Word: waitress
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...cover much territory (in time or space) or involve many characters to bring its goods home. It tells the simple story of a moody redneck named Robert Dupea (Jack Nicholson), who works on an oil-rig by day and sleeps with Ray (Karen Black), a dumb-blonde diner waitress, by night...
...example: A scene in a diner. Nicholson has had the classic crisis with the dumb waitress. She accepts no menu substitutions, cannot understand even his compromises. The moment arrives when our blood and Nicholson's are boiling with the same vengeful fury. Instead of responding to the situation (and response is what it's all about), Nicholson destroys it. Rather than commenting on the violent hate which such a situation calls up in us, rather than suggesting ways out these petty confrontations which add up to the trivial but crippling despairs of our existence, Five Easy Pieces plays a puerile...
...gypsy baron," 'a teetotaling Alexander," a "vegetarian Tamerlane," "an unclean essence." Mein Kampf is dismissed by Reck as "Machiavelli for chambermaids." Albert Speer's clean-cut expression is "the epitome of this whole, sickening, mechanical, little-boy-at-heart generation." Goring, the son of a waitress, is rendered among his looted art and phony coat of arms as a preposterous sham. In fact, Reck saw the whole Third Reich as ludicrous kitsch compounded of dueling-club romanticism, gymnastics and "a touch of Hegel...
Improper Fingering. Robert has taken a series of pickup jobs, losing himself in the lives of common laborers. He has even impregnated a short-order waitress named Rayette, shrewdly played by Karen Black. The yammering redhead is like an anonymous grain of sand that becomes a major irritation in the viewer's eye. She and circumstance are enough to drive Robert to the family home on an island in Puget Sound. There he views the wreckage of three lives. His autocratic father is paralyzed by strokes; his brother is a priggish martinet; his rabbity sister Tita (Lois Smith...
...angel-daughter Alice cries exasperatedly. "Why can't we be like other people? Roast Beef, and two green vegetables, and doilies on the table..."; Kolenkhov, the emigre ballet master, deadpans. "She is a great woman, the Grand Duchess. Her cousin was the Czar of Russia, and today she is waitress in Child's Restaurant. Columbus Circle." Unadulterated camp is screamingly funny just because it is so guileless. Humor is closely bound to context, and an amusing line in 1936 becomes a hilarious one in 1970, precisely because the time warp can kleig-light meanings only implicit in the original...