![]() It’s enjoyable to watch Dantes dole out his just desserts, but my favorite character in The Count of Monte Cristo has always been the bitter betrayer, Fernand. I couldn’t relate to that when I was 12 and I definitely can’t relate to it now. It’s the ultimate male fantasy: The good man who never deserved all the shit the world threw at him ends up on top of it. I didn’t know that when I was 12, but in hindsight it’s easy to see why he got so much satisfaction out of The Count of Monte Cristo. My grandpa was a strange recluse of a man who felt like he’d been wronged throughout his life - justified in some ways, in others not so much. He almost loses himself to his vengeance, but Dantes’s story ends happily enough - with his enemies dead or imprisoned and the Count himself reunited with Mercedes and the son he didn’t know he had (the most baby Henry Cavill). Dantes eventually escapes and reinvents himself as the wealthy and mysterious (read: fabulously extra) Count of Monte Cristo to ruin the lives of the men who wronged him. That was one of his most common refrains: There’s nothing better than a revenge story.Įdmond Dantes (Jim Caviezel), a hapless and trusting second mate on a merchant ship, spends 13 years in prison after his jealous best friend, Fernand Mondego (Guy Pearce), conspires with a cadre of other morally bankrupt men to frame Edmond for treason so Fernand can steal his fiancée, Mercedes (Dagmara Domińczyk), for himself. He wasn’t much of a talker, so I knew to listen whenever he spoke up. “There’s nothing better than a revenge story,” my grandpa said. I remember standing in their kitchen and holding the tape in my hands, intrigued by the red and black design and the sword that sliced between the two men on the cover. I’d still take his shitty songs about the Entwives over pre-algebra any day.Ģ002 was also the year my grandparents gave us their VHS copy of The Count of Monte Cristo. For a while there, it got so bad that I was banned from bringing books to school because I chose to slog through the Treebeard chapters of The Two Towers instead of paying attention in math class. The world was in the middle of a three-year Harry Potter drought, so I escaped reality with other fantasies - Artemis Fowl, The Golden Compass, The Lord of the Rings. My family went to Disney World for the first time - in February! I missed a week of school! - and inexplicably every item of merchandise I bought had Tinkerbell on it. ![]() Looking back, it feels like so much of who I am as a person was decided by the things I was obsessed with when I was 12 years old.Ģ002 was a big year for me. ![]()
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