But aside from appreciating the movie's sturdy performances, my reaction to this satire of the middle-class, all-German family swung from revulsion to mystification.
Poverty is brutalising, and it will sometimes result in people behaving in a way that does evokes not tears from the middle class, but disgust and revulsion.
Russian television stations have long devoted much of their time to dissecting the minutiae of America's every political hiccup, a consequence of the Russian ruling class's simultaneous fascination and revulsion with the U.S. political system.
Arriving at the McMurdo base, he discovers such banal appurtenances as a bowling alley and A.T.M.s, and what he calls "abominations such as an aerobics studio and yoga classes," and is seized with revulsion and a craving to get into the wilderness and experience the strangeness.
The public's revulsion isn't mindless class hatred.
"There's a revulsion against the political class I have never seen before," said Gerson D'Cunha, a former advertising executive whose civic group, A.G.N.I., presses for better governing.
Pat Barker mentioned that officers were on average five inches taller than the ranks in the first world war, while Ferdinand Mount noted that it was often intellectuals from the left who displayed the greatest revulsion towards the working class.
And they caused an explosion of revulsion in respectable middle-class England.
But day after day for over three weeks, The Daily Telegraph has mined a trove of legislators' expense accounts, stoking its readers' revulsion at an aloof ruling class depicted as milking the public purse.
Labov suggests that the meaning of these sounds would be entirely lost without reference to middle-class norms and are used as a deliberate way of arousing 'disgust and revulsion among those committed to the "good" standards of middle class society' (324).
