"I got male intuition/I got sexual ambition," he bellows.
His most memorable characters are collections of unruly appetites: John Self ("unless I specifically inform you otherwise, I'm always smoking another cigarette"); the whole cast of Dead Babies, guzzling booze and pills; Charles Highway with his intellectual and sexual ambition in The Rachel Papers; Richard Tull's bottomless thwarted hunger for literary acclaim in The Information.
Norton hijacks the play, stealing the acclaim that Keaton had worked so hard for and even ransoming Keaton's daughter to his sexual ambition.
It is felt by some of his friends that his sexual ambitions, compared with his professional ambitions, have always been modest.
One new song, a checklist of sexual ambitions — "cobra dancer," dominatrix, "porno starlet" — drew so many chuckles that Mr. Merritt, who sang it, didn't bother to milk another punch line by giving its title: "The Nun's Litany".
He begins by looking at his father's effect on his own psyche, presenting himself as a study in indecisiveness, stalled ambition, sexual vagueness, and general ineffectuality (not unlike the character in Benjamin Kunkel's novel Indecision).
Described as a contemporary neo-noir about the dangers of sexual obsession and ambition among a group of young people in their 20s, it is being directed by Paul Schrader of American Gigolo and Affliction.
Ironically, at the time of her trial, the qualities that render Thompson so attractive to modern commentators – her imaginative energy, her sexual confidence, her ambition – were the very things that damned her.
It centres on "the dangers of sexual obsession and ambition, both personally and professionally, among a group of young people in their 20s, and how one chance meeting connected to the past unravels all of their lives, resulting in deceit, paranoia, cruel mind games and, ultimately, violence".
I am shocked by the uninflected scorn, the derision and foul-mouthed trashing she is dealt, and how much of it is grossly visceral: hatred of her flesh, physicality, sexual confidence, athleticism, ambition, her preference for Latin spunkbots, her alternating bossiness and vulnerability and romanticism and eroticism and playfulness, her performance ability and hunger.
It's psychosexual drama: Those forces come from her confused perceptions of her mother, her sexual inhibitions, her ambitions and her increasingly schizoid fantasies.
