by Ilaria Muggianu Scano
Wednesdayteen drama by Tim Burton, says more than he would like. It influences fashions and customs exactly as expected by the Netflix production. Which, then, the sophisticated not said of the dark gothic series? The American director, a brilliant master of stop motion, between tactile quality and vintage suggestions, is the most theological “non-religious” intellectual of the 1920s.
“Religion is profoundly a dimension intimate. I don’t belong to any specific religion, but I try to be as spiritual as possible,” Burton said several times. It is not known whether it is agnostic, syncretistic or vaguely pantheistic, but certainly the city of Büsteni, in Romania, a hundred kilometers from Bucharest, converted into the fictional Jericho, which houses the Nevermore Academy recalls certain biblical analogies.
Radical and significant, just to give an example, the choice of Jericho, which is the first city in history (the oldest walls date back to 5000 BC), therefore emblematic to assimilate the logistic choice to the poetic one of the symbolic new existential beginning for i outcasts of societythe singular students of the Nevermore college, guilty only of not sharing certain social conventions of the contemporary bourgeoisie and of the past.
Without ever explicitly speaking of ableism, homosexuality and ethnic minorities, Burton entrusts a inclusion message and equality in pluralism of cultures, to the merry band of vampires, werewolves, gorgons and sirens each associated with what would be a deviance for modern society. Jericho is the first city the outcasts encounter once they turn their backs on the grim walls of the academy and its, all in all, amniotic and protective embrace.
It’s a twenty-five minute walk, and passages to Jericho are a privilege, not a duty, as Miss Tornhill points out, weird among weirdos, as students are defined by recover to normal. In short, we arrive in Jericho after a long and bumpy ride exodus. Does it not remind us of anything at all, not even a certain crossing of the Jordan which at its landing in Jericho has its greatest prize like the biblical Promised Land of Joshua?
The most attentive public will not have missed that the pride of Jerichoas well as in the times of leaders, judges and patriarchs is punished with defeat and the complete destruction by the outcast people, the Jews, with the sound of trumpets, more precisely by the shofar Jews, which Burton substitutes for Wednesday’s disturbing cello.
Rites of passage, acts of purification with a Jewish flavour, therefore, such as that of the young werewolf who with purity and simplicity will conquer the heart of the even inflexible eldest daughter of the Addams. Following the biblical logic, in some way, it will be the outcasts, united in the singularity of diversity, a refound, ideally, the tradition of Nevermore put in check after the rush of events which we prudently do not mention to avoid thespoiler alert.
Even before the undisputed fascination of style dark academygothic atmospheres, escapism with an artistic background, there are many suggestions that make Wednesday there most-watched Netflix series Of all times. For our parochial hearts, which for Wednesday would be trivially “normal”, the big one magnification of Italian culture through the figure of Machiavelli, who however was lost, as often happens, in the dubbing operation.