[Download] "Man's Desire Exceeds His Grasp--the Prestige As Utopia (Critical Essay)" by Journal of Religion and Film # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free

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Title: Man's Desire Exceeds His Grasp--the Prestige As Utopia (Critical Essay)
Author : Journal of Religion and Film
Release Date : January 01, 2010
Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
Pages : * pages
Size : 185 KB

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Article [1] The Prestige tells the story of the rivalry of two magicians, Alfred Borden (played by Christian Bale) and Robert Angier (played by Hugh Jackman), in turn of the century London. This rivalry can be understood as what Chesterton calls "the greatest difficulty of man", when one considers it in terms of Rene Girard's mimetic theory. In I See Satan Fall Like Lightning Girard uncovers the problem of human desire in the Tenth Commandment's interdiction of coveting what belongs to one's neighbour. (2) His anthropological model revolves around the tenet that human beings desire what belongs to one's neighbour because of a lack of autonomous identity. The object that belongs to one's neighbour seems desirable because the other seems to possess an identity that the self is lacking. Hence it is not so much the object that is being desired but the very being of the person possessing the object. Human conflicts, according to Girard, are based on the imitation of apparently independent desires of others. For Girard, the fallenness of humanity is a problem of deviated desire. After the Fall the desire for transcendence, for being that previously was met in an imitation of God is directed to one's neighbour in an act of deviated transcendency. Or as he has put it in Deceit, Desire and the Novel: "Men become gods to each other." (3)