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prominent split between the level of diegesis and the script storing and transmitting it. But there is further indication of this ‘rupture of the lines of communication’ (Beckett, 1984 , 70), notably in the following remark: ‘Et dire que tout ça c’est de la fusion thermonucléaire! Toute cette féerie!’ (Beckett, 1978 , 52). This aside immediately follows the lamp gag, and so may also be read as an allusion to the source of electric power (and not just the star-filled sky). The first commercial nuclear power plant in the UK, the Calder Hall reactor in
instances of cruelty reinforce the Prince’s own belief that the Windsors are not a family but a ‘firm’ – a reference to the beginning of the royal family circulating as a brand in the global marketplace. The pressures of the nuclear family and the impossibility of reconciling private desires with patriarchal power and duty – that is, the stuff of family melodramas – are rendered more acute for royals since
’s newly acquired house, a garden that has been previously attended to by his predecessor’s wife. Brande’s wife has left him at a very bad time, a time when the nuclear family model was being heavily promoted. Not only does he not have a wife as homemaker but his role of breadwinner is also in doubt as he fails to gain the promotion he believes he deserves. Brande’s separation from his wife, the other
for future shock when it develops into an allegory of the nuclear age. The ending is particularly haunting as irradiated children, who for a scientific experiment are being schooled for assimilation into a post-atomic world, are heard crying for help in a heedless universe, and a hero and heroine, who have attempted to liberate them, are now dying from contamination at their touch. The Criminal is
Jim’s departure would be as good for her as it would for him is curtailed by the ending. Although Jim packs his bags to leave with Georgie, his severance from the family home is short-lived, lasting only a few minutes. Halfway down the street he has a change of heart and returns to the flat. Woman in a Dressing Gown concludes with a resumption of the nuclear family, but one that is far from untroubled
ruefully on the aggrandisement of the nuclear family, an Ozzie and Harriet depiction of the fulfilled wife and mother, the breadwinning father, and 2.4 compliant children. Set within a culture of material plenty, Pleasantville lampoons a set of white representational fantasies of the 1950s established within the 1950s. 11 Despite their differences, the respective protagonists of
Movement. Memory and catechism Shared cultural events are always ‘historical’, as George Lipsitz has argued in Time Passages (1990), discussing the ways in which television in the 1950s naturalised the nuclear family as a touchstone of modern American society. Collective memory functions to coordinate and to fabricate national identity and unity. Movie memories circulate among
consumerist Toronto is identified with the commodification of the past. In contrast, the remnants of an ethnic identity, the memory of Armenia, is defined by its persistent attractions: stability, meaningful community beyond the imploded bounds of the nuclear family, the attenuated temporality of place and history embodied in the landmark. Given the profound appeal of Egoyan’s Armenia – from the party at
moved on to become our commanders in Vietnam, but they didn’t see clearly. Eisenhower was a grandfather figure, yet he built up our nuclear capability to the hilt and he intervened in foreign countries repeatedly. At the time of making JFK I admired Eisenhower for the speech he made about the military industrial complex, but it later shocked me that he was more responsible than anyone else for building it. He gave us Cuba and Guatemala. In a way, Saving Private Ryan [Steven Spielberg, 1998] is a celebration of the same kind of thing, a glamorisation of that generation
the failings of the government –with corporate defence and security contractors in its pay –was already underway. With this investigation came the spectre of Orwellian state surveillance: an apparatus-building exercise that was an obvious concern for Stone. The Untold History series started out with a question concerning the immediate post-war USA, and how it might have prospered without Harry Truman or the detonation of nuclear weapons at the end of the Second World War. This was a challenge to the partisan recording of events that Stone and co-writer Peter