Word: mordant
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Movies may glamorize mayhem while serving as a fantasy safety valve. A steady diet of megaviolence may coarsen the young psyche--but some films may instruct it. Heathers and Natural Born Killers are crystal-clear satires on psychopathy, and The Basketball Diaries is a mordant portrait of drug addiction. Payback is a grimly synoptic parody of all gangster films. In three weeks, 15 million people have seen The Matrix and not gone berserk. And Carrie 2 is a crappy remake of a 1976 hit that led to no murders...
From the start one expects something impressive: written by a Romanian-born poet, essayist and English professor whose last novel,The Blood Countess,was a national bestseller, Messiah promises to stun the reader. The dust jacket insists that "mordant social commentary and incandescent characters" lie within. A short plot summary instantly intrigues. And so one has every reason to expect a marvel between the covers of Messiah. Unfortunately, one has just as many reasons to be disappointed...
...mordant" social commentary referred to in the dust jacket doesn't get very far. The Internet is judged to be addictive. Drugs are seen as the modern equivalent of slavery. Television hypnotizes people. Consumption of Big Macs is morally reprehensible. No one needs to read a novel to figure these things out; one needs only to look around...
...shows have daters or honeymooners lewdly embarrassing each other. The mud wrestling is only verbal, but it's still a tiny step from Jerry Springer--and a long way from the stellar font of quiz shows, radio's Information, Please (1938-48), hosted by Clifton Fadiman and featuring the mordant wits Fred Allen and Oscar Levant. Back then folks tuned in to meet people cleverer than they were, not more deranged; and intelligence was an attribute to flaunt, not hide like an appendix scar. Today's game shows might take their cue from another '40s radio favorite, It Pays...
...sister Cathleen calls me back from this mordant line of thinking. A boomer herself, she is a doctor in Maine. She delivered three babies on Thanksgiving Day. She attends old people all the time, watches them die and anguishes over their endgame suffering. I tell her, "The law must never be an accessory to murder." She replies, "Be careful there. Be careful. We are not talking about murder in these cases, but about compassionate care in terminal cases in which the life has already been lived and is, in fact, now over...