Word: gesamtkunstwerke
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...bedrooms across America. But it's pro wrestlers who will reign supreme, because they are the embodiment of sport as soap opera. With wrestling's incomparable melding of the trailer park and Valhalla, its intricate and interlacing narratives, its music, pyrotechnic stagecraft and glorification of oratory, it is the Gesamtkunstwerk--the total artwork--of the sports and entertainment world. Professional wrestling will be the single most powerful influence on all other sports well into the 22nd century...
Richard Wagner envisioned something he called a Gesamtkunstwerk -- an all- encompassing work of art -- that would meld music, poetry, drama, dance and stagecraft into one unified, glorious spectacle. The Minimalist composer Philip Glass, 57, has been inviting comparison with Wagner ever since the 1976 debut of his four-hour epic Einstein on the Beach, Wagnerian in length and scope if not in idiom; and the Wagnerian ideal has been evident in much of his later work as well -- in Hydrogen Jukebox's marriage of Minimalism to the poetry of Allen Ginsberg (1990), and in 1,000 Airplanes on the Roof...
...turns out, Glass's most fully realized Gesamtkunstwerk has its origins in the movies. For his new opera, La Belle et la Bete (Beauty and the Beast), which had its American premiere last week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Glass has finally found the perfect vehicle for his Wagnerism in the film of the same title by the French author, aesthete and cineaste Jean Cocteau. Glass's is the best version of the story yet -- even surpassing Disney's animated movie musical...
This letter is in reply to Jeff Chase's review of Rocky V in the Friday, December 6 edition of The Crimson. Neither his use of the word Gesamtkunstwerk (which I did not understand) nor his characterization of the theater-goers who reacted hostilely to the Russian boxer Drago as "alleged human beings" is what particularly upsets me. What I do find disconcerting is his political mindset, particularly his characterization of the nation's current political mood as "reasonless xenophobia." This mindset sees improper jingoism in such movies as Rocky IV and Rambo. It views them as irrational...
Rocky IV is no ordinary movie--in fact it's barely a movie at all. It is a Gesamtkunstwerk done MTV style, a self-inflicted patriotic catharsis of shameless propaganda exploiting the current American past-time of reasonless xenophobia. Whatever you call it, I cannot deny Stallone's drawing power nor can I blame the people who froze with me in order to see his hulking physique. For better or worse, the former porn star has created a myth that exerts a definite influence over the attitudes and behavior patterns of most viewers...