Bedlam

"The Interior of Bedlam," from A Rake's Progress by William Hogarth, 1763.

















bedlam



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D



–noun 

1. a scene 

or 

state of wild uproar and confusion. 



2. Archaic. an insane asylum or madhouse. 





 　

Jolie doesn't perform in Changeling; she resolutely presents herself to the audience for admiration. The main attraction in Eastwood's [two]-fisted snake-pit weepie is the spectacle of Jolie's steely self-possessed suffering. As she lost her husband to Islamic terrorists in A Mighty Heart, Our Lady of Humanitarian Narcissism here [endures] another dreadful fate: losing her child to a mob of knaves, know-nothings, and psychos, even as she's persecuted by the entire state institutional apparatus of California.



knave

–noun 

1. an unprincipled, untrustworthy, or dishonest person.

2. Cards. jack 1 (def. 2). 

3. Archaic. 

a. a male servant.

b. a man of humble position. 



Based on a forgotten tabloid saga that illuminates a particularly lurid Los Angeles guilty secret and might have appealed equally to neo-noirist James Ellroy or cultural historian Mike Davis, Changeling is set in a late-'20s L.A. that Eastwood has lovingly repopulated with the streetcars and Model T's of his own childhood. 



Jolie's Christine Collins is a single mom and phone-company supervisor. One afternoon, her nine-year-old son vanishes from their modest bungalow; five months later, the LAPD announces [with] all due hoopla that the boy has been found. A reunion is staged, reporters are invited, and although dazed Christine immediately realizes that the cops are handing her another kid, she's told to take him home on a "trial basis—he has nowhere else to go."



The Collins mystery is predicated at least in part on the historical Christine's extreme suggestibility. Why did she accept this strange boy as her own? But this is subsumed in a greater mystery: Who could possibly compel Angelina Jolie to do anything she didn't want to do? Despite ample physical evidence that the child is not hers, as well as assistance from a teacher, a dentist, and a self-regarding radio preacher (John Malkovich), Christine is browbeaten by the police, bulli[ed] by the press, and finally committed to a local bedlam seemingly filled with people whose mental illness consisted [in] pissing off the cops.





blare

The [radio] is blaring: turn it off!

The [loudspeakers] blared the speech repeatedly.

The soundtrack's [jarring] contrast between sheer silence and a [blaring] brass band

fissure

The roots of the tree loosened their holds in the fissures of the [rock].

rift

A deep [rift] had started in their family life.

wedge

a wedge of [pie].  

to wedge [open] a log.  

to wedge clothes [into] a suitcase.

her entry into that world has driven a [wedge] into it that sets everybody [at odds]

Raucous