Word: metaphor
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Freud, of course, has been dead, literally, since 1939. What do we mean by using death as a metaphor in this way? Cover writer Paul Gray says the Freud story, like the cover on God, examines a system of thought "that is a matter of belief for millions but is coming under a particularly blistering attack at the moment. My purpose is not to debunk Freud and psychoanalysis but to assess the extent of his cultural legacy, which is vast. It is hard, although it may someday become necessary, to imagine our world without him." Speaking of debunking, Paul...
...steady decline since the '60s: more violent, less prosperous, less hopeful. We do not know what forces have driven our society to the brink; we fear that we could not control them even if we did. Kennedy's bloody death is a focus for our fears, less reality than metaphor: our shining future silenced by gunfire...
...revivalist Charles Templeton urged him to come to Princeton Theological Seminary and lay a deeper academic foundation for his preaching, Graham balked. When they met on their travels, they fell into deep debates, with Templeton now armed with philosophy, anthropology and a willingness to read the Bible as metaphor. Graham found he couldn't muster the logical responses...
This all but destroys the supposed deeper meaning of the film. Eventually you begin to suspect this story would work better on "Geraldo" than as a metaphor exposing gender and race as performance. Truth is indeed stranger than fiction, and in this movie Gallimard's story seems so peculiar it simply does not hold any implications beyond itself...
...fluency of metaphor here is (you might say) a mask; but the contours of a mask like this are the best possible guide to the emotions on the face within. Merrill's skill at the self-analysis which occurs so fluidly throughout his poetry may have grown out of his sessions with Dr. Detre: or they may not have. It's all secondary to the poems themselves, or should be. I imagine future generations of readers picking up A Different Person after, and only after, the poems have enchanted them already. Those future readers will find themselves diverted, but disappointed...