Some Examples of Pinter's Influence On Anglo-American Popular Culture
Allusions to "the Pinteresque" and to specific characteristics of Pinter's works and, more recently, to his politics pervade Anglo-American popular culture (OED; Susan Harris Smith; mass media accounts, as cited above). The Modern Language Association annual convention has already hosted two linked programs on "Pinter's Influence and Influences" and hosted another one relating to this subject in 2007 (Merritt, "Harold Pinter Bibliography: 2000-2002"; "Pinter Society Events", Harold Pinter Society website).
Exemplifying Pinter's cultural influence for several decades, a line in "The Ladies Who Lunch", a song in Company, the 1970 Broadway musical by George Furth and Stephen Sondheim, alludes to Manhattanite "ladies who lunch" taking in "a Pinter play", "fashionable" at that time (Merritt, Pinter in Play 217). Yet Pinter told John Barber ten years later, in 1980: "'This really is an awful business, this fashion. I must tell you I feel I've been unfashionable all my life. I was oldfashioned from the very beginning, and I'm unfashionable now, really.' "
Episode 164 of the very popular American television series Seinfeld, entitled "The Betrayal" (originally broadcast 27 November 1997), is structured in reverse somewhat like Pinter's play and film Betrayal. Jerry Seinfeld's comic parodic homage to Harold Pinter, the episode features a character named "Pinter". Since the first airing of that Seinfeld episode and since the subsequent release of films like Memento and other popular works with reversed chronological structures, some media accounts (such as that in the IMDb) refer to Pinter's plot device in his play and film as a mere "gimmick". But scholars and other critical reviewers consider the reversed structure a fully integrated ingenious stylistic means of heightening multiple kinds of ironies energizing Betrayal's comedic wit, its cumulative poignancy, and its ultimate emotional impact on audiences, and the play has been produced throughout the United States, Britain, and parts of the rest of the world with increasing frequency.
A character in the fourth episode of the second season of Dawson's Creek, "Tamara's Return" (28 Oct. 1998), alludes to Pinter's so-called "sub-textual" use of silence as "a classic 'Pinter' moment". In dialogue between lead character Pacey Witter (played by Joshua Jackson) and Tamara Jacobs (Leann Hunley), his former English teacher with whom Pacey has had an affair, Tamara tells Pacey that an awkward moment of silence between them is "what we ex-English teachers call a classic 'Pinter' moment, where everything is said in silence because the emotion behind what we really want to say is just too overwhelming. … silence is an acquired taste. The more complicated life becomes the better it is to learn to say nothing." When Pacey inquires "Who is this Pinter guy?" Tamara urges him, "Stay in school." Later Pacey tells Tamara that he has "looked up this Pinter guy. Harold, playwright, the king of subtext. You say one thing, but you mean another," wondering further: "Do you think it's possible for us to have a moment without all the subtext?" "Uh, I don't know, Pacey," Tamara replies. "Words have always gotten us into so much trouble." Pacey and Tamara finally agree that "This Pinter guy was really onto something."
Further alluding to Pinter's renowned "pauses and silences", the song "Up Against It", from the album Bilingual, by the English electronic music/pop music duo Pet Shop Boys, includes the lines: "Such a cold winter/With scenes as slow as Pinter" (Tennant and Lowe).
Also illustrating the frequent allusions to Pinter's "silences" in commentaries about others' work, in a book review of Nick Hornby's "debut teenage novel" Slam (Penguin Books), Janet Christie observes hyperbolically that Hornby is "spot-on with the way a conversation with a teenage boy contains more meaningful silences than Harold Pinter's entire oeuvre …."
Read more about this topic: Characteristics Of Harold Pinter's Work
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