My comic book La Grande Crociata just came out, so I’m starting a guided tour throught the depths os my personal collective consciousness to reflect on how the heck I arrived here. Let’s start with some movies, shall we? And if you called them barbarians, now you will pay! Jolly good, here we go…
Conan The Barbarian (John Milius, 1982)
Much more than a kitsch celebration of maleness, it is an aesthetic and conceptual triumph of Hyborian proportions.
Beyond decapitations, camel punching, vulture biting and trivial theological and cultural chats, the movie almost could be called The Amazing Valeria And Her Cimmerian Assistant, thanks to the larger than life presence of Sandahl Bergman.
One of the most interesting aspects in the movie is the contrast between different ways of dealing with spirituality. There are no intermediaries between Conan and his main god, Crom - an invisible buddy-deity with an attitude of the real world is your problem. As with pre-christian cultures, the divine is everywhere, everything is sacred and we are part of it. Good and evil are equally important components of life and the divine manifests itself through Nature. There are no temples and the only liturgy presented is improvised by Conan on spot.
On the other hand we have the cult of Thulsa Doom, a bureaucratic faith machine fueled with brainwashing and actively pursuing power in the material world. Yes, Thulsa Doom can turn into a giant snake, but his greatest strength is not magical: a wicked hability of influencing people, from peasants to warriors and kings. A strict hierarchy is essential in this institution to convert more people into followers and because gold, jewels and other goods must be counted and classified.
All of this delivered with a soundtrack that is one of the best artifacts ever done in this little rock we call Earth. Here the first and only time that Basil Poledouris conducted a live concert of the Conan Symphony. He passed away four months later, but his work is forever.
Flesh+Blood (Paul Verhoeven, 1985)
It’s ambiguity time, so shut up and take your mandrake.
Paul Verhoeven is not known for his subtletly, but this movie is a well crafted work on ambiguity. Crooks and bandits can be charismatic and can even perform noble acts, while the purest romance between first class heirs happens under a loathsome shadow.
Nothing is what it seems. The sweet princess has a bitter complexity, the cardinal is a crook (well, that’s not that shocking) and, more important, is it faith an instrument for good or is it faith an instrument for anything decided by someone with a sword?
As a kid, the first time I saw this movie I got really disconcerted, not by all the loot, killing, rape, corpses and even an early example of biological warfare, but by the amoral atmosphere, the humanity of it. It makes me think about all of us as this collective of cruelty, love, confusion, contempt, empathy and everything in between.
Valhalla Rising (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2009)
Or Conan If It Was Directed By Ingmar Bergman. Yes, it is that good.
Almost a silent movie, it is a contemplative barbarian journey through the vast and indifferent Nature. We are taken on this deep tour of (un)consciousness by not very chatty guides, a process that gives us time and space to feel and think about the sky, the mountains, the water, the mud and ourselves, traveling in a world that exists since long before us and will continue to exist after we vanish.
With a group of vikings converted to a shiny new cult known as Chistianity, we get a boat leading to the Holy Land. That’s right, it is a tiny Crusade Cruise and there are no return tickets. And, by Odin’s socks, it goes really wrong, not only in geographical sense, but at metaphysical levels.
So here we are with much more than an adventurous historical fiction, but a reflection on the other - other people, other beliefs, other thinking, other land, other experiences and the other inside each one of us.
The breathtaking and bittersweet soundtrack keep us on this boat.
For now th-th-th-that’s all folks! In the next chapters: more movies, comics, books, music and everything that feeds my work on comics like The Great Crusade.