He has the eyes of a bloodhound who's tired of your shit and the impassive manner of one of Leslie's euthanised hounds, even when he's lamenting broken puppy hearts.
Echoing President Bartlet's undisclosed MS in The West Wing, Kane learns impassively of the disorder's symptoms, the cruellest of which will affect his speech, rendering it "unusual, nonsensical, with unconscious repetition, loss of words".
Chang is a karaoke enthusiast, taking to the stage with his microphone, to sing impassively of heartache while his fellow officers sit around, their caps placed on tables, as respectful and alert as if at a debriefing.
Elijah Kollie, a frail 19-year-old taken from his home by Taylor's government troops in 2000, talked impassively of children's stomachs being slit open in front of him and of the multiple rapes and murders he witnessed on the front line.
The trademark suggestion of a spontaneously improvised pose is like the equivalent, in a still image, of Steve McQueen's impassive idea of what constituted acting and action: doing nothing and making the idea of more look histrionic.
And that's exactly why, in this context, smoking becomes an oddly heroic gesture, an assertion of personality in the impassive face of fate.
To think of Tolstoy is to conjure, at once, the note of impassive grandeur, as of creation being set out in glittering ranks for inspection.
A feature of his stories is the impassive observation of absurd occurrences by several anonymous characters who are really the same person.
But with his 10th feature, "The Limits of Control," which follows an impassive man of mystery (Isaach De Bankolé) on a lethal mission through Spain, Mr. Jarmusch, no less than his protagonist, is the stranger in paradise.
Hence, when they heralded the appearance of 1981's Computer World album with the release of Computer Love, the song's lyrics – about finding romance through the impassive interface of a flickering screen – seemed like something of a novelty.
