Word: darkeness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...they did, even the most brilliant among them. Janis Joplin. Jimi Hendrix. Jim Morrison. Burnt-out martyrs to the cause, done in by drugs and alcohol. The nobility of their nihilism is, today, a nightmare, the dark side of the force set free in the '60s. The paeans to the generation's liberties echo dolorously, as Love has truly become as strong as Death. "Sometimes," ( Eric Clapton said recently, "you need to hear some harmonic softeners, some quiet, to kind of quench the fire and calm yourself." But the fire cannot be fully extinguished. Though they abhor its destructiveness, those...
Nineteen sixty-eight had the vibrations of earthquake about it. America shuddered. History cracked open: bats came flapping out, dark surprises. American culture and politics ventured into dangerous and experimental regions: uplands of new enlightenments, some people thought, and quagmires of the id. The year was pivotal and messy. It produced vivid theater. It reverberates still in the American mind...
...explicator of Ulysses (Re Joyce), a postapocalyptic moralist (A Clockwork Orange), and a scholar showily at home in a double handful of ancient and modern languages. He wigwags strenuously at the outset of this new novel that primal, mythic stuff is ahead -- ancient tales threading through the dark, tribal roots of 20th century bloody-mindedness...
...Dark Habits: a chanteuse brings her boyfriend to her Madrid apartment, where he ODs on heroin and dies. What Have I Done to Deserve This?: an illiterate woman has quickie sex with a muscular student in the shower stall of the kendo academy where she scrubs floors. Matador: a beyond-gorgeous woman picks up a stranger, makes violent love, then stabs him to death with her hatpin. Law of Desire: a young stud is directed through some steamy autoeroticism by an unseen older man. Shock the bourgeoisie? The opening scenes in Pedro Almodovar's films seem designed to shock...
Almodovar says his movies are about the "five essential themes: death, liberty, equality, beauty and, of course, love." Scanning Dark Habits (1983), one finds not love but revenge. It is your basic anticlerical Latin comedy: Reform School Girls set in a convent. The film can be seen as Almodovar's payback for a Catholic education "full of hypocrisy -- you can't learn by being terrorized." But the convent's mother superior isn't kidding when she tells the chanteuse, "My only sin is to love you too much," for that is the only sin and salvation of any Almodovar heroine...