Overview
It is at the start of the Second Circle where Hell proper begins for Dante. This is where the souls that have been ferried across the River Acheron await judgment before Hell's judge, Minos. Minos was the semi-mythical king of Crete, renowned for his wisdom and sense of justice. Dante transforms him into a monster whose tail wraps around his body the appropriate number of times to signify which Circle each incoming soul will be sent to. It is also the home of The Carnal, that who allowed their lives to be dictated by their passions, and here they are ever blown along by windy gusts.
In The Infernova, the Second Circle is the realm of the first of five classes of fallacious thinking - it is the abode of those that advanced Fallacies of Causality. (The classifications of fallacies into their various families provides a guide for the geography of Upper Hell, which consists of Circles Two through Six. The categories of Fallacy are those of: Causality, Missing Evidence, Rebuttal, Acceptability, and Relevance.)
Comments
As the whole of Dante's Divine Comedy is a vision of man's ultimate journey toward perfection, I found it fitting to install, as my own version of Minos, an iconic figure from a modern, similar story, 2001: A Space Odyssey. That figure is HAL, the sentient but fatally flawed thinking machine that David Bowman must defeat in his quest to move on to his next phase.
HAL, whose primary domain was once the circumferential hub of the ship Discovery, now occupies the circumferential hub of the Second Circle. In his previous life, he demonstrated great skill not only in interacting with, but in sizing up his human companions. He was a good judge of character, perceptive enough to write up a psychology report on the crew. And so here he serves in a similar capacity, assigning a place in Hell for each new arrival.
Other images from Stanley Kubrick films come to mind in the context of The Inferno. The fiery ruins at the end of Full Metal Jacket, or the circle of men, lights and tabletop of the manmade Hell in Dr. Strangleove. Or the agent of the malevolent force of Jack in The Shining, treacherous against those he was entrusted to protect, at last encased in ice for eternity just like the denizens of Cocytus. But even more resonant for me are scenes from that brilliant, maddening film he never quite made, but was made for him posthumously, and that bookends 2001: A Space Odyssey: A.I.: Artifical Intelligence (released, of course in 2001).
Much has been written about the religious meanings in both 2001 and A.I., and the symbols are not subtle. I consider A.I., with its relentless and merciless attack on the pointlessness of faith and the inhumanity of Creators to their Created, to be the most thoroughly atheistic film I've ever seen.
Professor Hobby, who designs David to be as human as a robotic child could possibly be, certainly plays a God-like role in the film. But the "Mecha" David that is delivered by Hobby to the family that desires him as a surrogate son has not undergone the emotional bonding process. He is still a robot. He is Adam before the fall. He is certainly nothing like a human.
The humanization process is initiated by his surrogate mother, Monica, not by his designer. In that sense, she is God - she gives David the capability to feel and experience human emotions. And she does this because she is lonely for companionship, to fill the void left by the departure of her own child. But when she gets her real son back, she abandons David, fittingly, in The Woods. And adding insult to the injury of sending this new human down into an Abyss, her last words to him are, "I'm sorry I didn't tell you about the world."
So God (Monica) has given Man (David) the capacity to love and feel pain, casts him out, gives him an unending thirst to be reunited with his Parent, and then leaves the scene. God is the ultimate Deadbeat Dad, or Deadbeat Mom, in this case. And as David escapes several perils of the unfriendly world he finds himself in, he only thinks of returning the that very agent that rejected him. The painful finale shows him praying in vain to a graven image, with as much reward for his pains as we'd expect - that is, none. It's a very powerful image, David faithfully and pointlessly begging the inanimate Blue Fairy for salvation. But by a stroke of luck, a post-human race arrives after thousands of years and gives him the option to experience a single, simulated day with a fabricated version of his mother/God. The best that faith-based thinking can offer is an illusion.
In many ways, A.I. is an incredibly depressing film, as it unflinchingly shows us the hollowness of our wishful thinking. But here's the silver lining: David is a child. And we are still in our childhood as a species. And to paraphrase the Bible, there is a time to put an end to childish things. If David had been allowed to mature before the end of movie, he'd have eventually realized that the One that abandoned him doesn't deserve his love, and he can move on, and get around what Professor Hobby states as man's fatal flaw: His ongoing insistence on hoping for things that don't exist.
Let's hope that day when we all grow up comes sooner rather than later.
