Word: pirandellian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Marie-Josée Nat, shows up in the flashbacks, playing-nicely if unspectacularly-his mother; Drach's son David shows up as the boy Michel. The familial casting forms cozy Pirandellian arabesques, but they are merely decoration...
...lack of any feeling behind all of these deceptions reflects the hollowness of Chee-Chee. In the Pirandellian wilderness of mirrors and puppets, emotion at least must be real. Artistically, it is emotion which must charge Pirandello's otherwise intellectualized prose with dramatic truth, as he well knew: the playwright needs to find the word which will be the action itself spoken, the living word that moves, the immediate expression, having the same nature as the act itself...
...words seemed to convey the utmost reasonableness. There was none of the jut-jawed belligerence of a Duce, none of the menacing rhetoric of a swaggering martinet. In fact, an ironic, Pirandellian sense of split realities was inescapable. Here was a former functionary of Benito Mussolini's last government denouncing the "totalitarian" ways of contemporary Italy...
...make his Pirandellian conceit even more elaborate, Mailer has Maidstone introduced by a saucy English television correspondent named Jeanne Cardigan (and played by Lady Jeanne Campbell, Mailer's third wife). Appearing from time to time to interview Norman Kingsley and his colleagues, she finally bares her breasts on a live telecast, smears her face with blood, licks the microphone, and moans: "I love Norman T. Kingsley." Such fantasies seem attributable both to Mailer and the character he is playing. They are intermingled with scenes that Kingsley shot for his movie, that Mailer shot for his, and incidents that happened...
International finance was dominated last week by a Pirandellian discussion of a statement that everyone solemnly insisted had never been uttered. The alleged non-remark was a request that Japan increase the value of the yen, and it supposedly was not made by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Philip Trezise at an informal meeting of U.S. and Japanese government officials at Lake Kawaguchi near Tokyo...