Word: banalized
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...that moment, the viewer has had to squirm through two hours of banal commentary, inane commercials and an amateur talent show that only mothers could love. There is also something for daddy-the swimsuit finals, which unwittingly mock the characteristic American dilemma of having to select from many tempting choices that all seem exactly alike...
Fury at human imperfection is the first symptom of the hero's malady. As a teen-age poet, having made the banal discovery that his parents are far from perfect and that the whole world is wicked, he spews out a book of vitriolic verses advertising his family as an archetypal clan of upper-middle-class monsters. By besmirching their reputation he established his own. But his success becomes his fate. In literature he is merely a marked-down Rimbaud who curses a corrupt society as a way of joining it; in private life he is a frightened, self...
...joins the conversation -an easy transition, since he has usually been eavesdropping outside. There is absolutely no small talk or incidental detail in Dame Ivy's novels. There are, however, plenty of conversational bromides: the author delighted in characterizing her villains by making them overly fond of banal phrases. "The yoke is not always easy, or the burden light," sighs Eliza...
...cinematic circumstances. Director Visconti provides the worst. Mann is supposed to have based his hero on Gustav Mahler. So Visconti, ruthlessly deleting Mann's imagination, makes the neoclassic author a Romantic musician-accompanied by plaintive strains of Mahler's Fifth Symphony, emphasized until it becomes as banal as the theme from Love Story. Mann's Aschenbach was a harrowed spent figure with a dead wife and a grown daughter. Visconti's is played by Dirk Bogarde, a man barely into middle age. Accordingly, he is equipped, like Mahler, with a young wife and a deceased child...
...school worse than 'irrelevant'?meaningless. No wonder Jesus is making a great comeback." The death of authority brought the curse of uncertainty. As Thomas Farber writes in Tales for the Son of My Unborn Child: "The freedom from work, from restraint, from accountability, wondrous in its inception, became banal and counterfeit. Without rules there...