Archives | Film
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Duck Soup: This Means War
Or, The Right Hand of Good Fellowship
I grew up watching Groucho Marx on his “You Bet Your Life” television show. My father assured me that the Marx Brothers films were the funniest ever. But I didn’t get to see any of them until I went to The Johns Hopkins University, which had an excellent film series curated by Richard Macksey.
Then I saw at least some of their feature films and laughed myself silly. My favorite, and certainly one of their best, is Duck Soup (1933). It’s about war between two minor nations, Freedonia and Sylvania, with the four brothers playing both sides of the conflict against the muddle.
Groucho plays Rufus T. Firefly, who is installed as head of Freedonia by Mrs. Gloria Teasdale, played by Margaret Dumont, Groucho’s foil in several films. I won’t go into the absurd intricacies of the clap-trap plot as I’m interest in only one scene, the scene where war is finally declared between Freedonia and Sylvania.
Chicolini (Chico Marx) is on trial in Freedonia for spying. Firefly has, for whatever reason, decided to act as his defense council, though he’s the one who caught Chicolini. This that and the other happens and the news comes that Sylvania troops are at the Freedonia’s border. This causes some distress as “war would mean a prohibitive increase in our taxes”—maybe back then, but not now; now we cut taxes and spend even more money on undeclared war. There’s some wordplay on “taxes” and “dollars” = “Dallas, Dallas, Texas.” It’s eerie, you’d think those guys were reading the future.
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Friday, September 30, 2011
Disney Agonistes: Night on Bald Mountain
This is the penultimate episode of Fantasia, coming immediately before the Ave Maria. Our host and commenter, Deems Taylor, tells us that it depicts the profane while the last episode depicts the sacred. It the most frenzied and hyperkinetic episode, which places it in radical contrast to the all but static Ave Maria.
It is also one of the most frightening, if not THE most frightening cartoons ever made. The fright centers on Chernobog, the mountain/devil/demon being at the center of the episode. He was animated by Vladimir Tytla, whose father was a Ukrainian cavalryman. Tytla’s work on Chernobog is widely regarded as the finest hand-drawn animation ever done, an opinion I will not contradict or even question. I am particularly fond of two shots near the end, when we hear the church bell that brings the demonic revels to an end. Chernobog is in pain
and protectively fearful
Think on that, slowly, carefully. Only minutes before we’d seen him summoning the spirits of the dead to the revels, then toying with them and capriciously tossing them into hell fires. Now he’s cringing in pain and fear at the mere sound of a church bell. What gives?
Here, just a bit later we see Chernobog, a very weary Chernobog, folding his wings so as to then dissolve back into the mountain:
The animation here is exquisite, with an ever so delicate stagger between the arm movement and the wing movement. While Tytla had reference footage to work from – actor Bela Lugosi, and his director on this episode, Wilfred Jackson – he could not have had reference footage for this shot, because no such creature exists.
When John Culhane asked Tytla how he achieved such effects “he drew himself up, like an actor getting back into an old role. ‘I imagined that I was as big as a mountain and made of rock and yet I was feeling and moving,’ Tytla answered. Then he dropped the devil’s posture and became a man again. ‘You see?’” (Walt Disney’s Fantasia, p. 196). No, I don’t see, because I wasn’t there. But I feel Chernobog in my back every time I watch this episode, even when I sit here writing about it.
There’s a heft and grandeur in Chernobog that is worthy of Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost. Without Tytla’s powerful acting, his powerful realization of Chernobog, Night on Bald Mountain would only be a magnificent swirling freak show. Tytla gave it the weight of Greek tragedy.
But where’s the tragedy?
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Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Ave Maria: It’s Not About Us
It’s time to return to animation, the medium which has, in many ways, been one of my core arenas over the past few years, that and graffiti. I’ve working on Fantasia for the last several years, starting with an appreciation of the film as a whole, and then writing pieces on specific segments. I’ve got two more to go, Night on Bald Mountain and the Pastoral Symphony, plus the intermission interlude, including the sound-track. I’ve already discussed the Ave Maria sequence with Mike Barrier.
The Ave Maria segment, the last one in Disney’s Fantasia, must be one of the most restrained animation sequences ever produced. There are segments where nothing, or almost nothing, moves for a second or three. And this is not limited animation Hanna-Barbara style or anime style, where motion is minimized to save money, though money was an issue, as always.
There are two sources of movement in films: 1) movement produced by the camera, and 2) movements of objects in front of the camera. This segment runs for almost six minutes, half of which have no moving objects on screen. The IS motion, but it’s produced by the camera, and that is often minimal.
It’s an astonishing conception, especially since it follows Night on Bald Mountain, which is perhaps the most frenetic of the segments. And that, in part is the point. The two were planned to contrast the sacred (Ave Maria) with the secular (Bald Mountain). Disney has mirrored, amplified, and transformed this thematic contrast by an almost whole-scale contrast in formal and technical means.
Maximal Minimalism
This is maximal animation, as maximal as there’s ever been. And the visible restraint, in fact, required extreme technical effort, as John Culhane details in Walt Disney’s Fantasia. A special camera rig had to be built to film the last scene in the segment, a long zoom from deep in the forest to a sunrise. The rig spanned a sound-stage that was 45 feet wide. And that last segment had to be shot three times, each time taking several days. The wrong lens had been in the camera during the first shoot. The second shoot was interrupted by an earthquake which may have misaligned the equipment. The only way to tell would have been to develop the film and see how it looked. If it looked bad, it would have been too late to re-shoot it and make the premier date. So they started over again, from the beginning of the segment.
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Sunday, September 11, 2011
Network Awesome Features Sita Sings the Blues
On Monday 12 September 2011 Network Awesome will feature Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues.
Network Awesome? Never heard of it.
You’ve never heard of Network Awesome!&? What rock have you been sleeping under?
No rock, sheesh! Don’t get cranky on me. It’s a big world, you know, awesome. I’m busy, already flying on information overload. So chill out.
Well, to be honest, I didn’t know about Network Awesome ‘till about a month ago, when Michael Sporn hipped me to it. Well, not just me, but anyone who read his blog. Newtwork Awesome had programmed some classic Japanese animation, which interested him because he’s an animator—and, incidentally, runs one of the best animation blogs in Greater Blogistan. And it interests me because I’m interested in Japanese animation.
So I virtually hauled my virtual ass over there and took a look. Yep, there they were, old Japanese cartoons. Even better, interesting commentary, such as this piece by Cory Gross about Mitsuyeo Seo’s Divine Sea Warriors, which was Japan’s first feature-length animated film, and also war propaganda.
That’s the formula, interesting material intelligently curated coupled with compelling commentary. Where else can you find that?
Awesome!
See, I told you.
Network Awesome was founded in January of 2011 by Jason Forrest, an electronic musician and entrepreneur, who wants to make the best of an almost forgotten past available to us now and for the future. That is to say, he wants to keep culture alive, a mission that is particularly important as we face the daunting task of creating a new ways of living on this planet, not to mention an outpost on Mars one of these days.
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Sunday, September 04, 2011
The New World
Been watching Terrence Malick’s The New World (2005). Again with the underwater shots! Not so many as in Thin Red Line and The Tree of Life, but unmistakable there at the beginning. And the sun-streaming-thru-the-trees shots.
This time the grasses, especially the grasses. Mostly tall grasses, often man-or-woman high. Of course, I simply can’t see such shots except as I’ve come to know grasses. I’d like to think my own work had helped me better to see Malick’s, or that of his cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki. For that matter, I see Malick’s woods through the woods I played in as a child. There’s the look of innocent adventure, even as the innocence clashes two worlds.
It’s a sneaky film. Within minutes you can see it’s strong on historical accuracy. Not that I know enough about the Jamestown colony to judge, but it has the look of “we’re going to be authentic.” I trust Malick to be so.
As such, the titular new world is what that noun phrase means in most contexts, America. Europe ‘discovers’ half the world and the people thereon. Malick’s measured deliberate pace does indeed—the grasses!—make it new, but in a different sense. And yet that’s only the beginning.
Cpt. John Smith gets captured by ‘the naturals’ (as they’re called) and is saved, as in the old familiar story, by Pocahontas (though her name is never given). He lives among them for awhile. We’ve seen this one before, white man goes native. But not in quite this way, not with all the quotidian horse-play, nor again the deliberate pace. Now “new world” has a more specific focus. No longer the continent ready and waiting for the plundering, it’s John Smith among the naturals in THEIR world.
Malick’s setting us up, setting us up good.
The nameless Indian princess is kicked out of her tribe and has to live among these English colonists. Wearing European dress. Learning to read. For her, a new world.
See what he’s doing, this Malick.
She marries John Rolfe, believing her captain dead at sea. Has a child. Learns that her captain is not dead. And goes to England. The English see, and bow to, her. She sees the King and Queen, they show her off to the court. She sees her captain. Returns to Rolfe.
A New World, England. Really. And she acts it, this Q’orianka Kilcher, she carries the film. Without her, none of this newness would mean jack. Well, there is the grasses, but . . .
A year later Clint Eastwood showed Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), a story of that battle told from the Japanese perspective.
Maybe we’ll learn.
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Monday, August 22, 2011
Zhang Yimou: Not One Less, and Curse of the Golden Flower
Over the past year or two I’ve watched a number of films by Zhang Yimou, including Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern, To Live, and Shanghai Triad. I saw Hero when it was in American theatrical release. I’m currently watching Not One Less (1999) and Curse of the Golden Flower (2006) an astonishing pair of films.
What’s astonishing is that they’re utterly different. Not One Less is a realist drama using non-professional actors and is about the students in a small school in contemporary rural China. Curse is an epic about the Imperial court in ancient China and employs lavish sets, grand spectacle, and top-tier professional actors. Curse hardly seems like it’s about people at all; the central characters seem more like minor deities being moved about on-stage by cosmic forces—either that, or grandly colored shadow puppets. By contrast Not One Less is awash in the simple humanity of its characters, especially the children, struggling with their lessons, working to help one of their classmates.
The two films also stand in thematic contrast. And it wasn’t until I’d watched Curse for a second time that I actually managed to understand the plot, while Not One was transparent, step by step, from the start.
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Sunday, August 14, 2011
Spike Lee on the Shakespeare Tip
The following is an excerpt from a working paper on Spike Lee’s Mo’Better Blues. The paper is “Spike Lee’s Blues” and you can download it from my SSRN page.
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The depiction of this marriage [between the protagonist, Bleek Gilliam and Indigo] is, unfortunately, the least satisfactory and least plausible section of the film. As a coherent dramatic statement, the film ended with Bleek’s failed comeback when he sat-in with Shadow (his former sax player) and Clarke in the Dizzy club — the club’s name is an obvious reference to Dizzy Gillespie, jazz’s last elder statesman and trumpet-playing counterpart to Bird, who did have a club named after him, Birdland. His subsequent marriage and child are not very plausible. He proposes marriage to Indigo in the very terms which he had rejected and satirized in “Pop Top 40.” Now that he cannot be a musician, he changes his mind about one-and-only-forever love. Now he wants/needs a woman to save him. And the woman accepts him. But Bleek hasn’t grown and deepened in any obvious way; he has just transferred his dependence from his career to a wife. Which is to say, simply, that Spike Lee hasn’t quite figured out how to resolve these problems.
But he does give some indication of how he wants the matter resolved. To see this we have to examine the final scene of the movie. It parallels the first scene quite closely, so closely that any difference is thereby foregrounded. That difference, we can only assume, is what has been gained by the events of the picture.
Thus, in the final scene, a young boy is practicing his trumpet when his young friends come after him to join them in play. To emphasize the parallel with the opening scene, Lee uses the same child actors. In the final scene, as one would expect, Bleek is the father and his son, Miles (named after Miles Davis?), is the boy. But where young Bleek had been forced to continue practicing, young Miles is allowed out (at Bleek’s urging) after a little sermon on the importance of practicing. Bleek, we are to infer, doesn’t want to impose the inflexible discipline on his son that his mother had imposed on him. Young Miles will not, we are to presume, grow up in the crippled way that Bleek did.
By staging the final scene in this way Lee is asserting that Bleek has gained a measure of flexibility and insight, that he has grown though his experience. That is, he is asserting something which he hasn’t, in fact, shown. Mo’ Better Blues happens in two distinct phases. One runs from the beginning up through Bleek’s failed come-back at the Dizzy club. The other runs from Bleek’s proposal to the end. The only thing which binds these two together is Lee’s cinematic assertion that the second is the logical continuation of the first. But, whereas the moves in the first phase are carefully plotted, with plausible causal links between the actions and reactions of the various characters, the moves in the second phase are not carefully plotted, they are only asserted, with a great deal of dramatic weight falling on a montage sequence set to the music of John Coltrane. And the transition between the first and the second phase is similarly implausible. It is clear that what Lee wants to say requires these two phases, otherwise he wouldn’t have made the movie this way. It is also clear that Lee hasn’t yet been able to establish a coherent framework in which to make this statement.
This situation is not unprecedented in dramatic history. Five-hundred years ago Shakespeare created some plays — Pericles, Cymbaline, and The Winter’s Tale — that were similarly broken into two phases. Let’s look at one of them and compare it to Mo’ Better Blues. Like Mo’ Better, The Winter’s Tale breaks into two movements. In both cases, the second movement focuses on the offspring of the characters introduced in the first piece.
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Thursday, August 11, 2011
Apocalypse Now and Thin Red Line
I’ve been enjoying Malick’s The Thin Red Line and thought I’d compare it with Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Nothing elaborate or formal; just some notes.
Both are war films, and both involve the jungle. But they’re quite different. Still, I can’t help wondering whether or not Malick has learned from Coppola’s staging of the jungle. To be sure, Malick’s film is much more IN the jungle than Coppola’s, but I can’t help but think that anyone who’d see Apocalypse Now would be influenced by the Chef & Willard jungle tiger sequence. Not in any direct and deliberate way. It’s just that when you’ve SEEN that sequence in Apocalypse Now you can’t help but see the jungle in that way. On the other hand, all those shots of the sun filtering down through the trees in a misty air, those are Malick’s.
Both films involve a (human) sacrifice, though with different valence. Coppola’s Kurtz is sacrificed to rid the national soul of bad blood while Malick’s Witt is sacrified, well, that others might live, and perhaps to validate THE LIGHT as well. There’s nothing in Coppola’s film doing the work of The Light in Malick’s; nor is there anything in Malick’s film doing the work of a largely invisible directorate of four star general clowns. It’s not obvious to me whether this difference is metaphysical or merely a contingent matter of thematic choice.
Malick treats war as a fact of human life, as a fact, perhaps, of the cosmos at large. Deal with it. Coppola treats war as the product of cumulative human corruption. Deal with it.
And deal with it they have. Superbly, each in his way.
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Friday, August 05, 2011
Malick’s Thin Red Line
I’d never seen a Terrence Malick film when I went to see Tree of Life, so I had little idea what to expect. I’ve just watched The Thin Red Line (on a crappy Netflix DVD that skipped). The style was instantly recognizable. Well, not an instant. But only minutes.
It wasn’t the croc’s slow and elegiac slipping into the water (c. 30 seconds):
But this, the light streaming through the trees from above:
And the voice-over, meditating: “What’s this war, in the heart of nature? Why does nature vie with itself? The land contend with the sea?” Then the light voices (children’s choir?) on the sound track.
That’s him! I was thinking. That’s the guy.
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Friday, July 22, 2011
Fantasia 2000 Isn’t as Good as Fantasia, Why Not?
I think that the original Fantasia is one of the great works of 20th Century art. Fantasia 2000, alas, is only so so.
But I can’t explain why.
Sure, there’s lots I could say that would justify my assessment, which is an intuitive one, as such things are. The colors didn’t work in X. The animation was sloppy in Y. Z was too long and had too little action. Things like that, and more sophisticated as well. But I’m not sure that such observations would ACTUALLY CONNECT with whatever’s not going on in Fantasia 2000 that WAS going on in the original Fantasia.
Here’s an extreme example of what’s not going on. I’ve argued that Fantasia had an encyclopedic range of themes and topics, “sampling the space” of life and the cosmos as we know them. Fantasia 2000 doesn’t do that. There’s nothing about microscopic life nor any solar-system wide imagery, as there was in the “Rite of Spring” episode. Nor is there anything with the contemplative grace of the “Ave Maria” episode.
But I don’t think THAT’s the problem. The problem’s with the individual episodes. In too many of them, something fails to click. What? Everything is technically superb. The film was made by superb craftsman, with ample resources (that is, time and $$$) to work their magic. But the magic doesn’t astonish.
Except in Eric Goldberg’s visualization of “Rhapsody in Blue,” in which we see the intersecting lives of various New Yorkers. The visual style is quite unlike anything else Disney’s done. But surely it’s not that unlikeness that’s the magic, the difference-from. There’s something positive here that simply works, and works superbly.
And so we’re left with vague abstractions like spirit, or the lack there-of. The original Fantasia was infused with vital spirit in every second of film. Fantasia 2000, not so much.
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Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Apocalypse Now Redux, Reconsidered?
The reconsideration I have in mind isn’t mine, it’s A.O. Scott’s, movie critic for The New York Times. He hasn’t actually reconsidered. But would he do so if he accepted the account of the film’s ending that emerges from two of my posts: Apocalyptic Confusion, and Ritual in Apocalypse Now.
Of course I don’t know the answer to the question, but I have a reason for asking it. In a 2001 review of Apocalypse Now Redux he states unequivocally that the film is a great one. He also states that the ending doesn’t work. Given that the not-working ending takes considerable time on the screen, I’m wondering why he doesn’t hold that against the film so as to make it, say, only near-great?
You see, his review tells us what he thinks about the film, how he understands it, comprehends it, but it doesn’t tell us how he felt it. Was he bored by the ending? Or did the film grip him to the end, but when he thought about it, he found himself unable to rationalize the ending and so had to say it didn’t work?
Let’s take a look at his review. I don’t expect to answer those questions, but I do want to show that, in view of what he actually said, they are reasonable questions.
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Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Apocalypse Now: Working Papers
I’ve now taken my posts about Apocalypse Now and gathered them into a single downloadable PDF, which you will find at my Social Science Research Network Site. I’ve appended both the Abstract and the Introduction to this post.
Abstract
This is series of informal essays about Apocalypse Now that argues that the movie as a whole takes the from of a classic rite of passage as described by Durkheim and van Gennep. Particular attention is given to the opening montage, the trip into the jungle for mangoes, the sampan massacre, the final parallel killings of Kurtz and the caribao, and parallels between characters. There is a descriptive précis of the whole film that organizes it into five large sequences and screen shots throughout.
Introduction: Shakespeare Couldn’t Do This
I don’t know just when I bought Apocalypse Now: The Complete Dossier. But it was several years ago. I watched the film, most likely the original first, and was blown away: Shakespeare didn’t do this, I thought. In the spectacle department there’s no contest, just as Shakespeare wins the poetry competition.
Was I then thinking that Apocalypse Now was comparable to The Bard?
Yep, that’s what I was thinking.
[The horror! The horror!]
I still think so, but won’t bother to argue it. The Bard, after all, is untouchable, mythic, beyond category. Francis Ford Coppola, on the other hand, makes wine on the side.
When, for whatever reason, I finally decided to post something on the film, I decided to post doubts (see listing of posts below). And I had no firm intention to do any more than that. But, once I was in, I was in. I figured I’d do two, maybe three more posts. I had no intention of doing eleven posts, and I’d have done a twelfth if I hadn’t decided to start working on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
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Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Interlude: Slocum’s Pilot and Sensory Deprivation
The material below the asterisks is from my notes and has, as its point of departure, one of my touchstone texts, a passage from Weston La Barre’s The Ghost Dance, a classic anthropological study of the origins of religion. It was written before the era of evolutionary psychology and so doesn’t go at origins in that way. Yet it manages to be consistently interesting and insightful.
I’m posting this because it’s relevant to both Heart of Darkness and to Apocalypse Now, which focus on people trying to make sense of a world that is not comfortable and familiar to them.
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Friday, July 08, 2011
Ritual in Apocalypse Now
Now that I’ve come to terms with the film’s ending, I’ve seen a pattern in Apocalypse Now that’s been staring me in the face the whole time. The pattern is that of a rite of passage as described by Arnold van Gennep and Emile Durkheim. The final sacrifice of the caribao is part of this pattern, but only part. The pattern, in fact, governs the whole film.
First, let’s consider ritual pattern (using prose I’ve lifted from one of my essays on Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues). Then we can follow it through Apocalypse Now and conclude, symmetrically, with more prose lifted from that Sita essay.
Ritual Pattern
The pattern I have in mind are an abstraction from structures anthropologists have found in rituals around the world. Here’s how I characterized that structure in my essay on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (find downloadable PDF here):
In “Two Essays Concerning the Symbolic Representation of Time” Edmund Leach has described the ritual structure of Durkheim’s “states of the moral person.” They are: 1) secular life, 2) separation from the secular world and transition to 3) the marginal state where the ‘moral person’ is in a world discontinuous from the ordinary world, often being regarded as being dead, and from which a return to the secular is made by a process of 4) aggregation or desacralization, often symbolized by rebirth. Arnold van Gennep talks of separation, transition, and incorporation in The Rites of Passage. The ritual sequence involves two realms of being, the secular and the sacred, and is designed to order the transition of initiates between these two realms.
As a simple example, consider the bride’s role in the now standard Christian wedding ceremony, a ceremony in which she will loose the surname she was born with and assume her husband’s surname, thereby changing her social identity. She enters the church with a veil over her face. She is thus faceless; symbolically, she has no social identity and is now separated from the secular world. Accompanied by her father, she walks to the altar where she is met by the groom; she is in a transitional state. She and the groom exchange vows and the priest pronounces them to be married. Now that she has her new social identity, and a new name, the veil can be lifted and the new woman can be incorporated into society in that new identity.
This ritual is a relatively short, but anthropologists have recorded rituals that last for hours and days and even longer. Adolescent initial rites, for example, can last for months. There is an initial rite of separation where the young men, shall we say, are stripped on their ordinary identity. They may have to wear special dress and have special markings on their bodies. They may be given a different name as well. Once they have thus been separated from society, they’ll go live in some other place reserved for them and they’ll be taught things needful to be an adult man in their society. This process can easily last several months and may involve arduous physical tasks or a vision quest. During this period their friends and family may well treat them as being dead, which they are, socially. They are in transition, without an identity in their society. Once the proper things have been done another ceremony will be performed and the young men will be given new names, perhaps new body make-up, and will be incorporated into society as adults.
What’s important about the ritual pattern is not how elaborate it is, or how long it takes for the full ritual to run to completion. What’s important is the pattern itself: separation, transition, and incorporation. That’s the pattern we’re going to look for in Apocalypse Now.
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Wednesday, July 06, 2011
That Shakespeare Thing
It is a truth fervently believed, at least among those who have beliefs about such things, that Shakespeare is the greatest writer the world has ever seen. Without question. Period. End of story. So help me god. Cross my heart and hope to die.
Bollocks!
It’s not that I doubt Shakespeare’s excellence. Of course he’s good. But not that good. For THAT good is not about history, it’s about mythology.
And that mythology has got to stop. We can’t treat our literary culture as though it were but an appendage to Shakespeare’s large, various, and excellent output. Debts are owed, certainly. But appendages to, certainly not.
It’s simple: We can’t enter into the 21st century as long as we keep swearing fealty to The Bard, even if we cross our fingers behind our backs while so swearing. The world’s changing, it’s been changing since Shakespeare’s time. The old guy can no longer keep up. It’s time to put him on a raft, and cut the raft free. Let him float out to sea.
Who’s this WE you’re talking about?
Good question. Tricky question. I suppose I could say Harold Bloom and the Bloomistas and be done with it. In fact, that’s what I will say: Bloom and the Bloomistas!
Call it a figure.
Though Harold Bloom is real enough. His admiration for Shakespeare is well known – didn’t he write a fat book explaining how we’re all Shakespeare’s children? And he’s set himself up as the Defender of the Western Literary Canon, the Finger in the Dike that Protects Western Civ from the Sea.
Give the finger a rest. Let the water flow. Life goes on.
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