Word: morbidity
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...what we get is the Allen persona of all his films, at least up to Annie Hall--ingratiatingly awkward and insecure, morbid, conscientious; intellectual and only saved from pseudo-intellectualism because his sidekicks are transparently far more pompous and shallow. Above all, he's acutely aware of all these things about himself, and, therefore, by an easy step, somehow above all his failings because he knows about them, After all he wrote the film--A Woody Allen Film...
...drama of conflict between a cynical, depleted ancìen régime and the exploited lower orders. He tacks on an epigraph from Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci: ". . . the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appears." His Don, solemnly played by Ruggero Raimondi, is a joyless, brooding creature whose compulsive sexuality is merely a neurotic reflection of social tensions. Losey gives us the least passionate seducer on film since Fellini's curiously chilly portrait of Casanova a couple of years...
...very well. He picks great subjects. You keep having to remind yourself that Serpentine is, after all, non-fiction. In fact, after reading a couple of Thompson's quasi-novels, one might accuse him of choosing topics that any garden-variety journalist could fish a bestseller out of. Grisly, morbid, sick, perverse, psychotic--all this, and true...
...this is little indication of the truly morbid turn the novel will take as the narrator's investigation carries him further and further into the recesses of the subterranean hospital. During his quest he encounters a veritable circus sideshow of diseased cripples and sexual freaks: the building's assistant director, a character called- "the horse," who cured his impotence through an operation turning him into a kind of centaur; the secretary who was born a test-tube baby, and so lacks any sense of human relationships; & couple who determined to safeguard their marriage by subjecting every conversation...
Perhaps it is part of the famous narcissism of the '70s, but Americans forget how violent and depraved other cultures have been. There is something hilarious, in a grisly way, about George Augustus Selwyn, the late 18th century London society figure and algolagnic whose morbid interest in human suffering sent him scurrying over to Paris whenever a good execution was scheduled. Americans may have displayed an unwholesome interest in the departure of Gary Gilmore two years ago, but that was nothing compared with the macabre fascinations, the public hangings, the Schadenfreud of other centuries. In the 17th century, Londoners...