[What] is Altman's Brewster McCloud really about? The most obvious idea of the film is, of course, the fantasy of flying. As the Lecturer intones at the film's opening, "… the desire to fly has been ever-present in the mind of Man…. Was the dream to attain the ability to fly, or was the dream the freedom that true flight seemed to offer Man?" This question is the "score," or major leitmotif, of the film—the main theme upon which subsequent variations are orchestrated. From the opening sequence, throughout nearly every scene of the film to its finale, the ideas of flight, freedom, and constraint are developed, each with its own further variations. (p. 46)

Even granted [the] asides on contemporary society and its ills, it would be easy enough to dismiss Brewster McCloud as an entertaining fantasy. It is that, of course, but it is more than that; the...