Word: hysteria
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...needed to keep talking, and they said whatever came to them, as long as it was just color commentary ." So airless is this hive, it is not till near the book's midpoint that we learn that the office action, as distinct from the global flow of byte-driven hysteria, takes place in San Francisco. Some of the brighter salesmen muse about quitting, but to do what? As this amiable tour of the information economy makes clear, the wider world of wives, children, drinking and adultery has entirely ceased to exist...
Pauline and Juliet, two love-struck teenagers in 1950s New Zealand, created a voluptuous fantasy world and moved into it. Director Peter Jackson moves in with them; his fevered camera style communicates the rapture and peril of adolescent hysteria. This hurtling, upsetting film, based on a true murder case, has a thrillingly nervy performance by Melanie Lynskey as the darker, needier Pauline...
From the very beginning, Pauline and Juliet's intensity is exhausting and marginally believable. One could call it sustained hysteria, but even that would be a toned-down definition of their emotional states. Are they play-acting? (Well, we know the actresses are, but are they playing characters exaggerating themselves?) The film's conclusion makes it obvious that they're not pretending, but even before that, we believe in them. Their energy is a curious mixture of childlike hyperactivity and a more adult sexual tension. They may begin a game of chasing each other through the forest and end lying...
Appel bought the book Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, by Sigmund Freud, for a first-year seminar...
...film's triumph is to communicate this creepy excitement with urgency and great cinematic brio, while neither condescending to the girls nor apologizing for their sin. The film's serendipitous stroke was to find Winslet and, especially, Lynskey, a first-time actress. They are perfect, fearless in embodying teenage hysteria. They declaim their lines with an intensity that approaches ecstasy, as if reading aloud from Wuthering Heights. The giggles that punctuate the girls' early friendship are not beneath Winslet and Lynskey. The screams that end the film are not beyond them...