Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...gave rise to a gossip that paralyzed. We missed our privacy. Our peers were all too close. We were equals bereft of our symbolic ground of sexual distinctiveness. Hanging about in packs, we preserved their sexless equilibrium with implicit codes. Here the identification takes shape in something like a plot to prevent sex. The self-consciousness is killing...
Night School, originally written for television, has a relatively simple plot. A young man, Walter, returns from prison and is welcomed by his three doting aunts. Hesitantly they tell him, to his shock and anger, that his old room has been rented out to a pretty, young school teacher, Sally Gibbs, who is so industrious that she also attends night school...
...terms of plot and set, the play is largely conventional. More important, the play is a bit too Pinteresque to be good Pinter. It is as if he had merely rearranged bits of other plays to create a "well made" Pinter play. The aunts are the image of the Birthday Party's Meg. Sally's ambiguous character (school teacher or whore?) is reminiscent of The Homecoming's Ruth. And even the theme of the struggle for a room of one's own is an old favorite (The Room...
With Silence, the dissolution of naturalistic play structures is complete. In Night School we had a "plot" a conventional set and recognizable characters. In Landscape, at least we knew Duff and Beth were married, and knew a little of their past. With his Landscape set, Franco Colavecchia did what Pinter did with words, creating the impression of a country kitchen with only the barest of sets: a table, two chairs, side walls and a hanging wall fragment at the rear...
...includes not only rape as in Frenzy and A Clockwork Orange, but sado-masochism in all its ugly forms. Any work of art, or scene within one, which depicts violence as stimulating, or sex as in its essence violent and exploitive, should be suppressed. If the many reviews and plot descriptions I have read are accurate, The Last Tango in Paris fits this latter category in its entirety. Its systematic degradation of the female sex, its depiction of sex as pure violence, and its final scene of sexually motivated murder by the degraded girl, represent the kind of chemistry society...