Word: morbid
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Your article on teaching children about death [Dec. 3] brought back some memories of a class I recently had in high school. We visited graveyards and funeral homes. We also wrote our feelings about death. At the time we thought it trivial and a bit morbid. But this past summer a classmate died. Through our understanding of death we were able to cope and somehow adjust to the fact that we would never see our friend again...
Enough. A complete list of warnings would fill a shelf of books. Plainly the 20th century has turned into the Age of Admonition. It is also clear that the atmosphere is distributing more than a bit of anxiety. A modern form of morbid gallows humor ("Life is hazardous to your health"; "Everything causes cancer") has now become the respectable coin of small talk...
...what we get is the Allen persona of all his films, at least up to Annie Hall--ingratiatingly awkward and insecure, morbid, conscientious; intellectual and only saved from pseudo-intellectualism because his sidekicks are transparently far more pompous and shallow. Above all, he's acutely aware of all these things about himself, and, therefore, by an easy step, somehow above all his failings because he knows about them, After all he wrote the film--A Woody Allen Film...
...drama of conflict between a cynical, depleted ancìen régime and the exploited lower orders. He tacks on an epigraph from Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci: ". . . the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appears." His Don, solemnly played by Ruggero Raimondi, is a joyless, brooding creature whose compulsive sexuality is merely a neurotic reflection of social tensions. Losey gives us the least passionate seducer on film since Fellini's curiously chilly portrait of Casanova a couple of years...
...this is little indication of the truly morbid turn the novel will take as the narrator's investigation carries him further and further into the recesses of the subterranean hospital. During his quest he encounters a veritable circus sideshow of diseased cripples and sexual freaks: the building's assistant director, a character called- "the horse," who cured his impotence through an operation turning him into a kind of centaur; the secretary who was born a test-tube baby, and so lacks any sense of human relationships; & couple who determined to safeguard their marriage by subjecting every conversation...