Word: suburbanity
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...does, amassing his devastated drilling sites in a collection of short stories called PROBLEMS. If you read them you will probably become depressed. Updike's over-powering stylistic genius overpowers his reader's better judgment, forces him to wallow in the miserableness of his archetypal suburban man, who wanders "an irreducible unit, visiting one or another of the pieces of his life scattered like the treasure of a miser outsmarting thieves." Updike outsmarts, creating melancholy without proposing how solitary suburbanites can collect these bits to make a life worth living. He collects problems without morals...
Updike declines to extract and integrate into a morally significant vision his microscopic slide samples of suburban crises: divorce, guilt over divorce, guilt over not wanting a divorce, guilt over guilt. He focuses on the isolated nightmares with wrenching accuracy: the kid who phones his real father infront of Mother's new man because he instinctively knows it will hurt them and at the same time he knows they can't stop him Or the lone spouse who chain-smokes in "the blue light of midnight" while his unconscious wife snores contentedly beside him, unaware of his terrifying spiral into...
...acting fully matches the wooden level of the screenplay. Why did Jill Clayburgh ever attempt this part? As Erica Benton she was delightful. As a high-powered diva, she's positively grotesque. Those station-wagonned suburban looks don't help and that fabulously skinny body certainly doesn't look appropriate. Who has ever seen or heard an anorexic Joan Sutherland or Beverly Sills? Clayburgh careens about the screen, wildly overacting. Trying so damn hard, Clayburgh becomes positively painful to watch. Matthew Barry reveals some vestiges of talent but when delivering lines like "I must go; she awaits...
...padding is the kind of literal dramaturgy that obliterated The Scarlet Letter last season. Unlike the British creators of The Glittering Prizes or I, Claudius, PBS gives its audience little credit for sophistication. In The Sorrows of Gin, the first and worst of the Cheevers, the warring suburban couple (Edward Herrmann and Sigourney Weaver) can hardly be seen for all the shots of gin bottles. Yet Gin is not about alcoholism; like Henry James' What Maisie Knew, it is about a child who unwittingly discovers the self-deceptions of the adults...
...even with an overwhelming mandate, Nixon would quickly be "pushed against the grindstone of congressional pressures" to end the war on almost any terms. In this situation, an unprecedented four-day secret session was convened on Sunday morning, Oct. 8. The critical meeting was held in a house in suburban Gif-sur-Yvette, once owned by the French artist Fernand Léger and still adorned with his Cubist paintings and tapestries. Around noon, after Kissinger had laid out the essentially unchanged U.S. position, the North Vietnamese requested a break until four that afternoon...