Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 70

62 The Popular Culture Review "Father Flynn!" she said in a voice that made him jump. "I want to talk to you about something serious!" The skin under the old man’s right eye flinched. "As far as I’m concerned," she glared at him fiercely, "Christ was just another D.P."(6) Committed to a belief in the holiness of Christ, the priest can no longer avoid the raw unconcern Mrs. McIntyre feels for the displaced of the world. The semiological puzzle is to some extent solved when the two realize they are interested in different things, but the two speakers remain isolated and estranged from one another. Popular films with expert screenplays contain many such encounters and use dramatic monologue masterfully. When the stakes of missed communication are high, as in parent-child or romantic relationships, the failure is especially excruciating. In an essay entitled "The Museum's Furnace," Eugenio Donato acknowledges the "dream and hope of a total, finite, rational domain" of human wisdom but says that all must "come to realize that not only is knowledge as a given totality unavailable," "any act of totalization is by definition incomplete, infinite, and everywhere marked by accident, chance, and randomness."(7) In the flawed kingdom of film, failures and limitations are represented by human interaction, revealed in dialogue. Through pivotal conversations in which family members are unable to hear one another, one person often addresses core relational issues while the other talks of the mundane. For example, the priest and Mrs. McIntyre in "The Displaced Person" sound a great deal like Conrad and his mother, Beth, in Ordinary People as they strain to talk to one another in the back yard of their plush suburban home. Beth sees Conrad huddled outside on a lawn chair. In an uncharacteristic effort to reach out to her son, Beth goes outside and tells him to put on a sweater. Conrad tells her how much he would like a pet; she interrupts and tells him how much trouble a neighbor's dog is. Reduced to rage that his mother does not understand his need for something to belong to him, Conrad shouts over his mother's voice, and when she continues talking, he begins to bark. She looks at him stoically and calmly tells him to put on his sweater if he plans to stay outside. Moments later, Conrad follows his mother into the