The Puppet Comedy: Inferno

Link: This link leads to a video clip of a scene in the eight circle from Dante’s Inferno, 2007.

After reading the first five cantos of the Inferno, I had a strong desire to see how Dante’s journey through hell could be envisioned if interpreted from a modern context. And so, in search of this new interpretation, I began my own little journey.  A few key strokes and mouse clicks later, my journey was soon at an end. Unlike Dante, I could not say that I made it through hell and reached enlightenment, but the end result of my journey’s search was quite productive as for I found exactly what I was searching for.  In my search, I came across an interesting comedy movie made in 2007 titled Dante’s Inferno that successfully redefines this great classic. The movie cleverly uses paper puppetry and biting satire to adapt the story to a modern audience.

                The first few minutes of the movie could have well been the last few minutes, if my curiosity did not buffer my limited patience. My first hasty opinion of the movie was that it was poor, tasteless, and low budget comedic  attempt to say something new about what already been said more elegantly in the Inferno by Dante. The puppetry and tongue-in-cheek humor really threw me off at first because the grittiness usually associated with subject of Hell caused me to expect something more serious. For instance, there is hilarious and almost slapstick scene where Dante and Virgil are chased through an airport in one of circles of Hell by one of the demons of hell represented as a TSA agent. And there is another comical scene where Dante and Virgil are leisurely ice skating on the icy landscape of Hell’s inner circle, which is frozen over by  the cold gusts of wind from Satan's flapping wings.  Although the Inferno is part of a large work called the Divine Comedy, it was not written by Dante to be an actual comedy that inspires jolly emotions.

 Nevertheless, the more that I watched the movie, the more I loved it and the more connections I made. With the funny antics aside, the movie does a great job in tying elements in the Inferno with modern-day people and events and in the process serving a commentary on the culture and politics of our present-day society in the same way that the original version was a commentary on medieval society. For example, the movie criticizes the despicableness of the obesity epidemic in America by placing an obese version of the Statue of Liberty on to of a landscape overflowing with greasy American fast food in the third circle of Gluttony.  The movie also takes a jab at the fraud and counter-productiveness in American political system by placing Washington D.C. in the eighth and condemning the politicians to sin of flattery. There are many more creative and sometimes weird modern references in the movie, but in order to avoid spoiling the movie, it is best to see them for oneself.