Dickens devotes the better part of the chapter “Blissful” to his text so that he shows how Copperfield is obsessed. “She was too bewildering,” David later explains, “To see her lay the flowers against her little dimpled chin, was to lose all presence of mind and power...
Kentridge likes copies of images, each a variation on reality fluctuations. Sometimes he makes triptychs, other times diptychs as in the Picnic/Panic etchings produced for Sleeping on Glass (1999). For the diptych Picnic/Panic, Kentridge contrasted cups and saucers on...
Crace’s combination of an awful picnic and murder is not your average picnic. But Being Dead’s readers often find it so appealing that they search for Baritone Bay, where the central characters are murdered. There is no telling where they search because it...
In The Odyssey, the one-eyed giant Polyphemus is a cannibal who lives in a cave, but in Ethan Coen and Joel Coen’s O Brother Where Art Thou?, he’s at a picnic eating chicken, pickles, and drinking beer. The Coens claimed they did not read The Odyssey, but...
An intimate picnic in The Blind Assassin is a lover’s picnic on the grass that might fleetingly Genesis but more directly alludes to Omar Khayyám’s Rubáiyát “XI.” Iris Chase has returned from her wedding trip with Richard and is unhappy. By...
Marsh’s Dead Babies, Mood Swingers in the U.S., is a satire of a picnic disaster. If this satire is meant to be crude, it succeeds admirably. If satire aims to amuse, Dead Babies fails miserably. Ditto Martin Amis’s novel on which the film is based. The...
When the USSR dissolved in 1991, the hold on “official” artistic imagination produced many satires. Among them, Dubosarsky and Vinogradov’s Luncheon on the Grass reverses rigidity and social realism and embraces sexuality and lascivious behavior for the fun of it....
Altman’s fall shooting party and lunch in Gosford Park is a metaphor for social rot in English aristocracy and their servants circa 1932. The pheasant hunt takes place on a cold rainy day in October at which the lord of the manner, Sir William McCordle, brutally...
Von Hellermann’s When he came. . . is a feminist complaint about male attitudes and a woman’s compliance? The concept is an allusion to Méret Oppenheim’s Le Festin (1959), a Surrealist banquet set on a nude woman’s body. Oppenheim originally...
It’s unknown if Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash ever picnicked. His biographer Sylvia Nasar doesn’t mention any. Undeterred by the lack of biographical information, Ron Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldman invented a picnic to add narrative...
