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The 1980 Adaptation of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven (Screenshot 4)

The Obligatory Male-on-Male Casual Affection Shot

glam affectionHere we see the Socratic beard of Kevin Conway’s Dr. Haber almost making Greek love to the face of our hero in the 1980 Adaptation of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven. I read in a book somewhere that European males are more casually affectionate with each other than are their North American counterparts. Simultaneously, one could argue quite successfully that Americans sexualize almost all physical contact. Combining the concepts of the previous two sentences of this paragraph leads me to conclude that this shot is the gender-bending nod to the glam rock culture of the 1970s and the high heels of rockers like Prince to emerge in the 1980s. This is solid evidence of the liberal, leftist aesthetic that made public television in the 1980s seem so innovative and educational for me (but I am not really learning anything from this image).

Since I was only a child during the 1970s and early 1980s, I will assume that European culture and influence (dominated by the French) was not so ignored and misrepresented in corporate media back in those days—and a scene like this made filmmakers look continentally hip. Now that public broadcasting is “cleaned up” for “conservative” corporate interests, you will never see a shot like this again—probably forever. I certainly won’t miss it—but I do miss educational public programming.

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