which one tho
life of galileo
Couldn’t help pulling a
* apropos of two things:
1) We’ve been living in a post-soviet world for so long that, even for the sexagenarians, it’s difficult to comport yourself to certain themes that were intended to resonate in a political atmosphere where ‘leftism’ or whatever didn’t ultimately reduce to social progressivism and market regulations. For the early boomers sitting in front of me, leafing through the pamphlet and going “oh, he was a
socialist”, speaking truth to power -what I have to imagine was the whole reason they put this one on the bill this season- is probably only understood relative to the Trump presidency and the media climate that gestated it. There’s a really smarmy repose that gets produced in a certain type of liberal where they can honestly commit themselves to the proposition that “history has a liberal bias” and all that’s needed is for the wheels on knowledge-production to keep on churning and eventually mans fetters will naturally slough off of him -his moral enlightenment following lockstep with an increase in technical knowledge. Rather than Galileo’s hubris leading to the initial divorcing of technics from it’s embedded normative framework, his telescope being just a few steps removed from the atom bomb. So the call at the end to guard
Science! sounds like it’s being played 100% straight rather than ironically/hollowly.
2) the anticlericalism also sounds like it’s super straightforward. The effete scholastics come across like run of the mill superstitious obscurantists (with more than a little secret society malevolence). Galileo’s assurance that his telescope is in accord with Christian doctrine, or however he phrases it, is supposed to come across as comical to a modern audience, underlining again just how far we’ve come.
*i know this is shitty, but it was a Brecht play, fuck you
