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a few thoughts about our crazy world and how we fit into it...

Blog 1 // July 24, 2004

Last night I went to see King Arthur, written by David Franzoni, who wrote the screenplay for Gladiator. I thought Gladiator was a good film, with a strong script. King Arthur is an interesting historical repositioning of a famous story—but it’s not a great script. There has been some debate over whether A.O. Scott’s review in the New York Times was fair in its less-than-enthusiastic assessment of the film. I love fantastic stories of all kinds—medieval, sci-fi, comic, post-apocalyptic or pure fantasy—but the good ones tell a coherent story that makes you care deeply about the plight of its characters and that teaches you something important about modern reality. Gladiator did both these things; King Arthur did neither.

Still, the idea of taking a famous tale told and retold countless times in books, films, fairytales, musical theater, and comics and the basis of an infinite number of original (or not so original) stories, and moving its context entirely is a fascinating one—whether or not it is really based on new research, as the opening of the film states. The King Arthur story is usually set in the Middle Ages, effectively anywhere from the 1100s to the 1500s. This new version is set around 400 AD, when Rome was still the dominant power but heathen tribes such as the Saxons (and the Goths, the Huns etc.) were attacking the Empire from many directions. Arthur is a half-Briton who grew up in the civilized world of Rome but is forced by a long-standing contract between his people and the Roman government to serve as a “knight” and fight for the Empire for fifteen years. The Roman Empire is portrayed here, as it often is, as corrupt and driven by power and perversion (Fellini told it best in Satyricon). Arthur does wax on about how Rome is the center of culture, sophistication and knowledge—but he is convinced by the actions of others that the great city-state is no longer what it once was.

My father often said the same thing about New York.

I wonder if a thousand years from now—some time shortly after the brilliant celebrations, terrorist threats, technological confusion, and debates over which year is the real millennium, accompanying the arrival of the year 3000—someone will come up with the notion that the period of time in which we live now really happened earlier in history, or later. What if they get all confused and decide it was really after the second Martian settlement that a fanatic Muslim blew up buildings in New York and some long-forgotten U.S. president launched a war against the wrong country, setting off a chain of events that took centuries to untangle. Or after extensive research in files no longer accessible by up-to-date computer systems, it is determined that the Civil War was the result of an irreparable break between the Blue and the Red states, spurred on by the famous midnight ride of Michael Moore.

Hey, this is my blog, and if I want to go off the deep end, that’s my prerogative, lawyer or not.

To put this in historical perspective for future generations, the Democratic Convention is about to start in Boston. By the time anyone reads this, John Kerry will be officially nominated as the Democratic candidate. We’ll still have to suffer through the Republican convention, and three plus months of clever character attacks and defensive posturing by both sides. If you clicked “Archives”, you already know who won. Whoever it is, I hope the new administration takes to heart some of the concepts floating around our new millennium these days, such as protecting the environment in a meaningful way, taking care of all our people (with food, health care, security from wars and ethnic cleansing), a rational limitation on the proliferation of weapons we no longer need at all, and a resolution of some of history’s longest running religious, ethnic and political divisions. And if you want to better understand the issues raised by radical fundamentalists posturing against the rest of humanity, read Frank Herbert’s Dune (the book, not the movie).

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