Word: automata
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...work of this venerable figure testifies, his achievement is more modest and realistic. In the 200-odd works that make up "Calder's Universe," as the show is called, there is little of the real universe, but a pervasive flavor of its metaphors: orreries, planetary clockwork, automata. The Copernican epicycles turn out to be circus rings, and the vast music of the spheres comes down to the delicious noise of appetite rubbing against humor...
...many critics have been quick to point out. But his idea is still effective, to my mind, not because it makes an extra person but because the living room filled with lively figures extends Wyke's character into the complex fantasy of his fiction. Like Wyke's books, the automata are by no means puerile, though both belong to the realm of extended childhood...
...figures is unnecessary, but the best shots in the film depend on it. A long track around the living room, accompanied by Porter's "You Do Something to Me" sums up the mood of Act Two, and these final scenes conclude with a chattering montage, as all the automata go berserk...
...psychologists refuse to study anything but the most mechanical forms of behaviour-often so mechanical that even rats have no chance to show their higher faculties-and then present their most trivial findings as the true picture of the human mind, they prompt people to regard themselves as automata, devoid of responsibility or worth, which can hardly remain without effect upon the tenor of social life." Freud, Adler and Jung? Although psychoanalysts "offer many fundamental insights into real-life situations" and cannot be accused of banality or irrelevance, Andreski says, they lack "a sense of proportion." Thus, he concludes...
...rise of student and intellectual radicalism as a major phenomenon of the second half of the '60's." Prevailing orthodoxy, to be sure, dutifully assures us that "an affluent, consumer-oriented capitalist society has bred contented cows," that one dimensional technological society has reduced all its citizens to mindless automata. But even while Professor Lipset was solemnly proclaiming the end of an ideological era in which "fundamental political problems of the industrial revolution have been solved.... This very triumph of the democratic social revolution in the West ends domestic politics for those intellectuals who must have ideologies or utopias...