The Immoral Mr. Teas

In 1960, Walt Whitman Rostow, later an advisor to President Johnson, published his famous book “The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto,” in which he outlined the teleological development of the capitalist world. The end/climax of history thus falls on the "age of high mass consumption." Consumer society ultimately triumphed/triumphs everywhere in the world. What could be written (pseudo)academically, Meyer managed to capture perfectly in a cinematographic way. That is because he filmed at the end of the prudish puritanical American era, and his protagonist at least formally tries to rid himself of his pleasure in women/sex, and even in the title of the film he is presented to us as immoral. Yet Meyer knew well that a person in the culmination of Western history would not deny themselves their pleasure in the future, let alone feel immoral. As prophetically stated, some people want to remain sick. Mr. Teas is the spiritual father of all "Californication," etc., that is, those of mass culture who turn their mundane appetites and limiting their own responsibility in favor of adolescent and comfortable mundanity into the prototype of the easygoing/cool person. This comment is not a lament of an old-fashioned moralist, but a lament over how after so many other vital and natural human qualities, sex has become just another commodity in the wheel of mass culture. The fact is that B-movie director Meyer unwittingly captured it better than any sociologist or historian. (02.10.2014)