Dante has an active presence in popular culture. A visit to www.4degreez .com/misc/dante-inferno-test. mv Allows you to take a quiz that will calculate what circle of Hell you belong to. Dante is infiltrating not only the Internet but also our living rooms; there is a Dante’s Inferno video game! Electronic Arts released its highly anticipated action adventure in February 2011, for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PSP. Dante’s Inferno the video game takes players on a colorful (and often gruesome) adventure through Dante’s nine circles of Hell. Somehow, the allegory is lost in the translation of hand-eye coordination. The release of this video game comes on the heels of the comic book/ graphic novel on which it is based and the direct-to-DVD film spinoff, though the latter appears to have no obvious relation to the graphic novel or the video game other than its possession of the same title.
The film Dante’s Inferno (Www. dantefilm. com/about. html) was released on DVD in 2008 and places a thoroughly modern spin on the classic poem. It is retold through intricately hand-drawn paper puppets and miniature sets, without the use of CGI. In this world, Dante (voiced by Dermot Mulroney) is a hoodie-wearing alcoholic of indiscriminate age who wakes up (physically and metaphorically) from the previous evening’s drunken pass-out to find that he is in a strangely unfamiliar part of town. He asks the first person he sees for some help: enter Virgil (voiced by James Cromwell) sporting a mullet and wearing a brown robe of the bath variety. Because he has no idea where he is or how he will survive alone, Dante follows Virgil on a journey through the depths of Hell, which resembles a decayed urban landscape. There is a cast of contemporary presidents, politicians, popes, and pop-culture icons sentenced to eternal and horrific suffering. Dante eventually comes to understand Hell’s merciless punishment and emerges a new man convinced of the necessity to change the course of his life—while still drinking heavily.
Unlike the more modernized film version, the six-issue graphic novel miniseries Dante’s Inferno stays fairly close to the more traditional version of Hell set forth in Dante’s poem. Like the video game, the graphics are telling and disturbing. The first issue was released by DC Comics in 2009 to relatively wide acclaim.
For a version of Dante’s Divine Comedy that attempts a contemporary political setting, one need look no further than the Bread and Puppet Theater rendition of “The Divine Reality Comedy” (Www. loho10002.com/ Wordpress/?p=1079). “The Divine Reality Comedy” is geared toward adults and is a new and unique translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy divided into four parts. According to the website, in “Paradise,” the old human Born-to-Die gene is replaced by the brand-new Born-to-Buy gene. In “Post-Paradise Horsemanship,” a herd of white equestrian cutouts (of all sizes) is manipulated by a crowd of dancers in a picturesque, prancing dance. In “Purgatory,” the shadows of the indefinitely detained speak to you. In “Hell,” the Guantanamo interrogation process is staged with an eight-inch papier mache population, which recites actual interrogation transcripts and then witnesses three cases of torture as demonstrated on three larger-than-life-size puppets.
If you would like to have the same benefits of the Bread and Puppet Theater in the palm of your hand, the Dante’s Inferno puppet show available on YouTube for viewing on a cell phone or computer is your best bet (Www. Youtube. com/watch? v=TVM1vRm9GI8). This is an imaginative 11-minute stick-figure, sock-puppet, masked-figure rendition of Dante’s Inferno. There is also iDante, an interactive version of the poem for the iPhone and iPad. The iPad version features fully colorized illustrations, 3-D reconstructions of key environments, and maps of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.
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