In some instances, desperate North Korean units forced South Korean populations to carry their supplies for them.
I remember an instance in Desperate Housewives when it seemed, at the close of an episode, that Bree had been killed after plane crashed into Wisteria Lane.
Into addressing, for instance, the desperate, decades-long needs – for jobs, for housing, for a future – of those towns that have been left behind by the last 30 years of change, those towns whose people voted leave the way a passenger on a doomed train pulls the emergency cord.
First, because, in between the trills of kitsch, there are sharp glances at the conflict of our private and public selves; thanks to a glitch with the audio system, for instance, passengers' desperate phone calls to their loved ones are broadcast through the cabin, for all to hear.
India, for instance, is in desperate need of better highways connecting big urban centres.
In light of the grim circumstances of its production, "Watt" seems a remarkable and even desperate instance of pure fiction.
Mahmood's parents, for instance, said she was desperate to help those suffering in Syria, and Smith says the anger about Israeli actions in Gaza could also help extremist groups recruit new members.
The script of the 1992 film Far and Away, for instance, required Cruise, in desperate straits, to assert his authority over a horse by punching it (the setting is the Oklahoma land rush, and he is in a hurry to stake a claim).
But it was an unusually media-friendly instance of migration: 20,000 desperate North Africans struck out 70 miles across the Mediterranean to an idyllic sunshine isle with a population of just 6,300, which was then temporarily ruined by the sheer weight of humanity.
