Word: simulacrums
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...before directing Returns, Burton made Edward Scissorhands, which stands to date as his most unusual, as well as his most personal, work. This fairy tale involves a mad scientist (played by Burton's idol, Vincent Price) creating a simulacrum of a young man (Johnny Depp) in his laboratory. He gives the boy scissors for hands until he can finish his work but dies before attaching the new hands. The boy lives a lonely life in the castle until he is discovered by an Avon lady (Dianne West), who takes him home to the pastel-colored suburbia below. The boy, dubbed...
...course, when wilderness is so intensely managed, it ceases to be wild. It becomes a toothless simulacrum. It becomes a park. On an increasingly crowded planet there is probably no alternative. It is simply an unhappy fact of life on the cusp of the 21st century...
That it does in Wilson's production, and gloriously. Ignoring Stein's simulacrum of a plot (the lives of 16th century Spanish saints), Wilson treats the opera's Dadaesque musings as a delicate dreamscape, filling the stage with characteristically elliptical images. Some, such as a levitating illuminated triangle, are familiar from earlier Wilson spectacles, while others--fluffy sheep that slowly ascend into the heavens, where they become clouds--are new. Robustly conducted by Dennis Russell Davies, the opera's simple Midwestern melodies provide an ideal complement to the graceful stage pictures, while the cast, headed by soprano Ashley Putnam...
This has a good effect on Juan, whose long incarceration has, understandably, made him depressed and withdrawn. In his condition, as he slowly realizes, he doesn't need or want a simulacrum of his old life back; what he requires is an energizing new deal from a fresh pack. Oddly (and luckily) enough, Carmela is coming to the same conclusion at the same time, propelled by the appearance of a cop (Chazz Palminteri) who starts responding to her wistful, if discreetly displayed, charms as well...
...thespian conspiracy in modern society--the idea that your neighbors, for example, are not really neighbors, but actors hired by realestate salesmen to convey the image of an ideal neighborhood. Leyner calls this the "De Niro-ization' of culture...Migratory shifts back and forth from the real to the simulacrum [that] will calibrate the rest of history." "The Mary Poppins Kidnapping" pokes fun at the over-sensitive parents who worry that all forms of media, even the innocuous products of Disney, are dangerous influences on the impressionable minds of their children...