In Shakespeare Behind Bars, we get to witness firsthand the transformative, therapeutic powers of art. These are people--killers, rapists--struggling to find meaning and redemption in Shakespeare's Tempest, a play I have not read but think I have a good thematic read on after watching this film. And while it's a pleasure to watch these convicts better themselves through performance, I think the real social value of this film comes in what it does to us, as the audience.
One of my favorite directors out there is Todd Solondz, hyper-controversial nebbish behind Storytelling, Palindromes, and most famously Happiness. Most of the controversy that swirls around his films deal with his mostly sympathetic portrayals of what you'd normally think of as the dregs of society: in Welcome to the Dollhouse, for example, a young bully and would-be rapist is depicted as sweet, gentle, and confused. Happiness devotes a good chunk of its running length to fleshing out and making likable a pedophile and sex offender.
Of course, the characters in Solondz's film are generally not murderers, which the vast majority of the convicts featured in this play appear to be. The filmmakers have structured the film brilliantly, allowing us to meet and grow to like the main players before one by one letting us know about the reprehensible things that landed them in jail in the first place. It's hard to square, for example, the articulate-if-not-sort-of-oddly-affected Leonard with the rapist we find out he is. Ditto Sammie: it's almost impossible, from those first few minutes onwards, to imagine him hurting--let alone killing--anybody.
Had the filmmakers let us know their crimes upfront, it'd be far less likely that we as an audience would be able to accept and sympathize with them. But they don't, and the results are spine-tingling. Portions of Shakespeare Behind Bars made me remember what it felt like to watch The Sopranos in its prime: to watch tender scenes between Tony and his wife (or daughter, whoever his mistress was at the time) while at the same time knowing, in the back of your brain, that this person is not, technically, "good," that this person has done some incredibly bad things in their life.
And so these once-nameless convicts are "redeemed" in our eyes, the same way that acting out Shakespeare's words allows them to redeem themselves in their own eyes. (All this multi-layering and adaptation talk brings to mind Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation, perhaps the best work out there on the pitfalls and artistic headaches inherent in making a work of art out of a work of art.)
The film seems to be above all a testament to what the warden advocated in its first five minutes--the life-altering power of education. This is my last Rumination, so I'll end it by saying I learned quite a bit around here this semester. (Also I have an irrational fear of going to prison, which this film has in some ways relieved. They might be killers, but boy do they seem nice!)
Monday, May 9, 2011
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Volpone, and the Modern Sensibility
It has been a tough and interesting semester around the Bloffice. Like most of you, I'd never engaged with Old English poetry before enrolling in this course, and probably never will again (just kidding! Some of this stuff was very inspiring, the Shakesperean sonnets in particular). But, with this wonderful play by Ben Johnson, we nudge ever closer to the "modern" sensibilities that I am far better accustomed to. I have never read Shakespeare's plays (needless to say, I was not what you'd call a "good" student in high school), so Johnson's Volpone is my first introduction to this sort of thing.
The classical referents that have defined the work we've gone over this semester thus far are still most certainly here: in the first few pages alone, the always erudite Norton footnotes point out references to the Latin playwright Plautus, the poet Horace, the Illiad, the Greek philosopher Hermotimus, and so on. The play has one foot in the world we've grown so used to over the last few months, and yet its other foot is firmly lodged in something completely different. Most noticeably, this is a seemingly almost godless world, with sexual inhibitions at an all-time low (need I bring up Volpone's attempted rape? Or the constantly alluded to sexual suggestiveness of Lady Would-Be Politic, who at one point actually says "This band shows not my neck enough" like an old English sorority girl?).
And then there are the characters, who are far from the paragons of moral and civic virtue that we learned quite a bit about in More's Utopia. Everyone's a con man, it would seem (or, put more eloquently by Mosca: "All the wise world is little else in nature/ But parasites or subparasites" (p. 1371). It's hard to empathize with the people being conned when the people being conned are seemingly MORE reprehensible than the con-men themselves. (Take, for example, the scene where Mosca goes through an entire list of terminal (and, of course, made up) illnesses that are plaguing the ailing Volpone. He's saying this Corbaccio, who responds to each new illness saying: "Good," "'Tis good," and, eventually, "Excellent, excellent. Sure I shall outlast him!") It brings to mind, of all things, a TV show like Seinfeld or It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia--horrible people doing horrible things to other horrible people, with the creator depicting all of the proceedings with a light comic touch (and, it would seem, with a serious undertone of fear and contempt re: what the Norton Anthology terms the "proto-capitalistic" society of early 17th century Europe).
It's a sensibility that would be honed, refined, and vulgarized (because, really, some of the soliloquies here--particularly those by the hyper-eloquent Mosca, are beautiful in and of themselves) over the next few centuries; luckily, we will always be able to return to this, one of the original sources.
The classical referents that have defined the work we've gone over this semester thus far are still most certainly here: in the first few pages alone, the always erudite Norton footnotes point out references to the Latin playwright Plautus, the poet Horace, the Illiad, the Greek philosopher Hermotimus, and so on. The play has one foot in the world we've grown so used to over the last few months, and yet its other foot is firmly lodged in something completely different. Most noticeably, this is a seemingly almost godless world, with sexual inhibitions at an all-time low (need I bring up Volpone's attempted rape? Or the constantly alluded to sexual suggestiveness of Lady Would-Be Politic, who at one point actually says "This band shows not my neck enough" like an old English sorority girl?).
And then there are the characters, who are far from the paragons of moral and civic virtue that we learned quite a bit about in More's Utopia. Everyone's a con man, it would seem (or, put more eloquently by Mosca: "All the wise world is little else in nature/ But parasites or subparasites" (p. 1371). It's hard to empathize with the people being conned when the people being conned are seemingly MORE reprehensible than the con-men themselves. (Take, for example, the scene where Mosca goes through an entire list of terminal (and, of course, made up) illnesses that are plaguing the ailing Volpone. He's saying this Corbaccio, who responds to each new illness saying: "Good," "'Tis good," and, eventually, "Excellent, excellent. Sure I shall outlast him!") It brings to mind, of all things, a TV show like Seinfeld or It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia--horrible people doing horrible things to other horrible people, with the creator depicting all of the proceedings with a light comic touch (and, it would seem, with a serious undertone of fear and contempt re: what the Norton Anthology terms the "proto-capitalistic" society of early 17th century Europe).
It's a sensibility that would be honed, refined, and vulgarized (because, really, some of the soliloquies here--particularly those by the hyper-eloquent Mosca, are beautiful in and of themselves) over the next few centuries; luckily, we will always be able to return to this, one of the original sources.
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