Word: pretended
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...must think constantly about others. You needn't necessarily think well of them or think kindly about them. It's not that stressful. But you must think something about others all the time. And you have to be in a good mood--or at least you have to pretend. No sulking in your tent like Achilles. There are superiors to impress and subordinates to maneuver (or the other way around). Being a middle manager is performance art. And the show must...
Looking at what goes on in the ring, it's hard to see why all this is happening, since wrestling doesn't seem very different from what it always was: men with very large muscles pretend to sock each other while stamping a foot on the canvas to make a loud noise. But wrestling has changed. No one claims anymore that the bouts are legitimate; indeed, to reassure families that they will not see real violence, the promoters now emphasize that wrestling is staged. Then there is the change in the characters and story lines developed for wrestlers...
...father, at their first meeting in 10 years, when he took the 16-year-old Lorian marlin fishing off Bimini, lost his nerve and lost a great fish. She didn't know him, she writes, and wasn't able to comfort him, or help him laugh it off, or pretend that the failure was O.K. She certainly did not understand what became apparent later, that Greg's real passion, his father's ghost mocking him cruelly, was to dress in women's clothes. And in middle age, sober, married, a mother and a novelist (Walking into the River), she still...
...homogenous culture evaporated, everything got niched out. Blacks watch sitcoms whites don't watch. Most parents have stopped trying to pretend they understand the songs their kids love. There are no "standards," in either sense of the term: no more songs that teens and grandmas simultaneously hum, no more starched codes of behavior...
...standard film has no such lofty ambitions. It takes its audience on a familiar ride. Actors pretend to be heroes or villains doing amazing or funny things. And we, in an implied compact with the filmmakers, pretend it's real. In The Truman Show the rules are more complicated. We are watching a movie that purports to be a TV show and that we (along with everyone else but Truman) know is fake. Occasionally we watch "viewers" of the show, in their home or a bar, reacting to some dramatic moment. And at times we watch Christof and his crew...