The Frozen Ones: Dantean Moments, Characters and Space in the films Aliens, Amelie, Sunset Blvd, Batman and Others

Abstract

This chapter details Dantean characters and spaces, defining them and then tracing their invention to Dante’s Inferno. A Dantean character is someone who has had an experience of high emotional intensity that connects him to a place and time who then perceives the world and behaves as if still partly stuck in that experience. A Dantean space is a subjective narrative space that is both in the present and also in some sense imbued with a past experience so that it reveals the internal emotional struggles, history, and hopes, dreams or fears of the character. An example is Miss Havisham from Great Expectations: brutally betrayed and abandoned as a young woman on her wedding day, for decades she lives in her tattered wedding dress in her dark grand parlor with the table still laden with the rotting wedding feast. Examples of Dantean Space include Aliens, Amelie, Sunset Blvd, and Nolan’s Batman trilogy.