Word: netherworld
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...revisits from time to time. The 1978 hit Heaven Can Wait was a remake of the 1941 film Here Comes Mr. Jordan. In the '50s, Topper and the Kerbys explored the hereafter on TV. More recently, Field of Dreams cloaked the metaphysical in a baseball motif. In fact, the netherworld as a dramatic device is as old as theater. Anthony Minghella, writer and director of Truly, Madly, Deeply, a British variation of carpe diem, hails the technique as an inventive way to deal with loss and pain: "However dark these stories, they become an affirmation of life...
...same stage, as if for journalistic convenience, were the other fringe players in this netherworld of black rage. Helping open Farrakhan's rally was Congressman Gus Savage, lately reproved by a House committee for the sexual harassment of a Peace Corps officer, which trouble, among others, he blames variously on the racist media and Jews. To complete this chilling tableau, also on stage was Tawana Brawley. Two years ago, she turned New York upside down by charging she'd been raped for four days by six white men. The story turned out to be a fabrication. But she carries...
...standards in their newspapers and broadcasts: one for real news, in which "a little mud on somebody's shoes" is treated like a little mud, no more, no less, within the context of that person's life and work. Then there are the values of the gossip/celebrity press, a netherworld of journalism in | which flacks and hacks operate in a manner that would never be tolerated in the rest of the paper or broadcast. Fairness, accuracy and balance are abandoned in the cause of titillation...
...next, and the dynamic that fascinates him is why people make excuses, time and again, rather than attempt to be better. The title character, played by Treat Williams, is the conscience-pricked but ultimately expedient movie executive depicted in Mamet's Speed-the-Plow. Gould is called on the netherworld carpet for seduction and abandonment of a woman who, when summoned to testify, proves insufferable even to the great adversary. Mamet may mistrust all women -- his essay "True Stories of Bitches" featured his mother, sister and wife -- but this shrew is a giddyingly specific blend of utter unreason and serene...
Fundamentalist opinion to the contrary, Lewis was not Satan's satrap. Anxious middle-class parents, who saw him as an emissary from a netherworld that was nearer at hand -- trailer-park America -- were possibly a little closer to the truth. Like Presley, Dean and Brando, he was a figure partially shaped by a popular culture that in the '50s was learning to cater almost exclusively to kids and their need for rebel figures. But there was also an element of discomfiting truth in the message he sent. The thing about the young Jerry Lee was that he was all fecklessness...