Word: mythicize
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...gloves with determination and certain cruelty. Here is a man who maintains himself through symbolic actions, the trappings of office. He places his sunglasses. The effect is complete. Unimposing physically, Eddy cannot assert his power through physical presence. Yet, although he does not have the hulking build of a mythic dictator, he is awesome. Eddy has the authority to say and mean, "The Generalissimo is still the Generalissimo. The stairs are still the stairs. The prisoners are still the prisoners." Nuances in the text have probably been lost through translation from the original Spanish--but Eddy restores them. He simultaneously...
Throughout the '70s his work-painting, sculpture and cockeyed hybrid -has provided a winding, mythic narrative about travel and exploration, circling back on a landscape choked with color and crammed with eccentric heroes. Each new show provides a fresh chapter. Ferrer's sources are often literary: Pigafetta's chronicle of Magellan's explorations, for instance. His materials are a parade of incongruities -neon tubes and stuffed anacondas, old dinghies and melting ice, dry leaves and wild-dog skins, plastic roses, canoes made of rusty wire, maps that turn into masks, and drums, beads, burlap...
...grizzled teller of grisly war tales is also a time traveler who discovers a new world he cannot comprehend. Lest even the dimmest reader miss Rosales' mythic overtones. Day gives him the nickname El Lobo and introduces a scene in which the hero stares pensively at a caged but still spunky wolf...
...slavery was America's original sin. Roots, for all its soap opera, sex and violence, seems to have had a certain expiatory effect. From the various mythic provinces of TV, which may be the densest core of American imagination now, are gathered a virtuous and likable group of heroes: Pa Cartwright from the Ponderosa, Lou Grant from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, affable Sergeant Enright from MacMillan and Wife and sweet Sandy Duncan from the apartment upstairs. But in Roots, they all turn counterfeit-treacherous, violent and contemptible. Only one white, Old George, is sympathetic. The blacks are noble...
...sense, it does not matter whether what Haley has to say in Roots is literally true - and much of it undoubtedly is. What matters is that, despite a certain mythic stereotyping, Roots is plausible. The only pertinent generalization about slavery may be that it was an immense evil. Roots gives that evil a brutal immediacy. In that process, the years of bondage have assumed a new psychological pertinence for both blacks and whites. Oddly, many whites seem to feel not guilt but an unexpected shock of identification with blacks, while blacks experience a larger shock of pride at glimpsing...