Word: self
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...young president (he was the youngest we've ever had, by the way) embodied the intoxicating feeling at the turn of the century that America had at last become a world power. Reagan, at the moment of his accession, embodied a general national desire to put aside all the self-doubt and gloom of the 1970s and recover the optimism and patriotism of the 1950s. So to put it very simply, our presidents should represent the best of us. And when they represent the worst of us--as in the case of Nixon--the American people themselves begin to have...
...first I belittled him because I was looking for uniqueness and complexity and hoping for self-revelatory remarks. I got none of these things. What I got was a distressing ordinariness when I was alone with him. He seemed to have no culture, no originality, no curiosity. And my perception of him changed only very, very slowly over a period of the full 14 years working on this project. And I realized more and more that he was a man who could only be understood in terms of his public performance. What he did was what he was. There...
...Because irrespective of an artists intentions, there are certain symbols and images so sanctified by history, so essential to a peoples self-definition, and so central to the way they conceive of themselves and relate to the Universe, that public funding of what might legitimately be perceived as their desecration is downright wrong. Neither is this tantamount to censorship--desecrate at will in your home, display to your hearts content in private galleries. But don't demand that others pay for your vision...
...yuppie men chucking their grey flannel suits for a life of chaos. Other yuppie violence movies have stirred the male psyche recently - American Psycho and American Beauty just to name two. These movies all explore the deeper male mind, swimmingly (or perhaps frighteningly?) portraying academic vision of the subliminal self of the modern male. This string of sympathy for a group of people rarely sympathized with is only the beginning; nipping on the heels of Susan Faludi's much acclaimed study of the betrayal of the American man, these movies divulge further and further behind the cursory Bruce Willis-ized...
...Friday night at your local theater means choosing between American Beauty-in which a quiet suburb of yuppies cracks under the vacuousness of their up-and-coming lifestyle-and Fight Club, where nameless corporate yupster Ed Norton finds the only way to reclaim his micromanaged and overworked sense of self is to beat the living daylights out of other...