Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder by Mark Nelson Reviewed by David Thomson
The New Republic Online
"In sixty years, two huge changes have occurred at the movies: far fewer people go to see them, and those left behind are asked to behold unimaginably crueler things. (I say behold, because we know that our bargain at the movies is that we cannot intervene. We are not quite there.) I'm not sure how these changes are connected. You can argue that this decline, achieved really in the 1960s, allowed more adult (as opposed to Adult) movies. And you can point to a boom of maturity in the early 1970s. But when that adulthood retreated, we were left with cruelty, blood-letting, and violence of a kind that would have seemed outlandish in the 1940s." Read the entire New Republic Online review.