Thom and I had dinner last night at my house. Now that I have a proportionally sized lamp on my dining table, I can actually eat on it! Made pea soup with the Christmas ham. And we watched two items on the new TV: a DVD of an updated version of Dante's Inferno and a melodrama about Rudyard Kipling's son, who died in WWI, called "My Boy Jack".
The new Inferno is done with paper cut-out puppets and is set in large decaying US cities. Dante is an aimless mid-life drifter and Virgil is voiced by James Cromwell. It's an inventive idea and there's a good deal of faithfulness to the original, although God is never mentioned. Where the writers do make contemporary changes, they are either obvious or puerile, of the lefty Bush Derangement type.
Pope John Paul and the Cardinal of New York are down there. Fox News is in the circle of Frauds and Dick Cheney is in ice, just outside the center of Hell where Lucifer eats Judas, Brutus and Himmler in a Velveeta fondue.
Amazingly, the otherwise knee-jerk liberal politics of this inferno keeps a circle of hell for the Lustful. Their punishment is to keep having sex for eternity. And there is the circle for the Sodomites within the realm of Those Who Do Violence Against Nature, with a surprisingly faithful attitude; as in the original, Dante meets his favorite teacher, Mr Latini. The punishment is a bit milder: gays have to dance to disco music eternally. His response is more rueful than judgmental. Otherwise, it is predictable Hollywood: creative and clever use of media with a tired message.
"My Boy Jack" is an anti-war film. As I said yesterday, if you want a poster child for pacifism, WWI is your war. Rudyard Kipling, the voice of robust British imperial pride, has an only son who is myopic but still wants to enlist, against the will of his mother and sister, but with the help of his father. When Jack dies in battle, we witness the grief and the doubt of the survivors. It's quite moving.
But it's easy to make an anti-war film. What could be easier than a moral autopsy, a passtime at which our pomo culture, so paradoxically moralist and nihilist, excels?
2 comments:
I hated the BBC adaptation of My boy Jack. I read a biography of Kipling years ago- it is never easy to lose a child, especially when it's a young man who disappears into war and doesn't even have a grave. But Kipling respected his son and felt that Europe didn't do enough to defeat Germany, he had the misfortune of losing a daughter to disease and see Germany rise again and threaten the world before he died.
I'm sure it was very hard on his wife, but there was no indication that she was a pacifist. Yes he wrote moving poetry for his lost son, but unlike most of the west, even in his day - it was a sacrifice he accepted and didn't regret.
I know Dante placed the criminals of current events of his day in the Inferno (criminals as he interpreted them), but his explanations are intelligible and are related to what Allan Bloom would call "permanent problems." This "updated version" of Dante's Inferno reveals the liberal's or progressive's lack of any sort of permanent context. Does any liberal even know any longer how to explain why Hitler was bad or evil or immoral or something? Fox News and Dick Cheney! Had this revision been produced when I was a youngster, no doubt Watergate as an enormity ranking with Auschwitz would have figured prominently. Interesting that God is never mention'd: that is, God isn't the problem, but the "better" are? And Himmler as a betrayer who ranks with Iscariot and Brutus. Does the revision indicate why Himmler was a betrayer? He didn't use his personnel marshalling skills for Communist Socialism but for National Socialism? ... Is it clear that it's the homophobe and McCarthyite anti-Communist John Paul II who is figured, and not John Paul I, whom perhaps liberals fault for a deficit of phronesis: he didn't realize he was surrounded by conservatives (who at least let him die rather than summoning medical help, if they didn't in fact murder him) and thus didn't purge the Church of them and forthright lead Catholicism into realizing the promises of the spirit of Second Vatican?
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