Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship is a magnificent Jane Austen adaptation, not least because it conceives of the perfect ending for the unpolished project of Austen’s juvenescence, Lady Susan. This is Jane Austen, and it is a comedy, so of course there must be a wedding at the end. But how does one best pull [...]
Because Whit Stillman has adapted Jane Austen’s Lady Susan for his new movie, Love & Friendship, it is worth asking the question: Will most people find that Mr. Stillman has discovered, in this early work of Austen, something new and unfamiliar about her, and made it accessible? The question is prompted by the reports of [...]
Whit Stillman’s new movie, Love & Friendship, is an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Lady Susan. Mr. Stillman takes this piece of Austen juvenilia, an epistolary novella, and fleshes it out into a screenplay faithful to the spirit of Austen. Not only that, but also he has reworked Austen’s story into a novel of his own, [...]
In valor, there is hope. —Tacitus When it played in the movie theaters, the terrific movie Act of Valor (2012) earned notoriety for two reasons. First of all, for its casting it used real-life warriors instead of some Hollywood actors. This lent a certain unusual authenticity to the dramatic enactment, even if the acting seemed [...]
There is a classic passage in Vergil’s Aeneid in which Anchises commends to future Romans what is, in effect, the “mission statement” for the Roman Empire. In these lines, the father of Aeneas is telling us what his son Aeneas, the Trojan who has journeyed from the fallen city of Troy, will set in motion [...]
Are superheroes members of society? The movie Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice introduces a new development in the cinematic universe of Batman and Superman. We are invited to question the godlike status of such superheroes. Are they fit to live among us? Because superheroes possess unusual superpowers, they are designated as “meta-humans.” Do such [...]
In Plato’s Republic, we hear of the tale of Gyges’ ring. This famous tale has been adapted in equally famous ways: one need only think of The Lord of the Rings, or Wagner’s Ring Cycle, to realize its perennial influence. But what is the meaning of this tale in the original form in which the Republic [...]
How can the wealthiest people make democracies worse? Plato investigates the question in Book VIII of the Republic. Socrates suggests there that, in pursuit of more and more wealth, oligarchic citizens within the democracy will exploit the lower economic classes, even to the point of undermining their own oligarchic economic interests. In other words, the [...]
The disordered souls of the tyrannical mob, in projecting their power through the individual tyrant that they select as their leader, will all suffer by being betrayed and disowned by the tyrant. And what more could be expected? Plato gives an account in the ninth book of the Republic of how a tyrannical soul is [...]
Plato tried to act as a political advisor to the tyrant Dionysius II of Syracuse. Famously, it was a fiasco. What are the sources of this failure? Cicero, in his Tusculan Disputations, has an interesting section on Dionysius. He tells us how Dionysius ruled over the Syracusans for thirty-eight years, beginning his rule when he [...]
The film “Gladiator” imparts a feeling of what living according to Stoic virtue might be. One of the best Stoic lines of dialogue in the film is given to Maximus, who says: “I knew a man who once said, ‘Death smiles at us all. All a man can do is smile back.’” In Ridley Scott’s [...]
Plato’s Ion contains an unforgettable image describing artistic experience. In conversation with a rhapsode named Ion, Socrates likens the activity of poets to the operation of a magnet. Ion’s own professional expertise lies in the recitation of the poetry of Homer, and so Socrates says: “The gift which you possess of speaking excellently about Homer [...]
In the history of philosophy, what is the permanent achievement of the Pre-Socratics? Did they attain anything in thought that we can rightly credit to them? Or must they forever be seen as precursors to something greater? The very name used by scholars to classify them seems to condemn them forever to the status of [...]
Heading out to see the new Leonardo DiCaprio film, The Revenant, my friend joked, “Get ready for The Edge — Part Deux!” Mr. DiCaprio plays Hugh Glass, inspired by the actual frontiersman of that name. The Revenant tells the story of how, in 1823, a bear attacks Glass, who is then left for dead by [...]