Word: hellish
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...hollowness. They end up parodying themselves. Charlie's caught between outside pressure to conform to what traditionally held the neighborhood together, and peer pressure; between the pillars of his heritage and the way of life seductively decaying around him. He emerges vain, hypocritical and childish, sinning with scared, hellish abandon and giving only enough of himself to be self-serving. People finally have to suffer in order to save him, but he is imperturbable in his self-righteousness to the end, telling God, "Things are rough on me I know, but I'm trying, Lord, I'm trying...
...lush seriousness of his prose, Lowry was quite aware of the ridiculous, troublesome figure he cut for most of his 47 years. A touch of buffoonery even creeps into Under the Volcano, that hellish pressure cooker of a novel that was his only important work...
...establishment by rejecting an academic formalism rooted in the poetry of Eliot and Pound. They replaced this sterile stuff with a free-wheeling experiential American poetic idiom inspired by the more cautious William Carlos Williams. Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," with its Whitmanesque catalogues of the poet's own undeniably hellish experience, became a banner around which the new American poets rallied...
When Carlos was six, his story runs, his parents took their only child back and lavished guilty affection on him. "It was a hellish year," he says flatly, "because I was living with two children." But a year later his mother died. The doctors' diagnosis was pneumonia, but Castaneda's is accidie, a condition of numbed inertia, which he believes is the cultural disease of the West. He offered a touching memory: "She was morose, very beautiful and dissatisfied; an ornament. My despair was that I wanted to make her something else, but how could she listen...
...four films (the only ones even he admits are worth talking about) are explicitly political in subject matter: the Nazification of Germany (Munich 1938); the mass demystification of America in the wake of Cambodia (America Revisited); a French town's response to German occupation (Sorrow and Pity); and the hellish political situation in Northern Ireland (A Sense of Loss). Many people came to see Ophuls looking for a new and bracing political message for our currently apathetic time. It seemed only logical that the man making films about such highly charged issues would have some kind of powerful political motive...