What this emotional flat-line really means is that we don't trust ourselves.
It would look — I don't know — too messy and emotional, too flat, too un-MoMA.
The images that accrue pack a powerful emotional punch: Flat-pack each room, careful not to tear the windows away from their views.
The exaggerated gestures, dramatic chases, emotional scenes, simple flat characters, and impossible situations were later revived and parodied.
At the end, Don's surprise revelation, meant to pack an emotional wallop, falls flat, as do some other revelations.
There's a moment in the film where Franco (as Wiseau) recites one of The Room's most infamous lines, the emotional but ultimately flat cry of "you're tearing me apart, Lisa!"—a partially stolen quote from James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, an actor beloved by the real Greg Sestero, the real Tommy Wiseau, and the real James Franco, who portrayed him in the 2001 TV biopic James Dean.
Hide the pain because you have what has become known to psychiatrists as "flat emotional affect" -- a condition often associated with schizophrenia, catatonia and being schizoaffective, or even possibly bipolar and on medications that purposefully flatten your affect.
The story and its characters lack emotional pull; they feel flat on the page.
Although the play gently satirizes their self-seriousness, its gradual descent into knottier emotional territory would fall flat if the actors overindulged the loopier or more navel-gazing sides of their characters.
When he refuses ritually to invite her over the threshold into his mother's flat, her emotional pain expresses itself horribly in bleeding from her eyes, ears and pores: a haemophilia of rejection.
Ms. Wang says Ha-li Bo-te, as Harry Potter's name is rendered in Chinese, "teaches ethics that are universal, but does so in a very humorous and emotional way," unlike the flat melodrama of many children's books in China.
