Sunday, March 27, 2011

Big Love...The Sopranos...Lillian Gish...Bergman...Dostoevsky...Michelangelo...The Prophets

Bill Henricksen is a man committed to good whose actions have the taint of evil. Tony Soprano is a man committed to evil whose actions have the taint of good. Like the protagonists of all great literature from The Bible unto the present day, both characters are at the center of parables that reveal the world to us in a grain of sand. They are every bit as much revelations as any religious awakening, but in no way are they fiery awakenings that provoke us into action. Rather than reveal an explanation of the world to us in a flash, they instead reveal to us the world's full complexity. And in so doing they reveal us to ourselves. We sit, we watch, and rather than watch the boob tube passively as TV is generally conceived, we watch actively and we contemplate, and we then create our own interpretations without need that they ever satisfy anyone but ourselves.

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