Word: terrain
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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This strange mobility of terrain is of more than academic interest. It produces the earthquakes that suddenly and with out warning jolt areas of California, occasionally with catastrophic results...
Goffman has developed this proposition in six books.* They have cemented his reputation as one of the most illuminating-and disturbing-cartographers of that shadowy terrain where man plays at being a social animal without fully understanding exactly what he is doing. Some sense of the disquieting Goffman perspective can be gained from his elliptical revisions of prevailing human values, which are sown Like land mines through his books. Social man is not an entity but "a dramatic effect"; all social encounters are theatrical performances. In a marriage proposal, the suitor, who may think that he is swearing his love...
Besides wrecking the funny material inherited from Southern and Hoffenberg, Henry adds some unfortunate bits of his own: a right-wing army officer (How's that for new satirical terrain?), some lecherous and brutal cops, a racially stereotyped black chauffeur and so on. There's no wit, just half-remembered jokes from other sources, clumsily executed...
...eerie apartment, the screeching lovers' quarrels. Mercy and Childie have one love scene of unprecedented explicitness, but even that is not let alone. George catches the lovers en flagrante, throwing open the door in the manner of a Joan Crawford melodrama. In the fervent exploration of once-forbidden terrain, film makers are understandably attracted to themes of homosexuality. Still, treating lesbians as if they were only men in skirts is like treating children as if they were only small adults. Both attitudes are false to facts and dishonest to drama...
...Their terrain is the fresh green land scape of ancient pastoral, replete with somber mountains, gloomy caves, anthropomorphic rivers. They sing not of ordinary men, but of lovers, amoebae, angels, village rustics, swans, emperors, unicorns. And their music is an eerie compound of British and U.S. folk traditions. Indian ragas, rock, calypso, blues, even nursery songs...