Word: dumbing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...rise on this peculiar corner of the British Empire. The result, for viewers of a certain age anyway, is a sort of double-edged nostalgia: not merely for two beloved characterizations but for a whole vanished style of moviemaking, in which menacing shadows lay over every scene and divinely dumb people blandly insisted that the peculiar howl they heard must have been the wind or the call of an exotic bird...
...Dukakis may just get what's coming to him this time. Because the voters are not as dumb as they look. They are beginning to sec how that shell game works, and they know that Dukakis, rather than ending the game, is turning out to be just another inept player...
Quint, the shark catcher, initially dismisses his partners' charges of divine intelligence or beauty as hogwash. "Don't make him out to be more than he is. He's just a dumb garbage bucket." But as the chase goes on, he finds himself more drawn to the fish, almost hypnotized into the death duel. "Brody saw fever in Quint's face--a heat that lit up his dark eyes, an intensity that drew his lips back from his teeth in a crooked smile, an anticipation that strummed the sinews in his neck and whitened his knuckles." To Quint the fish...
...course, Andy Warhol himself, who in the 20 years since his days as a shoe illustrator for I. Miller has managed to parlay his cool into one of the social myths of our time. During the '60s, Warhol's silence about himself and his knowingly dumb utterances about the culture he helped form-"Pop art is liking things"-underwrote his durability as a star. Indeed, his banality endowed him with an air of mystery, since few people could bring themselves to believe that any artist could possibly be so banal. They may soon be convinced of it, however...
...work of art, turned out a series of 32 Campbell's soup cans differing only in color and the flavor printed on their labels, silk-screened the same photo of Marilyn Monroe or Liz Taylor over and over. One could find these passive, no-comment images either dumb or threatening, according to taste; and despite Warhol's own efforts to dispel it, a belief grew that somewhere behind his dark glasses a social critic was lurking. This fitted the mood of the period neatly...