Dead Sea Scrolls

Even with fragility being a need, keeping myself at arms' length, Cunningham's work is actually a conventional contrivance, overtly staged. Perhaps the novel lends itself to this almost operatic intensity of monologue. In the film, a great deal rides on Kidman and Harris. They pull it off. And it may be that the performances had such force exactly due to Cunningham's implied disavowal of multiculturalism. Yes, Woolf was sexually fluid and mentally ill, and Kidman's  modern character embodiment was sexually fluid and desperate to flee picket fences, but Cunningham's themes aren't that radical, and are actually fairly bourgeoisie, if you absent the AIDS of the contemporary novelist as metaphor. For me, this is the familiar terrain of 20th century self-interest, nothing more or less, so I don't understand why I found The Hours virtually as traumatizing as Babel, which, to its credit, eschews modernist icing on the birthday cake dessert.