Wednesday, December 16, 2020

Wine Game: A Metaphor for 2020?

Wine Game is a laugh-out-loud, 4-minute short film that I think could be a metaphor for the year 2020:

00:16 - Pandemic, lockdowns.

00:25 - Quarantined. Forced to look within. What are we carrying?

00:50 - New normal, new opportunities.

1:26 - In the new normal, it is not advisable to put new wine in old wine skins.

Wine "is a powerful literary metaphor used for centuries to refer to everything from love to blood to prosperity...no wonder the Greeks gave birth to the complex myth of Dionysius, a source of joy as well as thoughtless rage."

Some reviewers have likened the Wine Game story to that of the Sisyphus myth. According to Wikipedia:

"In Greek mythology Sisyphus or Sisyphos was the king of Ephyra (now known as Corinth). He was punished for his self-aggrandizing craftiness and deceitfulness by being forced to roll an immense boulder up a hill only for it to roll down every time it neared the top, repeating this action for eternity. Through the classical influence on modern culture, tasks that are both laborious and futile are therefore described as Sisyphean."

Of course, metaphors are subject to breaking down. Still, the beauty of "Wine Game" is that it is open to interpretation. To borrow from Robert Louis Stevenson's quip, "Wine Game is bottled poetry."