Page 22 - C.A.L.L. #35 - Fall 2012
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What happens when a Hollywood blockbuster pitches Jennifer Aniston into a
60’s-style commune? How accurate a portrayal of a commune did it turn out to
be? Paxus Calta of Twin Oaks Community, casts a critical eye over the 2012
movie, Wanderlust.
I went to see Wanderlust last night It would be way too much to ask
and really enjoyed it. Mostly such a film to have the heroes
because the film was pretty funny, decide to stay on the commune. The
but at least partly because it is an fact that one of them had gotten to
excellent parody of the culture I the place of loving it and wanting to
hail from. Someone had done a stay was slightly rewarding for me
bunch of research on US communes as a recruiter to a commune. We
from the late 60s and early 70s or actually had a couple who just
they have lived at one. graduated from
Dartmouth come and live
One of the parodies at Twin Oaks for a while
was about doors. The and when he was ready to
bedroom that Jennifer leave and pursue law
Aniston and Paul Rudd school, she decided that
end up in has no she wanted to stay and
door. The charismatic enjoy the “good life”.
leader explains that
doors separate people I am inspired to go
and they want to create through some of the key
a more connected points from this parody
culture. While we never which need to be
did this with doors to reclaimed.
peoples individual
rooms, it was certainly the case that Sharing: One amusing scene in the
there were some toilets which were film is when one communard asks the
not hidden away in stalls in the city folks to borrow their car
bathrooms in the community when I “because we share everything here”
arrived. Mostly these have gotten and then puts the car in the middle
covered up with curtains, but there of the lake. I have written often
once was definitely the idea/belief about sharing systems and how this
that we wanted to move people away is what the communities movement
from the shame of naked bodies. should be exporting to the
mainstream. As we would expect
The movie ends with Rudd closing from a Hollywood film, they get the
the door to his “small and expensive” stuff about sharing completely
apartment, symbolic of creating the wrong. It is exactly these types of
space and privacy which he needs. failures that we have designed our
sharing systems to avoid.
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