Word: ennui
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Enveloped in boredom and ennui, a group of middle class lovers and friends sail to the Southern Mediterranean islands for a holiday. Without warning, one of them, Anna, disappears. The group searches the area desperately trying to recover their lost friend. Antonioni deftly exposes hidden motivations and repressed desires in his characters as the group inevitably disintegrates...
...doing what you and I would do when we achieve a goal," says Lieut. Commander Gerry Carroll, a Navy pilot who has been Clancy's close friend since high school. "He's asking himself, 'Now what should I try to do?' It's not the great American ennui in the sense of a mystified now-what. It's more of an earnestness to hitch up your wagon and get on to the next horizon...
Baker insists that ennui was not responsible for his resignation, which he attributed to personal reasons. Joy, his wife of 37 years, is a recovering alcoholic who has undergone surgery for lung cancer, gastrointestinal problems and other ailments. Since his wife's recent hospitalization for chronic back pain, Baker has been spending more time shuttling from Washington to her bedside in Knoxville...
...that John Nance Garner ridiculed as "not worth a pitcher of warm spit." There are five stages in the downward slide of a Vice President: 1) Euphoria, which rarely outlasts the convention; 2) Examination, as the press rummages through back closets searching for another Ferraro furor; 3) Ennui, which sets in when the nominee learns that he is not permitted to make news as he barnstorms in backwaters like Biloxi and Butte; 4) Ephemeral Elevation, a honeymoon that lasts until the new Veep sees through the pious promises that he will be a "full partner" in the Administration...
There used to be no cure for the ennui of the returned hero. Now there is and it is worse than the disease. It is celebrityhood. Last winter a Washington radio station began a news roundup with this: "Joe DiMaggio, baseball hall of famer, former husband of Marilyn Monroe, and also Mr. Coffee, had surgery today." Hero status, unless arrested by artistic device (the fade-out) or tragedy (an early death), decays. There is a trajectory to fame, and it points downward...