Word: antiheroics
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...Henry Livings. This English import is a gorgeous farce with a stubbornly heroic antihero whom no machine, man or woman can tame. In a perfect cast, Dustin Hoffman is pluperfect. THE BUTTER AND EGG MAN first opened in 1925 and is the only play that George S. Kaufman ever wrote without a collaborator. This show-biz saga sags a bit now, and the lines are scarcely howlers, but period costumes and an able, loving cast endow it with innocent nostalgia...
...FORTUNE COOKIE. Director Billy Wilder (The Apartment; Kiss Me, Stupid) tackles that great pastime, cheating the insurance company. His antihero is a leering, sneering shyster lawyer, played by Walter Matthau, who pulls the strings for the supposedly injured party, Jack Lemmon, and ends up stealing the show...
...need for heroes is also seen in the widespread rejection of the literary antihero. He is kept alive only because "people who can't manage their own lives identify with him," says Joseph Campbell, professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence. The antihero, suggests Campbell, is a disease of New York, "a city which is a psychological calamity and which has no connection with the land America." In a very real way, the land America prefers Humphrey Bogart and James Bond. Bogart demonstrates the belief that a man can be tough but tender, ugly but sexy. The Bond syndrome suggests...
...affair with a Member of Parliament, who himself slept with the writer's wife. Both politician and wife are now dead, he of syphilis and she of the results of crawling into the bottom of an elevator shaft and waiting for someone to press the down button. The antihero, left alone with his nausea, distracts himself by recreating the career of a Mohawk Indian saint named Catherine Tekakwitha. "Catherine Tekakwitha," he maunders, "who are you? Are you (1656-1680)? Is that enough? Are you the Iroquois Virgin? Can I love you in my own way? I am better-looking...
...write a literate and believable story of suspense. At 58, she is a member of a disappearing breed, a natural storyteller who attempts neither to spoof her readers nor impress them with literary pretension. Her sole concern is a good story, and her characters are neither clowns nor antihero supermen, but human beings...