Word: hysteria
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This is a deadeyed, deadpan existential amorality play that has found a metaphor to make the 1950s come alive. At least it spins a superbly ironic fairy tale out of the emotional hibernation of those years in America, the simmering, collective detachment that could muffle hysteria and dull death...
...would collapse if collectors, who have been known to realize profits as high as 10,000%, were compelled to give artists 15% of the wind fall. The arguments against artists' royalties have the bristling, reactionary tone of oldtime corporate protests against antitrust laws. If some of the investment hysteria evaporated from the art world, it would be a spiritual gain - and probably it would not damage the well-being of living art ists. But since the speculation does go on, it would be nice if at least some of the cash were turned back to the men and women...
...cannot compete with it. Except for a fine, low-key characterization by Peter Masterson as a dutiful station-house cop, Frank Perry (Diary of a Mad Housewife, Play It As It Lays) has cast the movie rather haphazardly, and his heavy direction encourages a sort of collective actors' hysteria. The writing is without much enterprise; in deed, why make another movie about a police chief at all? It would have been far more interesting to use the same material for a film about Wills - that is, both a psychological and psychic speculation. But on the evidence at hand, such...
Many others who have seen the film experience nightmares, hysteria and an undefined, but nevertheless profound apprehension. "It is dangerous for people with weak ego control," explains Dr. Vladimir Piskacek, a Manhattan sociologist and psychiatrist, "but it would not cause psychosis." Small children may suffer from hallucinations after seeing The Exorcist, but Dr. Piskacek doubts that the film would permanently impair even an immature mind...
Ionesco described the play as an anti-Nazi drama. But, more broadly, it exposes the collective hysteria that lies beneath the thin veneer of reason covering modern society. The play is still more complex than a simple attack on mindless conformity. It questions what resistance to conformity really means. Because he resists rhinoceritis, Stanley appears to be a hero at the end. But there is an ambiguous quality to his heroism. When he realizes he is the only human left in the town, his resistance to the disease momentarily weakens. He begins to think it might be nice...