The Name of the Rose - AHB

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! Well, except for Sean Connery; he is always a step ahead of the game.

The Name of the Rose was a lot of fun to watch after many of the other movies we've done. It was done more in the mold of a typical Hollywood-style film, making it easy to follow and enjoy. There were a few times when you couldn't quite take it at serious as the Director wanted (It's a bit hard to be afraid of a man named Gooey) but in other ways the film was well crafted and it flowed particularly well, despite the presence of Christian Slater!
There were a lot of great lines in the film. I'm having a fun going through the imdb page for the movie. This exchange is particularly interesting both in itself and for the plot of the movie:
William of Baskerville: My venerable brother, there are many books that speak of comedy. Why does this one fill you with such fear?
Jorge de Burgos: Because it's by Aristotle.
William of Baskerville: But what is so alarming about laughter?
Jorge de Burgos: Laughter kills fear, and without fear there can be no faith because without fear of the Devil, there is no more need of God.
William of Baskerville: But you will not eliminate laughter by eliminating that book.
Jorge de Burgos: No, to be sure, laughter will remain the common man's recreation. But what will happen if, because of this book, learned men were to pronounce it admissible to laugh at everything? Can we laugh at God? The world would relapse into chaos! Therefore, I seal that which was not to be said. In the tomb I become.

I recently read Milan Kundera's work "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting", which had this same theme of laughter being tied to the devil. I'll try not to get too off topic with this but it is quite interesting.
"Angels are partisans not of Good but of divine creation. The devil, on the other hand, is the one who refuses to grant any rational meaning to that divinely created world. . .If there were too much incontestable meaning in the world (the angels' power), man would succumb under its weight. If the world were to lose all its meaning (the devils' reign), we could not live either. Things deprived suddenly of their supposed meaning, of the place assigned to them in the so-called order of things, make us laugh. In origin, laughter is thus of the devil's domain. It has something malicious about it (things suddenly turning out different from what they pretended to be, letting us live more freely, no longer oppressing us with their austere seriousness)."

I don't know what Aristotle would have said about comedy, but I do enjoy Kundera's description. Comedy has always meant the ability to satire the "untouchable" topics in life. Take Monty Python's Inquisitor skit (or any of their stuff for that matter), here they take the most ignoble period in Catholic history and make it a profoundly funny joke. I wonder sometimes if God laughs at my irreverent jokes; if not She is gotta be pretty pissed off by now. But how poor, lonely, and miserable would life be without the ability to mock the "order" of the world, because without this mocking there really are no good jokes left (ever heard an strict Evangelical try to crack a good one?). It is said that Socrates loved Comedies but almost never went to Tragedies in the theatre. We think of Socrates as a supremely rational person, so why would he be interested in joking satires? Maybe it is because his strength was that he did not think that he knew what he did not know. Socrates is a great example of someone who did not take the world too serious (there is a lot of humor in the Dialogues, it's just hard for us modern readers to find).

I'm not really sure where I'm going with this, but to me that is the point of a blog. I apologize if my joking ways have offended you, it's generally not personal.

"The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool."