Word: denouement
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...Pinter play, the questions are the answers. The denouement is total uncertainty. The audience knows less at the end than it thought it knew at the beginning. Harold Pinter provokes a devilishly clever sort of participatory theater in which the playgoer is lured into playing detective without any clues...
Ultimately, a spectator at the trial announces that Goldman is really a Jew [the telltale SS tattoo in his armpit urns out to be a self-inflicted cigar burn). This denouement makes the playwright seem like a bumbling amateur and the Israeli secret agents as incredibly inept. Goldman, it appears, was a kind of Christ-surrogate who wanted to be martyred so that his people might feel that some fitting atonement had been made for the monstrous wrongs done them. But Shaw's conception of martyrdom makes it seem less a matter of conscience that an attention-getting device...
...followed much the same script. There was the same hero, U.S. Steel and its chairman, Roger Blough, who undercut by roughly 50% the price increases posted by the same villain, Bethlehem and its chairman, Edmund Martin. And there was the same Lyndon Johnson, who declared himself pleased with the denouement...
...back of a bus from the irate witnesses to their elopement, Benjamin and Elaine stop grinning and stare ahead, each considering for the first time the seriousness of their act and the problems ahead; Nichols' muting of the otherwise conventional happy ending adds some honesty to the denouement, at the same time creating a sense of regret that similarly thoughtful moments don't characterize The Graduate's mindless, largely unmotivated, second half...
...oversexed girl in search of herself, but she looks mostly in other people's beds. What she finds there is a variety of sexual activity ranging from earnest fornication through onanism, homosexuality, and-since these pursuits are so familiar to fiction nowadays-some rather esoteric variations. The denouement takes place at a masked ball, where the participants shed everything but their masks. And who should end up dancing together but Merry Houseman and her daddy...