The earnest didactic ones: 'Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat,' 'Good-Looking Men...,' the weeping lecturer

texture · UNDATED (late oeuvre)

• When: UNDATED (Year-of-the-Whopper / late films; Wave Bye-Bye is a YW entry, Good-Looking Men... "Unfinished due to hospitalization")
• What: Against the cold parodies sit the sincere ones the family loves. Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat — a harried commuter who stops to help a knocked-over child, then is asked "Are you Jesus?" — is Mario's favorite "possibly because of its unhip earnestness," and Hal secretly likes it too. Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms... ends on Paul Anthony Heaven delivering a stupefyingly turgid film-lecture "in a monotone as narcotizing as a voice from the grave — and yet all the time weeping." The pathos the academics can't account for (event 10) lives in these; the earnest strain is the counter-evidence that the art was never only hostile.