Word: sadisme
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...ideal beauty of Leonardo's Mona Lisa or Cecilia Gallerani was the ugliness of his grotesqueries-an ugliness that disintegrates all possibility of desire and has something mockingly demonic, not just medical, about it. To see his grotesques as the mere play of a mind tinged with sadism is to misunderstand them. They are an essential part of the impulse that turned Leonardo toward an attachment to beauty as a kind of saving principle." Read more at timearchive.com...
...especially indebted to Anthony Shaffer's play and film Sleuth, in which the wily perpetrator revels in elaborate gamesmanship, with a soupcon of sadism and a killer of a kicker. The talking doll in Saw is a direct descendant of a toy that the Sleuth perp uses for malevolent effect. In a 2001 interview, Shaffer said he was inspired to write his mystery after taking part in one of Stephen Sondheim's maniacally elaborate treasure hunts. One clue directed players to a nearly deserted town near a lake. When they found the pertinent clue, a hand jutted...
...movie seesaws between the twin poles of masochism and sadism. It's a cunning variation on a behavioral test given to college students: they're instructed to push a button that will administer an electric shock to someone in the next room and, often as not, they do as they're told. There the point is to see if the subjects will take orders against their best instincts. Here, Jigsaw has two rationales for his eccentric behavior. One is to punish people he believes are moral transgressors, though his judgments tend to be hasty and draconian. The other is more...
Bought and savvily marketed by Lionsgate, Saw was a huge hit, proving that mainstream audiences have an appetite for sadism--at least if it's cleverly conceived. Another Saw quickly followed. So far the franchise has earned more than $250 million worldwide, and Saw III will open in roughly 3,000 U.S. theaters Oct. 27, the biggest release of the films to date. Saw films skew to the under-25 audience and are as popular with girls as with guys. "Good horror movies don't need stars, and they don't need special effects," says Tom Ortenberg, Lionsgate president...
...gyrations of Cleese's barbed satire, such as a skit "about a dog that has got trapped somewhere and people were being killed in the hundreds trying to rescue it." His 6ft.4in. frame nurtured a majestic scorn, whose clipped syllables instantly evoked centuries of institutionalized English sarcasm and sadism in the form of teachers and civil servants. He could apply this furious condescension to petty bureaucrats, a cheese or parrot shop customer, a professional arguer - almost anybody...