University of Virginia Library

Adept Stereotypes

The young female-cats
(whom Fritz expectedly calls
"chicks", although cats being
chicks is another way of
playing with incongruous roles)
drool over a cool, sun-glassed
black crow, cascading him with
all sorts of "I'm liberal, too"
cliches. The cops practice their
"Open this door!" routines.
Fritz discovers in an
inexplicable flash of inspiration
that he has to preach the
Revolution, and, from a car
roof, exhorts the ghetto-people
to fight against those "bosses
in their limousines". ("Get off
my car," an uninspired voice
yells to him)

And, in a scene that
virtually creates setting by the
sound track, old Jews in a
synagogue used as refuge by
Fritz interrupt the
undercurrent buzz of prayer
for a few bits of desultory
dialogue on Growing Up
Jewish. In another such scene,
blacks in a bar carry on their
own sort of ethnic verbal
counterpoint. I found both
scenes hilariously adept at
recognizing the comic uses of
stereotypes.

Like a good deal of the
counter-culture, "Fritz"'s
attention to form and style
supersedes any interest in
content. Iridescent landscapes
merge into one another
without any real movement,
physical or mental. Violence
on and deaths of character
become something between the
vivid cartoon bloodshed and,
like their very human voices,
something psychologically real,
as when a pool-shark crow
sinks to his death by bullets to
the decreasing heartbreak of
imaginary bouncing hillard
balls. It's a neat stylistic trick,
but our response is torn by
finding cartoon characters with
real consciousnesses. We're
surprised at finding
two-dimensional characters
with depth.