Word: metaphors
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...with a would-be producer tagging behind. At every step or two, the aspiring dealmaker histrionically kisses the mogul's hindquarters. Ostensibly this scene of ritual abasement between old, close friends is being staged for an audience of one, the mogul's new secretary. It is also a central metaphor in Broadway's hottest new hit, Speed-the-Plow, a foulmouthed and ferociously funny slice of Hollywood life...
...wings. But it's lots else. It's a fable about the search to reconcile knowing with feeling, purity with experience. It's the story of any man shackled by the expectation of perfection and aching to caress the soft curves of domestic danger. It's also a beguiling metaphor for the dilemma of the novelist or filmmaker who, omnipotently, creates his characters and then must let them breathe, misbehave, go their own ways. Who knows what happens next? Nobody, for sure. And that is the risk held out, like an apple in Eden, by life...
Jackson likes to talk in rhyme and think in metaphor; Dukakis is as poetic as a slide rule. Jackson, the college quarterback, is a scrambler, an improviser, a mixer; Dukakis, the college runner, is essentially a loner who learned the Greek monos mou (by myself) as his first words. Jackson sweats, gestures, emotes, preaches when giving a speech. Dukakis uses a terminal monotone and metronomic motions. Where Dukakis is cerebral and calculating, Jackson is visceral and physical. During a joint appearance in New York, as Jackson succeeded Dukakis at the lectern, the Governor shook hands as they passed. That...
...when I wrote the script." But any alert viewer can understand the wrenching dislocation of a child who is virtually kidnaped into royalty, raised by thieving eunuchs and condemned to a sham monarchy in a lifelong series of ever smaller Chinese puzzle boxes. The Last Emperor is a metaphor for the prisons we are born in and the prisons we create for ourselves...
...fantasy: a cat with a man's head serenading on the sill, a Janus head (Chagall himself, looking forward to modernism and back to the village?) displaying a heart on his hand. He was unquestionably a prince of tropes. "With Chagall alone," said Andre Breton, leader of the surrealists, "metaphor made its triumphant entry into modern painting." And though the procession that followed its entry had its tedious stretches, involving some fairly shameless plucking on the heartstrings, the best of Chagall remains indispensable to any nondoctrinaire reading of the art of the 20th century...