Word: faustian
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...movie begins sharply, laying out the panoply of privilege: the sleek cars, the comfortable faces (Gene Hackman, Hal Holbrook). It's like going on a shopping spree at Neiman Marcus and then getting whacked with the bill: here is the middle class's Faustian bargain of big money and sapping compromise, of anxious wives and Stepford lives. How handsome the paneling on a lawyer's desk -- as handsome as the paneling on a lawyer's casket. At Bendini, Lambert & Locke, death is the penalty for abusing the rule of confidentiality. Harvard Law whiz Mitch McDeere (Tom Cruise) will break that...
...middle rather than the tax-and-spend liberal that a majority of Americans now suspect him to be. While Clinton might have felt compelled to dump Guinier under any circumstances, the move, coming at a time of presidential image overhaul, looked like some kind of Faustian political bargain. Clinton not only dumped an old friend but in doing so also dismissed the views of his folk-hero Attorney General, Janet Reno, and in the same stroke managed to let minority groups believe their interests were secondary to other concerns...
What the staff should decry is the fact that men's and women's intercollegiate athletics at Harvard both consume so much money already. And every argument about the relationship between team support and alumni contributions shows that intercollegiate sports are a Faustian bargain; The University goes out of its way to recruit academically underqualified candidates because of their revenue-earning potential...
Assistant city manager Palmer has not budgeted for evil, but neither has he made a classic Faustian bargain. How could he? In a universe where God is only curious, the devil is certainly bored, at least with Five Oaks. To convey this sense of abandonment and emptiness without losing the reader is not easy. Shadow Play could have turned into another clever existential dead end. But Baxter fills the void with a hundred human touches, a style as intimate as chamber music, and a hero who rouses himself to reject the banality that hoohah happens...
...soft, scary Monopoly, about a departed lover, Colvin flays herself: "I'd rather do anything/ Than write this song for you." She warns herself not to soften the blow with irony: "Retreating behind these lines/ The same old tongue in cheek/ Regretting that both are mine." She swells into Faustian rage ("Imagine the nerve of God/ Letting me let you in") before sinking with the admission that "I would be anywhere/ Than here without you." This is bitter poetry: passion recollected in futility...