Monday, April 11, 2011
Kleist!
Hey everyone, I know I make a lot of references from a lot of our texts to films I have seen in the past, and Kohlaas story reminds me of "Law Abiding Citizen." Plot is very very similar.... in the film...Gerard Buttler's wife and daughter were killed and the legal system let the killer go free...Gerard was furious and became a mad man (he used to be a "law abiding citizen.")... makes me think? are all the movies we see today taken from some sort of story?
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I think there's a lot to that, Ahmed. It's what literary theorists call "archetypes" -- the same basic storylines, situations, etc. recurring over and over again. "Michael Kohlhaas" is a particularly popular archetype -- the anachronistic avenger, abiding by the law of a period that belongs not to his time but to the audience's time, and stopping at nothing to enact justice based on that code of law. "Kohlhaas" itself was a very popular story (among many, including the Nazis) -- and became a play and an opera. It also, as you say, inspired lots of other work -- most directly, the E. L. Doctorow novel (and later movie and musical) RAGTIME, set in the early twentieth century and starring a black ragtime musician named Coalhouse, who suffers similar indignation (replace horses with a Model-T Ford) and fights a similar fight.
ReplyDeleteTotally agree with you!
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