Here's something I read in the context of movie critic Anthony Lane's remark on the tepidness of The Dark Knight Rises: While The Dark Knight taps into the revolutionary spirit of Occupy, says Lane, the film at large "coughs politely and moves on" and its clamor for social change is positively "Victorian".
How is Batman Victorian?
In that its dread of disorder far outweighs its relish of liberty uncaged.
The observation allows me to see in a sentence the contradiction of Victorianism, celebrated as the era is for being both reformist in spirit and conservative to the core. The observation also helps make an extraordinary adjective out of "Victorian". You can call Obamacare, for instance, "Victorian".
My thought then turns to Jerry Sandusky's take on why Captain Ahab so vehemently hated the whale in Herman Melville's Moby Dick. According to Sandusky, the once stellar and now disgraced college football coaching legend, Moby had the advantage and privilege of "depth". Living under the sea, the whale knew, saw and understood things the mere human, Ahab, couldn't; Ahab found this truth of his own imbecility relative to that of the whale, intolerable.
Then there is the excellent interpretation of J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye in the film Six Degrees of Separation. Best if one were to just listen to this one:
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