Word: dumbness
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...Russell's Tommy is the ultimate trip, the ultimate TV show. Its central metaphor is a deaf, dumb and blind person playing pinball--total sensory overload. Add some drugs (the audience), loud music in five-track Quintaphonic sound, and a camera that socks back and forth like an All rabbit punch, and you have an experiences so full that it cancels itself out. You buck and heave uncontrollably for two hours and waddle out of the theater, hoping that you'll smash the car into a wall on the way home or something because maybe that...
Shaky Totem. What is best in this movie version is Ken Russell's attempt to comment upon and satirize a culture where a shaky totem like Tommy could attract such worshipful respect. Tommy shares with traditional operas a foolish libretto, this one having to do with a deaf, dumb and blind boy who becomes a pinball champion, a culture hero and a new messiah. Townshend wavered crazily between satire, science fiction and sanctimony; Russell mocks the very seriousness of the piece itself by focusing on, then extending it. The movie is entirely sung; there is no dialogue. But there...
...before thousands of fans. The Wizard looks like a character from the other side of an electronic looking glass. Shirt full of glitter, several pairs of suspenders holding up his pants, he perches in front of his pinball machine on seven-story platform shoes, singing Pinball Wizard ("That deaf, dumb and blind kid/ Sure plays a mean pinball"). Tommy defeats him, and our last sight of the Wizard is only of his shoes, upended, borne off through the contemptuous crowd...
...their best, these photographs have a wondrously subtle tension to them. On one hand, they seem absolutely dumb in conception. Their composition is so casual-seeming that it is as if their frames enclose not a work of art, but a transparent "peephole" to the physical event that Rosenblum recorded. They are almost like the leaves of a family snapshot album, so direct is the affair they seem to engender between the viewer and the viewed...
...Animals aren't so dumb as people make them out to be. They just can't talk. And if you watch them closely enough, they do sort of talk...