Word: metaphoric
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...only female principal in a cast of shysters, cops and crooks-and as the agent of their anxiety-Matty might seem one more example of moviemaker misogyny hiding behind the imperatives of the thriller genre. She surely is a metaphor for the seductive, destructive power of ambition. But she is also the one figure of reckless imagination. Smoothly and confidently, she guides the taut mechanism of the movie's plot. She creates between herself and Ned a sexual attraction that erases the past and suggests terrible new options. And she knows, as a young woman whose Midwestern memories...
...piano responds with a scaly slither. But the music is much more than a literal transcription of the poetry, for Harbison has given it a deeper layer of meaning in transforming it into song. The most unstable interval in music, the tritone, stalks the cycle relentlessly, a musical metaphor for the dissolution and decay that mark Montale's poetry...
...have lost even parity, the message is more clouded. Europeans increasingly doubt that any man in the Oval Office, in the face of some Soviet diplomatic-military blackmail move, would really risk all of the urban U.S. "to save Rotterdam." (For some reason Rotterdam has become the preferred metaphor, perhaps because Dutch attitudes toward NATO are so spongy.) Recent U.S. Presidents have declined, as they must, to relieve Soviet uncertainties on this point. Henry Kissinger, out of office, felt free to say in Brussels in 1979 that "it is absurd to base the strategy of the West on the credibility...
...while boasting a voice like an "ungreased squeak," Teddy was given a large pair of spectacles and a 12-gauge double-barreled shotgun. With his new glasses he discovered birds for the first time. With his new toy he shot them by the hundreds. This metaphor of myopic aggression dominates the book...
...absorption, the beach at Malibu, where movie people tend their tans, mend their deals and bend their minds with all sorts of curious additives. Dying is something that happens to your friend's act in Vegas or your rival's picture in Gotham. It is acceptable as metaphor, inconvenient as reality, something to be ignored in the hopes that it will go away, like a pinging in your Mercedes motor. It is a measure of this powerfully vicious and powerfully funny satire on Hollywood-undoubtedly the least benign movie about moviemakers ever released -that the only character with...