Word: captor
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During the attack, many of the terrified hostages, blindfolded and resigned to death blows from their executioners, were blissfully surprised. Phillip ("Curly") Watkins had been talking to his captor. "I asked him if he knew a buddy of mine. He said he did, and then I said, 'Well, then you know who I am.' " When the helicopters moved in, Watkins' man shoved him to the ground and fell on top of him. "The guy had time to kill me, but he didn't," said Watkins...
...litmus of crime. As two new films demonstrate, the accounts of evildoer and pursuant vary enormously with the turf. The favored French mode is the grittily realistic roman policier, in which the detective, like Simenon's Inspector Maigret, is presumed human, hence flawed. In England both criminal and captor implicitly play the gentlemanly hare-and-hounds game-a legacy of what W.H. Auden called the "guilty vicarage" tradition...
When he does capitulate, it is not unlike the final defeat of Victor at the end of Truffaut's last film, The Wild Child (which was dedicated to Leaud). Having been tamed by civilization, Victor must finally accept love on his captor's terms, thereby closing off the possibilities of life that had been his in the forest. By the conclusion of Bed and Board, Antoine and Christine have transformed their relationship into an apparently mindless mechanism, causing their next-door neighbor to remark to her husband that the newlyweds are now "really in love...
WHILE AT FIRST the man tries to explain to his captor that he is the victim of a fouled-up computer, soon he starts to go along with the routine-only to be told that he is 4-F anyway...
This is not to deny that the men who resist the will of their captors often perform feats of heroism and that some would hold themselves in contempt if they failed to try. The struggle against the captor can become an obsessive way to assert one's defiance of a hostile universe. But the majority of men are not assailed by such temptations of existential heroism. For the most part, the U.S. serviceman fights hard, risks his life and sometimes gives it in the service of his country. It seems unreasonable to ask him to continue risking his life...