Word: despairs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...enough bleakness and despair for one morning's reading, you say? Before you avert your eyes and turn to less disturbing subject matter, consider the other elements of Welcome to L.A. that commend the film to your moviegoing attention. Firstly, not every character flounders through life in the throes of utter despondency. The exception appears in the form of the superstar vocalist Eric Wood, played by Richard Baskin (who also wrote the scores for Welcome and Nashville). He serves the function of being the token enigma in the cast, providing a refreshing contrast with the honesty-chic psychobabble...
...this situation is changing, slowly; and it would be only natural if it took some time before the socialization of little girls of the middle class changes in response. Trilling's final note of despair--"If one of our outstanding women's colleges can do not better than to encourage such flaccid sentimental idealism...What chance, I wonder, have we for a female social force equal to the stupendous task of claiming a full citizenship for the second sex?"--seems overly pessimistic. On its own, Radcliffe can do very little to determine the kind of education its students seek...
...motivated by a love of real estate?" Queen Eleanor demands. All this verbal carnage must have deeper roots. Like light glinting off the edge of a steel knife, appearances in The Lion in Winter are blinding. The viciousness and deceit, the shell of anger and the hollowness of despair are masks the royal family wear to cloak the more profound hurt of rejection. If they cannot have love, Henry, Eleanor and their three squabbling sons will have hatred--not merely hatred, but complete and utter decimation of their victims and tormentors...
...lions, essentially masks a dramatic landscape as bleak as a snow-embalmed mountain. In this world, mistakes trigger others in an avalanche of errors, which makes retreat to hope and love impossible. "We can't stop and we can't go back. There's nothing else," Henry cries in despair. But even a drama of despair can offer testimony to the power of human endurance. At the end, when Henry and Eleanor re-mask, confronting the wreck of their lives with equanimity, they score a small triumph--a triumph in which the Leverett House company richly shares...
...worries over "his failing life, / his whiskey curse, his problems with his wife." He watches his young daughter grow older and thinks: "This is the end of Daddy, the shallowing of the depths of her childhood, when bearded Daddy was any." Though Berryman could movingly record Henry's despair at the deaths of friends, the poet could also tease his own creation...