Word: metaphors
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...metaphor is not the meaning. What emerges subliminally from The Contractor is that life runs the inevitable course of the rising and setting of the sun, that it moves with deceptive torpor yet is shatteringly brief, and that the sum of all its tediously accumulated fractions is a melancholy zero...
Messing moved like a ballet dancer, and that's not a gratuitous metaphor, only the nearest one I can think of which approximates his fluidity of motion. I once saw him go into the air after a headed ball that was impossible to get; there were three or four Brown guys clustered around the spot where the ball would come down. Messing somehow insinuated himself into that small crowd, plucked the ball out of the air, and then landed without having touched one of the opposition...
Mean Streets doesn't bother too much with conventional metaphor. A film like Last Tango in Paris derived its emotional impact from compression: a wide range of the experience of Paul and Jeanne was condensed into moments of expression (sex acts, for example) which operated like a prism, and at the movie's best, whole characters' lives were refracted and born again in rawer form. Tango was weakest, in fact, when it tried to fill in the details...
...pursuit of success not for fulfillment but only for achievement-these are the subjects of The Paper Chase, a movie of some incidental pleasures and insights and a great deal of silliness. Director-Writer Bridges (The Baby Maker) uses a typically tense year at Harvard Law School as a metaphor for the reflexive mania of competition, trying to squeeze into a school term a full complement of crosscurrents in the American national character. His designs for his story (adapted from a novel by John Jay Osborn Jr.) seem rather too hefty to be sustained by such a modest narrative, however...
...CONCLUSION of the book is that no writer on either side was able to find any satisfactory meaning in the war; no one could even make it an adequate historical metaphor. Aaron suggests that this lack of meaning comes out of the constraints of American literary conventions in the 19th century; not only did writers duck the issue of race, but also the experience of the common...