I have some Thoughts about Jonathan’s “a man’s death is not a calf’s” and the uncertainty of his soul’s existence after death. As a human, he has a soul. Jonathan has been using animalistic terms since he realized that Dracula isn’t human, such as lizard and creature. Vampires are known of having no soul, which means no casting of shadow or reflection.
Jonathan wants to die as a human than like an animal led to the altar for a blood ritual.
The calf is pretty much globally a sacrificial animal ([Moses] said to Aaron, “Take a bull calf for your sin offering and a ram for your burnt offering…” … So Aaron came to the altar and slaughtered the calf as a sin offering for himself. -Levictus 9:2-9). Though Jonathan could have used the more widely known lamb as a sacrifice simile.
But in this case, Jonathan is showing doubt about if he can even exist after death. Lambs represent purity and innocence, and he no longer sees himself as such. It could be that he feels he’s been becoming too corrupted. The castle’s influence, the creeping madness, the “wicked” desires he’s felt, the dreams, the intimacy with someone inhuman…
“At the worst it can only be death”. Death is no longer his greatest fear, it probably hasn’t been for a long time now.
suppressing unbecoming fantasies of making everyone who blithely talks like this spend a couple seasons spinning/weaving all their family’s clothing and chopping their own firewood
I love the complete lack of understanding about historical ways of living that imagine people had tons of free time not consumed by the constant labour of NOT FUCKING DYING come winter.
Or not living in filth and ruin. And so on.
eehhh, maybe they meant that the majority of a person’s labour would go towards themself/their family/their community, rather than going towards making someone else wealthy?
I have some very, very bad news about the majority of agrarian societies.
the unnatainable prelapsarian ideal but make it leftist
I award you one (1) internet and will be screenshotting this for later pithy use.
also what do people mean by “olden times?” because the nature of labor and compensation varies wildly by society, location, and time period
are we talking Bronze Age Japan? medieval Bavaria? the Benin Empire c. 1600? Gilded Age San Francisco? 1920s Spain? colonial Virginia? a Bering Strait Inupiat village in 1405?
…I mean like it’s probably everyone’s most favorite Imaginary Medieval Pan-European Society™, but still
actually i love growing older and learning how i work as a person like realizing what kinds of fabrics feel best on my skin or what brand of yogurt i like best or how I want to be touched. watching myself change, enjoying brussel sprouts when I used to hate them as a child, understanding why I got angry in that one conversation 10 years ago… there are so many mysteries inside me that i have yet to unravel and there will always be more and sometimes i think maybe its all worth it
idk when we decided that explaining yourself shouldn’t be part of an apology but like. if someone was a dick to me and apologizes but I still don’t understand why they did it I’m not gonna feel any better
“Sorry for hurting your feelings earlier. I was trying to say x, but I guess it came across wrong. I don’t think you’re stupid.”
or
“Sorry I snapped at you. I didn’t get enough sleep last night so my patience is a little low today.”
is a better apology than
“I want you to know that I am sorry that my actions offended you. I take full accountability for my actions and I am listening and learning. I hear you.”
Greek stage and screen actor who appeared in The Guns of Navarone, Zorba the Greek and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
It is apposite that Irene Papas, who has died aged 96, was at her peak when playing the heroines in film versions of classical Greek tragedies. Notwithstanding her many roles in a wide range of Hollywood, international and Greek films, including The Guns of Navarone (1961), Zorba the Greek (1964) and Z (1969), Papas always gave the impression that there was an Electra, Antigone or Clytemnestra bubbling beneath the surface.
She balanced expertly between theatrical tradition and the cinema closeup, her strong, expressive face being especially eloquent in moments of silent suffering.
All the films of the Euripides trilogy – Electra (1962), The Trojan Women (1971) and Iphigenia (1976) – directed by Michael Cacoyannis, were dominated by Papas’s dramatic beauty in closeup against realistic Greek landscapes, and proved that the ancient myths could grip modern audiences. It was Cacoyannis, with whom Papas made six films, including Zorba the Greek, who brought out her talent in full.
The daughter of teachers, she was born Eirini Lelekou in a village near Corinth, and attended the royal drama school in Athens. She started her career in her teens as a singer and dancer in variety shows before launching her film career in 1948, by which time she had married the director Alkis Papas.
After two minor films in Greece, she signed a contract in Italy, where she was underused. Among them were two sword and sandals epics, Theodora, Slave Empress (1954) and Attila (1954), in which she played second fiddle – in the first to Gianna Maria Canale, and in the second to Sophia Loren with Anthony Quinn in the title role. Papas would co-star with Quinn in several films, in which they were a combustible duo.
She made an impressive Hollywood debut as the lover of a ruthless cattle baron (James Cagney) in the Robert Wise western Tribute to a Bad Man (1956). This was the female lead role and she consolidated her star status as the valiant resistance leader in the war adventure The Guns of Navarone.
In the same year, 1961, Papas took on her first Greek tragedian role in Antigone. Directed by George Tzavellas in such a way to make Sophocles’s poetic parable come across with lucidity, it allowed Papas as the intractable heroine to demonstrate her elegiac power.
Papas as Electra, in her first film with Cacoyannis, prompted the critic Dilys Powell to exclaim: “I had never thought to see the face of the great Apollo from the Olympia pediment live and move. Now I have seen it.” Roger Ebert, looking back on the Oscar-nominated film 10 years later, said: “The funereal figures of the Greek chorus – poor peasant women scattered on a hillside – still weep behind Electra, and I can never forget her lament for her dead mother. I thought then, and I still think, that Irene Papas is the most classically beautiful woman ever to appear in films.”
The Trojan Women lost the power, poetry and beauty of the ancient Greek language by being in English, but the multinational cast of Katharine Hepburn (Hecuba), Vanessa Redgrave (Andromache), Geneviève Bujold (Cassandra) and Papas as a seductive Helen of Troy, compensated somewhat. The Oscar-nominated Iphigenia (based on Cacoyannis’s stage production of Iphigenia at Aulis), the last of his Euripides trilogy, had Papas, by now in her 50s, giving a forceful performance as Clytemnestra.
Between the first and second Euripidean films, Papas played the lonely widow in Zorba the Greek who, after making love to an English writer (Alan Bates), is stoned by the Cretan villagers. The character has little dialogue, but Papas’s face and body language are eloquent enough.
Papas went on to play other widows, notably in two political thrillers, Elio Petri’s We Still Kill the Old Way (1967) and Costa-Gavras’s Z. The latter clearly pointed the finger at the colonels’ totalitarian regime in Greece, which Papas – who lived in exile in Italy from 1967 to 1974 – called “the fourth Reich”.
In 1968, among the first work Papas undertook in Italy was the mafia drama The Brotherhood, opposite Kirk Douglas, and the television miniseries The Odyssey, in which she played Penelope. She had now become a travelling player, playing Spaniards such as Catherine of Aragon in Anne of the Thousand Days (1969) or Italians such as the lusty housekeeper in Francesco Rosi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli (1979). In the 1970s and 80s, Papas made an average of two films a year, many of them unworthy of her talents.
Happily, she had the chance to shine on Broadway in two plays by Euripides, in the title role of Medea (1973) and as Agave in The Bacchae (1980), the latter directed by Cacoyannis. Of her Medea, the New York Times critic wrote: “Irene Papas, who has often played aggrieved and grieving women, brings to the role a controlled intensity, an innate intelligence, and an implacably stubborn anger.”
In films, she began to get supporting roles, bringing fire and authenticity as mothers and grandmothers as in Rosi’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1987) and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (2001) before making a superb exit from cinema in Manoel de Oliveira’s multilingual A Talking Picture (2003).
At one point in the film, on board a cruise ship in the Mediterranean, Papas keeps the passengers spellbound by singing a Greek folk song. Her beautiful contralto voice can also be heard on discs of songs by Vangelis and Mikis Theodorakis.
After leaving the cinema, Papas appeared in Euripides’ Hecuba on stage in Rome in 2003, and directed Antigone at the Greek theatre in Syracuse in 2005. She also devoted herself to the establishment of schools of acting in Rome and Athens.
Papas’s first marriage ended in divorce in 1951, and her second marriage, to José Kohn, in 1957, was annulled.
Irene Papas, actor, born 3 September 1926; died 14 September 2022
Me to anyone who will listen: Judy Garland not winning an Oscar for the 1954 version of A Star is Born is the biggest Oscar robbery of ALL TIME in this essay I will
