According to the 1996 film "Gulliver Swift", the enduring popularity of Jonathan Swift's satirical book Gulliver's Travels was its exploration of the "grotesque", of "deviations from ourselves", which push us to ask ourselves who we really are. However, the film offers much more than that: it is also an exploration of Swift's personal beliefs and life experiences, which color nearly every scene of Gulliver's Travels. Thus, it becomes a more intimate portrait of a human being trying to shed light on political corruption, while reckoning with a deeply personal contempt for the mental and physical depravity of humanity. Swift places Gulliver of Gulliver's Travels first and foremost in Lilliput, a land of little creatures where government officials quite literally "bend over hoops" to gain favor with the court, and where flowery, self-important prose is the language of choice. It is important to note that Gulliver does not belittle this practice, not only because of the sincerity of the satirical style, but also because he sees no reason not to accept it, until it affects him personally. Take, for example, his reaction when he discovers his sentence to blindness at the hands of the Lilliputian king: “I could not discover the clemency and favor of a judge so sick of this sentence, but I conceived it (perhaps mistakenly rather for be strict) than kind” (Swift 2360). The Lilliputians are comical in their meanness and, according to the film, are a “Satire of the English and the politics of their time…nepotism, favoritism, flattery, corruption” (Gulliver's). Trips). They are small people, therefore narrow-minded, “who get along with their size” (Gulliver's Travels). According to the video, Swift himself was known to hate “war, slavery and the colon…”. .middle of paper ......must come to terms with the fact (as must the reader) that the potential for complete depravity is innate in his physical and mental make-up. Gone are the days of imitating Lilliputian speeches and he staged scenes surviving in a land of giants and serving the beasts of reason. Eventually he will have to learn to live in this world and come to terms with the fact that he actually resembles the despised Yahoos, despite his best efforts, and is subject to scrutiny. same moral decay. Works Cited Gulliver's Travels. Films Media Group, 1996. Films on demand. Network. 08 November 2011..Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver's Travels. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Julia Reidhead. 8th ed. vol. 6. NY, London: WW Norton &, 2006. 2323-462. Press. The Restoration and the eighteenth century.