Archetypal rendering of the same figure

Tony Montana commenting to mentalblog.com: Little Murders.

To Berl: It's all in your imagination. There's nothing scary about me. I am warm and fuzzy.

To Tzemach: The reason I told you to watch the movie is because it touches upon some of the themes that have been emerging from the blog lately. (BTW - I notice that every time the blog dies and comes back, it is reincarnated on a higher level. There's a certain cyclical nature to the topics, you revisit the same ideas; but on a deeper level. Whereas a year ago, the blog was about the breakdown of societal structures, it now speaks to the alienation of the individual that lives within those broken constructs.)

Little Murders is indeed a dark film (and that's why I warned you NOT to watch Jules Feifer's other screenplay Carnal Knowledge, because it is even bleaker). The reason I told you to watch it is because of your response to Deep Cover. Deep Cover speaks about moral ambiguity in the language of the early 90s gangsta genre. The Everyman is black, strong and emotionally detached from himself. Little Murders is essentially the same Morality Play as expressed through the filter of another now anachronistic genre, the early 70s absurdist dark comedy. Thus, the Everyman is Jewish, weak, and emotionally detached from himself.

The theme of emotional detachment of the Everyman within a society that has completely fallen apart gets re-casted every decade or so, but is essentially always the same.

In the 80s, the archetypal rendering of the same figure is in Alex Cox's punk sci-fi comedy Repo Man. There, the Everyman is white, working class, shallow, and emotionally detached from himself.

In any case, I think it is important to study how art perennially revisits the theme of the individual who is robbed of meaning, who is made coarse and lonely, by a world where there is nothing to hang on to: no family, no culture, no law and no religion. All semblance of order has been perverted.

This is really the question that chasidus addresses as well. How does one live in a false world and not suffer internal fragmentation and estrangement from the self. Organic (read: G-dly) law and order remains hidden deep below a superimposed false construct of immutable natural principles.

The danger is not that the Everyman will join the corrupt powers-that-be. Indeed, they will never have him except to use him temporarily for their own needs. The danger is that a lifetime of being conditioned to the brutality of amoralism, he will lose his own sense of outrage to the comfort of survival by apathy.

In Little Murders, Alfred loses his soul to the madness. In Repo Man, Otto escapes this reality for a new one. In Deep Cover, there's an obviously tacked-on Hollywood ending (yes, it is the only "studio" film of the three) where John brings the outlaws to justice. And as sophisticated as we'd like to think we are, we appreciate the Hollywood ending because it means that redemption is possible.