In many ways The Raspberry Reich is a defiant mess, which I mean as praise. Why should you care whether the actors sustain the illusion of being the characters, whether the director keeps his crayon within the lines? Are you ever unaware you're watching a fiction film? I also prefer blatant porn to the coy prick-teasing central to American pop entertainment. LaBruce may not be absolutely "right" in all his choices, and sometimes his needle gets stuck in a groove, but despite a totally rambunctious id and a heedless rejection of propriety, the movie holds together analytically. You won't miss the point but at the same time what's onscreen feels arrived at intuitively, which is why the movie can cohere without conforming exactly to LaBruce's intentions as he articulates them in interviews. He's probably the kind of "revolutionary" spirit who can't be contained in any program. Thank goodness. The Raspberry Reich is as thoroughly, gleefully disreputable a work of political critique as you could hope for.
You can find this review and a lot besides at The Kitchen Cabinet.
Alan Dale is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies of the 1990s and Comedy Is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies.
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Article comments
1 - g-boy
In the third paragraph you write, '...Karl Marx's formulation, "Religion is the opiate of the masses."'
This is a common misquotation of an oft-quoted contraction:
"Religion... is the opium of the masses." - "Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right"
But I guess Gudrun's boy wouldn't have been nearly as funny if he'd said "I thought opium was the opium of the masses."
For the full quotation see: http://atheism.about.com/b/a/101150.htm
2 - Alan Dale
Thank you for the full quotation. It's much more interesting than the bumper-sticker reduction, of course. (I do wonder, however, what the word is in the original language.) I did as much research as I could without access to a research library or adequate free time and made an educated guess that I was close enough, and I do think that's true. In any case, I agree with you that it's funnier as is.