“The black book of the Smurfs”: fun that mockers cancel cultures and totalitarianisms
Review by Patrick Bateman
In 2012 the Mimesis publishing house published in Italian an agile and curious pamphlet that was a great success beyond the Alps. The author, the journalist and university professor Antoine Buéno, has decided to re-read the utopian parable of the Smurfs – born in 1958 from Pejo's pencil – searching in it for possible similarities with the Nazi and Stalinist totalitarian experience.
Yes, you got it right: the Smurfs, the little blue men who "smurf" here and there, as the embodiment of a totalitarian and liberticidal society. If "The Black Book of the Smurfs" had come out in this contemporary thirsty on the one hand for the forced elimination of any cultural roots not in line with the new canons of politically correct and on the other of vulgar conspiracy, a real pandemonium would have happened. Already I imagine some super-informed conspiracy theorists associate the red and bearded Papa Smurf with a terrible incarnation of Karl Marx or see in the funny white hats of the Smurfs an antechamber of the Ku Klux Klan, but just as I imagine a champion of egalitarianism so much to criticize harshly the figure of Smurfette because heralds an archaic and disrespectful female stereotype. And instead, fortunately, this book came out in 2012 and was not overwhelmed by a gigantic wave of nonsense. The work starts from a phrase borrowed from the French serial of the '60s "Les Shadoks" : "Better to exercise your intelligence with nonsense, than your own nonsense with intelligent things". The author, on the strength of this wise advice, reviews the production of the father of the Smurfs Pejo (born Pierre Culliford, 1928-1992), and highlights all the aspects that could be double, strange or disturbing in the life of the their merry village.
Mind you, Buéno does not claim to be the first who ventured to find double meanings or ambiguous interpretations in this lucky comic (which later became cartoon, film and merchandising object, yes, all-encompassing), but he wants to show how certain interpretations cannot be detached from the reference period in which they are born and are being formed. Looking at a work of yesterday with the eyes of today falsifies its essence if one pretends to want to give a judgment detached from its context, while it may be sensible to evaluate, on the contrary, its anticipatory and visionary spirit with respect to the future. The author painstakingly reconstructs all the probable ambiguous references and dwells, ironically and without any delirium from cancel culture , on the hypothesis that the society of the Smurfs is a society that presents both Stalinist and Nazi aspects.
From the rigid division of work, to the contempt for vile money and private property, passing through a sense of exclusivity given by a homogeneous differentiation from humans and up to the characterization of some individual characters (Smurfette, the blonde Aryan beauty and Gargamel , painted with the classic traits of anti-Semitic propaganda, in vogue both in the USSR and in Western Europe), a fascinating but never moralizing or derogatory picture emerges. In fact, it is excluded that Pejo, a man equidistant from any form of extremism, wanted to give his creature any political connotation. At best, his intent was to paint a utopian society detached from time and external perturbations. But on the other hand, also Communism and National Socialism proposed, in theory, a utopian society based on absolutes which, in the practical test, have crumbled, lending their side to the liberticidal face of totalitarianism. Buéno's mocking reasoning is all here: it is not the Smurfs who are Nazis or Communists, but the totalitarian visions that are so simple and simplified that they clash with a much more complex reality.
The post “The Black Book of the Smurfs”: fun that laughs at cancel cultures and totalitarianisms appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/recensioni/atlas/il-libro-nero-dei-puffi-divertimento-che-irride-cancel-culture-e-totalitarismi/ on Sat, 13 Mar 2021 04:58:00 +0000.