Word: vapidly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...main parts call for frequent changes in character; unfortunately, these changes have to be absolutely clear-cut if the play is to make sense, and very few of them are. Jeffrey Harper's Perry is an overly blustery old man, and an overly vapid young one. Jill Clayton is even less believable in her role of the understanding mother and repressed woman. Alison Becker's Marina, the daughter who is sometimes a child, sometimes a sensuous torch-singer, and sometimes a cynical adolescent who rejects moral absolutes, is the best realized of the three, but even she can't quite...
Unable to form connections with street people, Travis's attentions turn to Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), a campaign worker for Charles Palantine (Leonard Harris). This, Scorsese implies, is the other, the dominant stratum of society. Betsy is confident, manipulative, and vapid--like the low-lifers, she registers no emotions, but unlike them, she is not motivated by fear. Rather, it is her job to calculate the effect stimuli will have on "the electorate" and to organize the stimuli in a way that will best promote her product. "After a while, everyone becomes his job," warns the Wizard, and Betsy has clearly...
...Portland, Ottoline spent most of her adult life playing the role of patroness of the arts. Her mother and brothers tried hard when she was young to force her to conform to the conventional role of an upper-class woman of Edwardian England, to become the kind of vapid woman that, as Ottoline said later, "gossiped all the morning, then drove out to lunch with the shooters in tweeds, had tea in pink tea-gowns from Paris, and dined in still more gorgeous brocades and velvets." Throughout her life, Lady Morrell sought intensity--through mysticism in her youth...
Surrounding the hero and heroine, however, is a world full of characters more willing than they to bow to the rigid dictates of regency fashion. Elderly female relatives are constantly shocked at the heroine's outspokenness, and make liberal use of handkerchiefs, tears, and smelling salts. Vapid young men simper about in absurd clothes, worrying only about the make of their Hessians and the height of their collars. Brainless beauties fall desperately in love with ineligible fortune hunters and threaten to elope across the border to Scotland in the face of their family's disapproval. These other, less competent characters...
DECADENCE IS A VAPID and appallingly amoral book in more ways than all this indicates. Hougan, a contributing editor of Harper's, seems to suffer from a malady from which precious few journalists escape--a desire to retire to an isolated cabin somewhere and put it all together. In the effort, he's thrown together an indiscriminate, undirected mix of modern philosophy, fiction and social theory, and fitted it to everything on the American scene. There is hardly a cliche of any sort about recent America that's missing, be it drugs, the New Army, rock music, assassinations, or Nixon...