Word: antiauthoritarian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Deinstitutionalization fit perfectly into the antiauthoritarian zeitgeist of the '60s and early '70s. Radical Psychiatrist R.D. Laing popularized the rather romantic notion that insanity could be a sane reaction to an insane world, while Sociologist Erving Goffman suggested that institutions, by their very nature, stifled individual development. Courts began to protect the rights of the mentally ill against the encroachments of the state. But in the 1980s, the continual seesaw in America between individual freedom and society's responsibility is tipping again...
...earnest of its good intentions. The acting is strong, and the film is well photographed. Integrity is stamped all over the project. Yet, in the end, this is just another prison movie, a genre that moviemakers love because it is an easy one in which to make antiauthoritarian gestures with out straining very hard for originality or for fine moral distinctions. Scum is a superior example of a familiar breed. By Richard Schickel