Word: hysteria
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...hurt and neurosis. But that does not diminish its uncanny relevance." As Steiner elaborated, Kafka "was, in a literal sense, a prophet . . . He saw, to the point of exact detail, the horror gathering. The Trial exhibits the classic model of the terror state. It prefigures the furtive sadism, the hysteria which totalitarianism insinuates into private and sexual life, the faceless boredom of the killers. Since Kafka wrote, the night knock has come on innumerable doors...
...complaints in which (extract of hemp) has been specifically recommended are neuralgia, gout, rheumatism, tetanus, hydrophobia, epidemic cholera, convulsions, chorea, hysteria, mental depression, delirium tremens, insanity, and uterine hemorrhage...
Carl Reiner's best films bear little resemblance to Oh God!. Where's Poppa?, for example, was pervaded by a manic hysteria, and peopled by feverish buffoons whose monomaniacal intensities constantly collided, resulting in sprawling calamities that were often exhaustingly funny. George Segal's wild-eyed sexual/homicidal obsessions (frustrated at every turn by his incessantly doddering mother, Ruth Gordon) produced scenes of comic genius, and in a lesser film, like The Comic, such moments successfully diverted attention from Reiner's maudlin tendencies in his quieter scenes. But in Oh God! the maudlin preponderates; Reiner chooses, for reasons...
...most spectacular and prosperous of the new centers, however, also grew out of the Jesus Movement: Chuck Smith's Calvary Church downstate in Costa Mesa, Calif. A liberal writer in Christian Century snaps that the church "churns out ignorance and hysteria," but in the pulpit Smith is actually a balding Everyman, leading hymns with only modest gestures and offering unvarnished Bible lectures accompanied by a disarmingly broad smile. "People come here because God is explained to them in a way they can understand," says Smith. They can also understand Christianity in action. Calvary sponsors homes for separated wives...
...hysteria subsides--and it is beginning to subside--people will begin to look for perspective, for the relative importance of things. Not that they'll ever say that Watergate was a good thing. It just won't loom quite as large...