the sensuality and barely concealed eroticism of frontier life divided by private property, of which barbed wire is the most twisted expression of -- the frontier of practical pleasures pitted against the profit motive. kirk douglas ripping open his shirt to reveal his scarred chest is such a shocking moment because he's been otherwise so genial and friendly. the barbed wire divides the nation just as those scars divide his life into pre- and post-traumatic -- vidor's heroes are all smiles because that's the way they remain sane in a world of over-stimlation and severance. man without a star anticipates the turn-on-tune-in-drop-out philosophy of the 60s, a post-heideggerian concern for the way in which industrial man has constructed a society which insists on reflecting all of his worst tendencies back at him -- the imperious hunger, the disposition towards self-destruction, the devaluation of value itself. vidor's star-less man wanders not into an unexplored land of possibility, but into a shrinking world already fenced-in by capital -- there's nowhere left to go.
