Writing Tools

I grew up in the 1950s watching the first Godzilla movies as simple expressions of mindless adventure and dinosaur violence. I remember my shock years later upon reading an analysis that connected the birth of Godzilla -- a destructive monster created by radioactivity -- to the atomic bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II. Wow, I thought, how did I miss that?

I love that kind of smack in the forehead style of criticism, the kind that seeks to answer the questions: Why this and why now? Is there any relationship to gruesome torture movies such as the "Saw" films and the graphic images of torture from the Abu Ghraib prison?

In an essay published in Sunday's St. Petersburg Times, I try to apply the same kind of analysis to the multiple revivals of the Old English epic "Beowulf." I had fun writing this lead: "Never in a thousand years could I imagine using the names Beowulf and Angelina Jolie in the same sentence."

In short, I hold Beowulf up as what Barbara Tuchman called a "distant mirror" of our own times, a story about the birth of a heroic civilization and its near destruction by a terrorist monster who hides in caves and hates the joyful noise of culture and poetry. Osama bin Grendel.

I worry, on a rare occasion, of overreaching, of stretching for connections that are not really there -- except in the mind of the critic. But perhaps that's what critics are for: to stretch the meaning of a work without snapping it.

Let me know if this essay works for you, or not. Can you think of an example of a trend in film, television or popular culture that could lead to a deeper understanding of the here and now?