Word: mythicize
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...Gardner's organization is baffling, at least his style is endearing. The sense of mythic wonder that fills his books Grendel and Jason and Medea is present here in the form of vignettes and metaphors; and even when he rattles on about the good and the true, Gardner never pontificates, never becomes self-righteous. Even when what he says sounds like it would suit a preacher among the unbaptized, his manner remains that of the elderly raconteur, sitting by the fire with a mug of ale and a pipe...
Critics of the critic suggested that Fiedler was playing to the crowd with a limited script based on pop Freud and Jungian stereotypes. His enthusiasm for discovering mythic power in such popular arts as movies and comic books was not appreciated by the guardians of high culture. Yet Fiedler outflanked them by describing himself as a hybrid of chutzpah (Yiddish for nerve or gall) and pudeur (French for modesty or reserve...
...primarily felt as objects not of awe but of pity. The true Freak, however, stirs both supernatural terror and natural sympathy, since, unlike the fabulous monsters, he is one of us, the human child of human parents, however altered by forces we do not quite understand into something mythic and mysterious, as no mere cripple ever is. Passing either on the street, we may be simultaneously tempted to avert our eyes and to stare; but in the latter case we feel no threat to those desperately maintained boundaries on which any definition of sanity ultimately depends. Only the true Freak...
...very different dimension opens in "Scallops" and "Figure 8," two sections added late to the piece. In both, the lights dim, and suddenly the dancers inhabit a remote world, a mythic world. Their place is no longer the kinesphere, the space within reach of the human figure. Their gestures relate to the entire space of the stage; the dancers have become larger-than-life...
...characters he can knock off in a month's shooting time. Newman is good wine, aging nicely but often bottled strangely, so that it is hard to identify his essence. Redford is adorable, but when they enriched that handsome hunk of white bread, they somehow left out the mythic minerals. Nicholson is a wise guy, a kind of Bogart manqué, who has not yet touched the darker depths that the screen's first, and greatest, existential hero suggested he knew. Hoffman is short, nasal and urban; set him against a big American sky, and you get a comedy like Little...