Despite his dark preoccupations, Mr. Haneke insists that he is no misanthrope.
In the few short interviews she's given over the past 12 months, the Cambridge philosophy graduate has talked about the dark preoccupations that fuel her work.
His thesis topic couldn't have been better chosen to illustrate the dark preoccupations of the jihad stream: in the Aleppo souk, Atta had found an age-old, smelly world of half-lit arched passages, violated by shameless and greedy kufr intruders — an image that might spring straight from the pages of Sayyid Qutb, where sex and jihad are intimately entwined.
But if you live and die for fashion, a documentary called "McQueen" could tell only one story, that of designer Alexander McQueen, whose extraordinary gifts, dark preoccupations and tragic death make for a completely engrossing, compulsively watchable film.
(He owned Herman Melville's traveling writing desk, in addition to rare Melville first editions). They would also see the workplace of a man who, though he brought joy to generations of children, harbored exceedingly dark personal preoccupations: He kept a rare death mask of the poet John Keats in a box at the foot of his bed and was known to put it on his pillow after waking.
I don't think Australian cinema or the Australian psyche is uniquely dark in its preoccupations or it's collective guilt.
There might be connecting threads, for example, a preoccupation with the dark side of Christianity.
And the family's preoccupation with the dark secret of the dead baby brings to mind Albee's Virginia Woolf.
And "The Hunger Games," besides dwelling, like so many of these books, on the age-old American concern about phoniness and authenticity, also points out the dark, scapegoating side of our preoccupation with reality shows, especially elimination contests like "American Idol" and "The Biggest Loser".
Such an ending indicates that Barnes has some feeling for the dark side of her carnivalesque preoccupations, but the last piece, "Everything Is Getting Better All the Time," a quartet set to music by Otis Redding, went right back to the hard sell.
Bestselling author MacBride has moved away from his native Aberdeen for his second standalone novel, but his trademark dark humour, darker subject matter and preoccupation with bodily functions are firmly in place for a very readable (if sometimes revolting) mixture of Grand Guignol and near-farce.
