Popular Culture Review 30.2
anger ” ( Inferno , Canto XII , ll . 33 , 49 ) that finds its reflection the mad rage behind most of the violence in Missoffe ’ s series and much of the violence of the Western world . In the third episode , for instance , the viewer learns that the Fuchs brothers , two simple-minded farmers , have executed Natalie Duval , a young woman who conveniently disappeared after escorting one of the Fuchs brothers into the labyrinth of caverns where Laurene supposedly found Marion Steiner tied to a wall . The truth of the matter seems to be that Natalie seduced both brothers with the intention of getting them to sell their parents ’ farm and so erase their mountain of debt . Apparently , she had also seduced several other males in order to defraud them and take their money . Thus , not satisfied with taking Natalie ’ s life , the Fuchs brothers hung her now decomposing , darkened corpse from a make-shift cross overlooking what was once their farmland , the repulsive and eyeless corpse representing another combination of the abject and grotesque and symbolically revealing a spiritually and morally bankrupt region , and finding a parallel in the ninth circle of hell , where those guilty of fraud are forever condemned to Malbroge , “ an abyss , a broad and yawning pit ”( Inferno , Canto XVIII , ll . 1-4 ).
In fact , most every episode in this series targets a murder or a suicide , the remains of which are graphically rendered in grotesque-abject manner . In a particularly disturbing episode , the wife of the coach of a local high school swim team , a man who has received praise from the community for pulling a young woman from a burning car , puts a shotgun into her mouth on the night that her husband is honored by the mayor and the community . With no hesitation , she pulls the trigger , blood spattering the walls of her hotel room and her eyeballs winding up in her mouth . The wife ’ s suicide is clearly intended as an act of vengeance and punishment directed
226