On Flatlands

Image from Flatland: The Movie (2007)

Ah! Those Victorians and their . . .  ways.

As a product of its time, "Flatlands" is as much a critique of social class as it is representation of another world in which the means of communication and recognition is dictated by the forms of the inhabitants. By using logic found in mathematics, a shape can deduce another shape's form (is it a triangle, a square, etc.) upon noticing a shape's depth of field and clarity of their side points. It seems everyone in Flatland live in constant fear of either being unable to recognize different shapes of beings--for fear of mingling with an inferior shape or tricked into marrying an irregular--or being impaled by sharp corners. It would not be surprising if they have a hard time telling part a polygonal "man" form a polygonal house.

Apart from fears of sharp corners, there are explicit negative views placed upon the women of Flatland who happen to be sharp dangerous lines. Every fault, every possible overthrow of society, every moment of destruction has the potential to be invoked by a crazy hysterical "line women" and so laws must be made to control them. Why there are no women squares or polygon is beyond comprehension, as does the evolution of the inhabitants of Flatland. Why are there still triangle in Flatland if every generation acquires an additional side to further their rise up the social ladder? Is it possible for a circle to have a triangle for a son?

With the hierarchy of Flatland based of the number of sides a shape (i.e. the more sides one has the higher its class) mirroring the social class structure of the 19th century based on wealth, it can also be noted that preference for the more complex shape and soon the organic and sublime nature of the curve has similarities to preferences developed over the course of western art history. Simple lines used to draw a figure maybe deemed primitive and as art passes though the renaissance and into the 19th century, knowledge of geometry to render a figure accurately gives rise to realism and soon becomes the standard to how art is judged by the masses. Lines were hidden or were secondary. Complex shapes or forms were not. There were even instances where painters were opposition of one another over the use of color with the question that should a painting have its merit be based in its architectural rendering, or the atmosphere and passion evoked by its use of color.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Odalisque with a Slave 

 

Eugène Delacroix, Death of Sardanapalus

It's Neoclassicism vs. Romanticism, Ingres vs. Delacroix. As in Flatlands, the architectural perfection complies to the austere tastes of the elite during much of the early 1800s.