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Archiver > GEN-MEDIEVAL > 1999-09 > 0936303428


From: < >
Subject: Re: William Wallace
Date: 2 Sep 1999 20:17:08 GMT


tiglath () wrote:

: > Take your foot off my head, and maybe I'll be able to join in your
: laughter.

: We are mixing things which should be kept asunder. As living, moral people
: we cannot but recoil in horror and condemn the perpetrators of what you
: describe. No one should suffer for his sexual orientation, a matter of
: taste. If you made a movie, however, about Europe in the 40s, you could
: include scenes in which homosexuals are being tortured and killed by the
: Nazis. Your portrayal would be descriptive not prescriptive. Equally,
: Gibson, who I presume has not been convicted of any hate crime, was not
: prescriptive in portraying a heterosexual royal father' final solution to
: the annoyance of his son's inamorato.

But particular artistic decisions of what to portray and how in this
particular movie cannot be excused solely on the basis of "that's
historical reality, like it or lump it". The movie introduced many
non-historic scenes and motifs. One must presume that they were
introduced for modern philosophical and artistic reasons. Since the
defenestration episode is a complete modern invention, rather than a
historic incident, we must conclude that Gibson introduced it into the
movie for conscious, deliberate, modern philosophical and/or artistic
reasons. It is therefore valid to challenge those reasons within a
modern social context -- the context in which the reasons, their purpose,
and their result (both cinematic and social) have their sole existence.

--
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Heather Rose Jones
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