Sullivan unearths a pathetic cultural tie-in: the minuscule ski jump of a nose that Jackson so determinedly sought was that of a child actor, Bobby Driscoll, best known for dying young, but only after lending his voice and his face to Disney for Peter Pan in the classic animated movie.
It is so unrepentantly ridiculous, so determinedly overblown, that you can't help enjoying yourself.
Lou's darkness, his blank, bleak determination could come from any horrible icon from Norman Bates to Keyser Söze, but Gyllenhaal's performance is so dedicated, and Gilroy's world so determinedly realised that it forces its way to originality.
Our narrator is a novelist (her personal details are kept so determinedly hazy that it feels almost embarrassing when, late in the book, someone suddenly uses her name) who is flying to Athens to teach a summer writing course.
Browsing Pynchonomanes had been alerted to a listing on Amazon.com, a 270-word blurb for a brand new book by the cult writer who is so determinedly elusive that he makes JD Salinger look vulgarly available.
(Did she have an incestuous relationship with her famous brother? Probably not, and let's not go there. But they were so determinedly intimate that speculation will never cease).
Palin is so determinedly American that, when she went into labor with Willow on the Fourth of July while kayaking on Memory Lake in Wasilla, she writes, "I so wanted a patriotic baby that I paddled as hard as I could to speed up the contractions, but she held out until the next day".
Despite the book's occasional flush of naïve charm, it is hard to think of another memoir that so determinedly assassinates the character of its author.
Jepko, who had run a telephone talk show out of KSL in Salt Lake City for years, so determinedly avoided controversy that some callers simply talked about the weather where they lived.
In the end, however, this book leaves you with a pretty bleak picture of the citizenry produced by a culture that lives so determinedly in the present.
