the trial

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: So Long, Marjane

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Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest instalment in your favourite franchise, an obscure preview for a strange indie darling, whether it’s good, bad, ugly or just plain weird – your favourite pop culture baristas are there to tell you what they think.

Two days ago, we learnt of the tragic death of Marjane Satrapi, French-Iranian writer and filmmaker, perhaps most famous for her graphic novel Persepolis and its later adaptation into a film, also by Satrapi. If you haven’t yet seen (or read) Persepolis, make sure to seek it out – it is a story that is timely not only because of its author’s untimely death.

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Criterion Corner: The Trial (#1191)

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“Someone must have slandered Joseph K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.”

Back when I went to school, it was clear that, at some point, we would be reading something by Franz Kafka – and, at the time at least, chances were it’d either be The Metamorphosis (published in 1915), in which a man wakes up to find himself changed into an enormous insect, or The Trial (published in 1925), that foundational work of paranoid fiction. If I remember correctly, we ended up reading both, though from the time I mostly remember the 1915 novella, perhaps also because of that memorable MTV short from the channel’s “Feed Your Head” series. But while The Metamorphosis still has that deliciously fantastic angle of a man turning into a bug (admittedly, at my current age I find that premise less fantastic than I did as a teen), arguably it’s The Trial that feels the most universal – and its footprints can be found across culture and cinema.

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The Rear-View Mirror: Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis (1912)

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Each Friday we travel back in time, one year at a time, for a look at some of the cultural goodies that may appear closer than they really are in The Rear-View Mirror. Join us on our weekly journey into the past!

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect… ‘What has happened to me?” he thought. It was not a dream.”

When I read Kafka’s classic novella The Metamorphosis (written in 1912, first published in 1915) as a teenager, that first, audacious sentence grabbed me – but it’s the one that comes a little later that punched me in the gut. Kafka’s story about a man who finds himself turned into a beetle should be dreamlike, but the telling is deadpan, if at times a little droll, and it never once allows the reader to go for that easiest of interpretations: it’s a dream, it’s all metaphors, it’s one big symbol. Certainly there is symbolism there, but as we’re reading Kafka’s story, he doesn’t grant us that facile emergency exit of consigning it all to the realm of unreality. Kafka’s prose makes it seem, and feel, all too real.

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