Word: mobbing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Ordinary things become sinister with vague understatement--something like a mob leader warning that "Mistakes can be made." The miracles that hold objects together, keep people from falling, and generally organize the world, turn inside out. Mistakes: a maid plunges into the hotel room while John is naked--one laughs, but with an echo. Coincidences: as John and Laura pass through an archway a shutter slams shut in the house above. Incidentals: in the wash room where Laura meets the two women sits a silent, Goyaesque attendant dressed in black, with an air of inexplicable mockery like the warning figures...
Sometimes the violence began almost playfully, as when the mob swarmed over Japanese-made automobiles and deflated their tires. But then the cars were set aflame. A special target was the Astra Toyota agency, where the entire stock of new cars went up in flames, their fuel tanks exploding with an occasional thud...
...Exorcist must be what people want. It must have tapped some starved mood of the public. For it has already become a happening as heavy in the air as the last Stones tour, a mandatory movie experience. In Los Angeles the mob turn-out set off a traffic jam that slowed down half the city; the scramble for tickets at the box office sparked off a riot; the theater reported an average of 23 vomitings and fainting fits per performance, and promptly jacked up the admission price. And although a crew of nurses was hired to help the sick...
THIS IS A crowd different than the one that came to quake at Psycho, different from the bloodthirsty at the bullfights or the gladiator contests, not a lynch mob, not witnesses to an execution. The people at The Exorcist come to get spellbound. This is a trip crowd. It is everybody that turned on to Easy Rider and El Topo, and just about everybody else. The people are looking for cool kicks that let them off clean. And here's what kicks them...
...might be called, is known to work out of a large white building within sight of the Capitol, and is in control of a vast organization sometimes jokingly referred to by insiders as the "Federal Government." Little is yet known of the inner workings of this particular mob, but investigation and infiltration by law enforcement agents have provided us with some idea of what to expect in the weeks to come...