of those in "2001," also introduces him as an intelligent, if not sensational, director. The director is Douglas Trumbull, a Canadian who designed many of the special effects for Stanley Kubrick's " 2001: A Space Odyssey." Trumbull also did the computers and the underground laboratory for " The Andromeda Strain," and is one of the best science-fiction special-effects men. All of this is told with simplicity and a quiet ecological concern, and it makes "Silent Running" a movie out of the ordinary - especially if you like science fiction. Then he hijacks his spaceship and directs it out into the deep galactic night. Lowell cannot bring himself to do this, and so he destroys his fellow crew members instead. One day the word comes from Earth: Destroy the greenhouses and return. Now he is millions of miles from Earth, but his thoughts are filled with weedings and prunings, fertilizer and the artificial rainfall. In an earlier day, he might have been a forest ranger and happily spent the winter all alone in a tower, spotting forest fires. The keeper of one of these greenhouses, Freeman Lowell, loves the plants and animals with a not terribly acute intelligence.