Word: dwarf
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...photographers cajole their subjects and occasionally deceive them. But even "concerned" photographers typically make us feel sorry for their suffering subjects, although our pity may be the last thing the subjects ever wanted. No one will ever feel sorry for the sovereign specimen who looms toward us in Mexican dwarf in his hotel room in N.Y.C., Arbus' 1970 portrait of a very short man who is stripped to the waist and sitting on a bed but still managing an erotic swagger...
...lens Rolleiflex that produced the weighty figures in a square format that became her trademark. It gave her pimply drag queens the mighty tonnage of Rodin's Balzac. Our predispositions still place pressure upon the images in the hope of making them conform to conventional expectations. This is a dwarf, file under "Curiosity"; this is a retarded child, file under "Compassion." But the pictures keep refusing to fit into those files. In that refusal is the enduring power, both of the pictures and the people...
...magical, surreal new drama, Carnivale, the first thing we see is ... a dwarf. Samson (Michael J. Anderson, of Lynch's Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive), the manager of a traveling carnival plying the Dust Bowl in 1934, sets the scene: ever since God gave dominion over the world to "the crafty ape he called man," good and evil have clashed in secret, magical combat. "To each generation," he intones, "was born a creature of light and a creature of darkness." Now the goodies and baddies are preparing for a final battle. In one efficient monologue Anderson sets up the show...
This is no knock on Anderson, who gives the series' best performance as the flinty carnie boss. Nor is it implausible that a dwarf would work in a carnival. But it's an unfortunate symbol of why the first three episodes of Carnivale (debuts Sept. 14, 9:30 p.m. E.T.) are as frustrating as they can be spellbinding. For every genuinely surprising image or premise, another is creepy in exactly the way you would expect...
...million luscious shades of brown and pulls off the occasional novel, spooky image. But we also expect the home of Tony Soprano to give us characters with well-imagined inner lives. Brother Justin comes across as a typical whited sepulcher--if there's one thing more trite than a dwarf in a surreal drama, it's a preacher with a dark side--and Brown's campy performance largely involves shouting "Enough!" and "No-o-o-o!" with horror-flick pathos. Stahl is more modulated as Ben, but the script stagily walks him from one set piece to another to establish...