Cinema Paradiso: Censorship & Scholarship

[Abishai100]

In the three incendiary films "Fight Club" [1999], "The Ninth Gate" [1999], and "Celebrity" [1998], directed by David Fincher, Roman Polanski, and Woody Allen, respectively, we are introduced to three very stimulating but controversial pseudo-fictional characters.

In the Fincher film, a radical and kamikaze alter-ego type mysterious figure named Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) haunts a bored American bureaucrat and seduces him to experiment wildly with anarchism.

In the Polanski film, a strange and hypnotic nameless girl (Emmanuelle Seigner) follows a curious and unscrupulous book dealer around who is investigating the validity of an esoteric Occult book apparently endowed with the power to invoke the mystical spirit of Satan (the Christian Devil).

In the Allen film, a wild and unpredictable but talented American movie star named Brandon Darrow (Leo DiCaprio) is followed for a day by a jaded socialite journalist who discovers that the celebrity is a titan of modern age gluttony.

Tyler Durden symbolizes civics frustrations, the mysterious girl symbolizes spiritual angst and perhaps represents the Christian harlot of Babylon described in the Book of Revelation, and Brandon Darrow represents pure moral apathy.

The vignettes and images surrounding these three modern film characters suggests there is a civilization fascination with, ethics corruption, so the real question is, should we use cinema as a medium to disseminate controversial ideas about morality hellfire?

Such considerations illuminate the contours of censorship and liberal dialogue in film.

Durden, the Girl, and Darrow signify an interest in using storytelling to explore both Nietzschean dissatisfaction and theism dissection.




Fight Club

The Ninth Gate

Celebrity

 

[Dekster]

IIRC, the two leads in fight club were the same person: Brad Pitt's character was more a Walter Mitty manifestation of Norton's mind.

 

[Abishai100]

Darkroom: Djinn


True, but the libertine features of Pitt's character made him representative of controversy indulgences.

Here are three more characters of worthy comparison/contour mention under the same general category. The first two are repeats in a way --- the Girl from Polanski's "The Ninth Gate" [1999] and a fictional American traveller (a protagonist named Richard experimenting with isolationism and nihilism on an island) named Richard (portrayed nicely by Leo DiCaprio) from Danny Boyle's Conrad-esque film "The Beach" [2000].

The third is a strange and subtly sinister French man from Michael Cimino's jarring war-psychosis film "The Deer Hunter" [1978], a stranger who allures one of the main characters, a wandering Vietnam war veteran, to compromise his life to play a deadly game of Russian Roulette in a black market gambling circle.

The Girl, Richard, and the Frenchman all symbolize antisocialism, and the girl, as in the prior comparison to the Woody Allen and David Fincher film characters, here again represents the 'logistics' of anarchy-oriented consciousness (which is why I'm using her here again in this contour).

The use of such film symbolism illuminates the offbeat nature of dogma-themed art dialogue.


The Deer Hunter

The Beach

 

[Abishai100]

I would have liked it if Polanski made The Ninth Gate earlier in his career, like right after making Frantic, and I would have liked a mainstream actress such as the crowd-pleasing Linda Fiorentino (quite prominent in the '80s) portray the Girl from the eerily-noir Occultism film.