I love the film and I mostly get it, but not the meaning of J. Hovah setting free the snakes (we don't need'em any more, wa have the music now) and the two gay guys. Kowalski takes them with him, until the hold a gun to his head.
Does anyone have enlightning thoughts to those scenes?
I suspect that the religious group scene - seemingly a comment on the "Jesus Freak" movement of the time - was supposed to be a evocation of the role music played in the culture of the time, how it was a sort of religious practice in and of itself, thus rendering the need for older and more primitive forms of spiritual adventures obsolete. The two gay guys! I rather liked this scene, because it not only introduced the subject of homosexuality into the film (not all that common back then), but had the nerve to not treat them with kid gloves, to make those characters PC, or make them automatically "good" simply to build sympathy for them. A sort of a shacking turn-about I think.
shareUh, you're interpretation of the two gay guys is as though this film was made today, with today's sensibilities. This film was made only 2 years after the Stonewall Riots. This was a typical portrayal of homosexuals in film, on TV and pretty much all other forms of entertainment. While not the principal or secondary reason for the Stonewall Riots, it is gratuitous characters inserted for humor like these that provided extra fuel for those gay rioters in Greenwich Village and the gay movement across this nation, this continent, Europe, Australia and elsewhere across the globe that ultimately resulted in the ruling that gay marriage is a Constitutionally protected right.
Gay people do not need the media to "build sympathy for them" but more as they are in ordinary life as your neighbors, your parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings, children and everywhere human beings live, trying to build ordinary lives like pretty much everybody else. I'm sorry for you that you find this offensive because one of the sensibilities of the 60's into the 70's was to accept people as they are in all their wonderful diversity. That is represented in VP by the hippies living in the desert. To bad you missed that as it is one of the themes of this film.
>Gay people do not need the media to "build sympathy for them"
So many of them act like they need just that.