Change Your Image
tennov1
Reviews
Brief Encounter (1945)
Brief Encounter influenced my work on limerence
Brief Encounter's wonderful subtlety conveys the power of mutual limerence and the pain of unfulfillment. I recalled it many times as I conducted my research. It is hard for me to improve on the comments of the previous reviewer, except that limerence was portrayed decades before the discovery that gave rise to the concept and the word.
Black and white was more effective than color could ever have been and today's youthful audience might find it puzzling, even boring. I never saw any of the attempted remakes, but can't imagine improving on perfection.
Dorothy Tennov
E=mc² (2005)
the role of women
The program gave a hint of what females might have been capable of had we not had to struggle under cultural practices that are still making it harder to publish important scientific thoughts than were we male.
I believe there are psychological sex differences, but we can't settle on what they are. That which is statistically measured (e.g., responses to questionnaires) may be trivial. Or the difference may be of great and obvious universal significance (e.g. anatomical and motivational aspects of the sex act).
Considering the obstacles to intellectual achievement and communication, that women were depicted in the program is a tribute to what may ultimately turn out to be a true statistical female intellectual superiority. There are some signs of it among school children. Or there may not be. It is hard to hold impinging variables constant. One thing is certain: women have been more capable than formerly they were almost universally believed to be.
In addition to social obstacles there was our dangerous biological role (which is much safer today). But what is allowable or encouraged differs greatly in different parts of the world. It has also changed greatly during the seven decades of my lifetime in this culture.