Word: protagonist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Kiernan's portrayal of the Palestinian movement is a sympathetic one, and in showing how Arafat's role grew out of the frustrations of his early years the study is in a sense sympathetic towards its protagonist--although the reader is not left with a particularly warm regard for Arafat. Kiernan's treatment is admirably detached and well-balanced--his critique of Arafat is implicit rather than blatant...
...overwhelming to us, for in but two days we felt as though we had known one another for years. The opportunity to meet and spend hours talking to the man who had written a play presented by Black CAST in the Loeb last year was extremely special. As the protagonist Gabe Gabriel, Mr. Gordone's alter-ago, I felt as though I had already known him--but the reality of spending time with him afforded more insight into the character than I had ever known before...
...vindictive. But Hitchcock works out of a bottomless pit of sinister imagination, and instead of making us feel sorry for the poor put-upon Joan Fontaine, he has us half-believing that she might have this coming to her. Only Hitchcock can make you want to rescue a protagonist and stab her at the same time, and the ambivalence chills. A neat double suspence turn-around caps off the film; all our sympathies change, and we start rooting for the once-hated Oliver faster than a smirk can spead across Hitchcock's face...
POETRY MAKES nothing happen," admits Auden in the middle of a tribute to Yeats. Similarly, for George Bernard Shaw, the poet or idealist changes nothing, not even himself. In Candida, the poet Marchbanks and the preacher/politician Morell--rivals for the protagonist's love--are each immured in a prison of words. Marchbanks, an intruder into Morell's apparently idyllic Victorian home, attacks the vacuity of the parson's Christian Socialist platitudes; but his own endless flights of romanticism are no better. Both forms of verbiage are equally foolish--and equally valid. Neither is, in Auden's words...
...easy to imagine the eight major characters of Alain Tanner's Jonas Who Will Be Twenty-Five in the Year 2000 bundling into the back of the moving van owned by the protagonist of Wim Wenders' dour Kings of the Road. Wenders' people are preoccupied with their own rootlessness. In Tanner's mirthless Swiss political comedy everyone is one variety or another of Boho Marxist. In Kings of the Road, the hero, Bruno, and his sidekick, Robert, are only sporadically looking to connect. For the most part, they have engineered a working arrangement with hopelessness. They...