Now let's study the plot. Husband Pat finds his wife in the shower with another man and beats him up. Everyone around Pat, led by psychiatrists and state workers, uses this to label him violent and bi-polar, drug him up, and then put him in an institution. No one in the movie finds this strange. Rather, the director of the film uses every trick in his arsenal to make the audience agree with the psychiatrists and state workers: a man who gets mad when he catches his wife in the shower with another man is mental.
The sane reaction to such a situation is to ask them if they need any shampoo, I suppose; or to walk out the door, stroll calmly to the drugstore, and buy a year's supply of tranquilizers.
Actually, that part of the plot is told to you as backstory, which conveniently keeps you from questioning it. It just burrows into your brain like an alien worm inserted into your ear. It is
surrounded by bad jokes and fast dialog, and you will have swallowed it before you even knew it was in your dinner.
This is so easy to deconstruct, folks. The government doesn't want you to think you have the right to feel any real emotions, or, worse, to act on them. If you feel mad or sad or even happy, they want you to think you have gone mental. They want you to believe the only sane response to the world is a flat acceptance. Even a shrug of the shoulders is suspect, because it indicates you may be hiding your true feelings. You aren't allowed any true feelings.
That is what “bi-polar” is telling you, you know. They are trying to sell you the idea that mood swings are unnatural. Just as they have labeled kids' natural energy as ADHD, they have labeled adults' natural moods as bi-polar. People are supposed to have mood swings, but they don't want you to believe that.
People are supposed to feel both happy and sad, provided they have some reason to feel either way. Life here on Earth provides highs and lows in abundance, so we should look sideways at people who do not have mood swings, not those who do. If you don't have mood swings, you are a zombie in training.
But that doesn't suit the drug pushers. They see human nature not as a given, but as another thing they can exploit for profit. They want to turn every action and thought into a symptom they can medicate.
This movie is selling four things, and is not selling them subtly. First, it is selling the idea that being a man (or a human) is now unacceptable behavior. Fifty years ago, the same scene in a movie would have been read the opposite way: the wife would have been seen as an adulterer, the other man would have been seen as a creep who got what he deserved, and Husband Pat would have been seen as a hero. If Husband John Wayne had thrown other man out the window on his head, no one would have blinked an eye.
Link to PDF of the whole thing:
http://mileswmathis.com/silver.pdf
