Friday, May 15, 2009

Hellboy, History, & Dialectic

Daniel Jones keeps bugging me to read some book or another by Joseph Farrell. However, after browsing his blog I see that I don’t need to read Farrell’s book after all since I’ve already seen the movie.

At least, to judge by his blog, Farrell is obviously the ghost screenwriter for Hellboy. It has all the key elements: Russian monks, Nazi technology, freewill v. destiny, &c.

Anyone can see that Hellboy is a thinly-veiled allegory for Farrell’s alternative histories. On second thought, maybe his alternative histories are thinly-veiled allegories for Hellboy. Hard to tell which is which.

1 comment:

  1. Mike Mignola would be surprised. Since he's been telegraphing that Hellboy's ultimate fate is to die Hellboy in the long run may be less about the freedom of the will than the inescapibility of one's destiny, not that I'd expect Mignola to have an especially nuanced view of destiny.

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