Wolf Hall [Blu-ray] [2015]

Novels usually do psychological insight better, as via language they can get into the head and do what we usually do there: talk to ourselves about ourselves and the world, including about images rumbling around in there, which may not be very replicable in video, not with the immediacy and complexity of the almost-constant stream inside. Soliloquies and conversations with others can transport some of the inner talk outward, but with limitations.But video can very effectively show the world around, the social situation, with a pungent immediacy. The BBC series emphasizes those aspects of Mantel's novels so very well.Consider the first few minutes: horses are galloping toward an opulent mansion. Inside, a large man in red prepares for the riders with some trepidation. They strut into the mansion with arrogance, braggadocio, evidently used to having others cringe before them. They are introduced as dukes, big men of the realm. They boast of triumph over the man in red who ’till then has had some power over them. Certain of victory — their arrogance is suddenly discombobulated, deflated by a figure emerging from the shadows to whisper in the ear of the man in red. But they’ll be back.That man from the shadows is a lawyer and more, a representative of the bourgeoisie, and we’ve been presented a very efficient, apt dramatization of the class struggle twixt the old warlord aristocracy, sometimes called blond beasts, and the rising new class of the bourgeoisie, urban elites who want to ensnare the former ever more in law, parliamentary procedure, rationality, new principles of civilization — rather than the rule of brawn, impulse, whim, and the privileged immediate gratification of whatever they want, whatever's there to grab. Fear of a bigger big man their only limitation.My guess is the author was very influenced by Jacob Burckhardt’s “The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy” and Max Weber’s “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” either directly or indirectly. What Thomas Cromwell in this depiction helps bring to England is a Renaissance, Florentine, Flemish, upgrade of what it means to be cultured and a gentleman — the gente nova (aspiring new new men, while the old new men of the lower bourgeoisie are more typified by Cromwell’s father and brother-in-law). In precarious positions but perhaps more noble by their own new definitions than the nobles, of worldly rationality, urbane and pragmatic with preference for cunning and compromise rather than the direct physical cruelty so usual at the time, and with a strong dose of Protestant asceticism and social conscience. And not immune to the lure of high art.A very excellent sequel of sorts to this series is Ingmar Bergman’s “Fanny and Alexander” — made in the 1980s — set in the very early 20th century, which depicts haute bourgeoise civilization at an apex and tipping point — with for some a slide into what today we’re inclined to identify with fundamentalism, fanaticism, fascism. The restoration of bourgeois normality at the end of Bergman’s tale seems less convincing today than those few decades ago.Today looks more like Thomas Cromwell’s world again in that a long struggle seems ahead against the rule of impulse, whim, crazy barbaric fantasies, and a ruling class besotted with privilege, as if a rational world order was all along only a delusion momentarily convincing.Changes — personal, social, cultural — how do they happen? Early in the novel "Wolf Hall" (p.37) there is a brief moment I wish the TV series had included: Cromwell remembers his aged eventual father-in-law asking him, "What happened? Because, by God, there was no one rougher than you were when you were a boy." Cromwell wants to tell him, "I gave up fighting because, when I lived in Florence, I looked at frescoes every day." But he fears this would not be understood. The alluring, confronting, enchanting, potentially transforming power of images.