Their characters tended to speak in grudging nonsequiturs, and their spiky, anorexic narratives -- concerning the mysteries of identity and the difficulty of connection -- attested to a cautious mood of alienation and numbness.
But all of that was, in a sense, window dressing for the much deeper and sadder tale that "Penny Dreadful" wanted to tell about the difficulty of connection and the strange beauty of grief.
In both "Emporium" (set largely in America) and "The Orphan Master's Son" there is a heightened apprehension of the precariousness of life, the randomness of fate, the difficulty of emotional connection.
Autism as a metaphor for the difficulty of human connections is especially prevalent in films about people who are considered highly functioning, like Ms. Weaver's character, Linda, in "Snow Cake" (which opened Friday).
Though windmills have since proliferated, a combination of planning woes and the difficulty of getting connections to the electrical grid have left the government's goal of getting 10% of electricity from renewable sources by 2010 looking more and more elusive.This week Mr Darling performed a smart U-turn, announcing plans to split the RO into four different levels of subsidy.
Less a journalistic contretemps than a lonely-hearts letter in triplicate, the drama centers — as many of Hunter's do — on the dangers and difficulties of human connection.
Whereas Carver's stories focus on the difficulties of emotional connection and tend to feature isolated characters living in a present quite divorced from conventional social and political concerns, Mr. Englander's people define themselves largely through their embrace — or rejection — of Jewish orthodoxy and tradition.
Were potential buyers disconcerted by the difficulty of understanding the connection between the title and this piece of artistic labor?
Reading about the cancer cluster of kids in Toms River, New Jersey, illustrates the difficulty of proving these connections, but for anyone reading the news or sitting by a sick bed, these connections are palpable – and science is getting closer to proving it.
But "Harper Regan" is also about the difficulty of making genuine connections in an age of quick and easy cybercommunication and fast sexual hookups, of being isolated in an increasingly crowded world.
Following 2013's Anxiety, it's the second in a trilogy exploring "the difficulty of making personal connections in an impersonal time," according to the press release.
