Newsgroup: it.arti.cinema
Titolo: L'articolo originale di Rushdie

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Getting Into Gang War
     By Salman Rushdie
     Wednesday, December 25, 2002
As the world prepares for war, two extraordinary portraits of
human conflict are offered at movie theaters this Christmas.
Peter Jackson's "The Two Towers," the second installment of the
"Lord of the Rings" trilogy, and Martin Scorsese's "Gangs of New
York" are superficially similar because of their mutual interest
in battle; but they could not be more different beneath their
bloodied surfaces, and the choice between their conflicting
visions is one we may all shortly have to make.
Both films have been eagerly anticipated. Neither has disappointed.
I do not speak here of their performance at the box office but of
their qualities as what one used to call "cinema," which is to say,
as art.
Like its precursor, "The Fellowship of the Ring," Jackson's picture
is an improvement on its source material, if only because Jackson's
film language is subtler, more sophisticated and certainly more
contemporary than the stilted, deliberate archaisms of J.R.R.
Tolkien's descriptive prose and, even more problematically, of his
dialogue. (I am a big fan of the book version of "The Lord of the
Rings," but nobody ever read Tolkien for the writing.)
One might say something similar about Scorsese's use of sources.
Herbert Asbury's 1928 classic "Gangs of New York" has been transmuted
in the film version into a poetic, visionary epic, a "birth of the
nation" saga that seeks nothing less, as the New York Times reviewer
comes close to suggesting, than to supplant the grand narratives of
national origins created by D.W. Griffith and John Ford.
It may seem strange to compare Jackson's fabular Middle Earth wars
among men, orcs, dwarfs, hobbits and elves with Scorsese's riots in
the all-too-real Five Points district of 19th-century Manhattan, but
both filmmakers share an interest in the cut and thrust of
hand-to-hand fighting, of close conflict realistically depicted
according to the "ancient laws of combat." Movie blood used to be
known as "Kensington gore" after the upscale London street, but
there's nothing posh or genteel about the gore offered here.
So much for parallels and surface similarities. Where the two films
differ radically is in what they have to say about men at arms and
about the nature of war.
"The Two Towers" -- how fortunate for all concerned that this title
was not ready for release 12 months ago, in the immediate aftermath
of the fall of the World Trade Center -- follows Tolkien in creating
a universe of moral absolutes. Tolkien didn't like people calling his
great work an allegory of the battle against Adolf Hitler, but the
echoes of World War II, the last "just war," are everywhere.
The Dark Lord Sauron is the incarnation of evil, and his most potent
(and very Wagnerian) weapon, the One or Ruling Ring, is made of and
perfects that evil. All who come under Sauron's baleful influence
become as thoroughly, homogeneously evil as their lord. The forces
of good that stand against him -- and this explains much of Tolkien's
appeal -- are, by contrast, extremely various: from Gandalf the wizard
(the powerful good guy), Aragorn the Ranger (the heroic good guy),
Legolas the elf (the cool good guy), Gimli the grumpy dwarf (the
uncool good guy), all the way down to the little people, the hobbits
or halflings, who will in the end save the day.
Scorsese's film offers no such extreme moral contrasts. As knife
goes up against cleaver, club against skull, nativist against
immigrant American, Protestant against Catholic, "good" and "evil"
seem almost irrelevant. This is the amoral world of bare-knuckle
power, a Darwinian cityscape in which only the fittest will survive.
And out of that world, Scorsese reminds us, comes ours. This is a
far braver, rarer vision than that of "The Two Towers," brilliant
as the fantasy epic is. Gang war is neither holy nor just, Scorsese
tells us, and, as one leaves the movie theater with his images
dazzling the mind's eye, the thought occurs that maybe all wars are
gang wars.
The films have opened at a time when all of us are trying to
come to grips with the fact of an impending, controversial war,
and many people, on both sides of the argument, are taking the
absolutist line. The Bush camp's interest in "evil" and "evildoers"
needs no further emphasis. But the Bushies are finding support in
some strange quarters. To take just one example, the crazy rage of
the writer Oriana Fallaci, directed without discrimination against
every Muslim in the world -- "every Muslim, without exception, is
a fundamentalist"; "they multiply like protozoa to infinity" -- is
one example of what one might call the New Evilism that is busily
painting the world in black and white. Oddly, opponents of the
proposed American attack on Iraq often look like mirror-images of
what they hate. According to these opponents, Western as well as
Islamic, the United States is the tyrant, the Dark Lord, and all
its purposes are vile.
The truth looks more confused, more amorally Scorsesean.  Saddam
Hussein is a murderous despot, but the present U.S. administration's
assaults on fundamental freedoms call into question its right to be
called freedom lovers. The overthrow of the present Iraqi leadership
may be desirable, but many of the scenarios for the aftermath of that
overthrow are undesirable, to say the least. America may be in less
danger from Iraq than its leaders claim, and the war on Hussein may
have more to do with breaking U.S. dependence on Saudi oil than
anyone cares to discuss.  Yet it is possible that this flawed war
may end up creating a better Iraq for most Iraqis than could be
achieved by any other means.
In short, we may be in for a gang war on a gigantic scale, and yet,
as in Scorsese's movie, that gang war, brutal, cynical, atavistic
-- a war in which one man's hero is another's villain -- may
paradoxically succeed in bringing a more modern world into being.
Ambiguity is out of fashion, however. We will be given a war
of heroes against villains at all costs. After all, "The Two
Towers" is a vast popular success, and "Gangs of New York" is
doing no better than modest business. Perhaps when the time for
the Oscars comes round, the academy will see fit to reward the
more profound complexities of the Scorsese movie. But by March
we may all be preoccupied by a greater, darker contest than the
one for the Academy Awards.
Salman Rushdie is the author of "Fury" and other novels.

needs no further emphasis.
Tradurre questo con "Rushdie e' intervenuto denunciando il
parallelismo fra la visione di Tolkien e quella dell’attuale
amministrazione Bush: il Male come un blocco unitario, il Bene al
contrario come un’unione di forze estremamente differenziate" mi pare
quantomeno una forzatura, ma tant'e'. In compenso, mi e' appena
sovvenuta un'assonanza fantastica: Sauron/Sharon. Perche' nessuno ci
ha pensato? Sauron ha un esercito potente e organizzato, mentre gli
eroi sono pochi e male armati, ma disposti a sacrificare la vita per
la Causa... suona familiare, no?
Prodi/Frodo! Gollum/D'Alema! Wheeee!

 Perche' nessuno ci ha pensato? 
:)
-- 
B. [ ICQ 13249673 ]
"Orwell was an optimist"
  Kibo

     Wednesday, December 25, 2002
[CUT]
Aiutatemi a capire: da *questo* articolo di Rushdie e' stato tratto
l'articolo de L'Unita'?
Bonfus