Word: hollywoodized
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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THERE is simply no other evidence that Maria's world-full of Hollywood-types that "registered on her only as a foreigner or a faggot or a gangster"-is capable of supporting any deeper sense of life. The very superficiality of its pretended pain mocks any postures of feeling it cares to feign...
Marion shared that vision when he fled the duplicitous world of his mother's Hollywood entourage. But Marion was cursed with an intensely painful moral sense-he never escaped adolescent dreams of becoming a priest-which ultimately short-circuited his attempts to destroy himself and those around him in great purges of oblivion. BZ is equally disgusted-and so, it would seem, is Joan Didion, who writes of her allegiance with Marion in an essay entitled "On Morality"-but BZ lacks Marion's moral fervor. BZ is simply tired. The fervor has long since burnt away. BZ confronts Maria with...
...there is any deficiency in the novel it lies in our lack of preparation for BZ's confession of fellowship with Maria. To credit it to the hypocrisy-shattering side-effects of his homosexuality is not enough. Lord knows, in Hollywood, where homosexuality seems just another building block in the whole rotten institution, the posturing that goes into both concealing and flaunting homosexual tastes is just as appalling as all the other pretenses with which the town is infected. But then the novel is Maria's story, and that alone would prevent us from understanding more...
...salutary: it is a unique way to bypass political party organizations and challenge entrenched incumbents. But in the process, the techniques of political image makers often work in the service of distortion-slices of life that belie real life, conversations that never took place, facial appearances as cosmetic as Hollywood's, life-and-death issues disposed of in ten seconds. In the extreme hypothesis of Writer Richard Goodwin, once an aide to the much-televised Kennedys, TV is a way in which "you could run a candidate who is maybe in a mental hospital." Even...
...Pierre Janet, a respected French physician and psychologist. It had occurred to Janet, and one or two others before him, that if handwriting could reveal the secrets of the inner self, it might be possible to change the self by changing the handwriting. De Sainte Colombe, who moved to Hollywood from Paris in 1940, makes claims for his treatment that sound something like a patent-medicine label. Graphotherapy, he has said, can be used to treat introversion, unsustained will power, lack of self-confidence, excessive drinking or smoking, sexual disturbances, timidity, laziness, depression and emotional instability...