Word: mythical
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Libertine, blasphemer, aristocratic scapegrace, eternal anarchist, the Don Juan of legend still enthralls and disturbs the Western consciousness. He is a figure of mythic proportions, larger than the countless works of art that have tried to contain him, from Moliere and Goldoni through Byron and Shaw. The fascination of his enigmatic psychology is apparently inexhaustible. He has been seen as a Punch-like comic character; as a tragic hero, or Nietzschean rebel against God; as a walking textbook of sexual pathology. He survives all interpretations. He will survive even this one: an opulent but confused and wrongheaded adaptation...
Grafting Atlantis's mythic structure onto the suburban experience of lonely bedrooms and psychiatrist couches, Updike grows monstrous trees of mixed metaphors...
Most public opinion analysts suspect that Kennedy's popularity may already have peaked, that it is the mythic Ted Kennedy who leads Carter 2 to 1. Says Pollster Field: "His popularity is like a great reservoir that is filled to the brim...
...American Graffiti, Screenwriters Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz collaborated with Director George Lucas to transform high school graduation into a rite of mythic proportions. Lucas has moved on to more celestial myths, but his former partners remain preoccupied with the pangs of growing up. In French Postcards, Huyck and Katz try to create a true sequel to Graffiti: their new film is a rueful comedy about American students whose lives change dramatically during a year abroad. But this time the director is Huyck, not Lucas, and the results are deflating. French Postcards'comic anecdotes do not coalesce into...
Neil Young and Crazy Horse: Rust Never Sleeps (Reprise/Warner Bros.). This kind of record vindicates all previous claims of greatness and clears the way for new ones. The melodies of these nine songs are insistent, instantly captivating. The lyrics veer between recollections of the mythic past to reveries of violence, from lines like haiku ("Aurora borealis/ The icy sky at night/ Paddles cut the water/ In a long and hurried flight") to verbal lasers of lancing irony ("Hard to believe that love is free now/ Welfare mothers make better lovers"). Young is in such thorough command throughout that...