Word: comically
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...more importantly, Swept Away itself has clear comic overtones. Raffaela is too bitchy, too hysterically ludicrous, not to be a conscious caricature; the island, whose tropical climate never changes, is so lush and idyllic that Gennarino has only to reach into the water to produce a giant lobster. Surely whatever happens here cannot be a direct statement about the real world...
Wertmuller's failure to overcome the sexist stereotypes she depicts cannot be excused as incidental, as a flawed execution of good intentions that can be minimized in interpreting the film. Her inability to carry out the comic project she creates for herself in the first half of film shows that the fantasy situation is more compelling to her than any understanding of the dilemmas of traditional sexual roles...
Brownmiller is ingenious in discerning the pro-rape message in today's culture: rock stars who feature abuse of females in their routines, comic books that dwell on images of bound women, men's magazines and women's romance magazines that feed rape fantasies, the obvious hostility to women that frequently shows up in male pornography, much of it devoted to bondage and sadism. In Roger Vadim's recent film Charlotte, the heroine voluntarily submits to murder during sex. (Last week there was growing suspicion that some film producers were outdoing Vadim's fantasies...
...through five decades, they have never neglected their primary obligation: to nourish the comic spirit, to make the risible visible in times of war and economic distress and social chaos. As this warm, hilarious collection demonstrates, despite the changing boundaries of artistic license and comic liberty, The New Yorker cartoonist has always known exactly where to draw the line...
...brassiere strap hung errant and anomalous." But these lapses are overwhelmed by the novel's bitterly comic vision: a world in which an eleven-year-old boy known as "JR" parlays a bid to supply the Army with 9,000 gross of wooden picnic forks into a multinational conglomerate. Barely literate, he works out of a telephone booth and gets his leads by subscribing to dozens of commercial magazines and catalogues...