Robert Wilson's Stations

This is an original work made for television which, apparently, follows the daydreams of a young boy who harbors resentment against his inattentive parents (father reads newspaper, mother washes dishes--endlessly). We say apparently, because after the first ten minutes, it's impossible to say just what this "experimental work" is about. Composed of vignettes, titled "Wind", "Cave", "Snow", "Glass", etc., the contents range from the perfectly pointless (a woman looks on horrified as a fat man eats for an excruciatingly long five minutes, and then she leaves) to the offensive (the family is shown in makeup which gives them the appearance of Japanese people, using chopsticks so quickly that ridicule seems to be the point). Halfway through this mess, we realized who "Robert Wilson" was; he is none other than Robert Anton Wilson, the sci-fi writer who wrote The Illuminatus Trilogy. We figured this out by the number of elephants who appear for no reason whatsoever throughout the program. All in all, this is the kind of lauded dreck that gives people complexes. They assume that what they're seeing is too subtle for their understanding, when, in fact, it's nothing more than self-indulgence to an almost criminal degree. All that anyone will miss here is an hour, which could have been more profitably spent observing the convection process in a pot of boiling water. Not recommended. (Available from most large distributors.)