His truculence is well conveyed in a Nicaraguan print of the crucifixion, where the impaled Che, who still wears his beret but has shed all his other clothes, shows off a portentous set of genitals.
At the end, after Knights of Cydonia – Muse's portentous, gleeful set closer – singer Matt Bellamy's grand piano is swallowed up by the ground, along with him.
In setting the scene – with its portentous music as much as its emphatic lyrics – as an apocalyptic conflict between tradition and modernity, Williams really caught the mood.
If there were a lesson to be learned from Damon Lindelof's Lost, it ought to be that you can get away with setting up gazillions of intriguing, portentous clues, provided that your TV show runs for so long that most people eventually forget what it was they were waiting so eagerly to find out about in the first place.
(Willy Decker's "Traviata," with its whitewashed minimalist set and portentous clock, is about as outré as things have gotten).
The writing doesn't explain everything, and you may be put off by its portentous tone, but it sets you thinking fruitfully along certain interpretive lines.
It is a truly rich, universal theme, which makes total sense of setting Susan Hiller's video installation Belshazzar's Feast – a comfy lounge with an eerie, portentous flaming vision flickering on the TV – in the same display as a picture by Vanessa Bell of two Bloomsburyites painting.
Both due to this real life high drama and the way that clubs have culturally become portentous symbols for populism and collectivity, a number of films have also set climactic conflicts in these locales bathing police officers in blinding neon and setting loose clubgoers in controlled chaos.
The Handmaid's Tale, as a film at least, is a glum, portentous feminist take on Nineteen Eighty-Four set in an America run by right-wing fundamentalists, where blacks, homosexuals and radicals are either exterminated or deported to death camps abroad.
"When you have been anointed one of the world's next great sport stars... .. begins the man from CBS, as he sets off on a portentous journey to find an answer to the question that everyone asks when it comes to Rory McIlroy – is he the next Tiger Woods?
Not until 987 was the Carolingian dynastic line set aside, but there had been portentous interruptions.
