Re:Digest Vol 3 #79/Gay Tommy

[James Marshall Boswell <jboswel@emory.edu>]

Nice read!  Works for me.

That's the whole thing about Tommy, isn't it?  The story is so cockamamie
and vague and yet at the same time suggestive of so many things that it
supports so many readings.  After all, everything is told in broad
symbolic gestures :mirrors, acid, pinball, psychic trauma, etc. You
connect the dots!.  This is also why none of the direct dramatic
interpretations of Tommy work all that well: they bring out the story's
parable-like quality in such a way that it suffers under the quotidian
reality necessary in a film or stage production. Ultimately, Tommy is that
record, that striking, mysterious, muted, and curiously lovely big blue
album, the music to which I, as a kid, used to imagine coming from out of
that blkue wicker ball floating in outer space. 

Marshall