Word: metaphor
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...DOMINANT theme of Inserts is sex and sexual inadequacy as a metaphor for the inability to cope with life in general. The big joke during the film is that The Boy Wonder is sexually impotent: "You couldn't get his rope to rise with a magic flute." The Boy Wonder's manic need to make films is a form of sexual displacement--perhaps it is the need for gratification that drives him to make "five-and-dime films" when he has been forced from "real films." In a confrontation with Cathy Cake he is made to face the full reality...
...screenwriter Paul Schrader, the taxi driver is a metaphor for modern, urban man. The taxi driver will go anywhere for money, and is forced to see everything, all the degredation and cruelty men are capable of, but always with the understanding that he will remain outside, uninvolved and untouched. This is the hack's code: be deaf and you will hear everything; be blind and you will see everything. Travis does eventually learn the rules, but only after one last, desperate, misunderstood attempt to remake the world in his image...
...late '60s. In the final analysis, Scorsese fails to explain the phenomenon, but at least he fails brilliantly and courageously. Robert Altman, capped Nashville with an assassination that remained unexplained and curiously unmoving; one was left with the vague suspicion that Altman was cynically creating a sterile, objectified, metaphor for the American Situation, an image audiences could construe any damned way they pleased...
...sharpest in a parody of psychoanalysis, where the analyst (David Reiffel) exults in his patient's lapses of memory and tells him pedantically that his suffering is necessary, since "only through suffering can you achieve pain." In another beautifully controlled sequence, an imaginary monopoly game becomes a metaphor for life; in this game without dice, escape from jail is possible only through strategems appropriated directly from The Wizard...
Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen turned the medium in on itself; the confines of the parlor were a perfect metaphor for the confinements of nineteenth century society. An adaptation of Ghosts at the Loeb transforms Ibsen's sitting room into a chic contemporary country home; the end result is a fine production which resembles Ibsen in form but not in sense...