Word: namelessness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Once the fires were out and the electricity was back on, the residents of Los Angeles spoke of both terror and gratitude. Unlike other disasters of more nameless suffering, each death could be counted and mourned. A 20-year-old man died after the power failure cut off his hospital respirator. Another died in a fall from a sixth-floor window of a downtown hotel. Then again, what if it had come three hours later? What if it had not been a holiday...
...cars, which either do or do not blow up when they turn on the ignition. They also talk on the phone quite a bit, usually in darkly lighted rooms, to callers who are not entirely forthcoming in their messages. From time to time, they are chased by nameless people who are boringly expert at dealing out sudden death...
...those looking for a dark side to the nameless generation, poor Beavis and Butthead are the perfect bogeymen. They represent our youthful contingent--more irreverent and more disturbing than their adult for-bears. These little nihilists are Generation X with an attitude, flaunting every imaginable form of repulsive behavior, and then some. They insult their elders. They torture small animals. They have poor personal hygiene. They think everything "sucks." The fact that we love it must be proof of our depravity...
...trouble is that this nameless Everydog doesn't talk, or even have many discernible expressions. That puts most of the comic burden on the characters around him, who are a dull lot. Mom and Dad (voiced by Molly Cheek and Martin Mull) have plain-vanilla marital spats, and the two kids are boring Bart-and- Lisa wannabes. The plots are thin (Family Dog goes to the zoo or befriends a homeless woman), and the dialogue, by sitcom veteran Dennis Klein (Buffalo Bill), is more garrulous than witty: "That was stealing, and stealing is bad . . . Ipso facto, Fido...
...months ago he left his wife and child in Fujian Province, where fellow villagers paid $20,000 to nameless smugglers to transport him to America. The plan was for him to make a fortune for all of his investors. Instead, once he arrived in New York, the snakeheads disappeared and he was left to fend for himself. He has no documents to certify his stay here. He lives in a one-room basement apartment with five other men, sleeping on three-tiered bunk beds. Anyone who can't pay the $100 rent each month is kicked out. He says...