Word: metaphoritis
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...forests and backwaters of Congo, and the world they hide within them, have long fascinated those with a passion for the unknown. In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad's 1902 classic novella on the horrors of colonialism, Congo's intricate geography acts as a metaphor for the recesses of the human mind--as if in the folds and bends of Africa's landscape we can find meaning behind our hidden desires and nightmares. In such a vast and foreign place, though, even the most plainspoken facts--4 million people dead since 1998; more than 1,000 people dying...
...merriment at their pairing; all the misery the Vatican-cowed Italian government tried to bring to their joint political, financial and personal life; the stories of his infidelities and of the movie stars (Cary Grant, Peter Sellers) utterly smitten by her allure. Yet Ponti and Loren persevered, becoming a metaphor for the lasting attraction of opposites...
...party is a tailor-made metaphor for Estonia itself: freed from the confines of totalitarian rule, it's having a blast experimenting with unorthodox ideas as it makes up for lost time. Since regaining independence in 1991 with the collapse of the U.S.S.R., Estonia (pop. 1.35 million) was the first former Soviet republic to introduce its own currency and adopt a flat-tax system, now widely copied in the rest of Eastern Europe. It has also become one of the most technologically advanced places on the planet. You can use your mobile phone to pay for parking, buy bus tickets...
...Like so many supreme expressions of showmanship, this shtick of dynamite - which Brown repeated unvaried for a half-century - was both a stunt and a metaphor. No, he wasn?t at death?s door, and yes, the imploring audience was in on the act. But who cared? It had the gaudy theatricality that would become the norm in pop culture: orchestrated hysteria that was either fake-real or real-fake. On this level, Brown was the godfather, not of soul, but of heavy metal and glam rock, of Rocky Horror and Dreamgirls, of the WWF and Jerry Springer...
...only film this year to fully realize the aesthetic potential of violence is “The Last King of Scotland,” a movie in which the depicted killings serve as a metaphor for the Ugandan genocide and thus magnify the atrociousness of Forest Whitaker’s magnetic and terrifying Idi Amin. But even when you forget that the film is about a historical tragedy, you still anxiously feel that everyone in the film is a piece of meat waiting to be hacked to pieces; when the butcher comes, it feels disturbingly right...