Episode 177: Riddles in the Dark: On Fairy Tales, Interpretation, and 'Rapunzel'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 09 Oct 2024 10:30:00 -0400

Fairy tales are among the most familiar cultural objects, so familiar that we let our kids play with them unsupervised. At the same time, they are also the most mysterious of artifacts, their heimlich giving way to unheimlich as soon as we give them a closer look and ask ourselves what they are really about. Indeed, these imaginal nomads, which seem to evade all cultural and historical capture, existing in various forms in every time and place, can become so strange as to make us wonder if they are cultural at all, and not some unexplained force of nature — the dreaming of the world. In this episode, JF and Phil use "Rapunzel" as a case study to explore the weirdness of fairy tales, illustrating how they demand interpretation without ever allowing themselves to be explained.

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SHOW NOTES

Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller" in Illuminations (Hannah Arendt, ed.; Harryn Zohn, trans.).
Novalis, Philosophical Writings. (Margaret Mahony Stoljar, trans.).
Cristina Campo, The Unforgivable and Other Writings (Alex Andriesse, trans.)
William Irwin Thompson, Imaginary Landscape
Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment
Marie-Louise von Franz,, Swiss Jungian psychologist
Sesame Street, “Rapunzel Rescue”
Disney’s Tangled
The Annotated Brothers Grimm
Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index
Marina Warner, Once Upon a Time
W. A. Mozart, The Magic Flute
Dante Alighieri, Il Convito
Panspermia hypothesis
Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature
John Mitchell, Confessions of a Radical Traditionalist
Clint Eastwood (dir.) The Unforgiven

Episode 96: Beautiful Beast: On Jean Cocteau's 'La Belle et la Bête'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 14 Apr 2021 10:00:00 -0400

Jean Cocteau's visionary rendition of Madame de Beaumont's fairy tale "Beauty and the Beast," itself the retelling of a story that may be several millennia old, is the topic of this Weird Studies episode, which proposes a journey down lunar paths to the crossroads where love and death intersect. Drawing on Surrealism, myth, and the occult, Cocteau's 1946 film transcends the limitations of media to become a living poem, a thing that is also a place, a place that is also a mind. This conversation touches on the genius of the child, the mysteries of Eros, the monstrosity of consciousness, and the sorcery of cinema.

Photo by Ivan Jevtic on Unsplash

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REFERENCES

Jean Cocteau (dir.), La Belle et la Bête

Jaques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry
Sergei Diaghilev, Russian impresario
Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise (dir.), Beauty and the Beast
David Thomson, Have You Seen?
Bram Stoker, Dracula
Johannes Vermeer, Dutch painter
Philip Glass, La Belle et la Bête (opera)
Game of Thrones, Television series
Weird Studies, Episode 84 on the Empress Card
Weird Studies, Episode 94 on the Moon Card

Weird Studies - Episodes Tagged with “Fairy Tales”

Episode 177: Riddles in the Dark: On Fairy Tales, Interpretation, and 'Rapunzel'

Episode 96: Beautiful Beast: On Jean Cocteau's 'La Belle et la Bête'