The Culture Beat

Another reminder that the culture of the past is valuable only to the degree of its potential for exploitation as a public domain, and thus non-copyrighted, source of entertainment. A pre-sold title of some existing story and characters is easier to bring to market based on the public’s familiarity with said “property.”

Thus seeing this trailer for the upcoming EA video game version of “Dante’s Inferno,” was a moment that speaks directly to the gulf between pop culture and the Western Tradition. The Divine Comedy is one of the great literary works of all time, a book-length three-part poem that captures the vision of the Christian cosmos at the height of the Middle Ages. At the beginning of the first book, The Inferno, Dante, lost in a strange wood, and longing for his deceased love Beatrice, is given a tour of Hell by Virgil the pagan Roman poet. Along the way as they descend into the underworld going down, eventually through all nine circles of Hell where sinners from history and myth receive their appropriate and gruesome punishment. The CGI trailer for the “game,” opens with a voiceover from the Dante’s poem, and we see an armor-clad figure who sights what is apparently his lost love, the saintly, deceased Beatrice who is swept away from him by a dark eerie spectre. At this point, the forces of Hell rise up to confront our hero, not evidently a poet searching for a guide, but a warrior spoiling for a fight. And with the nine game levels already conveniently laid out, our hero should provide gamers with hours of distraction from worthier activities.

Looking more like a Lord of the Rings video game, with demons and balrogs and really big worms, rather than one of the major works of Western literature, the idea that this will likely be the only way gamers will experience the first installment of the Divine Comedy is pretty depressing. The real story contains little if any conflict and no combat. Rather, as shown by one of the classic Gustave Doré’s illustrations, it’s a mighty sobering passage through the last home of sinners of increasing magnitude ending with Lucifer, the king of Hell, at the bottom, trapped in ice.

At least one doesn’t have to worry about sequels based on the rest of the story–it’s impossible to imagine how game designers, craving new material based on conflict and dark imagery, could do anything with Purgatorio, or especially the Paradiso, with its monumentally sublime image of Dante’s approach to the pure Light of the Face of Love Himself.