Over at The Bygone Bureau, I have a short piece talking about two movies: The Wolf of Wall Street and The Third Man. I meditate on the famous ferris wheel scene in Third between Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten, where Harry Lime is forced to talk about his penicillin scam, and how Lime’s thoughts are echoed by Leonardo DiCaprio’s greedy stock broker in Wolf.
Over at The Bygone Bureau, I have a short essay on road metaphors, David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis, and Leos Carax’s Holy Motors:
Perhaps no metaphor saturates language more than the one that equates life with a journey down a long, winding lane. Frost has his forked path, Whitman his “Song of the Open Road.” Troubadours — from Springsteen to Willie to Kanye — march along with lyrics aimed to chauffeur listeners down Thunder Road or to unfurl “the coldest story ever told/ somewhere far along this road.” We even adopt such symbolism in everyday conversation. We seek direction, cross a bridge to make a decision, move on from failure, stand at the crossroads of change, and run into the speed bumps of life. We are so ensnared with this metaphor that it has turned into a cliché.
Read the rest right here.
Benjamin Woodard 