Word: affectlessness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Just as curious, and ethically intriguing, is what gets written on that slate. For each job, an active is overwritten with a customized composite of the minds and memories of actual people. (Between tasks, the actives are creepily affectless tabulae rasae--like children or especially pretty, dumb actors.) Some of those people, like the voices on an old laugh track, are now dead. Which raises questions: What does it mean to be alive? What is the Dollhouse's obligation to the people whose memories it "resurrects"? Is Echo herself, Caroline or the sum of her borrowed parts...
...faire, drop them in the world of Washington, D.C., espionage, then keep ratcheting down their emotional IQs. They turn Frances McDormand (Mrs. Joel Coen off-screen) into a mad-man loser with a severe self-image problem. The characters' lives get more desperate as the camera style retains its affectless sheen...
...active mind. At first glance he appears to be a pretty standard and uninteresting type; you would pass him in the street without giving him a second thought. If you spoke to him, as documentary director Amy Berg lengthily did, you would find him to be rather bland and affectless, not particularly forthcoming about his long and astonishing career...
...sort of saying it. At the press conference in Bangkok at which Thai officials announced his arrest, he described his role in the crime with an odd circumlocution. "I was with JonBenet when she died," he said. Detached, tentative, composed sometimes to the point of affectless, he added that the killing was "an accident"--a strange way to describe the death of a girl who suffered a massive blow to the head and was strangled with a cord. When he hesitated before answering certain questions, you wondered whether it was to consult his memories or his fantasies...
...almost everyone else who had come to Scotland that day had in common: persuading developed nations to help lift 1 billion people out of extreme poverty. Bono's precise words on the subject are lost to history. "I couldn't stop looking at him," says Clooney. "He's so affectless. You felt like you're in the living room with your buddy who just happens to be a global rock star and has the world's best interests at heart." Says Wolfowitz: "Pomposity and arrogance are the enemies of getting things done. And Bono knows how to get things done...