Word: antagonist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...place, for good or for worse. You are meant to enter his world of social fatuousness, accept his intimate chit-chat as personal conseil and assume that you possess all the sports cars, villas and yachts that are referred to. As a result, you and your mythical antagonist--i.e., the ever-present social enemy--become the protagonists. The verbal bouts in which you both engage are conducted in two dialects: "pukka", to which you, the sporting aristocrat, are sometimes entitled; and "non-pukka", or common vernacular, to which your "bootless and unhorsed" social opponent is restricted. Fake, for example...
...fate leaves us curiously untouched. Similarly, the zany behavior of his fellows is amusing, but the depth of their need for McMurphy is not even suggested. Finally, there is the problem of Big Nurse, the chief authority symbol in McMurphy's little world and his main antagonist. In the book, a good deal of the tension between them is oddly sexual. In the film, Big Nurse (Louise Fletcher) is merely a prim, quite sexless nag and a symbol only of niggling institutionalism. So nothing of any dramatic power gets going between her and McMurphy...
...Moshe Dayan: "Naturally he has his faults, and like his virtues they are not small ones." She is more lenient with Richard Nixon: "He did not break a single one of the promises to us." Her long time political antagonist, Henry Kissinger, is suddenly embraced for "his intellectual gifts, his patience and his perseverance...
...Robert Kennedy to spring him from a Mississippi jail. His nickname is "K.O."-a reference to his skill and ferocity as a boxer-and he comes on as though the courtroom were a ring. Eyes glinting through his spectacles, muscles bulging beneath his flashy suits, K.O. Hallinan is the antagonist of the team, the one who has seemed the most abrasive figure in the pretrial proceedings...
Brown got off to a slow start last year with some tough losses, including a 7-6 heart-breaker to perennial antagonist Dartmouth. But the Bruins won their last four Ivy games, and things look ripe for Brown to pick up where it left...