Once and Future Heroine: SARAH LUND

detail, Hammershøi: Young Woman from Behind

She's back. Despite being profaned by the cult of her sweater, Sarah Lund has joined the pantheon of Norse gods and heroines. Indefatigable, fallible, unflinching goddess of retribution and lady of sorrows, she and Forbrydelsen (The Killing) have elevated the TV thriller genre to modern myth. At its best, in the first two series, it achieved the moral authority of classical drama, consistently superior to English-speaking imitators and Scandinavian successors. 
Never mind that the third series does not, and never could, match up, that the supporting characters are less profoundly observed and the interlocking plots more formulaic. With a sense of duty that matches Lund's, Sofie Gråbøl.....CONTINUED

Who's afraid of heroes?

A twilight world of haunted houses on blasted heaths, billowing curtains, priest holes and craggy old retainers, grown men struggling with oedipal longings and alcohol addiction, a slender plot about a list of names and a china English bulldog, an accused Great Actress, superb yet ridiculous, reciting Tennyson's rallying cries to a lost people torn between technologically advanced modernity and their sentimental loyalties to a myth of nationhood - what is this we have, yet another re-working of a Bronte novel, a missing scene from the Olympics opening ceremony, or just more teenage vampires? 

I hear a gunshot on the Scottish moors; a man and a woman get out of their car and stand in the whisky-coloured heather beside a trickling burn. Is it mother and son on holiday in the Highlands, searching for their roots? Maybe it's Richard Hannay from The Thirty Nine Steps on the run from master criminals in 1915?
No, the year is 2012, and the man is Bond, James Bond, as we have never seen him before and should never, ever, have to see again.
In a feat of heroic acting against the odds, Daniel Craig doesn't lose Bond's masculinity or credibility (or put on a funny voice like the Batman, rasping long after everyone's realized he's Bruce Wayne), 007's upper lip still twitches with humour, not emotion, thank god, but he has to fall through the treacly vortex stirred by the director and screenwriters, hooked on the currently pseudo-Freudian, psychobabbling, whinging interpretations of action heroes, like men afraid of their own shadows.

JAMES BOND TAKING HIS MOTHER ON HOLIDAY IN THE HIGHLANDS

Detail of Morning in the Highlands: The Royal Family Ascending Lochnagar, by Carl Haag. Watercolour, 1853, in The Royal Collection

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Discovery and Denial

A Mermaid by J.W.Waterhouse (1901). Royal Academy of Arts. Image source: Wikipedia

On January 8th, 1493, during his first New World voyage, Christopher Columbus, wrong again, mistook three sea cows swimming south of the Bahamas for mermaids. This had been a common delusion among sailors for centuries, whenever they saw the large grey creatures raising their amiable, long-nosed, whiskered heads above the ocean surface, and bending their fore-limbs like arms.  

Columbus was not the man to give up a preconception.The next day in his blog - sorry, log - rather than speculate that he had seen a new species, any more than he would ever admit landing on a new continent, he dissed his mermaids for being less beautiful than they were painted (no eran tan hermosas como las pintan) and for having masculine-looking faces (forma de hombre en la cara). From the distance of his ship, he was sure he had seen three butch sirens waving at him. CONTINUED

Acting the King: Power and Illusion of the Baroque

Louis XIV as Apollo, Grotto at Versailles. Photo source: Web Gallery of Art

Louis XIV turned the ceremonial rituals of kingship into ballet, every gesture studied to be as graceful and as pregnant with meaning as possible; even his bodily functions had to be treated as if they were an entertaining performance, but nobody laughed. Individuals like Louis XIV and Elizabeth were skilled performance artists able to bring off the parts of pseudo-deities they created and costumed and choreographed to hedge themselves with divinity, which worked its charm only for as long as the supporting cast was persuaded it had a vested interest in suspending disbelief.  

Full story: Power and Illusion in the Age of Baroque

The falsified self, continued

PRISONER OF FREE WILL

There are worse jobs: shielded by tree bark from harassment, she is free to be beautiful, intellectual and adorable forever. 
But is she happy?

Mortal anguish made exquisite through artistic metamorphosis:  
detail of Bernini's Apollo and Daphne, Marble, 1622 - 25, Galleria Borghese, Rome.

The transformation of Daphne from chaste nymph into laurel tree is portrayed by both Ovid in poetic form and Bernini in sculpture as a sexual experience, even though it is ostensibly sex that she is running away from. Ovid emphasizes the languor of her surrender to a consummation she has prayed for, the death of carnal existence in exchange for spiritual and cerebral life. Revulsed by the lust her beauty stimulates in other people, perpetually in flight from sexual contact - and Ovid in Metamorphoses constantly reminds us how fast she is, one of those athletic women who outrun men in classical mythology - she is an ethereal, wistful being even before she is changed from human to plant form, a dutiful daughter who doesn't want to grow up and bear children of her own, who slips away from flesh-pains as gently as Sleeping Beauty, acquiescent to her new vocation as a symbol of other people's triumphs, conferring prestige without feelings or sensations of her own. There are worse jobs: protected by bark from sexual harassment, she is allowed to be decorative and intellectual forever. 

The significant point about Ovid's Daphne is that she wants to be changed, though she has no say in how or to what. Bernini's Daphne, pursued by Apollo, is traumatized, less of a conflicted personality than a victim of attempted assault, caught in the moment of violent transition....

The falsified self

HECUBA AND THE LANGUAGE OF EMOTION

part two

The Heroine and the Moment

Queen Louise of Prussia
and
neoclassical images of female power

Prinzessinnengruppe by J.G. Schadow, Nationalgalerie, Berlin.
Photo source: Web Gallery of Art

- coming soon to mark the anniversary of the birth of Louise,  

on 10th March, 1776.

Best Actor in an ESCAPE

Charles II painted in exile, by Philippe de Champaigne, 1653