[Ads-l] allegory

[Jonathan Lighter]

Quora.com asks, "What are the best allegorical films ever made?"

A "film enthusiast" replies with ten "allegorical" films:

Sunset Boulevard
Dr. Strangelove
Blow-Up
Easy Rider
El Topo
The Man Who Fell to Earth
Nostalgia
Brazil
Barton Fink
Dancer in the Dark

None of these movies is an allegory.  All, however, seem to be
thought-provoking in imaginative ways.

JL


On Sun, Oct 13, 2019 at 4:58 PM Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
wrote:

>  According to another guy (same movie):
>
> "the sheer density of political, religious and philosophical allegories
> that Lebanon presents makes repeat viewings mandatory."
>
> https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/lebanon-2010/reviews?type=&sort=&page=4
>
> JL
>
> On Thu, Oct 3, 2019 at 6:41 PM Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>> 2010
>> https://www.miaminewtimes.com/film/lebanon-the-best-movie-of-the-year-6367660   :
>> Maoz's cine-memoir is at once political allegory and existential combat
>> movie — Sartre's No Exit as directed by Sam Fuller.
>>
>> In this movie (_Lebanon_), an untried  Israeli tank crew rolls into
>> Lebanon in 1982. People on both sides get killed, and at the end. the tank
>> is seen in a field of sunflowers.
>>
>> Allegory?  Of what?
>>
>> JL
>>
>> On Thu, Sep 12, 2019 at 8:02 PM Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Whoa.  Should have been:
>>>
>>> "The combat genre reshuffles a series of potent mythologies containing
>>> valiant heroes, dangerous quests, malevolent villains, recognizable
>>> iconographies, repeated narrative patterns, and recurring conventions to
>>> design compelling allegories to define themselves and identify America's
>>> salient values."
>>>
>>>
>>> On Thu, Sep 12, 2019 at 7:46 PM Stanton McCandlish <
>>> smccandlish at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 1:00 PM Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> [...] But the point here is that the word "allegory" is used in a highly
>>>> dilute
>>>> form not yet recognized by OED.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Maybe "allegory" is a new "ironic".
>>>>
>>>> Several other high-falutin' words get misused in a similar way
>>>> ("literally", "metaphoric", "proverbial", "methodology", etc.). It's as
>>>> if
>>>> the writer/speaker knows that the word can fit into similar sentences
>>>> and
>>>> is used by others within the same topic area, but they don't actually
>>>> know
>>>> the precise meaning.
>>>>
>>>> It may relate to buzzwording in management and other professional
>>>> circles
>>>> ("paradigm", "sustainable", "empowering", "synergistic", etc.) – a form
>>>> of
>>>> pseudo-intellectualism.
>>>>
>>>> It seems distinct from the more slang-induced sort of meaning shift.
>>>> E.g.,
>>>> when my mother used "awesome", it was closer to the original sense; a
>>>> millennial would not properly understand "an awesome explosion" as
>>>> something frightful, while someone my age is apt to find it potentially
>>>> ambiguous (our generation introduced the positive sense, but knew the
>>>> older
>>>> one, too). Shifts like that seem to come from intentional meaning
>>>> distortions in the then-contemporary youth culture; viz. "cool" turning
>>>> into "rad[ical]" in the 1980s, and odder expressions later, like "sick".
>>>> The weirdest one I heard was "retarded" in the same sense of
>>>> "impressive in
>>>> a with-it, hip way". I only ever encountered it in Toronto in the
>>>> mid-2000s, but haven't really looked further.
>>>>
>>>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>>>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the
>>> truth."
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the
>> truth."
>>
>
>
> --
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>


-- 
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org