Word: melodrama
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...would expect otherwise? If a scandal hangs around long enough and becomes familiar enough, it takes on the quality of a melodrama, pushed along by characters that quickly harden into recognizable types. Depending on your point of view, Linda Tripp is a double-crossing shrew or a courageous whistle blower. Monica Lewinsky is either a vixen or a violated innocent. (An innocent in thong underwear, but still.) And Lucianne? At a minimum, she is forever sealed in history as the New York City literary agent who uttered to her friend the most ruinous sentence of the Clinton presidency: "Linda...
...type as old as melodrama itself, ranging from the truly malignant (Iago) to the merely heedless and goofy (Auntie Mame). Where you place Lucianne between the two extremes is a matter of taste and political predisposition. But there's no denying that she brought color and diversion to a scandal that might otherwise have sunk under the weight of its own tawdriness. The highlights of her bio became quickly familiar even (maybe especially) to those who pretended to hate the scandal. She served as a hired spy for Richard Nixon's factotums on George McGovern's press plane...
...LIVE FLESH It could be a 1940s Hollywood melodrama or an 1840s French farce, but Pedro Almodovar's gaudy thriller is as modern as Monica. His characters hurl themselves off fate's precipice to find love, lust, deliverance. A wise woman tells her beau that "making love involves two people." That's right: delirious director, dazzled viewer...
...MAGIC FIRE In Peron's Argentina, a family of refugees from Hitler's Europe is jolted into a realization that history may be repeating itself. Lillian Garrett-Groag's play, staged at Washington's Kennedy Center by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, combines warm family comedy and savvy political melodrama with rare skill...
When Psycho first appeared, it was a shock. At first the picture seemed like a familiar Hitchcock melodrama of guilty escape: a woman, on the run with stolen money, stops for the night in a tatty motel, chats with the eccentric owner, takes a shower. And then, 44 minutes in, the movie goes a little mad. Exit leading lady, in a whirlpool of blood. New characters appear, are slaughtered or imperiled. What the hell is going on here? Audiences knew (it was one of Hitchcock's most profitable films), but the critics were annoyed, dismissive. It took a while...