Whether or not one believes in the Christian God, it's clear that the spirituality of Salieri is corrupt and destitute. He calls the death of his father a “miracle” as it affirms the legitimacy of the pact he’s made for the furtherance of his desire to compose music. While a Christian might say this is not the work of God but of man or the Devil himself, an occultist may look to the human psyche as well as ancient spiritual concepts to explain Salieri’s experience. One may also point out that this is a fictional story and thereby requires no such explanation, but I believe these pacts and affirmations, or betrayals of them, occur throughout human history and society. Amadeus, even if an entirely fictitious depiction of these two men and their entanglement, is realistic in its depiction of this spiritual phenomenon.
Posts tagged #film review
Getting to Know A Complete Unknown
I recently went twice to see A Complete Unknown, the biopic about Bob Dylan’s early rise to stardom from 1961 until 1965 with Timothee Chalamet as Dylan. Both times the audience was mostly age fifty and up. I am eighty-five—two years older than Dylan. We are members of what is called, misleadingly, “The Silent Generation.” The postwar generation are Boomers, who are associated with the upheavals of the 1960s, but as Dylan puts it in his memoir, Chronicles, One, “I had very little in common with, and knew even less about, a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of.” The well-known movers of that era—Dylan, Warhol, Ginsberg, Baez, Beatles, Rolling Stones, and many others—are prewar or war babies.
