Word: realism
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...lamented that cinema, unlike painting and music, was yoked to narrative. Movies told stories about real people, and the audience was meant to care about them. Would Rick leave Casablanca with Ilsa? Would Scarlett get Rhett? Film theorists didn't care. They wanted movies to slip the shackles of realism and burst into modernism. For cinema to enter the intellectual mainstream, there had to be movies whose subject was movies...
Like many immigrants, the short story was born in Europe and flourishes across the Atlantic. Case in point: The Barnum Museum (Poseidon; 237 pages; $18.95). Although Steven Millhauser can tell a straightforward anecdote, his true strength is magic realism. In one tale a boy steps behind a movie screen to find rooms full of ectoplasmic actors coming to life for an audience of one; in another, a certain Mr. Porter runs into inclement weather and washes away like a watercolor in a rainstorm. Brilliant parodies, pastiches and comments on Alice in Wonderland, Sinbad and T.S. Eliot show how this gifted...
...novel, Vineland, Thomas Pynchon, that disembodied know-it-all hiding out somewhere inside our nervous system, performs an eerie kind of magic realism on the McLuhanite world around us. His is an America, in 1984, in which reflexes, values, even feelings have been programmed by that All- Seeing Deity known as the Tube. Remaking us in its own image (every seven days), TV consumes us much more than we do it. Lovers woo one another on screens, interface with friends, cite TV sets as corespondents in divorce trials. And the children who have grown up goggle-eyed around the electric...
...real. But the easy affluence that is the birthright of Doogie's family might seem representative enough, especially when on the following ABC show (The Marshall Chronicles) the TV father was dressed in a tuxedo for an evening of Manhattan night life. Despite the pseudo-lower-middle- class realism of Roseanne and Married with Children, the implicit message in much of prime time remains almost effortless economic entitlement. For while most of the nation resides in what bicoastal types call "the great flyover," TV characters are never rooted in Toledo or Omaha; instead, most spring to life magically equipped with...
...player, who leads an insipid bunch of tragedians who meet Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on the way to Elsinore. Throaty and amusing, O'Keefe's performance almost matches the quality of the protagonists, but his part is a lesser showcase. Still, he imbues the play's discourses on realism with a subtle touch of irony...