Word: zelig
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Zelig Tues...
...Zelig...
...Zelig. Technically bedazzling, Woody Allen's parody of a square-cut documentary is also a hard-edged examination of the way modern celebrity rituals, magnified by the media, bend people's minds and perhaps deaden their hearts...
...troubled community also seeks scapegoats, and the adoring crowds who initially put Zelig on a pedestal were just as quick to grind him into the earth. Though cured of his disease, many of the side effects lingered and came back to haunt him, including the countless women he married while pretending to be different men, the operations he performed while pretending to be a doctor, until finally he became the victim of a moral majority-type crusade...
Irving Howe, author of World of Our Fathers dryly states that Zelig symbolized the early 20th century Jewish immigrant: "He wanted to assimilate like crazy." Through this character Allen more than ever before finally captures the American mentality. Noting the violent vicissitudes of the bizarre man's career, Howe observes "that's what the 20s and 30s were like...