Word: invert
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Miss also tricks the viewer by setting up apparently ordinary situations and then altering them. The effect is somewhat like the Escher prints in which water flows uphill, straight columns bend, and roofs and ceiling invert on each other. Mirror Way at the Fogg is an elaborate experiment in such deception: pathways are blocked, stairs run up into floors, a ladder leads up to a slatted roof which then leads nowhere. In short, the structure is illogical--it feigns functionalism and yet refuses to function...
...adds: "It was the adultery of the soul that claimed most of their spare time." In this arrangement of the Cantabrigian quartet, Bryan Forbes, the English actor, director (The L-Shaped Room) and novelist, homes in onTheo Gittings, who bears a passing resemblance to Blunt. Theo, a brilliant, alienated invert who becomes a pillar of the literary establishment, is compared by critics to E.M. Forster (a fellow homosexual who issued the closet cri de coeur: "If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country"). Theo...
...Melville. What happens if the future seems to be closing down, to be darkening? If nature, first an enemy to be subdued and then a resource to be exploited, is now an endangered victim of technology? The classic American salvation (clear the land! build! disembowel the mountains!) threatens to invert to damnation. Acid rain pelts the Adirondacks, destroying their fish. Smog blows east from the Pacific Coast and eats the vegetation off the Sierras. The Love Canal and Three Mile Island and Kepone in the Tidewater all make mothers anxious in their genes. The once almighty dollar shrivels. Productivity dips...
...johns in the middle of the movie--leaving Violet being and leaving us wondering why she did it, and where we missed something. Less self-explanatory still is David Carradine's portrayal of the photographer-suitor, Bellocq. When he first intrudes on them the house madame calls him an "invert"--he begins to just hang around, looking less like a sinister voyeur than a dazed peanut vendor at a ballpark. The scene where he finally admits his love for Violet lacks both preparation and emotion: I'm all yours, Violet," he says--but Carradine doesn't seem...
...take their author like warm milk at bedtime, cozily oblivious to the ground glass of her ironies and tough-mindedness. Perhaps only a Janeite would be capable of completing Sanditon-and this version is certainly a skillful pastiche-but at the same time, perhaps only a Janeite could so invert its value. In an afterword, the Other Lady praises Austen for the elegant escapism she provides from "the shoddy values and cheap garishness...