Word: subtext
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...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...
...does he look like?" most people, male or female, will answer with specifics--height, hair color, eye color and so forth. Asked, "What does she look like?" one tends to preface the same facts with a value judgment; "Well, pretty cute." "Actually, she's sort of ugly." The invisible subtext runs through everything, like any other type of discrimination people have grown up with; what matters first in a woman is her looks, her rating as a sexual creature or as a member of the amorphous sub-sex of the unattractive...
...England, Passion's title was Passion Play. The music of the Dies Irae boomingly punctuates some scenes, and the drama has a neoreligious subtext. James and Eleanor proclaim themselves atheists, but they are wistfully haunted by the death of God. While ranting about his right to "a flash of happiness before the void," James curses Christianity and Jesus Christ for depaganizing mankind: "The Christians took over the language of sexual emotion for their own purposes -passion, love, adoration, ecstasy . . . those words are now more meaningless than the so-called dirty words...