Word: antiheroes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...prominence of the pronoun I--the center of relativistic thought. Thus spake the confessional poetry of the 1960s, the memoirs in the 1980s and 1990s, the prominence of the narrator in all of modern fiction. A commonplace paradox that was soon to characterize fiction was that the antihero, who was beset and disempowered by modern bureaucracies and machines, was simultaneously exalted by his diminished status...
Relativism brought the underground man into his own--in Europe, with Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Beckett, Aichinger, Sartre, Mann and Pirandello; in America with Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Ellison, Capote and Salinger. The antihero, too, searched for unified meaning, but the narrative that held him was all about divisions, schisms and self-inspection. He sought to be by himself, like a god. In Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities and Richard Wright's The Outsider, protagonists become serial killers out of the desire to be alone...
...there's more to View than switchblades and red sauce. Bolcom has refracted Miller's '50s angst through the prism of an unlikely source: Benjamin Britten's great opera Peter Grimes, in which a deeply alienated antihero confronts a band of small-minded English villagers who demand his conformity or his life. Incapable of sleeping with his wife Beatrice (soprano Catherine Malfitano) and tortured by his dark longing for his niece, Eddie finds himself similarly ostracized by his fellow immigrants--a situation that allows Bolcom to deploy his chorus to galvanizing effect. View is among the first American operas...
...could change with Henry Fool, the intimate epic that made a splash at festivals last year and has now opened in U.S. movie houses. No less quirkish and studied than his earlier films, this one has an expansiveness, a rowdiness and emotional generosity, that flows directly from its ribald antihero...
...page-plus compendium of iconographical dos and don'ts assembled over nearly a half-century by Toho Studios, Godzilla's propagator and the cinematic demiurge of the Land of the Rising Saurians. This mishnah of the face and form and spirit of Japan's most popular mutant antihero was solemnly handed to Dean Devlin, 35, and Roland Emmerich, 42, in 1996, almost as soon as the pair signed to produce and direct a new version of the monster classic. "We had to read it before we could write the script," says Devlin. The implicit caution: thou shall not take Godzilla...