There is that scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where all the knights are singing about Camelot and it flashes to the guy in the dungeon who is capping to the beat without the benefit of the music and I have always found that just darn amusing (it was also the first time my son had ever seen that movie and while he found it super amusing, he didn’t quite understand the ending). But what it really got me thinking about was more of the subject of today’s Tweetic.
There is this sort of old world mystery to Europe that America only has a bit of and even that is only sparse in the 13 colonies. And I wonder how many people have the same impression of the prison system that Lee might have. Where when you are thrown into jail, it is complete with moldy brickwork and hanging skeleton. Or perhaps, it is simply that a greater majority of people have not been in jail at any point so we use television and movies as our source material. That being the case, it is a bit sad if someone has seen nothing but Women in Prison films or other softcore exploitation films that portray the prison experience as some sort of sado-masochistic sexual fantasy. Or, perhaps, there is this niche of people that feel that Jailhouse Rock is perhaps a better place to mine for information. While The Count of Monte Cristo is probably not necessarily the truest representation of a European prison, I think that film allows our fantasy of what an old world prison is, to exist in what we see as some sort of “gritty” manner (although, come to think of it, I think the majority of the cast was English, so once again we must live through a French book with a British cast).
The fact of the matter is, we probably don’t want to really know what the inside of a prison looks like. Not because it is so horrible that we couldn’t deal with it psychologically, but instead because it is generally so plain that it would rather ruin our impressions. Just like neither Roots nor Gone with the Wind really pinged the “Slave” experience, I don’t think The Green Mile or The Longest Yard really set it down. Chances are, something more like The Chamber is where we get a better representation of the Prison Atmosphere. But do we ever really want any real Reality in our fantasy? Is it funnier to see extreme characters in a real setting or extreme characters in an extreme setting? I think a mix of both, maybe. The movie wasn’t great, but I think Showtime did a great wink and nudge to the entire notion of glossing up an environment for the purposes of entertainment, and it is worth a look if you can rent it for .99¢ at Blockbuster.
Where do you think that cinema has taken a rather mundane environment and “extremed” it?
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