Word: muted
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...that was not to last forever. Under pressure from social conservatives, who were angry at the Republicans' mute response to such putative evidence of Clinton's moral turpitude, Gingrich by April had reverted to form, accusing the President of "lawbreaking" and swearing he'd never deliver another speech without mentioning the Clinton investigations. The G.O.P. base loved the return of the old, attack-happy Newt, but Gingrich, who is considering a run for President in 2000, saw his already low personal-approval ratings take a dive. And so, since mid-July, the Speaker has been dismissing questions about impeachment with...
...Island of the mind, where Amy Fisher-style melodrama rubs up against working-class angst. They are part strong, silent types, part East Coast neurotics. They revel in their own contradictions; one Hartley heroine, a nymphomaniac virgin, explains the anomaly by saying, "I'm choosy." His creatures will sit mute and mopey, then turn endlessly articulate once they get going. Self-conscious but not self-aware, skeptical yet wildly romantic, they have a horror of the personal commitment to which they are also drawn. A girl asks her dyspeptic beau, "Will you trust me?" and he says...
...would drown such a tenuous, fragile plot with the dense description Deane favors, but Deane makes observations like "a pulse passes up and down from my head to my toes as though someone had slashed me from behind" or "the armchairs on either side of the fire [were] now mute and emptied of all confidences in the whitened light of...the tall windows" seem not only unaffected but completely natural. Hmmph, that's exactly how I would phrase it myself, one thinks wishfully...
When a character in Monsieur Verdoux remarks that if the unborn knew of the approach of life, they would dread it as much as the living do death, Chaplin was simply spelling out what we've known all along. The Tramp, it seemed, was mute not by necessity but by choice. He'd tried to protect us from his thoughts, but if the times insisted that he tell what he saw as well as what he was, he could only reveal that the innocent chaos of comedy depends on a mania for control, that the cruelest of ironies attend...
...other cartoon characters might try to claim Bart's place of honor. This century is gaily strewn with them, from Winsor McCay's benign Gertie the Dinosaur (cinema's first animated icon) to Fox's other cartoon glory, King of the Hill (whose Bobby Hill, all perfect circles and mute yearning, is the anti-Bart). The Warner menagerie--Bugs, Daffy, Tweety, Wile E. Coyote--energized three decades of Saturday matinees. And when cartoons invaded TV, creatures from Bullwinkle Moose to Tex Avery's Raid insects kept alive a hallowed comic tradition. Bart fits in snugly here. As he once cogently...