Word: metaphorizes
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...records mean record companies; Mistah Kurtz, he alive over at Warner Brothers. Record companies knew that the New Wave could be reduced to formulas and cranked out of the mill, that like everything else this exciting new music was susceptible to the process that had become a metaphor for the decade--cloning. They knew that they could sell overproduced pseudo-New Wave to most of its fans, artsy fartsy students with plenty of money and charge cards from Mom and Dad, ugly girls without taste or talent, nouveau hipsters who found Talking Heads "well, you kneu, so bizarre...
...rented a rowboat in New York City's Central Park in order to dramatize, according to Mrs. Abzug, the fact "that while President Carter was showboating on the Mississippi, Americans were left up the creek in the fight against rising prices." To itemize that metaphor, the two sailors paid only $3 for their trip, while the presidential excursion cost several thousand. The pair also launched a new political organization called Women U.S.A. and urged their sisters across the land to ship their household bills, once paid, to Congress as a protest. Somehow, however, the ladies of the lake look...
...second model is the metaphor of natural decay, the seasons of human life, for example. Animals, people, have birth, growth, periods of vigor, then decline and death. Do societies obey that pattern? The idea of decadence, of course, implies exactly that. But it seems a risky metaphor. Historians like Arnold Toynbee, like the 14th century Berber Ibn-Khaldun and the 18th century Italian Giovanni Battista Vico, have constructed cyclical theories of civilizations that rise up in vigor, flourish, mature and then fall into decadence. Such theories may sometimes be too deterministic; they might well have failed, for example, to predict...
Fellini's crucial error is his movie's governing conceit. Rehearsal is built on a single, restrictive metaphor: the notion that a symphony orchestra can stand as a paradigm of society as a whole. Set entirely in a lovely 13th century oratory, the film ostensibly describes the rehearsal of an unnamed piece by the late film composer Nino Rota. But very quickly Fellini bends his dramatic situation into a cautionary tale about the dangers of anarchy. The musicians begin by goofing off and refusing to play together; then they break into open, violent revolt against their German conductor...
Curiously, British Playwright Tom Stoppard has used the same metaphor to make essentially the same point in his Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977), a 70-minute theater piece for actors and orchestra. Stoppard enlivened his schematic political lesson with wit, and so, at times, does Fellini. In the film's first half, a visiting TV documentary team interviews the musicians and gets a lively response. A flutist turns a cartwheel. A drummer attacks the piano as a "chatterbox." An insomniac trumpeter confides that with his instrument, "a clinker is death." Once anarchy takes hold, however, the idiosyncratic individuals...