truepenny | mostly about The Brotherhood of the Wolf

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.