(((nataluna)))

Okay SO? This is actually a lot more than even the superficial comparison, which bless you, OP, for making.

I’m an art history professor so bear with my nerdgasm.

The title of the painting is Wanderer Above A Sea of Mist/Fog.  It was painted by Caspar David Friedrich in 1818.  Friedrich was a German Romantic painter and it’s crucial to understand the landscape painting movement for which he was famous, to grasp what the cinematographer shooting this scene of the Doctor was trying to imply.

The title itself is indicative of the Whovian genre:  “I’m just a traveler,” the Doctor claims, when her newfound friends laud her for her aid and efforts.  This is actually extremely compatible with the Romanticist genre, which encompassed writing, philosophy, and art in the late 18th and early 19th century, from which other movements, such as Transcendentalism, sprang. It’s a response and a foil to the Enlightenment, generally agreed to have been fathered by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who argued that self-governance and individual, Reason-guided moral compass should take precedence over institutionalized thought (both church and state).  Romanticism as a foil to the Enlightenment posits all of the strange, unique/baroque, eccentric, uncontrollable, ineffably powerful and sometimes terrifying qualities of the human experience (largely emotion-driven) are crucial to a fully enriched life.  This lended itself well to landscape painting, which served as a metaphor for the human psyche, and the full gamut of human emotion (including the bad stuff–rage, fear, grief, loss) in the form of untamable natural phenomena like storms, oceans, fires, earthquakes, waterfalls,  etc.  

A particular subgenre of Romantic landscape (and of Romanticism) is the Sublime:  that which cannot be categorized or fully understood when experienced, that which is awesome and unknowable, simultaneously beautiful and overwhelming (even frightening).  Think Niagara Falls.  It’s beautiful, but huge and very loud, and if you tipped over into it, you could drown.  Now translate that feeling to a painting, and you have a Sublime Romantic landscape.  

Which brings us to Friedrich, who often married Christian religious ideology with the worship of the Sublime in nature.  Here he is showing us an anonymous man, unknowable, his back turned to us, having climbed a mountain to view the mighty range, partially obscured by fog.  He BEARS WITNESS AS THE VIEWER BY PROXY to nature’s–to the world’s, to LIFE’S–amazingness.  In the ACT OF LOOKING, he provides us with a CONDUIT for our own wonder.

Have you ever heard of anything MORE Doctor-y?  

Gomez gives out better relationship advice than like 90% of dudes.

Gomez Addams is a suave motherfucker who loves his wife more than his own life.

Everyone should want a Gomez. He’s p cool.

Gomez and Morticia Addams actually have a very loving and extremely healthy relationship, both in the old TV show and in the more recent movies. They were also one of the first television couples to be shown to have an active (albeit offscreen) sex life. Their frank attitude towards sexuality was shocking in its’ time, but their relationship and their family dynamic is actually more functional and more…dare I say it…sane than most families portrayed on TV.

The comedy in the show came from the family’s “odd” lifestyle, rather than from infighting and petty bickering, or worse, as was common on other shows of the time, thinly veiled references to spousal abuse. They didn’t make fun of each other or act like their children were creatures from another world. Were they strange and outside of social norms? Yes. Were they united in creating a loving home and being good, supportive parents? Absolutely.

These two support and adore their children, care for an aging mother and an estranged brother, put family before everything, and they love each other, wholly, fiercely, without reserve. They are every bit as much in love after at least a decade of marriage as they were the day they met.

Relationship goals. LIFE goals.

Just remembered in the second movie when their third child became “normal” for a period and although they were shocked and didn’t know how to handle it, they didn’t mistreat the child or love it any less. They accepted the difference, even though it was hard for them. 

Reblogged for truth.

Posts about Gomez and Morticia Addams are almost always uplifting and I’m happy to have them on my dash, but I think my favorite bit about this conversation is what Gomez is actually saying to Fester.

It’s nobody’s surprise that many of the aesthetic and thematic elements of The Addams Family in its various incarnations are influenced by Gothic tradition (not goth, that mostly came later. And not Goth, that was much much much too early), and I think Gomez’s words are a dead bullseye in terms of Gothic mentality.

The sublime is a recurring theme throughout Gothic literature. Although the word (like “awesome”) has lost a lot of it’s original luster over the intervening decades, sublime doesn’t really mean elevated and lofty (or even heavenly) as it’s often used today, but rather something possessing the power and grandeur to induce awe and veneration in the mind of the beholder. Although less than divine, something sublime possessed a wildness and power that transcended human ability to control…or even to comprehend.

Sublime is standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon leaning as far as you dare over the railing and still not being able to see the canyon floor below. Sublime is warrior-queen Galadriel being tempted by the One Ring. Sublime is waking up in the middle of the night in the heart of a wild thunderstorm.

Gomez isn’t advising Fester to treat a woman he fancies like a princess, or even elevate her to pedestal of angelic nature (who’s idea was it to equate femininity with purity anyway? What a laughable and historically damaging idea. Shame on whatever dead (probably) white dudes promoted that!)

Gomez is advising Fester that if he truly loves a woman he must do everything he can to remind her of how she’s an untameable force of nature who’s grandeur brings him to his knees in awe and terror. Just like Morticia, for Gomez.

I’ll sign off with one of my most favorite quotes of all time, because it feels suddenly very relevant:

Reblogging for the commentary on the Sublime

See its posts like these that I love. Seeing this post and connecting it with mid eighteenth century literature is just amazing