Fool's Paradise

Lear: Dost thou call me fool, boy?
Fool: All thy other titles thou hast given away; that thou wast born with.
William Shakespeare, King Lear, I, iv, 163-195

Again and again, Milan Kunc picture paradise in everyday visual language. But there is always something amiss in it, some jarring note, suggesting that it has a morbid underside. Thus the couple in Club Med (1992) drive a car with a death's head. Club Med is the capitalist paradise of petit bourgeois pleasures – of leisure time activities once reserved for the upper classes (golfing, tennis, and presumably extramarital sex) now made available to all, at a reduced rate. The brightness of the scene is comprom ised by the grim-faced blackness of the car, which also suggests the alienation between the couple, who stand on opposite sides of it. It is as though their relationship, for all the ostensible fun it involves, is a living death, like the car.
In Penetration of the Dialectic (Young East European Lovers in the Caribbean for the First Time) (1992), the young lovers still carry the hammer (his) and sickle (hers) in their heads, having traded their Communist paradise for a Caribbean paradise – a real material paradise, where red is not the colour of the failed social revolution but of the successful sexual revolution (of passion rather than social planning). However idyllic their embrace, they are secretly linked by barbed wire, not love. Prisoners of passion indeed! They are also tempted by the American Express Card proffered by a crab, Kunc's version of the snake in paradise. (Both the card and the crab are the green colour of American money.) The card is no doubt on their minds because they made the trip to paradise on credit: Eastern Europe being economicaliy bankrupt as well as a social lie, who will pay the price for the holiday when it comes due in the socialist future?