Word: paranoias
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...leadership-have much to do with each other? Some of their characteristics are similar-the winning American grin, the air of decent good guy. In both, the voter senses a remarkably steady emotional grip, a self-confidence; both inspire loyalty. In neither have Americans detected those dark glints of paranoia and compulsion that eventually repelled them in some Presidents after...
...time, Joe McCarthy was loose, with all the blackbirds of his paranoia. When Ike federalized the Arkansas National Guard to integrate the schools of Little Rock, the country had an ugly glimpse of things to come. If we think of the '50s now as the last golden age, a period of moral poise, they seemed at the time very different. Archibald MacLeish wrote in 1955: "We have entered the Age of Despondency, with the Age of Desperation just around the corner." Someone is always saying that; it is almost always true...
...eerieness of the final slaughter is heightened not only by its verisimilitude, but by the movie's one extraordinary performance. A young actor named Powers Boothe captures all the paranoia, sexual magnetism, hysteria, rage and even intelligence of "Dad" Jim Jones. His final incantations to the dyingdelivered in a feverish but strangely disembodied voicecreate a more deathly mood than all the corpses piling up onscreen. If Writer Tidyman had only matched Boothe's talent with a complexly written role, Guyana Tragedy would be as notable as drama as it is as ratings gambit...
...arrival of new neighbors is likely to brush even the most stable of home owners with a tinge of paranoia. Property values are at stake, after all, not to mention the territorial imperative. Will the newcomers possess large marauding dogs or, worse, teen-age children? Will they fill up their front yard with rusting automobiles, set up a permanent garage sale in their driveway, sell cosmetics or encyclopedias door to door, deal hard drugs, paint their house pink, fire pistols randomly at passing cars and pedestrians . . . ? Such fears usually remain unrealized, but they still retain the power to induce night...
...this seriously will find everything twice as senseless as before. What Berger has produced is a tour de force, his most successfully sustained comic narrative since Little Big Man (1964). Like the best black humor of the 1960s, Neighbors offers a version of reality skewed just enough to give paranoia a good name. - Paul Gray