Watching a film version of Shakespeares Antony and Cleopatra and, weirdly, I was reminded of the stilted & sometimes unnecessarily awkward language, and the stylized acting, that kept cropping up in David Lynchs Dune. Bingo. Lynch was doing Dune as Shakespeare, which wouldnt be an obvious conclusion since (as this article points out) Dune isnt an adaptation of Shakespeare, as is the 1950s sci-fi classic, Forbidden Planet. Instead Dune, and Hamlet, share a common source--Sophocles Oedipus Rex. Im in the minority when it comes to Dune, Star Wars, and anything by Tolkien too. Its all self-important, Wagnerian melodrama. Sophocles made his points with keen insight and intelligence, and economy. Ditto with Shakespeare. Once Wagnerian spectacle--heir to Roman spectacle--engaged the popular imagination, the human-scaled lessons were lost and everything became portentous, pretentious, galactic and apocalyptic. We lost our sense of proportion, our classicism. We also lost our humility. Wagner, Nietzsche, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Tolkien, Frank Herbert, George Lucas--all ego and spectacle, and hyperbolic and world-shattering hooey. Its the source of our modern hyper-inflated beliefs: we can SAVE THE WORLD, we can CHANGE THE WORLD, we can do it NOW, we can do ANYTHING WE PUT OUR MINDS TO--that sort of nonsense. No wonder we dont honor the classics any more, or even Shakespeare. Those human-scaled comedies and tragedies dont match up with our cultures bloated sense of self-importance.
Posted on: Fri, 07 Mar 2014 13:35:25 +0000