Anti-liberal prevention. In modern popular culture, the typical plot of socially antagonistic conflicts has degenerated into a set of completely primitive and predictable cliches, without any meaningful depth, but with a quirky primitive agitational morality. The simple layman sympathizes with the idea that even one person can achieve justice in this world, and even more so because the unity of the oppressed masses is somehow capable of creating a more just society without any problems or contradictions. Rare phantasmagoria about authoritarian-totalitarian society allows itself bold and objective allusions to reality and certainly they do not pretend to bold statements, just the opposite, the central ideas are just as superficial as primitive. It is much easier to exploit primitive ideas of justice, or at least the illusion of an ideal society.
But that's all for the most part. Some units are used to living outside the laws of the mainstream, ready to demonstrate their nonconformist essence on this field. Especially characteristic in this regard are societies at a time of change, when there is a rethinking of old values and an attempt to see beyond the horizon of the future new. In fact, American culture of the late sixties and early seventies is particularly rich in this cultural heritage, when the central theme was the search for individual freedoms and rebellion against the establishment. Basically, several iconic pictures come to mind at once: from my beloved “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Easy Rider” to the much less and more dubious “Cold-Blooded Luke” and “The Disappearing Point”. The film that will be discussed below is a worthy representative of its era.
Young radicals and rebels on the one hand, and conservatives and conformists as representatives of the repressive machinery of the state apparatus directed against liberal elements on the other. One layer of conflict is superimposed on the other: it is a conflict of generations as old as the world, and the clash of different opinions and views with the subsequent forcible suppression of undesirables. If we operate for convenience with such a well-worn concept as “system”, then the voice that says things that are undesirable for it must be suppressed in the bud in the form of a typical struggle not with cause, but with effect in the name of preserving its internal order and foundations. And no matter what that voice was talking about, in the end, by manipulating and frankly falsifying facts (as is done now) you can easily form public opinion in your favor. And for those who doubt the prevailing ideological attitudes in society, it is possible to arrange show trials, where those who are guilty only of their disagreement will receive incomparably high terms or a cruel alternative. Here ends the fairy tale of a just and free society and begins a harsh, rejected by all reality - when there is simply no way out.
The trick is that the situation presented in the picture does not seem absurd. Surprisingly, despite the fact that the film is more than forty years old, the parallels with modern Russia line up with frightening accuracy: from show trials to the use of patriotic rhetoric for dubious purposes. Here and now we can see a monstrous cynical struggle against ideological pluralism and individual freedoms for the sake of dubious notions of the public good. Here and now, the ruling elite, with the tacit consent of the masses, is always ready to stage demonstrative persecutions of the conditionally undesirable, calculatingly choosing suitable targets for this - from the opposition to subcultures. On the other hand, what we pay for, we get.