Dante , the Gothic , the Abject , and the Grotesque in Mathieu Missoffe ’ s Thriller-Crime Drama Black Spot
ment that , for the sheriff of Villefranche , has as its source not only in the three nights that she spent , alone , chained to a mountain side , screaming for help and left to die , but in the history of a town that God seems to have abandoned or forgotten .
In fact , Laurene ’ s observation “ We are alone ” reflects a larger desperation or longing that has so infected the residents of Villefranche that they no longer seem able to recognize it . It is a desperation , born of despair and dread that characterizes those condemned to live in the Inferno and will never know the light and love of the God alluded to in Dante ’ s Paradiso . More importantly , it is a desperation that has infected the larger Western world that Missoffe had in mind when he gave Amazon Video service the rights to stream Black Spot to an “ international ” audience ( Stewart ). In the current world , this hopelessness born of desperation and longing�which psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl labels “ sociogenic neurosis ”( 140 ) �is more likely to lead one to the psychiatrist ’ s office that to the church . In this sense , the final and ultimate horror for Laurene , for Villefranche and for the Western world it represents may be the absence of God . Indeed , the analogy that informs Missoffe ’ s script , that Villefranche is a contemporary version of the Inferno , provides a ground for Laurene ’ s ambiguous statement “ We are alone ” and for the conclusion that God has apparently separated Himself from a Western world that , morally and spiritually , has lost sight of its center . Like Yeats ’ falcon , this world seems , at times , to be frantically spinning out of control and in a descent into an Inferno of a “ new barbarousness ” that characterize those condemned to Hell , that characterized Dante ’ s thirteenth century Florence for which the Inferno is a microcosm , and that characterizes Missoffe ’ s twenty-first century Western society .
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