Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 1, January 1993 | Page 47

Delicious Poison

45

Their irreligious attitudes do not accord with the facts of their lives
as we know them. All Donner's attention is on human power, with no
possibility of meaning outside of what humans establish. This agrees
well with the economic interpretation of Heloise's life previously
noted, but not with the surviving texts.
All through the film, Abelard's text-source words and arguments
are transposed to the voice of Heloise. He is robbed of intellectual
power, which is replaced with sexual charisma and little else.
Heloise shares this sexual charm, but is granted additional power
and validity through the strength of Abelard’s words. This
wholesale transposition is probably intended to make Heloise seem
brighter, to suggest that Abelard is as intrigued by her mind as her
body. It is a condescending thing for Dormer to do, and essentially an
untruthful one. The historical Heloise was already one of the
brightest women of her day, and in any case Abelard says it was not
her mind he was initially attracted to, but her body. Dormer reverses
Abelard, and in doing so forces the story into a twentieth century
mold. We want their love to be nothing less than the total spiritual,
mental, and physical involvement of peers, rather than the blatant
seduction Abelard clearly says it was (^ d ic e 66 ff).
Dormer seems determined to make this a romance worth losing
one’s soul for, while denying that there is a soul. This confusion is
surely typical of late twentieth century thinking, which finds itself
tom between heaven and earth and convinced of the efficacy of
neither. Donner’s overlay of twentieth century thought on twelfth
century concerns thus acts more as a template of our time than as an
interpreter of history. The story he tells has little to do with
Heloise and Abelard as they were, but everything to do with the
desolate outlook at this end of the century.
The tw entieth century began in the "sentim ental
humanitarianism” of many writers such as Helen Waddell, but the
years since have led to none of the sureties and few of the verities
that the existentialist-informed thinkers of the twenties and thirties
hoped would arise from humanity’s assumption of responsibility for
its own destiny. Both Waddell’s novel and Donner’s film are humancentered, but neither ends in triumph of fact or spirit. Humanity is
defeated by its own limitations, as sentiment replaces genuine
emotion in Waddell, as lust replaces love in Donner. Neither holds a
candle to the poignancy and power of actual event. Our twentieth