Word: occultism
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...baronial estate in the New World. But what is an American? The question has provoked writers as diverse as Henry James and Gertrude Stein, and it haunts Joyce Carol Oates throughout this vast seven-generation epic. That is not all that haunts her. Oates' twelfth novel informs the occult with Freudian insights. Boys change into hounds, men into bears; a man, swallowed by a great flood, returns decades later to be recognized only by his 100-year-old wife. One of the Bellefleurs has a habit of leaving her window open so that her lover, a vampire...
...devil, or simply a pantheistic deity. Alfgif gets a lot of help from a winsome polecat named Meg, a pet who rides in his coat pocket and turns out to be the kind of "familiar" (a supernatural spirit-animal form) familiar to witchcraft. He learns that he has modest occult powers himself and eventually converses with one of "the Purpose's" top executives, a gentleman, polite enough but obviously not an Englishman. When this personage inquires as to the source of Alfgif's powers, the reply comes: "No power at all beyond the concentration of the master craftsman...
...natural explanation for the strange goings-on in the old, grand, snowbound hotel in the Rockies, it is just barely possible to do so. But Stanley Kubrick really does not care. His adaptation of The Shining, Stephen King's pulpy haunted-house novel, keeps forcing reasonable - or non-occult - interpretations on the behavior, variously bonkers and bloody, that his camera records with its customary elegance. Whether his stylistic mastery and rigorous intelligence will carry this film to commercial success with the bedrock audience for horror - a young crowd that likes its metaphysics murky and its menaces crude - is problematical...
Like a poet, she understands the grave magic of our unconscious life. The compelling, almost occult narration of Ted Tice's inspection of the Wasteland of Hiroshima exemplifies this style. The scientist's fate "became equivocal and ceased to make quite clear if he would win or fail" as he toured the atomic ruins, she writes, while his "imagination stalked ahead, aghast, among sight soon to be outdone." Shedding light on the bizarre truth of our inner, irrational metaphors, she presents this vision of a city unnaturally demolished to expose the contours of the earth, leaving only "a single monument...
...film, also, the decade witnessed some notable contributions--foremost among them The Godfather, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Annie Hall and The Deer Hunter--but they were overwhelmed by a procession of disaster films (The Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake), occult films (The Exorcist, The Omen and sequel films (The French Connection, American Graffiti, Rocky, Jaws and most everything else, part II) that provided the standard fare for most of this country's theaters during much of the decade. We tended to stumble into the trap of praising a movie just because it made money when our critical instincts should...