Word: subtext
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There is a sober subtext to this nonsense. The film preaches against the excesses of self-absorption that are the wages of modern celebrity. It also makes a case against the cult of youth by demonstrating the grotesque lengths to which some people will go to try to cheat mortality. Since only a few thousand of the world's most privileged people are in a position to cope with these problems, it is hard to work up much moral indignation about them...
...east past the Charles, like the necklace of a dark lady, and that told him it was dawn or otherwise he might not have known because time, like history, had broken down for Bell--time became irrelevant to the text of events that private myth, the personal subtext of events, had replaced. Down the wet streets of Cambridge Bell walked, but he walked, careless of time and of history, down down into the fading gray all-nite movie theatre pool hall used car lot out front of Dreamland, a Jungian slide show punctuated by snatched conversations and bits of song...
...demands of the camera, of the English language and of the director. Russell, who might have used Valentino's short, unhappy life as a device for social and dramatic purposes ends by distorting the man and the epoch. What emerges beneath the dazzling exteriors is a subtext of Russell's idiosyncratic personal peeves. His movie is perhaps understandably anti-journalist and anti-mogul, since both have lately been unkind to Russell. But the representatives of these groups are seen to be so preposterously venal, so unredeemably evil, that one half expects to see them appear twirling mustaches...
...hero of the self-styled experimentalists, the text is simply a mask that must be ripped off to reveal the unconscious, irrational blood flow of the play. The dramatist is presumed unable to capture the Id of his work in words, so the director imposes a distracting new subtext that blurs, blots out or mangles the real text. In The Cherry Orchard, earlier this season, Serban altered the living space of Chekhov's drama to a kind of surrealistic all-white silo in which Mme. Ranevskaya ricocheted around without any discern ible contact with her beloved home...
...once fled the hell of war and totalitarianism; like them, he suffered unnamed-and perhaps unnameable-trauma. Cockpit seems to be a refraction of those anguished early years. If it is, then the novel's epigraph need not be from Dostoyevsky but from Auden, whose insight remains the subtext for all acts of vengeance: land the public know What all schoolchildren learn Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return...