Word: disembowelment
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...modest way, Jakob finds the centralized, autocratic German state harsh and arbitrary as well. It scorns the old, leaving them to languish and wither in unheated anonymity, and sends the young to the trenches. As Hegel claims, not without graceful ride, states disembowel individuals on "the slaughter bench of history...
...time," said Herman Melville. What happens if the future seems to be closing down, to be darkening? If nature, first an enemy to be subdued and then a resource to be exploited, is now an endangered victim of technology? The classic American salvation (clear the land! build! disembowel the mountains!) threatens to invert to damnation. Acid rain pelts the Adirondacks, destroying their fish. Smog blows east from the Pacific Coast and eats the vegetation off the Sierras. The Love Canal and Three Mile Island and Kepone in the Tidewater all make mothers anxious in their genes. The once almighty dollar...
...over this segment, clouding our faith in the idyllic surfaces that greet us. Gielgud's torment seems sharply discontinuous with the mildness of this family reunion. And yet a certain continuity is present in seemingly chance words and images, in Bogarde's attack on his father's desire to disembowel people for artistic purposes, in the very preoccupations which mark the dinner conversation. The resonances are different, however, the tone flatter. Where the dialogue was highly abstract and the characters rigidly controlled, there was a sense that Gielgud and Resnais were attempting to penetrate to the very deepest level...
...discover in his actual self-destruction. His fictional suicide is Isao lunuma, a right-wing student with an obsessional love of Samurai tradition and a hatred for the 20th century's destruction of imperial values. lunuma enjoys an almost erotic anticipation of the moment when he will solemnly disembowel himself for the Emperor. In the 1930s, he assembles a group of similarly obsessed conspirators to plot the assassinations of Japan's leading industrialists, hoping to precipitate a general uprising against the corruption of Japan's ancient national spirit...
...Russell is a director whose appetite for excess verges on petulance. His enterprise in films like The Music Lovers and The Devils was not to reconstruct history but to disembowel it; one felt that if he were to try a biblical spectacular, all the extras would be wearing Mickey Mouse wristwatches. His directorial tone has the subtlety of a timp roll played on an eyeball. A new Russell film, particularly one about an artist (the dramatization of artists' lives being his forte, or rather his fortissimo), is therefore to be approached warily -especially with a title like Savage Messiah...