A Dream and a Terror

Have any of you seen trailers for the new movie Beowulf? In theory, I like the idea of taking great literature and translating it into film. The problem, though, is that I'm almost always disappointed and then I get depressed. I've not seen Beowulf, but I've just watched the trailer - and I find it distinctly disturbing on two levels. First, Beowulf is a classic piece of English literature, the oldest full piece that we have - its language is beautiful, rich, layered, mythic, heroic - it evokes another world, another time. The movie, however, looks like a video game at worst and at best, like the recent poorly-reviewed movie 300. It looks to have very little carry over from the richness of the original text. "Buff man meets monster, kills monster, buff man meets second monster and dragon, fighting ensues. The end." Let's just pull the heart out of the piece and stomp on it, shall we?

So after taking a lovely thing and making it cheap, it gets worse. Featured quite prominently in the trailer and in movie posters is the lovely Angelina Jolie, and I find Adrienne Rich's "When We Dead Awaken" may have a great deal more carry over than I thought. Her complaint, you remember, is that in literature male writers only ever portray women as a dream or a terror, an angel or a monster, a redemption or a threat. And in the end of her piece, Rich also refers to the grindhouse movies of the 70's. One would think we've moved beyond those days, that literature, those films, but I don't know if we've moved at all beyond those exploitative grindhouse movie days when sexy women were victims who became terrors who then took particular pleasure in killing men. Jolie plays Grendel the monster's mother - and guess what? She gorgeous, sexy, semi-naked, and she seduces men into her lair, so she can kill them. They didn't make Grendel's mother a monster, they made her a beautiful woman. No wonder Rich was angry.

Here's the beginning of one of her poems:

A woman in the shape of a monster

a monster in the shape of a woman

the skies are full of them

Are our theaters full of them, do you think?