Word: brothel
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...Balcony. Part burlesque, part Black Mass, Jean Genet's shocker argues that the world is a vast brothel run by an allegorical madam who panders illusions to her customers in return for the surrender of their masculinity. Shelley Winters is the madam...
...Balcony. Jean Genet's shocker, part burlesque, part Black Mass, argues that the world is a vast brothel run by an allegorical madam who panders illusions to her customers in return for the surrender of their masculinity. Shelley Winters is the madam...
...Balcony. The first brothel was a temple. In antiquity the Mother Goddess was worshiped in the person of the sacred prostitute. Today the idea of erotic relations between heaven and earth persists in the fantasies of a frightening Frenchman named Jean Genet, an abandoned child who became successively a thief, a prostitute, a convict, and the most ferociously brilliant poet now at work in the French theater of the absurd. In The Balcony, a drama that resembles both a burlesque show and a Black Mass. Genet expounds his fantasies in a monstrous metaphor: the world is a vast brothel operated...
...this point, Genet's play dissolves hideously into myth: the immortal myth of the new king who conquers the old king, and then celebrates his marriage to the Mother Goddess with a rite of self-castration. The rebel leader comes to the brothel, buys the illusion that he is the strongman, and at the climax of his impersonation mutilates himself. To delete this episode is to castrate the drama. The moviemakers delete it and the play ends not with a scream but a snigger...
...chastity was immortalized by Samuel Richardson in Pamela. In fact, so much uninhibited dalliance went on belowstairs that Hack Writer Daniel Defoe found the maids fair game. Nothing is more common, he wrote, "than to find these creatures one week in a good family and the next in a brothel. This amphibious life makes 'em fit for neither, for if the bawd use them ill, away they trip to service and if their mistress gives 'em a wry word, whip they're at a bawdyhouse again, so that in effect they neither make good whores nor good...