Word: insight
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Discretion may have been imposed upon Lenny's creators by their obligation to protect his survivors. But the film is equally without insight on a less private issue. It fails to explore why sudden and belated celebrity can bend the minds of lifelong flops like Bruce. It afflicts such people with a belief that now, having paid heavy dues, they are entitled to act out all their long-suppressed fantasies of power. The failure to deal with this point lends credence to the lurking suspicion that the moviemakers prefer myth-making to truth-telling...
...love martyrology as much as political people do. Fearing and loving the audience which has so much power over them, the temptation to present someone like Bruce as a misunderstood genius, an artist ahead of his reactionary times is irresistible. So Director Fosse cops out, buying and selling, without insight or irony, his protagonist's own version of his life and hard times. As he proved in Cabaret, he has a fine eye for the gritty details of the grimiest levels of show business, but here realism (the film is shot in grubby black and white) reinforces the mistaken...
...genre of the diary is a particularly revealing record of woman's struggle for coherent self-definition. The diary is traditionally the ultimately personal, direct model of expression. Surely Revelations derives a measure of its power from the personal intensity of the diarists' experience. But it was the insight of editors Mary Jane Moffat and Charlotte Painter to recognize that much of woman's personal experience is often universal and always political, a recognition which gives the collection its over-riding force. "For all the differences in their individual temperaments, social circumstances, and historical periods," write the editors, "the...diarists...
...diary's first volume, Freud's one-time disciple, Otto Rank, analyzes Anais. By the fifth volume, her digressions on neurosis come as a matter of course. With the conviction that personality has ceased to be an enigma, she resolves to deflate her anxieties with keen insight, pretty much like the prick of a needle eliminates balloons. To this end, she doggedly pries apart relationships and scrutinizes the pieces for wear. It turns out that the traits she rebels against in friends often lurk unacknowledged in herself, so that an end to friendships ends external friction, while the sparks smolder...
...biographer or student of O'Neill's drama it's lucky that his order was never carried out, for the manuscripts provide insight into themes that concerned one of America's greatest playwrights. Fortunately Yale has preserved many such manuscripts. But O'Neill never lived to finish More Stately Mansions and asked, in effect, that the play not be performed in its present form. Here, the author turned out to be the best judge of his work and his request should be honored. More Stately Mansions belongs in a library, not on stage...