mostly about The Brotherhood of the Wolf

[truepenny]

papersky gets more mileage out of playing Civ than anyone else on the planet. I am in awe.

Computer, in the normal annoying way of technology, mysteriously resolved its own issues between horrifying MH and myself yesterday morning with its absolutely stellar impression of a dying duck, and pretending nothing had ever been wrong when MH went to take it apart last night. We are both baffled as a bathroom geyser.

(And, btw, if anyone can explain that line from Busman's Honeymoon to me, I will be eternally grateful.)

Last night, we watched The Brotherhood of the Wolf with heres_luck. I discovered that my ability to understand spoken French has not entirely atrophied; I caught a couple stupid errors in the subtitles, which is always good for the geek!ego.

And then I had a revelation . Which is going to aid me immensely in finishing my dissertation.

One of the things I'm trying to do is explain the generic lineage which leads from Seneca, to the Elizabethans and Jacobeans, to modern horror movies. We (21st century types) distinguish between "tragedy" and "horror," claiming that the former is high-brown and the latter too too plebeian; Seneca, Shakespeare, Webster, Ford, Middleton ... those guys didn't. If Shakespeare wrote Hamlet today, it would be classified as a thriller, but because he's Shakespeare and he wrote it 400 years ago, give or take, we call it "tragedy" and teach it to bored high school students. We've been buffaloed by the Enlightenment into thinking there's such a thing as "tragic decorum," and there isn't.

But this is why Seneca has a bad name, and why Titus Andronicus is sneered at. Because they're following a particular aesthetic that we now associate with movies like The Exorcist and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. We no longer take this aesthetic of blood seriously, but the tragedists of Elizabeth and James's reigns did. In John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, the anti-hero comes on stage at the end with his sister's heart in his hand. No, literally. (And Giovanni, like Jean-Francois de Morangias, has a most unhealthy and passionate interest in his unfortunate sister.) Think of the blinding of Gloucester in King Lear; think of the way Shakespeare lingers over that scene. These plays are gory, violent, and completely unabashed by the line between black comedy and Grand Guignol and stark tragedy.

Just like The Brotherhood of the Wolf. You have to have a strong stomach, mind you, but watch the movie, paying particular attention to the first fight scene, the taxidermy scene, and any time le bete is on-screen. That uneasy place you end up in, between giggling, retching, and screaming? That's Seneca.

And that gives me a way to show my readers what I'm talking about when I explain Senecan aesthetics of horror. That's my revelation.


Which boils down to: if you want to understand what Seneca and Senecan tragedy is like, watch The Brotherhood of the Wolf.

I'm very pleased by this; I was all bouncy at MH last night. And that shows that no matter how much I whinge about my dissertation, I'm still interested in it. V. good.

Another important insight from The Brotherhood of the Wolf? Not all French actors look like Gerard Depardieu.

Comments

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Bathroom geysers are hot water heaters that heat up the hot water for your bath, or don't, because they are notoriously temperamental.

If it's a geyser, it's likely gas, which may heat a tank of water (never enough) or may heat the water as you need it, giving you hot water for as long as you need it, at least when it works.

We had a modern (1950s) one when I was a kid. You had to stand on a stool and thump it when it cut out. You had to light the pilot light with a match, and you had to turn the tap on slowly to get it to light from the pilot at the right speed. These things soon became second nature, as you can imagine, but were challenging for guests.

I had an ancient (1930s) gas one in my flat in Harrow, which was situated in the kitchen, was as baffling as one might desire, and when it worked it worked beautifully. See also "Ascot" which was (is?) a brand name sometimes used a s generic. It had a sticker on it saying it was unsafe and condemned, which we removed whenever my flatmate's parents visited, in case it caused them alarm, and then replaced, as there was a fine for removal. It was unsafe because apparently in 1930 it was OK to have a short chimney on the thing, but by 1985 when I moved in and had the thing serviced, longer ones were recommended. It never did us any harm.

I had a modern gas one in my bathroom in Lancaster, which I had installed myself in place of an ancient copper electric tank, which took an hour to heat not quite enough for a bath.
This modern gas one worked faultlessly except when the weather changed, or if the wind came just wrong and blew the pilot light out. I had it installed because I had become fond of being able to have a bath or shower whenever I wanted, and not needing to plan to have one an hour in advance, by which time anything might have happened.

I had an ancient copper electric tank in Swansea, in a cupboard in the dining room, which also took an hour to heat not quite enough water not quite as hot as you'd want it (but could be supplemented with a kettle), and which broke three times in the four years I was renting the house, always very inconveniently. You'd imagine I'd have been glad to see that this was supplemented with an electric shower -- an electric version of the geyser. Unfortunately, this device had two modes, burning hot and ice cold, making it challenging to enjoy. I lived there for several months before making it work at all, instructions for guests, after the caveat about the temperature range, began "Turn the dial twice around until the invisible light comes on..." My landlord couldn't understand the problem.

In North America, the gold-paving turns out to be an exaggeration, but hot water magically emerges from the tap in quantity whenever you turn it, and there are no geysers or water heaters to be seen. Also the buildings are warm inside. Furthermore, telephone calls are free. I sometimes wonder why there are any people left in Britain at all. I mean I am as fond of castles as the next person, probably fonder, but even so.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Oops, sorry, unclear. Bad Truepenny.

I know what a bathroom geyser is. The bit that was baffling me was, well, the "baffling." Is the geyser "baffled" beccause it itself is baffling, or is there something else going on there that I just don't get?

But, on the other hand, if I had said what I meant, I wouldn't have gotten this fabulous post on Time Considered as a Spiral of Bathroom Geysers, so I guess I'm not sorry after all.

Helix!

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Time Considered as a Helix of Bathroom Geysers!

That'll teach me to make weird Delany-allusion jokes without checking.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I was going to say that it is baffling, and that's certainly how I always read it, but now it occurs to me that "baffled" is a technical term -- don't car engines have baffles? Hmm, not according to the OED, which thinks the word is Scotch, or possibly French, but says nothing about baffles in the noun sense, which might possibly be things geysers also had, if I only knew what they were.

Baffled of Montreal.

Sorry for thinking you didn't know what they were, but I had sufficient American visitors who didn't that it was the natural assumption. One friend from usenet even took a photo of me putting a card into the electric meter, and some others did a re-enactment of the bit of Tacitus where he says the natives of Britain are so short of wood they are reduced to burning stones to keep warm.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

I am glad you posted, because I had no idea what these were, although I did indeed have some experience with British showers which seemed to have no intermediate temperature between "ice-cold" and "scalding."

This makes me feel quite nostalgic for my first apartment with its lacework gas-pipes and its bathtub-on-cinderblocks, whose faucet nonetheless produced water of whatever temperature I desired.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I don't think, mind, that I'd know how to use one without considerable coaching, but I read enough British lit in a sufficiently sfnal frame of mind to have deduced from context what they were.

And yours was a perfectly reasonable assumption. I would have assumed exactly the same thing.

But, *sigh*, I still don't know what Peter meant.

[heresluck]

I didn't know about cars having baffles, but I believe some kites have them, and so do some curtain-rod setups. The noun version means, more or less, "a device to regulate flow" (of liquid, light, air, sound, etc).

If this is actually the meaning in the phrase in question, it sounds like it's meant to be said with heavy irony.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

That would make sense, and that would, don't you think, be very Peter?