Word: tabooed
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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What is the purpose of this combustion? Just as night most vividly defines day, Grotowski believes that blasphemy against a taboo re-creates a sense of the holy. If a man were to defecate on a church altar, for example, even a confirmed atheist would feel some sense of shock. In that shock, in the very act of profanation, some sense of the sacred would be reborn and reconfirmed. Opposites imply each other. Grotowski shows an audience the passion of man, his agony, his desolation, his death, and above all the violation of his body and his spirit. By portraying...
TIME'S cover story was written by Contributing Editor Christopher Cory, researched by Madeleine Berry, reported by Ruth Galvin. Their efforts were supervised by Senior Editor Michael Demarest. It deals with one of the most delicate issues of the day: homosexuality in American society. Once taboo, it is now the subject of debate and concern. Yet, as Cory says, "Basically it is still a topic that is explained piecemeal and in polemics. Like all study about sex, large-scale homosexuality research is really just beginning. And the findings seem to knock down many of the stereotypes...
Darlington states, for instance, that the incest taboo, which is not only common to all human societies but is regarded as a moral decision to avoid the hazards of inbreeding, is, in fact, instinctive. Just as evolution forbids self-pollination to the hermaphrodite flower, so evolution prohibits incest in man. "In a stable world," he writes, "[inbreeding] allows, it even guarantees, success. But in a changing world it brings disaster. For the inbred race in plants, animals or men is uniform and predictable like a variety of potato. Faced with new situations, new environments, it is quickly displaced in competition...
...Harrison would portray a pair of middle-aging homosexuals is calculated to strain, and simultaneously tease the imagination. From the time that the filming of Staircase was announced, cinemagoers wondered whether it was a stunt, an acting challenge or another bold foray into the territory of the taboo. The danger was that the pair would nance it up and produce a heterosexual parody of homosexual mannerisms-a kind of male pseudo-female impersonation act. It is to the credit of all concerned that Staircase is nothing of the sort. The foremost of the film's quiet, unobtrusive virtues...
...that protection is not enough. Critic Pierce Hannah complained in the London Times: "We, no less than the Victorians, have our current cant. Ours is to protest that books and plays with only the most tenuous claims to be taken seriously must be fought for because they contain once-taboo words and situations. We make martyrs out of third-rate writers in no danger of going to the stake." A compelling answer to this argument is that third-rate or even tenth-rate writers must be protected if first-rate writers are to be free. Banning books and prosecuting theater...