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Re: Starting here (Reply to this comment)
by panguitch
Neither am I! Mostly...
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Mar 14 '05
8:23 am PST
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Starting here (Reply to this comment)
by artbyjude
to catch up on the reviews you wrote while I was gonre. By the way, I am NOT evil. LOL
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Mar 13 '05
5:01 pm PST
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Fat people are bad guys? Since when??? (Reply to this comment)
by panguitch
I suspect the term "heavy" has more to do with the beefiness you ascribe to people like Rabban.
As for Boris, since I happen to be built like him I don't think I'm in a position to judiciously comment. Although maybe Natasha only looks skinny next to him. Is that why my wife always gets so many compliments?
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Sep 26 '03
1:12 pm PDT
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Fat people are bad guys? Since when??? (Reply to this comment)
by catu11us
Lots of persuasive arguments, well articulated. But I feel uncomfortable with the conclusions. Usually a stereotype gets wide play ... and then we would see more fat "dismissive" or "evil" characters than we actully do (I should think). But it is true that we see virtually zero fat primary or "hero" characters. Knotty question; I'm glad you raised it.
Re: Boris Badenov. Do you know anyone who doesn't look overweight compared with Natasha?
I meant to make this observation last time. I'm astounded you haven't mentioned the fact that a villain (particularly a small-time one) is referred to as a "heavy".
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Sep 26 '03
12:46 pm PDT
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Re: Re: Re: Fat people are bad guys? Since when??? (Reply to this comment)
by panguitch
"In our culture, obesity can call up impressions of indulgence, lusts, cowardice, ugliness. . . ." Yes, but it seems to me that they could (and do) apply equally well to villains in general.
This is true. And yet making a character fat is one way to tell your audience that the character has these attributes. Perhaps portraying a fat, lusty-eyed villain is a more efficient, though less effective way than showing a skinny villain actually fulfilling his lusts. Again, there are no rules here, just different approaches to characterization.
As for fat villains being a tiny minority, I would suggest that they are no more a minority, proportionally speaking, than are fat characters in any other kind of role, save comedic. And less a minority than are fat heroes.
Interesting comments on Hamlet. He always struck me as a bit of a soap-operatic teenager whose life is so full of drama. Petulant. Which is perhaps a failure on Shakespeare's part since the character was justified in his feelings. Or a personal quirk of my own--an over-eagerness to dismiss drama as melodrama.
The Flash Gordon guy? I'm not actually sure if he had a name. I can't even say whether he was an arch-villain or just a villain. Boris, well I guess he's not grotesquely obese by any stretch. But compared to Natasha . . . . And that raises another point: what about short people? Height, while rarely used to accentuate villainy, can be just as dismissive as weight.
I think the Baron and the Emperor are examples of two different kinds of evil, a baser kind and a more subtle, intellectual kind. That's oversimplifying, of course, but I do think there's two paradigms there, and that the supervillains are usually in the vein of the Emperor, the second-tier villains more often like the Baron.
Why is the Baron fat?
Ultimately, I think my original point with the review was that the Baron is invariably portrayed as fat because such obesity helps characterize him as evil. It is immediately effective. If this is not the case, why then is he fat? The conceit, as you point out, is that he was made fat by Mohiam. But that incident only emphasizes the link between his fatness and villainy. And it doesn't answer the question I intend to ask. Not just "why is he fat?" But why did Herbert make him fat? What was Herbert trying to achieve with this surface attribute? I have to believe it was more than a by-the-way or odd point of curiosity. I have to believe it was to add another indication of his evilness.
Now to the important questions you ask:
to what extent does the fictional (film, TV) view of fat people agree with or differ from reality? Is this role-casting a bad or good thing? Is it a useful (nowadays apparently not very effective) social mechanism?
To a sad degree I think there is correlation between the negative, and especially dismissive portrayals of the obese and the reality of our culture. Which created which, I couldn't say. Chicken and egg. But I think it's true fat people are ignored, can be invisible. Much like any minority. Only fat people are often seen as causing their own obesity. Even choosing to be fat through their lifestyle.
Is this role-casting a good or bad thing? Well, on the one hand I want to say it isn't good or bad. It's just the reality of our culture that such role-casting goes on. And it works, as seen by the use of obesity in characterization. On the other, I think it's horrible. Defining your perceptions and expectations of a person based on a surface characteristic. In this sense I think the dismissive portrayals of fat people are most damaging. In the PC age, the people it has always been safe to mock are the obese. This is a much more unfortunate problem than I have the strength to fully go into right now.
The fat girl (or boy) in school who falls in love with the popular kid--is it sad that she probably can never have him? Yes. Is he a bad person for not wanting her back, even if he otherwise thinks she's a great person? No. It's just another tragedy of life. But what goes beyond tragedy and into moral wrongness is when the fat person is persecuted, discriminated against. When the fat girl is teased for being ugly. When the fat boy is thought of as stupid. When the fat adult is thought of as a disgusting slob who can't control their appetites.
Anyway, I doubt any of these thoughts are surprising to anyone, they're certainly not unique to me, so I'll stop now. Thanks for the discussion, as always.
-Andy
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Sep 26 '03
9:36 am PDT
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Re: Re: Fat people are bad guys? Since when??? (Reply to this comment)
by catu11us
Since when? Well, relatively recently for the most part. Only since our culture has come to detest obesity so strongly. I don’t think I need to go into the whole women’s magazine issue, nor the facts of discrimination or the "invisibility" of fat people. I suppose, as a fat person myself, I should be more sensitive to these issues.
Fat people aren’t necessarily evil, but they’re almost never heroes. Yet, I still stand by my assertion that making a character fat is an effective way to paint a villain. In our culture, obesity can call up impressions of indulgence, lusts, cowardice, ugliness. These negative attributes fit well with a villain like the Baron. Yes, but it seems to me that they could (and do) apply equally well to villains in general. If that weren't so, we would have far more fat villains in the media rather the tiny minority that we have in fact.
Nor is there quite the dearth of fat villains you suggest. Just as you point out a fat Bond villain (again, I never said fat was the rule for villains, only that fat can help portray a villain), there is the exception to Disney’s rule of skinny villains: Ursula of the Little Mermaid. So she is ... a lone exception proving the rule. And while you mention that Satan is usually portrayed as skinny, I’ve seen plenty of fat demons. As in "Spawn", for instance. Yes, but they'd be a tiny minority compared with the legion of thin devils. In fact, Falstaff, one you call a rogue instead of villain, is actually called Satan in Henry IV. Prince Henry’s words are "That villainous abominable misleader of youth, Falstaff, that old white-bearded Satan." While some portrayals of Falstaff have been of a rogue, there is room for a more villainous interpretation. Prince Hal was of course very peeved at the moment and engaging in hyperbole. But Falstaff lacks the depth of evil, as exemplified by Harkonnen or Goldfinger, to qualify as a real, honest-to-Lucifer villain.
Perceptions of obesity have changed since [Shakespeare's] time. Fat was usually a good thing back then. Even Hamlet is supposed to be fat. Truly? I had no idea ... albeit Hamlet isn't exactly my idea of a "good guy, but rather a bit part gone wild in the absence of any really worthy center of interest. You're right, and of course perceptions of fatness (at least for men) were different even as recently as Victorian times. In the anti-Shakespearean first Blackadder series, the only truly identifiable hero figure is Brian Blessed's Richard IV.
Anyway, what other fat villains can we think of? Well, there’s comic book villains like ... I must confess to being less well informed about current print comics or a great many TV shows. But I have no doubt these will have fat villains now and then. Flash Gordon’s girlfriend needed rescuing from a fat lecher back in the 1930s. Not that I've been through the entirety of the early Gordon 'toons, but I don't recall that one. Who was it? Perhaps the villains that are most commonly portrayed as fat are bullies. Like Dudley Dursely in Harry Potter. Now, that's a point. I can think of numerous examples from current animation, particularly schoolyard bullies who seem almost uniformly oversize.
But because obesity is so often a dismissive characteristic, it can lend itself to villains in comedies more readily. Very good point. Boris in Rocky and Bullwinkle. Um, no. Boris is short and squat, but not fat. In the recent film he's less short, and not so slender as, say, Fearless Leader or Natasha, but still not fat by any means. Newman in Seinfeld. Mimi in Drew Carey. And Mike Meyer’s fat incarnation in Austin Powers. But fat villains aren’t necessarily comedic. As shown by the most famous fat villain of all, Jabba the Hut. Star Wars, BTW, is another great example of the ultimate baddie being sinister and slim, while a lesser baddie (Jabba) is fat. Jabba even likes to keep fat mini-baddies around as guards. And while Jabba is sometimes funny, his main purpose isn’t comedic. He’s actually rather like the Baron Harkonnen.
Again, I don’t mean to suggest that most villains are fat, or that fat characters are villains. Only that making a character fat is an effective way to signal the audience that he/she is someone we aren’t going to like, possibly even a villain. Just as is dressing them in black. Just as is making them gay. Or giving them red hair. None of these things absolutely mean the character is a villain. But they can be used as tips to the audience. So while I wouldn’t say fat is "essentially" associated with evil, I don’t hesitate to say it is "commonly" associated with evil, which isn’t the same as saying it "usually" is. That, it seems to me, is a distinction without any real difference. Be that as it may, the best point here is that fat characters are mostly cast in dismissive roles, whether it be involved in villainy, or ridicule, or being second banana, or the like. Even in evil the fat guy may be a villain, but is seldom the villain. (Of course in Dune it can well be argued which is the greater villain, the Baron or the Emperor. From material in Brian Herbert's books and the Encyclopedia of Dune, we learn that they both -- Vladimir probably, Shaddam certainly -- murdered their fathers and they both engaged in terrible massacres. The films both make Shaddam appear somewhat less evil.)
If we refine your comment that fat characters usually play "dismissive" or "negative" roles, then I feel your point well made. Next, perhaps: to what extent does the fictional (film, TV) view of fat people agree with or differ from reality? Is this role-casting a bad or good thing? Is it a useful (nowadays apparently not very effective) social mechanism? It might discourage people from letting themselves get too overweight, which usually involves making wrong food choices -- usually: I make right ones but I make too many of them. However, it appears the the salutory example (if that's what it is) of Vladimir Harkonnen can't compete with B**ger K**g ads.
Well, that was fun. Now I have the munchies....
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Sep 25 '03
5:46 pm PDT
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Re: Fat people are bad guys? Since when??? (Reply to this comment)
by panguitch
Since when? Well, relatively recently for the most part. Only since our culture has come to detest obesity so strongly. I don’t think I need to go into the whole women’s magazine issue, nor the facts of discrimination or the "invisibility" of fat people.
But villains? Obviously not all villains are fat. In fact, I’m more than ready to agree that most aren’t. Particularly the sinister uber-villains. The Emperor Shaddams as compared to the Baron Vladimirs.
And just as not all villains are fat, neither are all fat characters villains. As I said in the review: "fat isn’t necessarily evil. It can also be a dismissive tool that helps us differentiate between a character in a supporting or comic relief role, and anyone we should really care about. But fat remains an effective way to paint a villain."
I believe fat is primarily a way to indicate which characters are heroes and which aren’t. Fat people aren’t necessarily evil, but they’re almost never heroes. Yet, I still stand by my assertion that making a character fat is an effective way to paint a villain. In our culture, obesity can call up impressions of indulgence, lusts, cowardice, ugliness. These negative attributes fit well with a villain like the Baron.
Nor is there quite the dearth of fat villains you suggest. Just as you point out a fat Bond villain (again, I never said fat was the rule for villains, only that fat can help portray a villain), there is the exception to Disney’s rule of skinny villains: Ursula of the Little Mermaid. And while you mention that Satan is usually portrayed as skinny, I’ve seen plenty of fat demons. In fact, Falstaff, one you call a rogue instead of villain, is actually called Satan in Henry IV. Prince Henry’s words are "That villanous abominable misleader of youth, Falstaff, that old white-bearded Satan." While some portrayals of Falstaff have been of a rogue, there is room for a more villainous interpretation.
But that’s all beside the point as far as I’m concerned. Because Shakespeare doesn’t enter into it. Perceptions of obesity have changed since his time. Fat was usually a good thing back then. Even Hamlet is supposed to be fat.
Anyway, what other fat villains can we think of? Well, there’s comic book villains like Blob and Kingpin. There’s the vast array of heels in professional wrestling, especially in earlier periods. Flash Gordon’s girlfriend needed rescuing from a fat lecher back in the 1930s. Even Jackie Chan and Chuck Norris have gone up against fatties in Crime Story and Hero and the Terror. And everybody’s favorite gangster, Al Capone, was fat. And played that way by Robert De Niro. Perhaps the villains that are most commonly portrayed as fat are bullies. Like Dudley Dursely in Harry Potter.
But because obesity is so often a dismissive characteristic, it can lend itself to villains in comedies more readily. Boris in Rocky and Bullwinkle. Newman in Seinfeld. Mimi in Drew Carey. And Mike Meyer’s fat incarnation in Austin Powers. But fat villains aren’t necessarily comedic. As shown by the most famous fat villain of all, Jabba the Hut. Star Wars, BTW, is another great example of the ultimate baddie being sinister and slim, while a lesser baddie (Jabba) is fat. Jabba even likes to keep fat mini-baddies around as guards. And while Jabba is sometimes funny, his main purpose isn’t comedic. He’s actually rather like the Baron Harkonnen.
Again, I don’t mean to suggest that most villains are fat, or that fat characters are villains. Only that making a character fat is an effective way to signal the audience that he/she is someone we aren’t going to like, possibly even a villain. Just as is dressing them in black. Just as is making them gay. Or giving them red hair. None of these things absolutely mean the character is a villain. But they can be used as tips to the audience. So while I wouldn’t say fat is "essentially" associated with evil, I don’t hesitate to say it is "commonly" associated with evil, which isn’t the same as saying it "usually" is.
-Andy
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Sep 24 '03
3:35 pm PDT
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Re: Re: The Red Baron . . . (Reply to this comment)
by panguitch
"The weight gain is due to a medical condition introduced into his system by Helen Gaius Mohiam as revenge for (and during) the rape."
Too bad all rape victims can't give their attackers something like that to remember them by!
As to the incest, while I can't at the moment cite passages, it was my impression that the original novel left little question. It didn't say anything outright, but implied enough. The Baron's resenting Feyd's hanging around the sex slaves, for example. And the comment after the attempted assassination by a sex slave that Feyd had had plenty of opportunity to kill the Baron himself (the suggestion being that Feyd had been in the sex slave's position often enough). The two movies are much the same in implying sexual tension between Vladimir and Feyd.
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Sep 24 '03
11:31 am PDT
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Fat people are bad guys? Since when??? (Reply to this comment)
by catu11us
This is a really splendid review and certainly has the measure of SciFi's "Dune" effort. However, I take issue with the notion that "fat" is essentially or even commonly associated with "villainy". 'Tain't so, Magee.
We need to ask ourselves how anecdotal evidence, at least, bears out this equation. Let's start with the James Bond films ... how many fat villains does Bond actually face? OK, there's Aurid Goldfinger. And there's Ernst Stavro Blofeld, who may or may not be fat ... he's portrayed by Donald Plaisance, fairly heavy at the time, in one film -- but by Telly Savalas, NOT fat, in another. But generally Bond villains run thin-to-average in build; many are fairly athletic.
What about Shakespeare? He has villains in many plays -- any of them fat? Richard III, thin (although inaccurately portrayed as deformed). Cassius, "lean and hungry". Iago -- anyone ever seen a fat Iago? Macbeth, fat not likely. And so on. The one genuinely fat Shakespearian character I can think of is Falstaff -- more a rogue than a villain.
If fat villains were the stereotype of choice, we might expect them to show up a lot in animation. In point of fact, how many fat villains show up in Disney toons? Especially as compared to the legion of thin ones?
In point of fact, fat villains sometimes don't work out at all. In the Oz books, Ruggedo, King of the Nomes, is fat in exactly one appearance (in "Ozma of Oz"). From then on, he's wizened and skinny.
How about the ultimate villain? How many fat devils (Mephistopeles, Beelzebub, Nick, Scratch, all that) have we encountered in literature/plays/operas/films/&c? The only Satan I know of who is even close to fat (and a very muscular fat at that) is on South Park.
How about fat villains in Dickens? Scrooge? Fagin? Anybody? Who's the best-known fat character in Dickens? The genial Samuel Pickwick.
OK, take Julio-Claudian Roman emperors. Bad? One fat (Nero), two skinny (Tiberius, Caligula). Good? One fat (Claudius), one variable (Augustus). Well, real life is no help.
As an alternative, what sorts of roles do fat actors play? How about the assumed quintessential Hollywood fat villain, Sydney Greenstreet? The fact is that he portrayed a villain (more or less) in only 1/3 (8) of his 23 films. That doesn't mean that some of his non-villain characters, such as the venal Ferrari in "Casablanca", didn't have some negative characteristics.
For a living fat actor, we have to ask: how many times has Maury Chaykin been cast as a villain? As nearly as I can tell, without going over his extensive filmography item by item, not often.
Finally, in "Dune" itself, what do we see? One fat villain (the Baron) -- but what about the other villains? Feyd-Rautha is athletic, Shaddam IV is certainly not fat, Gaius Helen Mohiam is slender, Piter De Vries is thin, Hasimir Fenring is also certainly not fat. There is Glossu Rabban, the Baron's other nephew, who isn't so much fat as built like a tank. But I'll concede fatness for sake of argument. That gives us 2 fat villains and 5 unfat ones. We also have a fairly hefty nonvillain, Thufir Hawat.
In many contexts, fatness is associated definitively with non-villainy. Santa Claus. Old King Cole. Buddha. Nero Wolfe. Winston Churchill (the enemy of skinny old Adolf), W.C. Fields, Jackie Gleason, the Cheshire Cat, hobbits, Bacchus, Porky Pig, Aunt Bea, Babe Ruth, Fat Albert, Onslow and Daisy ...
In fact, fat non-villains so outnumber fat villains as to make the latter a non-starter as a stereotype.
All of this points in the same direction -- namely, that villains are usually skinny and fat people are usually something else. Sep 24 '03
1:20 am PST
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Sep 24 '03
10:46 am PDT
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Re: Re: The Red Baron . . . (Reply to this comment)
by catu11us
Ah, but the movies do show Harkonnen's pedophilic preferences. In the SciFi production, after Feyd's attempt to assassinate his uncle, the dead boy in the Baron's bed is almost certainly prepubescent and looks to be no older than 10 or 11. Unless I mis-remember, the same scene in the Lynch film has an equally young body in the bed. The Baron's victim in the earlier scene in the Lynch film also appears prepubescent to me, although it's difficult to tell ... however, the issue in that scene is more gratuitous cruelty than sex (he rips out the kid's heart plug). It's not in the novel, and is simply a clumsy attempt by Lynch to make the Baron look even more depraved than he actually is. As I note in an earlier comment, the entirety of the Baron's "bixexual" experience is one event under Bene Gesserit compulsion and one case of rape (which has nothing to do with sex). As I note in a later comment, the idea that "fat" is used to equate with "villany" is fallacious.
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Sep 23 '03
9:21 pm PDT
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Re: The Red Baron . . . (Reply to this comment)
by catu11us
Sorry, Ed ... while it is true that most pedophiles are heterosexual, Vladimir Harkonnen was precisely an "incestuous homosexual pedophile". He was in no way bisexual. He bedded only 1 (count her, one) female in his life: Gaius Helen Mohiam. He did this twice, the first time under Bene Geserit compulsion. We learn from Brian Herbert that the child if this union was defective and was destroyed. Mohiam returned with a view to a second union, but Baron Harkonnen was on to her by then and instead of being seduced under her compulsion, raped her (which, as we well know, is an act of power and humiliation, not sex). His taste for underage boys is well documented in the novel, where he expresses the desire that they be drugged so he doesn't have to struggle with them. By the time of the novel he was hugely fat, but in his youth he was (equally evil, equally gay) slender and athletic. The weight gain is due to a medical condition introduced into his sytem by Helen Gaius Mohiam as revenge for (and during) the rape. Oh...as to the "incestuous" part. This isn't made clear in the original novel nor in the films ... but The Encyclopedia of Dune makes clear that while Harkonnen's nephew Feyd-Rautha was young, he was seduced by his uncle.
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Sep 23 '03
8:03 pm PDT
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Re: I read a few of the opening fat jokes . . . (Reply to this comment)
by catu11us
Evil is, as so often the case, is in the eye of the beholder. Blame the redactors (editors) of the 4 Gospels in their final state. These all were set down after the end of the Roman-Jewish War; that is, after 70 C.E. The Temple and the Sanhedrin were gone and the Jewish branch of Christianity was tarred with the same brush as Judaism itself. Only the Hellenistic (or Pauline) branch -- suspicious but not overtly treasonous -- was left. All 4 Gospels speak for that branch -- even Matthew, with its its detailed reliance on allegedly predictive material in the Tanach (or "Old Testament"). The story that emerges from the "evil Sanhedrin" rhetoric is, I think, essentially correct. A virtually unknown religious activist comes to Jerusalem during the Passover of 36 CE. He symbolically claims (first) royal authority by entering astride a donkey and (second) prophetic authority by intervening in operations in the Temple outer court. If he arouses a sufficient following, the Romans are going to intervene and very likely do to Jerusalem exactly what they did 30 years later (fall of the Temple, 66 CE). The solution is to nip this sedition in the bud by reporting him and turning him over to the Romans. This they do and the problem is eliminated. In any rational environment, this would be called statecraft, not evil. However, the Pauline bunch, having crossed swords with the Sanhedrin for years, jumped at the opportunity to make them the bad guys. Of course the later church jumped way beyond any textual evidence with the silly calumny "the Jews killed Christ". Yeah, sure ... like the Jews and Moslems of Spain conducted auto-da-fes in Granada. (P.S. -- considering the Roman economic depredations in Palestine, the idea that any Jewish people, even in the Sanhedrin, were fat.)
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Sep 23 '03
7:32 pm PDT
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Re: Costello (Reply to this comment)
by panguitch
All along he was playing the patsy, while inside he was plotting tyranny and nasty evilness of all sorts.
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Sep 12 '03
9:07 am PDT
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Costello (Reply to this comment)
by jankp
Wasn't he the fat one? :-) Very interesting take on this...
Jan
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Sep 11 '03
4:17 pm PDT
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Re: fat-bottom royals (Reply to this comment)
by panguitch
Glad you liked it.
This raises another question: you can indicate that a man is bad by making him fat. But the same doesn't work for women. If you want to indicate that a woman is bad you don't make her fat, you make her doubly attractive, and make her come on to the hero.
If the latter is obviously a male (heterosexual) fantasy, is the same true of the former? Do men secretly long to be fat?
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Sep 09 '03
10:32 am PDT
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Re: The Red Baron . . . (Reply to this comment)
by panguitch
You're right that the movies give no indication of pedophilia. I guess that's just me bringing in more context then should be assumed.
While argument can be made that the Baron was bisexual, not homosexual, I think it's clear that his preferences usually tended toward the latter (here we are talking about him like he's a real person). And, though my memory may be faulty, I think it's also clear from the novels that his tastes often ran a little young.
Again, my point was largely that in our culture an easy way to tag a character as someone the reader should not like is to make them fat, or homosexual. It's effective, but a cheap treatment. And used in this way says more about us than it does about the characters.
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Sep 09 '03
10:27 am PDT
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Re: Re: Re: I read a few of the opening fat jokes . . . (Reply to this comment)
by panguitch
I don't think there are any obvious points when it comes to religion. It's when we start thinking there are that we get into messes like this.
Thanks for the thought-provoking comments.
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Sep 09 '03
10:20 am PDT
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fat-bottom royals (Reply to this comment)
by voxpoptart
I read the whole review. Does that make me a bad person?
Actually, as some who loved the book Dune probably ten years ago and long since forgot anything about it, I appreciated the plot summary (which triggered a good number of actual plot memories). As for the fat "jokes", I personally thought you were making excellent points. In real life, villains have had the common sense to be lean and fit for decades now. (Fat women, as anyone who really paid attention to TV and movies would realize, don't exist.)
best,
- Brian
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Sep 09 '03
10:00 am PDT
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The Red Baron . . . (Reply to this comment)
by ed_grover
I thought you did a great job on the review and agree that the series should be valuable to people who haven't read the books. I have Children of Dune on order at the library and can't wait to see it.
I do have one small disagreement. You call the Baron Harkonen an incestuous, homosexual pedophile. While the major number of pedophiles are proven to be heterosexual, there are some who are homosexual . . .but not many. The Baron was more bisexual than homosexual, and Feyed Rutha, his nephew, was an adult and obviously just as kinky as his uncle. Even in the first movie that was released, the little "snack" he had in the laboratory wasn't a child and that's what a pedophile goes after . . . children . It really bothers me to see homosexuality equated with pedophiles. It just ain't true!
Ed
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Sep 09 '03
9:57 am PDT
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Re: Re: I read a few of the opening fat jokes . . . (Reply to this comment)
by theeye
Absolutely no offense taken: your tongue-in-cheek tone was clear, as well as clever.
I'm sometimes just stymied when I realize, yet again, just how different our respective worldviews are. In a word-association game, given the word 'Sanhedrin', the words 'Jesus' or 'crucifixion' wouldn't occur to me in a million years. Yet, clearly (and rightly, for one who accepts the premises of Christianity, as I do not), they are the primary associations for Christians.
Failures of communication and understanding go both ways, of course: I'll try to remember in future to give the word 'Sanhedrin' some extra context and explanation when using it with a general audience. Thanks for opening my eyes to what, in retrospect, ought to have been an obvious point.
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Sep 09 '03
9:52 am PDT
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Re: I read a few of the opening fat jokes . . . (Reply to this comment)
by panguitch
Okay, I can see how I may have poked my nose into a hornets' nest with that. But I intended it to be taken in the same vein that my later comments about the Baron Harkonnen being homosexual, therefore evil, were meant to be taken. Tongue in cheek. And I apologize if anyone feels such irreverance inappropriate.
Unfortunately, as for your question, (The Sanhedrin is evil? Is that really a common impression among Christians?) I think the answer is definitely yes. And the reason is that most Christians think of the Sanhedrin in a much more limited sense than would a Jew.
Most Christians will think of the Sanhedrin as the leadership of the parties that feared/hated Jesus and pressured the Romans to execute him. And later enforced the persecution of the fledgling Christian Church. After all, that's how the New Testament portrays things (on a surface level).
And yet, even at the surface level, Christians do a disservice to that body. Because the New Testament also indicates that there were men in the Sanhedrin like you describe: "exemplars of the sort of learning and virtue that we rarely, if ever, see today." For example, Nicodemus was a member of the Sanhedrin that Christians should honor (John chapters 3, 7, and 19). As is Gamaliel (Acts chapters 5 and 22). These men urged patience and tolerance on the council, when those who did not fit your description, urged otherwise.
This is as the NT reports it. So informed, conscientious Christians should not think Sanhedrin=evil (or fat, for that matter). Which all circles back to the crux of my intended humor--the illustrated scriptures so many children read are not informed nor conscientious in such matters. All too often they over-simplify (or worse) matters by saying things like the Sanhedrin were evil or that the Jews crucified Jesus.
As you point out, very much the same thing that's happened to the word Sanhedrin has happened to the word Pharisee. But to an even greater degree, considering how terms like pharisaic have entered the common lexicon with such negative connotations.
I guess these things are just indications of how much understanding can still be absent after two thousand years of living together. I hope my glibness hasn't contributed to the perpetuation of such.
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Sep 09 '03
9:07 am PDT
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Re: Damn... (Reply to this comment)
by panguitch
Thanks muchly!
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Sep 09 '03
8:43 am PDT
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Re: News to me (Reply to this comment)
by panguitch
Well, I'm not one of the defenders of A.I., but I thought he did well in it--that is, that he was cast well for it. Granted, I'm not a big fan of his in general. He's very limited IMO. And totally wrong for Dune.
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Sep 09 '03
8:43 am PDT
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I read a few of the opening fat jokes . . . (Reply to this comment)
by theeye
and then had to come back later to read the whole thing because I was too distracted.
The Sanhedrin is evil?
Is that really a common impression among Christians? That's a serious question. You see, as a Jew, I view the members of the Sanhedrin as exemplars of the sort of learning and virtue that we rarely, if ever, see today. The notion that the Sanhedrin could, even in jest, be viewed as 'evil, therefore fat' is, well, unthinkable.
I suppose I ought not to be so stunned. If the word 'Pharisee' can be construed as an insult (hello, friendly neighborhood Pharisee, aka observant Jew, here), then it's only natural that the Sanhedrin would be held in disdain. Still, the comment did stop me in my tracks.
No criticism intended here -- your review, as always, is quite delightful -- but I felt compelled to mention my reaction.
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Sep 08 '03
7:25 pm PDT
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Damn... (Reply to this comment)
by avepythagoras
Well, I have to say, best introduction to a movie review I've ever read....damn good.
-aveP
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Sep 08 '03
6:35 pm PDT
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News to me (Reply to this comment)
by Stephen_Murray,  in Movies
William Hurt was great in "A.I."??? He's been good a few times (Body Heat, Accidental Traveler, and, especially Broadcast News) but great? I think not... and I'm one of the defenders of "A.I."
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Sep 08 '03
3:43 pm PDT
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