The Diary of a Madman

(BAM, 5 March 2011)

Aspirations differ across individuals. Therefore, one should refrain from imposing one's preferences on others---individually or as a society. Doing so is easy in most cases. One exception is the diagnosis of insanity, which can potentially lead to extreme censorship, second only to murder and torture. (Bringing up a child amounts to guessing his preferences, not suppressing them.) The utmost respect for the freedoms of thus diagnosed helps avoid the slippery slope (mistaken judgements and abuse) that can promote tyranny and that is also the main argument against capital punishment and torture.

A freedom much conducive to sanity is the control over one's position in the social hierarchy. This freedom is best served in the society in which one's position is least dependent on the accident of birth. Hierarchies are indispensable for satisfactory governance. Their multiplicity can help an individual experience being at the top of the hierarchy that that he deems to be most important.

In the Received Pronunciation, the Australian Geoffrey Rush delivers the lines of the character who is as Russian as the Ukrainian Nikolai Gogol intended him to be. Rush's portrayal of Aksentii Poprishchin is playful, but not grotesque. By not having subordinated the character study to a political  slogan, the adaptation will have reached timelessness. It is hard to disentangle the contribution of the director, Neil Armfield, from that of the rest of the team. At the least, Armfield can be credited for having led the team that has engineered the product whose components one is afraid to take apart for the fear that their collective brilliance would be compromised.