Word: villainizing
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This is sadism with scruples. But in all his movies Seagal snacks on villains as if they were sunflower seeds. In Marked for Death he broke the lead villain's body -- snap! -- over his knee. In Under Siege, by far the snazziest of Seagal's films, he got to smash Tommy Lee Jones' head through a computer screen. Faced with a bunch of thugs in Hard to Kill, he used his fatal grace to dispatch all but the gang leader, then tossed his weapon aside to give the gun-toting goon a sporting chance. Talk about your Zen machismo...
What these shows generally lack, for all their charm, is conflict. Acting, an aphorism of the craft holds, is reacting -- responding spontaneously to what another actor says or does. In one-person shows, that essential tension is missing. Every confrontation feels contrived. No villain or even annoyance gets a fair say. If one-person shows can feel as candid as a session on the psychiatrist's couch, they can also be just as narcissistic...
...condescending portraits of the town's residents--that is, of those on the wrong side of the issue--can be downright insulting. Speaking of one leading opponent of Lewiston's gay-rights ordinance, the reporter believes he speaks for all his readers: "You want Paul Madore to play the villain, to become the Jason Robards character made flesh." Does this sound like respect for the "gray areas" of morality...
...incoherence" via pneumonia, meningitis and lymphoma of the brain. As he lay dying, Garcia was taking 14 experimental medications, none of which slowed what Nuland calls "a jet- propelled pestilence." Death certificates require that attending doctors state a cause; Nuland points out that for most of the elderly the villain is old age. Bodies wear out like old machines, as Thomas Jefferson, then 78, sagely wrote to the 81-year-old John Adams in 1814: "We must expect that, worn as they are, here a pivot, there a wheel, now a pinion, next a spring, will be giving...
What is the larger significance? Allan Carlson, president of the Rockford Institute, a conservative think tank in Illinois, offers this analysis: "We are at the tail end of the deconstruction of patriarchy, which has been going on since the turn of the century. The last acceptable villain is the prototypical white male...