A Needed, Avuncular Voyage

 

avuncular - adjective - like an uncle; careful, heedful

Sometimes it is unsteadying to reach a certain milestone in life and then look back at the past, as the tendency is to compare what was then to what is now. If you are 65 or over and gaze back over your shoulder about fifty years, the differences between then and now are so extreme that they could make you dizzy. Although I make a conscious effort to live in the present, occasionally I drift back into the past when prompted. 

The other day, a gentleman whom I met recently suggested that I watch an oldie but goodie, Carl Reiner's black comedy "Where's Poppa?" (1970, United Artists) on a streaming service. Since the film's cast is topnotch (George Segal, Ruth Gordon, Ron Leibman, Trish Van Devere, Rob Reiner, and Vincent Gardenia), I could not say no. If you are brave enough to follow my lead and take a walk on the unwoke, wild side, make sure you are safely ensconced on a couch for the entire duration so that you don't get a quick case of vertigo from the experience of watching. After having gotten used to a sanitary, woke world, to take in scenes of the opposite got me reeling. Nothing, believe me, nothing about this movie is remotely politically correct. If writer Robert Klane were to attempt to submit his screenplay to any production companies today, he would be laughed out of Hollywood. Cancelled indefinitely. 

In case you are too scared to take the plunge, I'll spill the beans re: the contemporary atrocities in a work wherein cultural stereotypes abound. Warning: there is no subgroup that is not satirized. To start, Jewish men, their wives, and their mothers are ridiculed: Ruth Gordon, a brilliant character actress, plays the insufferable Mrs. Hocheiser, demented mother to forcibly avuncular George Segal (lawyer Gordon) and Ron Leibman (henpecked Sidney). She has them both shackled to their dying father's wish, not to put their impossible mother into "a home," the only sane solution to the problem. George bends over backwards to get her into an early grave, including buying and then wearing a gorilla suit in order to scare her to death. When he meets the love of his life, angelic Louise (Trish Van Devere), a caregiver who answers Gordon's ad for help with mom, he loses patience and informs his brother Sidney (Ron Leibman) that he will throw Mom out of the window if he doesn't take her off his hands. Despite the protests of Sidney's unsympathetic wife, he answers the call but must first go through Central Park after dusk before he can get to Gordon's apartment. While in Central Park, he is accosted by ruffian rapists and muggers (all played by African American male actors, which would NEVER fly today) not once, but twice. Fragile, malleable Sidney himself is forced by the unlawful gang to "rape" an off-duty, gay police officer dressed as a woman who doesn't not press charges, claiming the encounter was one of the passionate highlights of his life, icing the cake that is his infatuation with red roses. There are other subgroups that are criticized, namely American military officers who are depicted as austere, profane, immoral warmongers capable of genocide. Naturally, the film is an unforgiving, biting satire at which audiences laughed only to realize that '70s society needed to change drastically.

And somehow at some point it did a 180. Today, nothing is politically incorrect, nothing is satirized for fear of reprisal, cancellation on social media. Very few have the audacity to take pot shots at what is wrong with society today, even comedians are kept at bay. So it all comes down to us being left to take an honest look at what is going on around us and make a few alterations. "Where's Poppa?" of the 1970s may very well segue into "Where's Sanity?" in the 2020s, a needed, avuncular voyage.

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