Word: subtext
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...show's directors are encouraged to look for creative ways to use music. "What I wanted to do was not to use music as just background but as psychological subtext, if you will," says Thomas Carter, who directed the pilot episode. "What I felt was happening to Crockett at one point was he had lost touch with reality. His marriage had fallen apart, and he had discovered that his ex-partner was leaking information to the bad guys. So I said, 'I want to do a sequence with Crockett and Tubbs in a car, lay some music over...
Although this specific dread is unacknowledged by the autobiographer, it seems to be the subtext of the hearing and all that follows: "I had been led on into a strange country, a country that knew no boundaries and was called Pain." Terrified of strangers, besieged by reporters, taunted in schools, Gloria blinks through a chaos of flashbulbs and interrogations; in a nation wasted by the Depression, she becomes America's real-life Little Orphan Annie...
...becomes progressively disenchanted, the golden pilot goes into a nose dive, changing from superhero in goggles to another classic American archetype: the perennial juvenile. Whole histories of the Lost Generation have revealed less; this is a novel that uses adventure to disguise a subtext of apprehension...
...opera? Billed as a "musical tale," it seems neither fish no, fowl nor the best of both worlds. The music, written and performed by Philip Lasser, is elusive and singularly inappropriate in nature; it runs on incessantly, ubiquitously beneath the speech, providing less of a meaningful subtext than a distraction or, at worst, an embarrassment, as the unfortunate singers actors explode into snatches of unsingable, off-key melody. This post-Wagnerian syndrome is if anything aggravated by the nature of the text: to rhyme or not to rhyme is the crucial question that seems never to have been settled...
...misplaced. In the old noirs, women were mostly seen as black widow spiders, luring the wimpish male toward his doom. Placing a new, healthy vision of female strength in the old context is a beguiling notion. Not that Truffaut lingers over his cleverness in providing recall with a subtext. Mostly he is concerned with driving his vehicle along at a great pace, so that no one notices the occasional knocks in the engine or the potholes in the plot. With help from his cinematographer, Nestor Almendros, who perfectly captures the sleazy artiness of those long-ago B pictures, Truffaut runs...