Word: ritualization
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...better question. A scant hour and a half long, padded with clips from earlier Rocky pictures, adding nothing to his mythic, let alone human dimensions, it lacks even the primitive suspense and crude capacity to release underdog emotions that permitted its predecessors to conquer one's better judgment. The ritual this time celebrates only cynicism and, perhaps, star egotism. In Rocky IV, the underdog is the noise-mauled audience, and one can only hope that it will come off the canvas and take a hike. Or better still, refuse the rematch. --By Richard Schickel
Just another night of Rocky Horror. Each Friday and Saturday night, at a couple of hundred houses across North America, the faithful gather in a strange and bracing ritual. A high-camp priest of an emcee announces weekly events and milestones: a birthday, say, or a new record for consecutive attendance. The "virgins" in the congregation--those making their first visit--are baptized with incantatory catcalls. Then, in the velvet darkness of the blackest night, rises the communal cry: "Let there be lips!" And lo, there are lips, big ruby-red ones on the theater screen, intoning an invitation...
Self-anointed revolutionaries and other theoreticians have tried throughout this century to make the theater esoteric and archetypal, depicting a delirious dreamscape, an incantatory religious ritual, a shower of aimless verbal fireworks or perhaps a murmured hint of psychotic menace. Too often setting such moods has been an end in itself rather than a means to what satisfies audiences: telling a coherent, affecting story. In the effort to avoid being old-fashioned, to prove that the stage has an authentic voice beyond the naturalism commonly found in film and TV, theater directors often turn their backs on narrative...
Going without a shave for a few days used to be mostly an act of practical ritual (Jack Dempsey never shaved on the day of a fight) or of casual defiance, like the raggedness of the 1950s beats. Actors showed stubble in movies only when their characters had been through the wringer or on a bender; even rebels like Brando, Dean and Clift were smooth cheeked. But when Clint Eastwood rode through those Italian westerns in the '60s, a meaner, more maverick kind of frontier hero was born, an amusingly amoral gunslinger whose standard equipment was a Colt Peacemaker...
Stumpf wants the best parts of childhood made available again, the mixture of surprise and ritual, comfort and wonder. Images of his own youth in a polyglot St. Louis neighborhood pop up again and again in his conversations about design. "I used to crawl behind the radio," says Stumpf, son and grandson of engineers, "and stare at the tubes." Almost every machine, he says, is at some level a toy. "The concept of jauntiness is a quality lost completely in design. It is a wonderful quality. The horse and buggy had it." By jaunty he does not mean arch...