Word: eviler
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...impeccably subtle technique in the service of "serious" matters. As if his lifelong contemplation of the way disorder violently intrudes upon the blithe assumptions of ordinary men that the world is a logical place were not a serious theme (see Kafka). Or that his insistence on the omnipresence of evil, even in the most commonplace settings, did not square with the basic drift of thoughtful philosophers (see Hannah Arendt). Or that the decline of the traditional moral order, supported by society's most basic institutions, did not throw everyone?not just Hitchcock's heroes, who were so often forced...
...climbing the stairs to bring Joan Fontaine a glass of milk?or is it poison??in Suspicion. There is sweet Uncle Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt musing about women in a small town kitchen as Hitchcock deftly uses light and a simple camera move to bring out the evil implications of his seemingly innocent speech...
These enduring vignettes all reflect Hitchcock's central preoccupation: the intrusion of the anarchical, the evil, on great symbols of order (such as a society's revered monuments) or on the pleasantly quotidian (amusment park, playground, church, home). Born the son of a lower-middle-class London shopkeeper and reared as a Catholic, Hitchcock discovered early on that original sin was very likely an immutable concept, that bourgeois security was perhaps all too mutable. He never quite got over the shock...
...idea of happiness, Hitchcock once said, was "a clear horizon, no clouds, no shadows. Nothing." Given a choice, it seems possible that he would have cho sen to live in a blank world rather than a chance universe, where the evil and the unexpected? perhaps they were the same thing to him ? could suddenly crowd in upon one, where everyone knew he was guilty of something, if not necessarily what he was being punished for. It is a measure of his achievement that he lit erally made light of these dark feelings, miraculously transforming them into deft and graceful popular...
...even more entertaining than Volume I, In Memory Yet Green. Covering the years between 1954 and 1978, In Joy is a detailed account of the writer's literary recognition, his marital failure, his thyroid cancer, his heart attack and the trauma of turning 40: "But the evil day came. On January 2, 1960, I was forty years old. To be sure, there's nothing wrong with middle age, but it comes hard to a person who is a child prodigy by profession. Of course, I have never permitted myself to act old, or to admit to being...