Word: metaphoritis
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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...
...women, especially that written before this century, casts the adolescent as heroine: for centuries, adolescence was the climax and turning point of a woman's life, the time when she married and took on another--a man's--identity. But more significant is the potence of adolescence as a metaphor for woman's condition. Women, like adolescents, are frustrated in their desire for autonomy; they are encouraged to remain children; their attempts at self-definition are never so desperate. Spacks reserves her strongest language and most poignant metaphors for elaborating this argument...
...California. West, who did some screenwriting himself, knew the raw fringes of the movie world. He saw the kind of anxiety that led people to Los Angeles and the gaudy madness that was nurtured there. He used Los Angeles, and particularly the tawdry glamour of Hollywood, as a perfect metaphor for the screaming end of many poor dreams of glory. West wrote with fury, but without rancor or condescension. "It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible the results are," runs the novel's most famous passage...
...good; but the effort to go further, to establish Caro as the one and only serious heavy weight, can lead Caro's exegetes into some astounding cadenzas of gibberish. Thus to Michael Fried a simple cantilever structure like Caro's Prairie (1967) becomes nothing less than a metaphor of sublime essence rising above the gross sublunary earth: "Prairie defines the ground, not as that which ultimately supports everything else, but as that which does not in itself require support. It makes this fact about the ground both phenomenologically surprising and sculpturally significant...