Word: nihilistic
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Korder first showed talent with 1987's Fun, a teenage boy's nihilist spree, and burst into prominence in 1988 with Boys' Life, a Mametian glimpse of postadolescent rituals of drinking, puking, courting and infidelity. In Search and Destroy, now on Broadway, he looks at men his own age who have achieved material success but feel an inner hollowness. They seek cures ranging from ritual maleness a la Iron John to shedding their ties and common sense in reckless crusades for adventure. The central character, played by film actor Griffin Dunne, reacts to a busted marriage and a Florida income...
...black America hasn't suffered enough, it now faces a new calamity: the rise of an alternative political leadership, racist and nihilist, leading it angrily down a path to nowhere. The group -- a motley crew of scoundrels, losers and liars -- had its national premiere at the circus surrounding the perjury and cocaine-possession trial of Washington Mayor Marion Barry. It was a scary show...
According to Balzac, "Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation." According to P.J. O'Rourke, "Manners are a way to screw people over without their knowing it." Although 150 years separate the master novelist from the Rolling Stone nihilist, their contempt for social artifice is identical. The difference, of course, is that one of them has a savage comic flair. The other one wrote in French...
Despite the sullen tone of the three plays, they must, upon reflection, be seen as optimistic. Beckett shows that even in a world that is nihilistic, man cannot bring himself to be a true nihilist. In Rough I, the cripple asks the beggar why he doesn't just do himself in. The beggar replies, "I'm unhappy, but I'm not unhappy enough...
...dominate serious fiction and film. Eliot struggles under the romantic illusion that absolute fulfillment can be our lot on this earth. He mistakes his fleeting moments of passion with Lee as promise of perfect happiness and in so doing threatens a good--and much more lasting--relationship. Mickey, the nihilist on the other extreme, erroneously concludes that because life ends it must therefore be meaningless...