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The most interesting aspect about Man of La Mancha’s success was, according to Wasserman, the fact that it plowed upstream against the then current philosophy in the theater, that of alienation, moral anarchy, and despair. “To the practitioners of those philosophies Man of La Mancha must seem hopelessly naive in its espousal of illusion as man’s strongest spiritual need, the most meaningful function of his imagination. ... For the moment I shall let these two negative views stand as examples of how “Man of la Mancha” provokes divergent responses. The Newsweek man argued that the screen version came across like an animated Classic Comic, that Don Quixote “resembles an enfeebled scoutmaster emeritus, spewing laundry lists of virtues that might have been taken from the troop manual. ... We are told that “Those (teachers) who identify it (Man of la Mancha) with their own romantic interpretations of Don Quixote regard it as a modern adaptation of universal ideals that inevitably conflict with reality. ... ” Other Cervantes scholars consider Man of la Mancha a trivialization of Don Quixote and some have used it to show how the spirit of the original text can be misinterpreted in the modern age (Bjornson, 32). ... The Duke, (the prisoner who is called the Duke) then asking about the region of La Mancha, suggests that the place grows lunatics and tht a man must come to terms with life as it is. ... humanistic studies are ends in themselves; they focus on man’s creations, discerning in concepts, texts,and images what man is and ought to be (Newsweek, October 13, 1980). ... The idea that man should study himself, know himself, and then determine what he can and ought to become begins at least with Socrates, and is reiterated by Aristotle. ... The audience’s tears also testify to the achingly human ambivalence of Quixote, who is both a criticism and a defense of man’s idealism.
Approximate Word count = 4160
Approximate Pages = 16.6
(250 words per page double spaced)
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