Christians, Cannibals and Spite: Notes on Films by Bob Young I try to take time off and avoid treating everything as grist for psychoanalytic rumination, but some leisure activities are so apt that it would be churlish not to think about them analytically. At the top of my list is 'Babette's Feast' a film set in an utterly bleak Danish village, among the members of an ageing Christian sect which thrived under the leadership of …showed first 75 words of 1787 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1787 total…rampant and acted out in domestic, social and geopolitical settings. We identify with her and are led to believe that while everyone else may be at risk, we will be spared, because we have suffered enough and are essentially innocent, just doing our job. Though Freud said that 'Man is a wolf to other men', we can, in cinematic fantasy, believe that the veneer of civilization will support our weight, though perhaps not the others'.