These dramatic moments are organized around a series of hoaxes or stunts. The film makes disappointingly little of what is quite suggestive material. Kaufman's family was one of many that made the move from New York City to Great Neck, Long Island in the 1950s. This was more than a trip of a few miles, nor was it merely a journey upward on the economic scale, made possible by postwar American conditions. Scrubbing all that history away wasn't so easy to do and the less thick-skinned inevitably paid a psychic price.
People can be sad for any number of reasons.
We don't know the family circumstances. No one is obliged to swallow the argument that this was the best of all possible worlds, but many contemporary artists, and others, apparently do. Historical trauma, a repressive atmosphere, strangled social and political expectations, these, many apparently believe, had no consequences. And for most of the population, as long as economic life in the postwar decades retained a certain stability, this appeared to be the case. Others, a minority, felt inexplicably sad or angry, or felt a need for a quite distinct existence, a need which was mysterious to everyone, including themselves.