FIVE EASY PIECES
The film Five Easy Pieces was released and first shown in the last months I lived in Canada(9/70-/7/71) before becoming an international pioneer for the Canadian Baha' community in Australia. I did not see the film until nearly forty years later--until this evening on a cool Tasmanian evening in the last week of summer. By the time I saw the film, in 2009, I had been married twice, had raised three kids and been retired from full-time work for a decade. I had never been faced with the problem, the disease, for it was a sort of disease, of the main character in the film, played by Jack Nicholson. His problem was one I first analysed in sociology theory classes in 1965/6 at McMaster University: normlessness, valuelessness, purposelessness, directionlessness, anomie, meaninglessness. The film was eventually selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the US National Film Registry because it was seen as: 田ulturally, historically and aesthetically significant.?Ron Price with thanks to ABC2 TV, Five Easy Pieces, 8:30-10:00, 14 March 2009 and Wikipedia.
The film was and is a metaphor
for the rebellious spirit of youth
in the 60s and 70s when I was a
young adult struggling with my
own rebelliousness so long ago.
They lost their centre, then, had
been losing it for generations, one
historian said for four hundred years,
the loss of authority, authority was
anathema; community falling apart
by the wayside as individualism and
capitalism and a lot of other isms were
becoming wasms, coming into a space
with a slough of despond, phantoms of
a wrongly informed imagination in the
midst of revolutions that were spiritual
and out of men痴 control様ittle did they
know it*nd advancing quietly and not-
so-quietly in the hearts of millions who
had dropped out of a world they found
meaningless and got into a hedonism,
a doing your own thing with careers and
family, hobby apparatus, TV, gardening
at the centre擁n the midst of saviours-
in-a-hurry while the axis of the oneness
of humanity gradually took form with
greater clarity and------crystallisations.
Ron Price
15 March 2009
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