Word: freaking
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...wandering libido. When, on learning that Hubby is fooling around with someone at the office, she waits for him to come home, stabs him dead with a kitchen knife, then cleans the weapon and replaces it daintily in its holder. Edna (the quietly spectacular Martha Henry) is a neat freak who freaks...
Screenwriter-Director Leon Marr (adapting a novel by Joan Barfoot) is a neat freak with images. Every shot is composed precisely enough to win Edna's approval. The cool, creepy, witty splendor of this Canadian psychodrama is that it resides simultaneously inside and outside Edna's pristine, pathetic mindscape, from her daft rapture over the perfectly made bed to the moment when she hears of her husband's infidelity and tears and saliva cascade down her face. Dancing in the Dark dares to be misunderstood as a case history; in fact, it is Heartburn with a haunting irregular heartbeat...
...show's most serious shortcoming is its scant supply of sentiment. Because the narrative hurtles immediately into action, it takes quite a while to involve the audience with the characters. Then, just when it has developed the Phantom as a pathetic blend of noble genius and physical freak, it turns him into an almost random murderer. In an ideal entertainment, there must be someone to root for. But as Alice noted of a wonderland no more demented or enchanted than the Phantom's opera house, they are all very unpleasant people here...
Soon enough, though, she straightens up to introduce herself to the camera. It's not that she cares what people think of her, she says with a candid smile, but "enough is enough." Tired of being called a "freak" (in the Rick Jamesian sense), she'd like to set the record straight. Thus, the parade of Nola-experts--including father, ex-roommate, sexologist, and lovers--rolls out. She knows that their comments--for instance, "I was the best thing to happen to Nola Darling...I was the sculptor, and she was but a piece of clay"--will be her best...
These trips of inward discovery take on apatina of glamor at Harvard, not in the leastbecause students here are much more taken in bythe "Harvard myth" than they would like tobelieve. To freak out in Cambridge is not just tofreak out, it is to freak outsignificantly. Perhaps it's just because Ilike writing that the Harvard-consciousness is sostrong, but I don't think so. I always have thesneaking feeling that I am living out someoneelse's Harvard novel or memoir, or that friendsthink they are somehow acting out the script tothe play of the human condition...