Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here, or, Hell in a Handbasket

In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to
myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost.
Ah, how hard a thing it is to say what that wood
was, so savage and harsh and strong that the
thought of it renews my fear!
It is so bitter that death is little more so! But to
treat of the good that I found there, I will tell of
the other things I saw.

Call it karma or Newton's third law (MacGyver's favorite, as it turns out) or whatever you like, but the universe has a way of balancing things out. And because of that, I should have seen this thing coming. I mean, I don't want to endorse any sort of overly rigid distinction between high and low culture, but I think it's fair to say Spider-man becoming a Broadway musical isn't necessarily a lateral movement for the intellectual property. But the moment something so thoroughly pop culture is being "elevated" to theater, I assure you somewhere someone is raping a cultural treasure. And usually I can keep a wry distance from it. But no one fucks with Dante Alighieri (or puts Baby in a corner).

But apparently that's exactly what Electronic Arts is doing. EA, shirt collar wide open so the ladies can appreciate its chest pelt and faux-gold necklaces, slithered up to the Divine Comedy at the bar and offered to buy it an appletini. And now, some indeterminate time later, Dante is shivering on the corner at 3:15 am offering to suck your dick for a fiver so his pimp doesn't cut him another nostril. For those of you less well versed in the arcane cryptography of my metaphors, allow me to spell it out: they're making a video game of Dante's Inferno.

As I watched this seven minute interview with one of the criminals responsible for this abomination, I felt like someone had punched me in the gut. Sure, maybe I was a little drawn in, but I also slow down to rubber-neck at freeway accidents. And like my molars, which were slowly grinding one another to dust (and plaque, and the gum disease gingivitis), the details I remember from Dante's epic poem and the plot of this game ground together. The pilgrim (Dante) wanders through Hell with Virgil as a guide, until the poet's beloved (Beatrice) must take over Virgil's duty when the pilgrim ascends to Paradise; Digital Dante returns from kicking ass and taking names in the Crusades to find his sweet-heart, Beatrice, has been murdered and her soul dragged to hell by Lucifer himself, so he goes to hell alone to get her. The pilgrim is alternately terrified, infuriated, and seduced by the stories told him by the damned; Digital Dante kicks ass and chews bubblegum, along with the help of his giant fucking scythe (which they'll hopefully name 'Florence' or 'La Vita Nuova' or something). The medieval poem showed me what literature can really do and made me fall in love with poetry; this video game makes me want to strap on a diaper, jump in my car (which is stalled out in parking lot right now, but that's another story), and drive to the developer's studio where I can "get medieval" on each and every one of their pasty asses. I'll show you a contrapasso, you sons of bitches.

Maybe I'm getting a little worked up here, so I'll cut this short - despite my plans of meticulously combing through all thirty three cantos and parodying what I imagine those bastards at EA might do to the text. Come to think of it, though, somebody better check Dante's tomb; I have a feeling his skull is upended somewhere in a game studio and serving double duty as an ashtray and urinal. If there's any justice, those responsible will have an eternity of purging flames to regret their trespass. If not, I'll remind them when I arrive fresh from the Crusades, shotgun in one hand, chainsaw strapped to the stump of my other. Groovy.