The Wire, Vampires, The Rules of the Game and Bengal Tigers

1) So I got into reminiscing with @ashwinpande over Twitter about The Wire (yes, this is what our lives have become. We reminisce about years-old tv shows with complete strangers we have never met IRL.) when it struck me how closely it resembles an Aeschylean tragedy. No one is allowed to rise above the roles they have been set. Anyone who tries to buck the rules like a  Major Colvin or a Stringer Bell or even an Omar Little get pruned away from the system by death or exile.

Aeschylus is my least favourite of the three major Greek tragedians. I like Sophocles best because he manages to infuse more drama, more heroism into his works than Euripides. Euripides, I respect for keeping things straight and balanced. His characters are the closest to our times of all three tragedians. But I still like Sophocles better. Somehow, I don’t see Euripides writing an Oedipus with that gut-wrenching lament at the end of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. There’s that heroic spark in Sophocles which gets dampened in Euripides and which is completely subsumed in Aeschylus.

2) I’ve also recently re-acquainted myself with Angel and Hellsing. It is clearly apparent that any fight between Angel and Alucard will end with Alucard ripping Angel apart with silver bullets. Angel is tall, dark and brooding though while Alucard’s an abomination.

My favourite vampire remains Nosferatu as played by Kinski in Herzog’s Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht. The baldness, the rat face with its itty fangs and the general animal nature of the Count lends itself to far more interesting a vampire archetype than the foppish aristo vamps made popular by Rice-pires. I never read Twilight but I doubt the vampires there are that substantially different from a Lestat or a Spike. It’s YA after all.

3)

 

I wanted to do a full post on The Rules of the Game which I caught last night and I probably will after watching it again and catching some more Renoir. The movie features the French bourgeoisie of the 30’s, so it’s rife with adultery, hunting, Jews, Austrians, and other eccentricities of old people when they were young (like mechanical singing birds. Or transatlantic flights.) Odd bits I remember from it are:

• A very KKHH line at the start where the servant girl says something along the lines of “Men can’t be friends with women”
• Nothing spells class divide like a hunting scene where the servant-folk go beat rabbits out into the open and their masters snipe them from a machan. That’s right, a machan. Like a fucking Bengal Tiger’s gonna pop out of the wilderness any time.
• Purple lipstick is unnatural.
• Deep focus. I read later Renoir used it first here.
• French bourgeoisie throw sissy punches.
• French don’t like Austrians much. But then I knew that from watching Marie Antoinette.
• Being a gentleman is like being a dog. You know you’re good only when old Generals nod approvingly at you.
•                
    Calliopes.
• Nordic folk are big on fidelity. A full 100% of all Nordic people in this movie are like that, unlike a sizable % of Frenchies.
• Renoir is a fine actor.

4) Someone should make and release a Bengal Tiger action figure. I’d totally buy one.