Incomplete Revolutions

I had the displeasure of watching two fairly awful movies and one flawed but intriguing tv series recently that I would describe as capturing historic moments of incomplete revolution.The first movie was Blowup, the most respectable distinction of which is that it inspired the character of Austin Powers. Actually, Austin Powers is less ridiculous than the photographer in Blowup. The unrelentingly stupid plot of Blowup is not important. What's interesting is the sexual politics. I believe it captures something essential about the sixties era sexual revolution, something I have read about but am glad to have missed as it seems to consist largely of arrogant men treating women as dismissively as possible while trying to have sex with lots of them.This adolescent womanizing is also at the heart of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, in which Jack Nicholson's character endows his fellow mental patients with revolutionary enlightenment by donating one of his chick friends to distract the guard while he throws a boozy party. To cap things off, he donates his other chick friend to the sexually immature Billy in the hopes of liberating him from his prudish hang-ups. That either of these girls might have some opinion as to what they are utilized for is never dealt with. Nicholson's character is so repellent, his goofy "charm" so tiresome, I actually found myself rooting for Nurse Ratched.Both of these movies represent an awkward and totally phallocentric fumbling toward sexual liberation. A liberation which seems to pit the sixties against the fifties (Cuckoo's Nest was made in 1975 but set in 1963; Blowup was made in 1966). In this conception of sexual liberation, women have no agency of their own. They exist only to facilitate men's liberation through the unapologetic celebration of a more "primitive" sexuality. The fact that Cuckoo's Nest ends with a freshly lobomized Nicholson being nobly murdered by a big, silent Noble Savage who then escapes to the tune of tacky Noble Savage music only reinforces this idea. It's a return to nature, man. Get it? Oddly, in this "revolutionary" film, the bad guys are all women and black men.By sheer coincidence, I saw both of these movies within a few days of watching the John Adams series on HBO. Talk about an incomplete revolution. The ease with which our founding fathers legitimized their struggle for independence using the language of slavery while, like, owning slaves, is almost surreal. And when Abigail Adams brings up the plight of women in light of all this talk of freedom, it is cavalierly dismissed by her husband who supposedly respects and loves her.But this got me thinking (always a dangerous endeavor). All revolutions are incomplete. They must be. If you are going to ask your fellow citizens to follow you into new terrain, you must allow them to cling to some piece of the old. So, for example, sexual liberation was palatable only because it preserved the social hierarchy between men and women. The liberation of women would have to come later. Likewise, the liberation of the colonies from England was palatable only because elements of the old way of life (i.e. slavery and the subordination of women) were preserved. Change one thing and you are a revolutionary. Change everything and you are a lunatic.I wonder how history would have unfolded if the order of events were changed. What if slavery were abolished before independence? What if women got the vote before slavery was abolished? What if the second wave happened before the sexual revolution? And, even more intriguingly, which flawed aspects of our own society are we currently blind to? And what will our children and grandchildren say about that blindness?