Word: tterdammerung
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...tterdammerung on the Potomac...
...symbols have lives of their own and possess a diabolical potential. Yet in The Ogre, in contrast with his last book, Friday, Tournier seems incapable of expressing an idea without sacrificing art to pedagogy. As an old East Prussian aristocrat says just before the Russians do a Götterdammerung on his castle, "When the symbol devours the thing symbolized, when the cross-bearer becomes the crucified, when a malign inversion overthrows phoria, then the end of the world is at hand...
...belching steel furnace. Then, from the midst of the apocalyptic flames, the title roars with a force that threatens the entire population of the first twelve rows of the orchestra. The Damned, it proclaims, shimmering with the intensity of white heat. A gratuitous parenthesis adds (Götterdammerung). It is too much. Like the rest of the film, it overpowers and finally overwhelms with its own unabashed sensationalism...