The original title of Divided Loyalties was Industrial Keys. The young Orpheus is awakened rudely to a world in which industry holds all the keys, and even personal life has a manufactured, industrial quality, as Adorno would say. Warren Sonbert's films have always had a trace of sociological inquiry, and in Divided Loyalties one can almost make out the beginnings of a critique of modern society: from the furs and tuxedo set at the opening of San Francisco's opera season, to the mangy train tracks of the Chicago Loop, to factories and impersonal glassed-in elevators. Collective action is also treated sardonically, in the gay lib parade sequences, as one more illusion or pretense to be punctured (we see a cemetery after a gay be-in). However, the mosaic technique as Sonbert (unlike Vertov) uses it does not take responsibility for direct political or social statements that can reasonably be attributed to the filmmaker. Indeed, we can assume nothing but a pileup of ironies which imply, in the worst circumstances, a shrug of indifference.

A frightening emptiness dogs these films. Perhaps their real program is spiritual [...]

One ex-Kaelite willing to talk on the record was screen-writer-director Paul Schrader. "Pauline Kael was my mentor. She got me into this business. I was going to a religious school, Calvin College, and my college and my church for. bade films-therefore I got interested in them. I took some film courses at Columbia. One night at the West End Bar I was vociferously defending Pauline's book I Lost It at the Movies, and Paul Warshaw, Robert Warshaw's son, said: "Would you like to meet her? She lives nearby. So he brought me over to Pauline's apartment on West End Avenue. We got to talking. I hadn't seen many films but I had strong opinions. It went on so late that I ended up sleeping on her sofa. The next morning she said to me, 'You don't want to be a minister, you want to be a film critic.' And: 'If you ever want to go to film school I can arrange it? Not only did she help me get admitted to UCLA Film School though I didn't have the proper requirements, but thanks to her recommendation I also began reviewing for LA Free Press.

Thierry Jousse, editor of Cahiers du Cinema, wrote a piece in 1994 called "The Killers of the Image" in which he tried to understand the long-range consequences of such filmmaking:

Take, for example, Oliver Stone's film, Natural Born Killers. It's a child monster, a maelstrom of images, a whirlwind of colors and sounds, a sort of hash of gestures and movements, a magma of sensations and music. Can we speak here of the shot's composition? We need to find a new word to denote these incessant passages of images, simultaneously subliminal and convulsive—of electrons as much as projectiles. But decidedly, they're no longer composed shots. They're a space where everything is on the surface, like in a baroque sphere; where images never stop arriving, speeding into the eye and sliding over each other, in place of the old cinematic way, where the eye takes the road in order to scrutinize the shot. ... It's a video environment, a big live show as well as a self-cannibalization of cinema by the media, or a sacrificial ceremony with the immolation of the frame and the invocation of new images.

Jousse goes on to say that the use of such images in Stone's and Tarantino's films approaches the sensation of a drug, a "film-trip." He likens the irresponsibility, the lack of consequences, in Tarantino's films to a cocaine high. "You could call it a stylistic exercise, but it's also the same sensation procured by cocaine, a drunkenness of the intelligence verging on the absurd, a feeling of superiority detached from reality..." Ironically, Tarantino does not shun dialogue; in fact, his movies impress with their snappy talk. But the talk is designed to bounce back at us with a stylized, "off" quality, a tinniness further detaching us from reality, the way you hear words when you're high.