Gulliver’s Travels

Designed as a festive season film to rake in the moolah, this is a Hollywood assassination of literature

Jonathan Swift and his  ‘excremental  vision of life’ has long been the subject of  literary discussion.  The vanity and pretensions of English politics, satirised in Gulliver’s Travels, are as base as nature’s call.  In the book, when Gulliver pees on the palace of the Lilliput King to put out a raging fire, he is promptly slapped with an edict that prohibits public urination.

In the movie, this scene is a frat boy joke and the high point of an American assassination of literature.  Drenched by Gulliver (Jack Black), the King sputters his gratitude. There is no upper limit to parody and the makers of Gulliver’s Travels are on their own trip. They turn Lemuel Gulliver into a jerk working in a Manhattan newspaper mail room, circa 2010.  He gets to write a travel piece, takes a boat, and ends up in the Bermuda Triangle. Caught in a storm, he washes up at Lilliput where, for the first time in his life, people look up to him.  Soon, he is the hottest dude in town, spoilt by thousands of little guys who entertain his slightest whim.

The king thinks he’s mean.  The princess thinks he’s cool. The general is green with envy. Lilliputians eating out of his hands, he turns himself into ‘Brand Gulliver’, and billboards, theatres and T-shirts are plastered with his name and mug-shot.

The corporatisation of Lilliput in the movie is thought of as a huge joke.  Introducing consumer culture to an eighteenth century fantastical literary work is apparently 3D pop art. Who knows? Could the makers of Gulliver’s Travels have finally understood Swift’s novel  as a bitter  indictment of his own civilisation and, correspondingly, turned the movie into an ironic reflection of contemporary Americana?

Not bloody likely. Gulliver’s Travels is designed as a season’s greeting, with expectations of much moolah.

GulliverJonathan SwiftLilliput