Word: metaphors
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Desire isn't easy to follow. Without resorting to gimmicks--superimposition, fast motion, slow motion, whizbang lab work--director Tim Hunter manages to sideswipe crusted habits and expectations of perception, daring us to see just a little more than we see. Let me introduce a critical term, a metaphor, a clue for everybody. This is a marijuana movie, Mary Jane on a magical mystery tour...
...introduce another helpful metaphor to capture Desire's demon trick, time, the medium as message. You know what a dream looks like? Disjointed, jarring, a succession of pictures in queer sequence. Think about dreams, then try to take a close look at this movie. It's impossible. Desire unfolds at a curious distance as if its people and actions were washed in the gideon colors of Dream. The salient elements of Dream are speed and deliberation. Desire approximates both. The plot careens arrogantly through a disequence of scenes, no connections provided: the junkyard; Twelvetrees in a hallway, in a bathroom...
...acquiesce in and admire this development is to lose track of Miss Hellman and to underestimate her work. Simple avarice cannot have been The Little Foxes' overriding target, as the Dean would wish it to be, and mere human decency cannot have been its message. The economic metaphor encompassing the play is too grand and too well constructed to be peripheral. The Little Foxes depicts the passing of one system into another--of feudalism into capitalism--and the figures who resist the design of economic history are, to some extent, revolutionaries. Of course the line between liberalism and radicalism seemed...
...never thought of that" (a remarkable reaction from a man who seems to have thought of more than anyone else) and goes on to speculate on why verse is somehow sadder than a prose treatment of the same subject, and on what the opposite of a labyrinth (Borges' central metaphor) is. "Borges and Us" is a marked improvement over the days when Island editors asked Mary Poppins' creator, in issue number two, "First of all, Miss Travers, where were you born...
...novel a little more than a flighty drag is Vidal's stylish and erudite sense of humor, his sharp pokes at intellectually provocative themes, and his spoofing of literary forms: the book, he says, is really "a send-up on the nouvelle roman." In that vein, he offers metaphor after metaphor based upon far-out late-show conceits ("I whispered like Phyllis Thaxter in Thirty Seconds over Tokyo"). And he makes it Myra's thesis that the flicks of 1931 to 1945, if not the high point of Western culture, were certainly the most formative influence upon anyone...