One of the ways to find a kindred comparatist spirit is to play a little game. One person will throw out the name of two seemingly disparate the texts and the other will then be asked discourse on all the unifying threads. If that person responds enthusiastically, then you know you've found a comparatist. If she balks, then you know that you've met a specialist who's more comfortable focusing on the features of one particular text a time.
What makes the game so much fun among comparatists is that what begins as the most trivial and amusing of coincidences can result in meaningful connections worth exploring. More often than not the coincidences I find are trivial but I still keep playing the game.
The coincidence that I've been obsessing over the past 24 hours involves Superman Returns and Epitafios. Thematically the movie and the miniseries go in different directions. Whereas Superman Returns tells a story of a savior who through sacrifice can keep the belief in purity and wholeness alive, Epitafios delves into the fragmentation and loss that hero and villain experience. When watching Superman soar through the air (which is absolutely amazing in IMAX 3D, we feel grounded in tradition and mythology. We've seen Superman before as as Christ, Atlas and Christopher Reeve so we know he will suffer but he will ultimately prevail. He embodies the physical and moral perfection to which we aspire and, better yet, he's willing to risk his own wholeness to make sure that the human world and soul (and family unit) remain whole. We feel safe rather than threatened in a world with Superman hears our every word because we have faith in his love of human beings in spite of all their flaws (something with Marlon Brando points out to us in a recycled voiceover.)
We feel anything but safe in the world created by Epitafios. Those on the hunt for the serial killer in Epitafios are talented and intelligent but they are also damaged. Unlike the almost omniscient Superman, Laura, Renzo and the police make fatal mistakes each week as a result of their limitations. Each time they finally put clues together which should bring them closer to Bruno, their inability to connect with each other leads to their failure and another decapitation. Unlike Superman's divine loneliness, the isolation of the characters in Epitafios heightens their feelings of impotence and frustration.
(Alas, I've reached my self-imposed time limit for blogging and have yet to mention the coincidence I alluded to in the beginning of this entry. As it turns out, although the coincidence pushed me towards writing about Superman Returns and Epitafios, it has no apparent connection with what I ended up writing--that is unless you can find the connection for me---. What struck me yesterday was how certain classical music pieces mark serial killers. The same aria played by Lex Luthor turns out to be Bruno's signature piece and I've sure I've heard while watching other dastardly deeds on the screen. More to follow on music to play when planning grisly murders)
posted by cim @ 7:46 AM
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1 Comments:
Surrealists employed countless variations on the comparatist game, one of which was the exquisite corpse.
In my favorite version of this game, a paper is folded three times, once for each player, and one of them then begins a drawing in the top thrid of the paper. When the figure approaches the first fold, the artist allows the continuing lines of the drawing to just cross the line into the next section.
The paper is then folded so the next artist cannot see what the first has drawn. The second artist has only the fragments of lines coming into view from the unknown. He or she then creates a drawing from that starting point, allowing whatever lines continue into the final section of the page to just cross the second fold. The paper is folded yet again and the third artist repeats the process, unaware of what the first two have done. When the paper is unfolded, an exquisite corpse is the result.
How nicely this game captures the human condition of partial knowledge and infinite interconnections. This, I think, is what Superman shares with us. Superman comes to us from a broken world. He crosses the folds of catastrophe and picks up his self creation on its far side. What I liked about Superman Returns is its purity (we have none of the irony we could have expected if, say, Tim Burton directed the film). The film enacts the character of its hero. But insofar as there is a moral to the film, it might be this: we risk human relationships when we quest for a lost wholeness, an Eden from which we always find ourselves already cast out. Isn't this what Superman learned when he returned from his search for the shattered Krypton? And isn't Kryptonite itself a metaphor for a particularly poisonous kind of nostolgia? Maybe the best we can do is to note the fragmentary, enigmatic hints we are given, and to create from them what we can.
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