Word: metaphor
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...thrust of the novel appears to be a modern attempt at D.H. Lawrence's St. Mawr--the good versus evil, wildness versus civilization animal as metaphor for our darker, more ancient selves kind of struggle. It's all lost in the movie. Jaws flows along the course of a lot of films adapted from hooks--to shallower waters. Brody is a piece of white bread. Robert Scheider's portrayal of a keeper of the peace is about as inspiring an Andy of Mayberry. There's nothing wise or animal about Robert Shaw's Quint. What you get is the perennial...
Jaws is almost like a latent dream. While the observer may not consciously realize it, the film offers a metaphor for aggression. It plays out violent tendencies willed but suppressed by the spectator. The relief that meets the end of each shark attack does not just come with the certainty of death, it also marks the relaxation following a thorough purge. Sort of like an easy feeling of release you'd get if you told off the bastard who just fired you. Earthquake had a similiar man-on-the street life gamble element to it but it played on violence...
There is both a monstrous willfulness and a monstrous absurdity to the whole affair. But no amount of contemporary psychology can controvert the evidence that here, in all its banality and glory, was a true love story. Kitty (in the metaphor of her biographer) was a magic bucket in a fairy tale. When Parnell died, she went empty. The sometime spell that had changed her from a Victorian housewife into a femme fatale was broken. All too soon she lost her powers, her odd beauty, and from time to time her sanity. After World War I she ended up back...
What Playwright Reynolds has deftly and sometimes poignantly done with in the guise of rollicking humor is to treat sport as a metaphor for the perils of imminent middle age. It is not the batters whom Duke hates the most but the loss of physical powers, of fame, of the only work he is qualified to do. Tony Lo Bianco captures every nuance of this, and his evening on the mound is a dramatically blazing no-hitter...
...thematic ambitions for Nashville, and it is a good measure of his success that the movie is always fleet and supple, never top-heavy. The director and his talented collaborator Joan Tewkesbury (who also did the screenplay for Altman's excellent Thieves Like Us) find their major metaphor right at the heart of the country music scene and the people who create all those tunes about broken hearts and long lonesome roads. One suspects that what attracted Altman and Tewkesbury to C. & W. was both its audience ("These are the people who elect the President," a political advance...