Communicator (communicator) wrote,

True Grit and the Quixote

Borges wrote a well-known short story called Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.

The idea which Borges is conveying is that the words of Don Quixote, if written as an original novel by a 20th century man, would constitute a new book entirely. The same words have quite a different meaning and emotional tone to those written by Cervantes in the 17th century. For the 20th century writer depicts Quixote rejecting, as insufferably mundane, a distant and romantic era (while Cervantes, using the same words, merely described a man rejecting his present day).

It may be that Gus Van Sant had a similar purpose in mind when he remade Psycho shot-for-shot in 1998.

Similarly, the True Grit made by the Coen brothers in 2010 has a very different feel to a film depicting the same events made in 1969. I am not talking here about differences between the films, I am talking about how identical scenes have a very different significance because they are filmed in 2010, with all we know now that we didn't know then.

I was a child in the 1960s, and I read two comics every week: Beano and Dandy, with Dennis the Menace, Bash Street Kids, Desperate Dan etc. I would say 50% of the comic strips in those comics ended with a boy (or less often a girl) being beaten by an adult. For laughs. Spanked let us say, or slippered. You don't get that now, of course, in those same comics. Like Menard's Quixote, if someone were to write that strip now the significance, of an identical cartoon, would be quite different. We can pick up a 1960s strip and not be concerned. But if someone were to churn out hundreds of comics like that today, of children, I personally would find it very offensive.

In 1971 an underground Magazine called Oz published 'The schoolkids issue'. It was banned, seized and pulped (and the publishers prosecuted for obscenity). I have never seen a copy, but I believe that one of the things it did was to highlight and attack the hidden sexual component to the widespread beating of children. During the 1970s and 1980s awareness of child abuse was dredged up into the light, and this coincided with a greater scepticism about adults beating children. I don't need to say how much murky emotion is still swilling around in relation to these issues.

In this context, the scene in which 30-year-old LaBoeuf whips 14-year-old Maddie (1969 original here) feels very different in 2010. I thought the Coen's would drop it. I can't link to the same scene as it was portrayed in the new film, but it's not that different in content, but it has a very different feeling.

I think the Coen's handle the scene well. It's not made a big deal of, it is integrated into an overall dynamic, and it doesn't diminish Maddie in my opinion. I think the way the scene, and the overall dynamic between the two characters is handled, is updated by modern sensibilities without making the error of projecting modern sensibilities onto the historical characters.

  • Phew what a scorcher


  • GCSE Computer Science

    My book is now for sale

  • LJ Settings


  • Post a new comment


    Comments allowed for friends only

    Anonymous comments are disabled in this journal

    default userpic