Word: stare
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...designed as a showcase for Arab unity, a chance to stare down Israel and perhaps devise a "positive alternative" to Camp David. Instead, last week's Arab League summit in Amman, Jordan's capital, knocked the notion of Arab solidarity into smithereens. Six of the 21 league members, including Israel's archfoes, Syria and the Palestine Liberation Organization, stayed at home. As though the boycott were not enough, Syria massed 20,000 troops along its border with Jordan. Rattling its own saber, Jordan massed thousands of troops on its side...
Since that is so, it ought to follow that the world's big spenders would constantly be shrinking from the public's stony stare, like devils in the sunshine. That they do not shrink, that instead they swell and shimmer, may be yet another sign of our essential depravity. For all its sermons to the contrary, the world loves a big spender. We cannot help ourselves. We may be stripped of all our possessions, out in the cold, down to our last charge plate (not one from Saks), and standing last in a breadline that accepts only cash...
...early scenes make clear Treves' conflict between mind and heart. When the sideshow curtain is flung back, revealing Merrick for the first time, the camera slowly zooms toward Hopkins as his mouth hangs open and his eyes stare unblinking. He suppresses a scream and then a wince as horror replaces terror and sorrow replaces horror on his face. Later, when Treves displays Merrick before the audience of physicians, he must describe, in detail, his physical distortions. Hopkins delivers these lines quickly, his short clipped sentences and detached, analytical tone fighting the emotion that threatens to crack his voice...
...these caricatured villains, the writers might have more thoroughly examined the subtler exploitation that Merrick suffers under Treves' care. The doctor worries that the hospital has replaced the carnival as Merrick's freak show, that the Victorian socialites come to have tea with the Elephant Man only to stare at him and "to impress their friends." He begins to question his own motives in taking care of Merrick, wondering if he sought only recognition and not social justice. It's an intriguing idea that's just left hanging with no further development...
...Vliet's Water and Stone is a deceptively quiet collection of near, image-rich work, largely what might be described as observations ("In a Photograph by Brady") or apercus ("The Shade," "Girls on Saddleless Horses"). There is also, incidentally, some particularly chilling cancer imagery in various places ("...cobalt's/basilisk stare, the destroyed blood"; "the crab/under the heart, the thickening node"); and the death-soaked title work, a sort of Japanese No drama, is frighteningly memorable...