Word: paranoia
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Phoebe was starting on a similar course. To lose weight she took diet pills; to overcome shyness, she drank. But if pills, liquor and drugs vanquished inhibitions, they also led to paranoia. "If I smoked a joint and went into a restaurant where people were laughing," she explains, "you could not convince me that they were not laughing at me. The lady in the corner holding the compact was looking at me over her shoulder." A year ago, her throat raw from marijuana, she decided to stop using all drugs. Now she avoids even aspirin...
With this bout to be champ so emphasized, questions of vanity, ambition, and the paranoia of isolation take center stage. Suicide is the not-so-subtly hinted at shadow lurking around the corner. So self-hate, which is here one Hemingway hating another, is crucial. Some of the most ugly and malicious acts imaginable are acted out by Hemingways on Hemingways. And why do they hate each other. It's hard to fell, unless they've jealous of each other's success. Stardom seems to be the thenic here Hemingway could be a TV personality except for the few matador...
...father, I don't feel it is necessary to design my family around the needs of my religion but rather around the needs of my economic status and the world at large. Any attempt at equating Z.P.G. with anti-Semitism is a frightening Kafkaesque paranoia...
...Night Moves, Gene Hackman is Harry Moseby, also an observer. But the theme here is no private drama or study in paranoia; Moseby's problem is knowing where he's headed. A pro-football player turned private investigator in L.A., he's a failure to his wife, who when she can't reach him cheats on him, almost in frustration. He disrespects himself for hiring himself out on divorce cases, but he can't help it--the step-by-step of the process fascinates him, as though by compartmentalizing experience and solving things he's getting at the root...
...only known exception to this rule was his Inquiry listing a string of actions by the History faculty, that ranged from declining to waive department requirements to acting rude to him in elevators. "None of this was in my self-interest," he wrote, in a classic expression of Harvard paranoia. "I began to see the pattern emerging...