Abishai100
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- Sep 22, 2013
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Hellmouth is the entrance to Hell envisaged as the gaping mouth of a huge monster, an image which first appears in Anglo-Saxon art, and then spread all over Europe, remaining very common in depictions of the Last Judgment and Harrowing of Hell until the end of the Middle Ages, and still sometimes used during the Renaissance and after. It enjoyed something of a revival in polemical popular prints after the Protestant Reformation, when figures from the opposite side would be shown disappearing into the mouth. A notable late appearance is in the two versions of a painting by El Greco of about 1578. Political cartoons still showed Napoleon leading his troops into one (source of summary: Wikipedia).
For our modern age, a hellmouth can refer to a breach of trust or a distortion of social contracts. Contract-making is the hallmark of our age of mercantilism-globalization (i.e., eTrade).
When controversial film-maker Stanley Kubrick released the Nabokov-adapted film "Lolita" (1962), movie audiences were introduced to the 'hellmouth' idea of a younger woman drawing the attentions of an emotionally anxious man away from the charms of an older woman more appropriate to the man's own age.
"Lolita" (1962) makes us think about why the seminal Fisher-Buttafuoco suburbia extra-marital scandal (involving an attempted murder and a younger woman drawing away an older man from his marriage to a wife closer to his own age) evokes conversational considerations of how everyday life choices can draw us towards scandal, temptation, controversy, and a contract hellmouth. After all, isn't suburbia the modern sign of cosmopolitan related urban development residential outlier sprawl? Amy Fisher shattered our sensibilities about the safety and coziness of suburbia.
I read a news report on the Internet of an airline stewardess who informed on an intricate narcotics ring operating among the pilots and employees of her airline company and the airports in which they were parked. Travel/tourism speaks to a civilization investment in mobility, and a stewardess in troubled with the law suggests that our assumptions about the security of suburbia, airlines, immigration (etc.) are undermined by symbolic 'hellmouths' created by unlicensed profiteers (Wall Street tycoons) and daredevils (home-wreckers, drug-smugglers, etc.).
Why do American youngsters, for example, seem endlessly fascinated by instability-toxic comic book characters such as Two-Face (DC Comics) --- a criminally insane rogue vigilante who believes punishment should be administered at the flip-of-a-coin when cops are simply ineffective?
What is the difference between graffiti and rage?
Hellmouth
Amy Fisher
For our modern age, a hellmouth can refer to a breach of trust or a distortion of social contracts. Contract-making is the hallmark of our age of mercantilism-globalization (i.e., eTrade).
When controversial film-maker Stanley Kubrick released the Nabokov-adapted film "Lolita" (1962), movie audiences were introduced to the 'hellmouth' idea of a younger woman drawing the attentions of an emotionally anxious man away from the charms of an older woman more appropriate to the man's own age.
"Lolita" (1962) makes us think about why the seminal Fisher-Buttafuoco suburbia extra-marital scandal (involving an attempted murder and a younger woman drawing away an older man from his marriage to a wife closer to his own age) evokes conversational considerations of how everyday life choices can draw us towards scandal, temptation, controversy, and a contract hellmouth. After all, isn't suburbia the modern sign of cosmopolitan related urban development residential outlier sprawl? Amy Fisher shattered our sensibilities about the safety and coziness of suburbia.
I read a news report on the Internet of an airline stewardess who informed on an intricate narcotics ring operating among the pilots and employees of her airline company and the airports in which they were parked. Travel/tourism speaks to a civilization investment in mobility, and a stewardess in troubled with the law suggests that our assumptions about the security of suburbia, airlines, immigration (etc.) are undermined by symbolic 'hellmouths' created by unlicensed profiteers (Wall Street tycoons) and daredevils (home-wreckers, drug-smugglers, etc.).
Why do American youngsters, for example, seem endlessly fascinated by instability-toxic comic book characters such as Two-Face (DC Comics) --- a criminally insane rogue vigilante who believes punishment should be administered at the flip-of-a-coin when cops are simply ineffective?
What is the difference between graffiti and rage?
Hellmouth
Amy Fisher
