Have you noticed those "LDS Millionaire Matchmaker" billboards that have been flowering through Utah Valley the past couple of months? I sure have. And it…really is weird to me. But, since I'm not a single, vivacious, unique, starry-eyed blonde Mormon woman (I am, according to my latest calculations, not even half of those things), I didn't put too much thought into it save, in true LDS-fashion, a quick "What the fetch?" as I was continuing my commute. Now that we're in the last throes of June, the deadline for the millionaire's matchmaking dreams has come and passed, the ending of which I still don't know. The blessing of Twitter, however, has given me a much needed (and wonderfully snarky) update to the story. You should read this before you finish mine, if only because the professional writer does such a great job, plus it fills you in on some of what I'm talking about. And, as a heads up, I'm not interested in simply ridiculing those involved (Meg Walter does it well enough). Everyone finds those who matter in different ways, so perhaps this millionaire finds happiness through this process. In fact, it's less the people and more the process that I want to look at here. From where I sit (in my Tudor-esque office, overlooking a neighborhood street with wind-rippled trees undulating prettily) and from my essential non-experience*, I feel like much of what is constructed in Mormon-culture (or, as I use the term, Mormonism, which, I would argue, is quite different from the culture endorsed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, much as the doctrine of the Church and the history of Mormonism are not necessarily the same, either) with regards to dating, courtship, and marriage, is massive spectacle. Consider Guy Debord, in The Society of the Spectacle: The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation. (1) There's a highly performative aspect to Mormonism on many (perhaps all) fronts: Clothing, verbiage, political point of view, daily behaviors, and much, much more. The interiority of conversion is encouraged, via monthly testimony meetings (Open Mic Sundays, as I like to think of them), to be brought out publicly for communal commodification and inspiration. Tears are not uncommon accompanists to the spiritual retellings of private moments**. The society of Mormonism is a fascinating amalgamation of traditional accumulations and nonce incorporations. Ossification happens, as does innovation. In many ways, the "modern conditions of [spiritual] production" truly do prevail within Mormonism and the Church proper. (A quick example: The Church has fully embraced the power of social media--to the point that a process of "selling God" is so prevalent that, though I don't have any Mormon-related views of videos on YouTube, I still get Church-sponsored ads on that website.)
One of the things, interestingly, that the Church has now given up on, is the spectacle par excellence of the "Mormon Miracle Pageant" in Manti, Utah, a sanitized version of Church history, performed with all the spectacle that a pageant ought to have, on the extreme slopes of the Manti Temple. (I went once. I was not a fan.) Despite that, there's still plenty of spectacle that's part and parcel of the Mormon experience, though it is often a spectacle that is done with an eye toward symbolism and spiritual depth: Baptism is one, complete with attendant witnesses and audience; marriage (as it is throughout non-Mormon society) is also highly spectacle driven, even if the ceremony itself is often privately attended inside the temples. Performative worship, while nothing compared to, say, the whirling dervishes, is also part of the Mormon experience. So it's little wonder that there's also performative spectacle when it comes to Mormon cultural expectations. Which leads back to the LDS Millionaire Matchmaker Challenge (it's not really a challenge, which is sad, because it would have been great to see a played-straight Iron Chef segment where the ladies had to incorporate something bizarre into their Jell-O dishes, ranging from carrots to marshmallows) and the experience as shown in the video and described by Meg Walter (again, follow the link). What happened at the actual event is, for me at least, an awkward afternoon that has a serious assumption underpinning what was thought of, by some of the contestants, as a joke, and that has to do with prosperity theology. This is not a uniquely Evangelical (though you could make an interesting argument about how Evangelical-like (-lite) Mormonism is), and though it isn't an official Church doctrine, it is absolutely part of how many Mormons view wealth. Particularly here in Utah, it is much more unusual and uncommon to see a teacher, a librarian, or any number of countless lower-middle class workers become involved in Church leadership than those who are of a more wealthy class. Since the Church is a lay religion, the bishops and stake presidents all come from the wards in which these leaders live. They don't attend seminary or any sort of rigorous, full-time training to do their service. It's all on the Church leader--say, the stake president--to do both money-making and Church-leading activities. Again, it's not the rule, but it is the trend to see those who are financially more well off--upper management, software CEOs, retired-before-50 types--in the leadership roles. Implicit, then, is the idea that wealth = righteousness, with the idea of additional wealth an indicator of even greater righteousness. I can't cite numbers, as this is more my intuition than anything, but I think it's fair to say that members who struggle financially, despite doing all of the things prescribed by the Church, have moments of wondering if they simply aren't righteous enough--aren't obeying the manifold rules well enough--to be given the blessing of wealth. One other thing to add to the mix: Mormonism's highly conservative tendencies mingle in disastrous (in my view) ways when it comes to self-reliance (an actively taught principle in the Church; it's a part of the doctrine, which is probably why part of me likes Milton's Puritanism to a certain degree) and what happens when a family requires Church assistance. There's a stigma to taking welfare of any type in the Church (but not, interestingly, in giving it…provided it's with the Church's name slapped on the side of the truck, rather than a governmental agency), and, from what I can tell, that is only made worse by the assumption on the part of some members that the reason a person is failing financially is because he's*** also failing spiritually. So the words "LDS Millionaire Matchmaker" sound, superficially, as though that's all there is: A millionaire who happens to be LDS is looking for a relationship. As I mentioned before, there are manifold ways of finding a worthwhile partner. Why not advertise it, if you have the means? But those words imply an additional level of piety that may not be visible to the uninitiated. This nameless, sheet-drenched millionaire (who couldn't afford to just, I don't know, take all the ladies on dates?) isn't simply saying that he's financially well off (I don't want to say "stable" because millionaires don't necessarily make good financial decisions all of the time--another assumption about wealth that, I personally think, plays into the trust that members put in their (rich) leaders: He's wealthy, so he must know how to make the right decisions!). No, those three words mean--to me, at least--that there's someone who is available and is, in essence, flaunting his righteousness by asserting his wealth status. Like a peacock whose feathers are made out of dollar bills, there's the outward spectacle that's meant to catch everyone's eyes; but the peahens are also aware of what those feathers are really saying. --- * Many of you know that my courtship with my wife involved meeting her as a junior in high school, dating her exclusively (so exclusively that we've never had any other serious relationship; we've only ever held hands with each other; neither of us has so much as kissed any other person romantically), and marrying her when we were both 21. I do not speak with personal experience at all when it comes to courtship and marriage. ** Please note, I am not disparaging those whose emotional response to important things is through crying. If anything, we need to have more times where it's socially acceptable (though not expected or required) to shed tears. *** And I mean he in many of the cases. The idea of a working Mormon woman as being someone without condemnation is a recent phenomenon and it doesn't have a lot of widespread application. That's a whole other subset to this: Single women are judged as somehow being unworthy of the blessing of marriage; poor men are judged as somehow being unworthy of the blessing of wealth. Video gamers are a peculiar lot. While I wouldn't say that I'm a "gamer"--it carries with it enough negative connotations that I'm leery to use it--I definitely call myself an aficionado. And I like what I like the way I like it, rather unapologetically. Though my stance is shared by many who play video games, others--purists of one stripe or another--don't see games the same way I do.
For a long while now, there's been arguments about whether or not a video game should have an "easy mode" or some sort of accommodation so that the player can enjoy the game on her own terms. On one hand, the game's conception and conceit is designed around a particular experience--more than many other media, video games' ability to interact with the player (and vice versa) means that the personal connection is, at times, crucial. Though particularly impenetrable cinema or literature (I haven't, for example, been able to finish Alan Moore's Jerusalem yet, despite picking at it for years) can require mental fortitude or an intellectual flexibility to "get" what the filmmaker or writer was trying to say, there isn't a skill set that has to be attained when one picks up the latest John Grisham novel. Almost every video game demands a certain level of skill to enjoy the product. It's part of the nature of the medium. And so the desire of the designer to enjoy their vision is, in a sense, predicated on the assumption that the game will be played a certain way. This means, however, that the ability to enjoy the video game is contingent on something outside of the designer's control. I may get bored of a movie and turn it off, but I've abandoned video games that I liked because I got stuck in one particular part. My skills weren't enough to be able to continue accessing the content that I enjoyed (and paid for). The designer wasn't able to anticipate my skill level, thereby shutting me out of the experience of the game that I wanted to enjoy. And that's where the other hand comes in: I've invested in a product in the hopes of being entertained and--if the video game is good in more than superficial ways--leaving the title behind having had an emotional response to it. Not only do a great many games rely on narratives to pull the disparate parts of the game into a coherent experience, but the catharsis of completion--of hitting an end state--is a crucial component to the point of video games. There's a reason that characters in video games have specific missions, actionable desires…players want to be able to know if they have succeeded. It's a primal thing--some writing advice insists that a character should always be wanting something, even if it's just a glass of water--that helps propel interest in what's on the screen. Completing the objective--regardless of what it is--requires that the game allow a way deeper into its contents. If there's an obstacle between the player and the game, and that obstacle is the game itself, then the game isn't actually doing what it was designed to do: be played. Yet there are some neckbeards out there who are really adamant that a game even having the option (not even that it would force them into using the option, mind you) to play the game on an easy mode is an insult to the designer's vision and ought not to be. The idea that a feature programed and implemented by the designer as somehow being against that designer's vision is…um…stupid. Why sugar coat the absurdity of that argument? If it's in the game, it didn't happen by accident.* This reminds me of how excited my five year old, Demetrius, has been going through my old catalogue of Spider-Man video games from the original PlayStation era. They both have a "Kid Mode" which allows for the player to swing about more easily, take less damage, and basically have a way through the story and beat the game. Demetrius was ecstatic when he beat the first game (though he did need some help from his more experienced dad, even with the kid mode). Why? Because it's a Spider-Man game and so it was awesome to play as Spider-Man. It's pretty straightforward: He wanted the experience of playing as the wall-crawler and the game allowed him to do that. No vision** was corrupted, no video game gods offended that a player of a different level than an "ideal" player got the opportunity to play through a game. It was nothing but positive. The inspiration for this essay comes from a kerfuffle that I just learned about, explained well here. Since you can click through and read that article, I won't repeat what it's about. Instead, I want to dig into the sanctimony of what Fetusberry (I'll pass over the name without comment) was implying by his tweet. Not only is he completely wrong about the idea of the writer "cheating [him]self", but he's also, apparently, confusing real life benefits with digital ones. There's nothing risked in video games. I quote this bit by McKenzie Wark's Gamer Theory all of the time, but it's always important to how I view the medium: "[In games,] violence is at its most extreme--and its most harmless" (23). The reason it can be so extreme while still being harmless isn't just that it's pixels and digital representations--it's because there's nothing risked anyway. The stakes in a narrative aren't a personal stake; they're important for the characters. And though the interaction that a player can give the video game shifts this to a small degree, unless someone is playing video games professionally (like with e-sports), they're not "risking" anything when they plop onto the couch and fire up Bloodborne. What really irks me about Fetusberry (besides his*** asinine name) is that he's probably (and I'm acknowledging that I don't know this person and I'm making a broad generalization and assumption that could be wrong) the type of gamer who 1) doesn't think that violence in video games affects a person, nor should there be controls over who has access to violent content; 2) video games are art, but; 3) it's "just a game" so who cares if someone is offended by problematic content in, say, a Grand Theft Auto game? The reason I assume this is because there seems to be a trend among people of a certain gaming stripe: The more hardcore they are, the more they abide by those three interpretations (though number two is a bit squishy, since the concept of art--what it is, how it works, why it matters--is often lost on them). The thing is, number three can't be a defense if numbers one and two are true. If it's "just a game" then it's not really art--it's a game--and toys that lead to harm and violence can easily be banned. Additionally, if it's "just a game", there's very little to talk about. People don't get hot under the collar over a game of Parcheesi, why should they if someone is playing Sekiro differently than they would? Yet he insists, almost as if Sekiro and its punishing difficulty are part of a divine aspect of spiritual growth, that the author somehow skipped over an Abrahamic test by playing differently. We can't have it be "just a game" and the path to apotheosis--some contradictions can't work, no matter how hard we try to force them together. Now, as I said before, I may be wrong about Fetusberry (*ugh*) specifically, but the mentality is one that I see really frequently. One of the complaints that I see surface is when a video game is called out, criticized and critiqued, and its defenders seem incapable of realizing that criticism of a thing that they like isn't the same as a criticism of them. Just because I think that the treatment of race is immensely problematic in Resident Evil 5 doesn't mean that I can't appreciate and enjoy it. Shakespeare's treatment of women, while progressive for his time, doesn't mean that he's above reproach in our era. He has women behaving in all sorts of damaging and dangerous ways--just look at what Kat puts up with in The Taming of the Shrew--and that needs to be confronted. The same can happen to video games: If they are supposed to be treated seriously enough to inspire people and change who they are and how they see the world, they are serious enough to receive criticism. Perhaps more importantly, if they're going to slap an M for Mature rating on their boxes because they have "mature content" (boobs and blood and bad words), then those who play them they should be "mature" enough to know how to converse about games, to listen to criticism, and to empathize with others' points of view. Accessibility in video games is a hot topic now, in no small part because (no surprise here) disabled people like to play video games. If designers can accommodate that, it's a sign of maturity and respect for their audience to provide them. The greatest thing about video games is the interaction between player and game. Why not rely on that strength to allow it to be flexible, so that players can interact with it as they will? And, for crying out loud, Fetusberry, change your insipid handle. --- * Glitches are a bit of an exception to this rule, but only in the sense that it's impossible to get a perfect product. I've purchased books that had pages printed out of order, or with screwy margins. Flaws abound. An easy mode, however, isn't something that glitches into a game. It's not a bug. ** Vicarious or otherwise. Okay, that's a really deep cut for that joke. Hats off to whoever gets that one. *** Yeah, I don't know the pronouns, but let's be real: The person behind that stupid of a name with that stupid of a comment has gotta be a dude. In which I get political… There's a longstanding platitude--and who can challenge a platitude, save, perhaps, Plato, but then it's just platotudes on platitudes--about fishing. In its many iterations, it tends along these lines: "If you give a man a fish, he eats for a day; if you teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime." I most often hear this idea expressed by devotees of supply-side economics and/or American conservatism/libertarianism. Its superficial meaning is, I think, pretty clear, but--like most aphorisms--its simplicity and superficiality overshadow the deep, inherent problems of the idea. Consider this poem by Kahlil Gibran, one of the most criminally underrated poets of the 20th century: Once there lived a man who had a valley-full of needles. And one Though less known as far as parables go, this one, I fear, more accurately represents the mindset of those who espouse the Fishing Proverb*. And, more than that, I think it comes from a misunderstanding of what's required of people within the Fishing Proverb. The premise is simply: A man comes to you and is hungry. "Teach him to fish" is not a bad idea--it is a useful skill that will sustain him, perhaps for the rest of his life. It's something that can benefit him and, provided he passes on the information to his children, subsequent generations. In many ways, that is literally what I've dedicated my life to doing: Teaching others so that they can benefit and pass on what they've learned.
The problem with using the platitude as a type of panacea for the problems many are faced with is in the first part of the premise: The man is hungry. Who can be bothered to learn to fish when one is about to expire? Using the Fishing Proverb as the response of a person to another's need gets us Gibran's poem, "On Giving and Taking". There's nothing inherently wrong with the man who lived in the "valley-full of needles" believing and giving a discourse on an important topic. That isn't his sin; it's that he gives her something that doesn't help her right now. Ought the mother of Jesus to learn about Giving and Taking? (Well, frankly, she has a better idea of sacrifice than almost any other human, I would argue, but let that go.) Sure. Timing, however, is rather important, and she needs something the man has. And not just what the man has, but what he has through no effort of his own, and an enormous abundance. The fact that he's awash with needles--so many more than he could ever truly need, and giving away one would in no way diminish what he has or could have in the future--is a crucial detail. The mother of Jesus doesn't go to one without and demand of her; she goes to one with bounty and requests a tiny boon. Though the broader principle of Giving and Taking is surely one from which she could learn, the mother of Jesus doesn't need an education at this juncture: She needs a needle. When pundits invoke the Fishing Proverb, it's often as a rationale against handouts and government subsidies. While there's plenty of room to figure out who (and, perhaps, to a certain extent, what) should receive governmental assistance in whatever form, I most often hear the Fishing Proverb used as a closing argument against welfare for the laboring class. (I never, incidentally, hear those same pundits argue against welfare for the corporate class; indeed, they often seem quite vociferous about tax cuts at the top somehow magically benefitting the remaining people below.) The idea, of course, is if you "incentivize laziness", then people will rely on governmental assistance ad infinitum and then where will we be? The thing about the Fishing Proverb is, even if it's only taken at face value, it is not the abnegation of responsibility for the "you" in the proverb to take no action. In fact, it insists on something quite different: The "you" in this is supposed to teach "the man" how to fish. It presupposes that you not only know how to fish, but that you will also take the time to impart that knowledge. In other words, it insists that the person petitioned devote time and energy to imparting skills to those without. Though less explicit than "On Giving and Taking", the Fishing Proverb is still a call to action. In our modern day, money has become the shorthand for almost every interaction. Karl Marx: "The bourgeoisie…has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment'." Be that as it may, ours is a world wherein labor's value is entirely monetized, and the greater potential for monetization, the greater we value that labor. Intrinsic value is ignored--there's a reason people tease humanities majors--because worth has become tied to capital. (The current president was, by some, regarded worthy of the office on the sole qualification that he was a businessman--as if running a business and running a country are somehow comparable.) If this is the way in which we communicate, if economics is the new lingua franca of the modern/post-modern society, then money is the way to provide the "time and energy" component of the Fishing Proverb. Through money, then, we can teach hungry men and women "how to fish". (Additionally, it is through money that we can help feed a man for a day…long enough, in other words, that he can learn to fish.) And that's my job. As a teacher, I am in charge of a very small sliver of my students' overall education. I recognize that--I am one of six or seven teachers that they have each day, during one school year. In the grand scheme of things, I've very little chance to make a difference in the students' lives. That realization--for me, at least--is part of what inspires me to continue to teach as well as I possibly can: I've a limited window of opportunity that I** don't want to waste. Teaching is the potential remedy to the Fishing Proverb's problem, but what of "On Giving and Taking"? In this, we see a clear condemnation of the objectivist's creed that greed is a virtue. The man in the valley has much, much, much more than he could ever worry about consuming or using. He is asked to share a very small piece of his unearned bounty with another; instead, he bloviates about why others should think hard about giving and taking. Lest the comparison I'm drawing is too subtle here, I'm arguing that the American concept of economics is morally debased and men like the man in the valley should not be allowed to act in this way. I'm arguing that a more socialistic approach to the economy is morally superior to the supply-side economics that is currently destroying*** the lives of so many. And this leads me to my final excoriation: The Utah legislature, following the example of Rep. Christ Stewart (R - Utah), has recently made a more deliberate and clear push against socialism (and, because the idea of nuance in American politics is, apparently, impossible, communism as well). In the case of Stewart, he has made an Anti-Socialism Caucus to show…well, I'm not entirely sure. Ostensibly, the "marketplace of ideas"**** should allow the free intercourse of ideas, much like a "free market" should allow the buying and selling of goods without a lot of governmental intervention. Stewart's hypocrisy is hardly the point: Socialism as practiced in the United States is very mild, and is pretty much seen as using taxes to pay for public services…including his paycheck as a representative. I, as a teacher, get my money through taxes--and, as a worker in the state, I pay taxes, too. Like, 30% or so--percentage-wise, twice as much as a person like Utah Senator Mitt Romney did back in the 2012 election (remember when presidential candidates released their tax returns so that we could see if there was any pecuniary conflicts of interest?). I own a house, so my property taxes go toward, eventually, paying me. (It's weird, frankly.) How does this tie into needles and fish? The requirement of the Fishing Proverb is that we help teach those who do not know how to take care of themselves. This idea is not radical, but it does require money. Teachers in particular are in demand for this very thing, as well as being very poorly paid for it. Especially in Utah, we have a continual growth segment of the population: Children. As the linked article points out, one in five Utahns is a child. These are those who need to learn how to fish. But, more strikingly, is the fact that one third of those come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. (and if you don't think that economic disparity is damaging, you have some research to do). These are the ones who are--sometimes literally--hungry. If we are to take the Fishing Proverb seriously, then being dead last in per-student spending needs to end. Yes, Governor Herbert has proposed an increase--one that translates into a 4% increase on the WPU (how much the state spends on each student). That pushes Utah out of 51st place and into 50th (D.C. is on the list) place, assuming that the extra $280 Utah is adding per student isn't matched by Idaho--the current penultimate place on the list of per-student spending. Granted, the numbers are from 2016, and a lot can change between those numbers and what we actually see implemented. But the point, mixed metaphor though it may be, stands: Utah is more interested in being the man in the valley-full of needles rejecting the mother of Jesus than in truly teaching hungry children how to fish. --- * There are worthwhile distinctions between parables, proverbs, aphorisms, and platitudes, but I'm eager to explore the broader idea and will use them all interchangeably. ** Admittedly, not all teachers feel the same way, but that's their problem…and their students', actually. So, yeah, that's a bit of a problem. There are solutions--imperfect, as almost all solutions are--but they're not the point of this essay. *** I know what I wrote. I certainly wouldn't claim that socialism is perfect. I'm also not such a lackluster student of history as to assume that the crimes of capitalism and the crimes of communism are somehow comparable. Both systems have led to indescribable suffering and misery; both systems have furthered people's lives in positive and fulfilling ways. I reject the idea that capitalism's only alternative is communism, and I assert that there are ways to improve the lives of more people than capitalism can provide. **** A poor way to derive truth, honestly: The popularity of an idea does not equate with the validity of the idea. Just ask Socrates. Taste is an interesting quirk of humanity, isn't it? There's food-based taste: I have an affinity for caramel (which, when asked, I say I pronounce as "kuh-RAM-uhl"), raspberries, and brownies (all at once, if you please, in some nice sweet cream ice cream from Coldstone, thank you very much), but I also like lamb. There's also musical tastes: If it isn't third-wave ska, '90s alternative grunge, or light rock like John Mayer, Dave Matthews, or Jason Mraz, then I'm not interested. Aesthetically, I am a big fan of gothic architecture and Tim Burton-esque milieu. In other words, Bloodborne is my kind of game*. There are a lot of things that recommend it to any PlayStation 4 owner (as it's an exclusive title, only those blessed with the good taste of purchasing the Sony console can enjoy the game), not the least among these things is the aesthetic. The story--from what I can glean from the sporadic narrative--is that there's a cursed city, Yharnam, wherein monsters and villagers are…um…there to kill the player. Okay, so I don't know a lot about the story. Narrative in video games is inherently different from other visual media (including Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid games, which run decidedly in a more cinematic style than almost any other series), in large part because there are protracted moments and experiences that intersperse plot advancements. That is, there's a game interwoven between the narrative. Some games choose to omit the narrative altogether (Tetris doesn't really have a lot of robust backstory or worldbuilding to dive into, for example), while others--consider the Final Fantasy series--will spend inordinate amounts of time developing concepts, themes, and plot points. Part of what makes video games so exciting is the different ways of telling stories. When it comes to Bloodborne, From Software (the makers of the game) chose to err on the side of drip-fed, organic storytelling. Though the game begins in the same place, and there are a handful of expected moments--narrative unlocked in order to progress any further in the game--the way the lore of the world is unfolded varies on the playthrough. In my case, I played a good fifty hours or so (I would guess) before getting stuck and lost and, sadly, losing my save file. I've since started a replay of the game and have been enjoying it much more than I did back when I first started. Part of this is because I learned how to play it better--I'm still not specifically good at it, but I don't die quite as often as I did my first time through--and part of it is because I have enough familiarity with the world to know that I had misspent some of my time during my first foray into Yharnam. With this new playing, I get a chance to again enjoy the thing that allured me to the game in the first place: The setting. Yharnam is one part horror setting, one part gothic memories of a Victorian London. The costumes, architecture, and ambiance all blend in to a strong sense of location and identity. There's nothing quite like Yharnam, but there are echoes of a nineteenth-century Paris. It's familiar, but also uncanny and unfamiliar. The name of the game is apt: There is a lot of blood in this game, and though there isn't any swearing to speak of, nor nudity/sex, its grim tone, endless streams of blood and death, and morose setting make it a decidedly family-unfriendly sort of game. I feel, though, that this game really lives up to the Warkian concept about violence, as he wrote about in his 2007 book, Gamer Theory: That games present the digital in its most pure form are reason enough to embrace them, for here violence is at its most extreme--and its most harmless. (23) Bloodborne is hyperviolent, but its purpose and tone are so different than, say, Grand Theft Auto V or any of the Call of Duty games that it's hard to put them into the same category. I think part of this is the equivalency of the violence. In other games where violence is the method by which the player experiences the world, there's an imparity between the gamer's avatar and the enemies. Setting aside online gaming matches, a player going through Resident Evil 6 will control a character who can dish out massive amounts of violence--grenades, knives, guns, rocket launchers, and more--against the enemies. Mindless zombies get ripped apart by the player's arsenal. Bloodborne, however, doesn't do that**. While I have the advantage of non-algorithmic thinking and can exploit bugs, features, and quirks of the system, I do not have invincible impunity. The hallmark of From Software games--as countless other people have noted--is that there is a punishing amount of work to get through these games. That is to say, a player will have to play for hours to get good enough to make it through even small sections of the world. The avatar can gain experience, yes, and become stronger--weapons can be refined and repaired, stats can be boosted--but the escalating costs for everything makes it harder and harder to keep up with the strength of the creatures. The parity between my character and the enemies I fight is always tipped in favor of the enemies. Playing this game, the avatar dies. Frequently. Often painfully. Intermixed with this frequent reminder of the fragility of life is the fact that, as a game, the player can return to the world. Death may not be permanent, but the fact that the game's experience/currency (called "blood echoes") is lost at each death creates a different risk/reward paradigm than other games rely on. If I die while playing Overwatch, the punishment is that I wait nine seconds before jumping back into the match. Though I've always the incentive to play well and avoid death, its permanence on the game is trifling. This, to me, is the genius of the Bloodborne method: Because it's a game that expects you to die a lot--even the weakest of monsters, if ignored for a few moments, can deal lethal amounts of damage--it has shifted the meaning of death from "Press X to continue" to a strategical response. Is it worth plunging deep into the world to harvest the blood echoes from the creature who last killed you, restoring your lost booty? Or is it safer to chalk them up as a loss and seek experience elsewhere? This idea of repetition and cycles is reflected in the motifs of the game. Again, I'm early in the lore, but it's clear that the Hunt that's taking place in Yharnam is not an unusual thing; that is, it has happened before. The curse for the "Night of the Hunt" is clearly not a one-off. The denizens who aren't transformed into nightmare fuel are holed up in their homes, barricading their doors and praying that they survive the night. That there are Hunters who are expected, who have a role to fill, also shows that the entire world is built upon death, rejuvenation, and repetition. That's pretty cool, if you ask me. Also, it just looks awesome. Look at that! Creepy, yes. But also super cool. ---
* Yeah, yeah, I know: This essay is at least three years old, as the game is hardly brand new. But it's on my mind and, since my kids are awake, I can't really ignore my writing and go play it, now can I? ** Worth noting: It doesn't do the opposite, either. Games like the original Resident Evil and even Resident Evil 7 or Alone in the Dark are anxious to put the player in the place of the NPC--powerless, weak, and at the mercy of a much stronger entity. Games can play it both ways, though it's clear that the depowering motifs of survival-horror games do not translate into the same sort of steady sales as the power-fantasy fuel of Battlefield and Call of Duty. ==== Hey, friends. I have been releasing essays on my website for a couple of years now at a pretty steady rate. I'm happy to do so, as it benefits me as a writer and (I hope) you as a reader. I also think that, as a writer, it's okay if I believe that my work has some value monetarily as well as emotionally. To that end, I've created a Ko-Fi account, which is basically a way to give an online tip to a creator whose work you appreciate. The idea is, you can buy them a cup of coffee. (That's what the name of the website sounds like, if you're curious.) I'm not charging for any of the content on my website; instead, if you'd like to toss me a cup-le (see what I did there?) of bucks to show your gratitude, that would be cool. I'd totally appreciate that appreciation. If you don't? No problem. We can still be friends. As always, thanks for reading! Video game criticism is still in its infancy. While there can be the occasional thoughtful thought-piece about a game, trends inside the industry, or design critiques, video games' bizarre center-of-a-Venn-diagram existence means that ludic critiques often fail to do more than sum up a subjective enjoyment while cinematic critiques can't capitalize on an inherently interactive medium. McKenzie Wark tried laying a critical framework back in 2007 with Gamer Theory, but I think it may have been too theoretical to be applicable. One reason is because of the rapid way in which the medium as a whole morphs. There are comparatively few ways to consume written stories: Serialized stories (like Dickens' work) or complete novels (I'm thinking of Hugo) are pretty much the only way that books were consumed for a lengthy space of time. Video games, on the other hand, have transformed during my 35 years of life from a niche pastime to arcade cabinet extravaganzas to home consoles tethered by cables to 4KHD games played on wireless controllers and managed through smartphone apps. Video games are used in education, exclusively online, and in countless other ways.
The result of this is that the form of the game becomes nebulous enough to prevent a workable definition, without which it's increasingly difficult to know what games actually are. And how can we critique what doesn't exist? The folks over at Third éditions (a French company, as I understand it) have nevertheless taken pains to create book-length, sustained looks at some of the most seminal video games currently in existence. I read their book on Final Fantasy VII, and just finished their approach to Metal Gear Solid. Of the two, the book discussing Metal Gear Solid is better--in part because they dedicate a hefty portion of the book to the chronology of the story as laid out in the sundry games that make up the series. In the case of FFVII, they have fewer games (and fewer bizarre plot twists) that allowed the book to work well for me without pushing me too hard on what was going on within the game. The one on Metal Gear Solid, however…well, spoilers on the games ahead. What Brusseaux, et. al. have accomplished is an attempt at documenting the entire, complicated mess of the MGS universe while also giving intriguing interpretations about the game that I hadn't really thought of. Though some of their preferences come through (their comments about which game is the weakest in the series, for example, doesn't always track), they manage to put an enthusiastic, thoughtful lens on these games. I've been a fan of MGS since it came out in 1999--though I originally thought it was stupid because the character couldn't jump over any obstacles. And I've eagerly awaited every new version of the game, with MGS 2 being my favorite entry of the lot. (I played most of--or maybe it was all?--of the original Metal Gear, but I never tried my hand at Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake.) In fact, I purchased a PlayStation 3 specifically so that I could play Metal Gear Solid 4, which remains the only game that I've ever purchased that I spent the extra money for a "deluxe edition" that came with a "Making Of" Blu-Ray and a couple of other goodies. (I did that because I assumed that there wouldn't be any more Metal Gear Solid games, so I wanted to go out with a bang.) So when I saw this book was available, I immediately picked up a copy and read through it over the course of a week or so. While there are some things that bother me (the authors use exclamation marks far too frequently, which is to say, at all), and it's clearly a French text (not that I'm an expert, but there's a certain flavor that translated French provides…also, it's not a bad thing, merely a noticeable one), the overall process of the book was really enjoyable. One aspect of the book that was useful was seeing the entire story unfold chronologically, using prequels in their correct context. Skull Face's jobs (not learned about until playing through MGS V) during MGS 3 are interwoven into the entire fabric of the story. It's a chapter that spans almost 100 pages of the 250 page book. They omit small details for the sake of clarity, and though I liked seeing it all placed together in such an approachable way, I realized that there's a lot "lost in translation." This is like reading Shakespeare with the Sparks Notes effect: The magic of the story is in how it's told, not necessarily the story itself. Stripping the way Kojima's narrative works--its tandem effort of being both cinema and video game--really makes the whole thing sound preposterously silly. And it is. I mean, most stories, stripped of the passion of their creation, sounds tinny and hollow. This is why I struggle with writing a query for my books: Perfunctory distillation is hardly inspirational. What if the games were given a different medium? Well, there are a couple of books by Raymond Benson released a few years ago that retell the story from the first two games, which end up feeling like a fanfic version of a walkthrough. Even the dialogue is carried over from one medium to the other. Presented in that format, the story becomes even more extreme, with gaps in logic that operate normally within a video game becoming untenable when put into book form. A quick f'rzample: In Metal Gear Solid 2, the character Raiden must deactivate a bunch of bombs by finding them and freezing them with a freeze spray. This leads to a boss fight which is filled with the player finding additional bombs and freezing them. As a gamer, that's an enjoyable experience, as it's tense and the possibility of missing one of the bombs could lead to a game over state. In the book form, it seems tedious and there's little tension about Raiden's victory as the spontaneity of a game is pulled into the less-flexible logic of a novel. As for Brusseaux and company's analysis, I really liked the way they pointed out some of the cyclical motifs that I had failed to notice when I was playing the games, most significantly in the way that Metal Gear Solid V echoes the usurped expectations of Metal Gear Solid 2. The difference, of course, is that it's clear that Raiden has taken Snake's place in MGS 2. In V, I didn't see Venom Snake as a phantom to Big Boss' Naked Snake until the final moments, when the ruse was established. Raiden has S3 to turn him into Snake; Venom Snake has Mother Base turn him into Big Boss' "clone"--a clone that Big Boss actually wanted and appreciated. Those parallels are really cool, but the emptiness of learning that I actually learned nothing about Big Boss still hurts*. I guess it's a type of phantom pain. Anyway, if you've played the games, I would recommend checking out the book. It has some dry parts, but on the whole it was a worthwhile and enjoyable experience. --- * The loss of David Hayter as the voice of Snake in both Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain is something that still makes no sense to me. I've decided to blame Konami more than Kojima on that front, though I really don't know what to make of it. An article from The New York Times came out ("Should Art Be A Social Battleground?") in which the author, Wesley Morris, makes an argument/observation about the Morality Wars--the next step in the Culture Wars of the past two or three decades. Morris gave me some things to think about--stuff I agree with and others that I don't--which I wanted to jot down here. I'm not going to give a lot of context to his arguments, as I recommend you use one of your free articles to read on the Times' website to read what he has to say. He begins with his argument that "culture is being evaluated for its moral correctness more than for its quality," but I don't get the sense that he sets down any parameters for what "quality" may mean. This is not an unfamiliar experience for me: At my school, we're a liberal arts, classical school in a lot of ways. We talk about (much more often than we read) the Classics (capital C) and as I teach World Civilizations from the High Middle Ages to current affairs, that focus on the classics is something that I have to wrestle with all of the time. As an unabashed Bardolator and Miltonite, I am perfectly comfortable claiming those two dead, white, British males as the dead center of the English canon. Part of it is the undeniable quality of their writing--which, as a native English speaker, I can appreciate in a more fundamental and satisfying way than I can anything in translation (sorry, Homer and Dante)--that continues to keep it firmly planted. The universality of some of the thoughts, feelings, and problems (not in the superficial way that "Shakespeare in the Bush" would make you think, but in important, fundamental ways) of this aspect of the canon make them indispensable. At the outset, I have to recognize that bias inside of me. I don't think it's a subjective-only claim, and I'm not talking about popularity, either (most people don't know anything about Milton or Paradise Lost, though they've used the word pandemonium, a word that Milton coined). Provided one is willing to invest the time and can understand the language these men are speaking, there is something for everyone inside of this part of the canon. If you want to talk about quality, then that's where we land. Moving out from there, however, things rapidly become murky and additional criteria are necessary. In part because of the continuing growth of art, we gain more and more potential voices. Which ought to be selected? Which studied? Which embraced? Which ignored? Which reconsidered? I bump against this problem in choosing my curricula, which focus on the European side of history more than any other section (though I have been criticized by a student for not teaching more American history in my World History class). This is where the question of quality begins to be begged, I feel. There is no equivalent to Shakespeare. There's nothing like Bach. They are, so far as we can see, unique to their time and place, rare instances of fortunately-timed preservation of genius. There are other beauties of the world from every culture. Many--perhaps most--will be forever forgotten and unknown, preserved (or not) in a way that prevents us from knowing about them. The idea, however, that quality is exclusively found within the Western Canon is the problem area: The story of a creation myth from Igboland isn't comparable to Paradise Lost in terms of its raw, poetic power--but it also isn't supposed to be. Judging a piece of art for areas of deficiency is not the best way to criticize that art. Or, to repurpose Neal A. Maxwell, it would be like faulting a phonebook for lack of a plot. The Igbo version of creation isn't supposed to compete with Paradise Lost (or the Bible, for that matter); it's part of the same genre and that's about it. The purpose, delivery, and quality of it are contextualized in ways that don't apply to Western cosmogonies. My thinking is that there is a lot of art out there that is of excellent quality and part of the process of living is to find, learn from, and enjoy it. So when Morris makes that opening claim, it immediately makes me question. Now, I can easily take a "for the sake of argument, let's operate on an intuitive level" approach to Morris' paper, and that is for the better, as it allows me to get into some of the other things that he brings up. For instance, he brings up this idea that societal pressures are increasing on not what is said, but who gets to say it. Morris says, "We're talking less about whether a work is good art but simply whether it's good--good for us, good for the culture, good for the world." He says that in a way--as I took it, anyway--that bemoans that loss of addressing the quality of the art, focusing instead on the way that the art's effects are felt. On one hand, I get that: Is Wonder Woman a good movie? For the most part, yes, though it fails to stick the landing with a rickety third act and a couple of other strange choices throughout. That can be debated, by the way, and there have been some people who have put forth some worthwhile critiques of the film whose points are solid, even if I disagree that the flaws disqualify the movie from being "good". However, part of what made Wonder Woman so popular and important is the way in which it operates in the broader cultural milieu. Without a reliable rubric for what makes a film good to base any other judgments on, the greater contribution to the conversation of superhero movies, female representation, and acknowledgment of previously unheard voices means that Wonder Woman has more purpose to it than whether or not the cinematography is well done or the editing competent. Though what I just described is Morris' point--we're no longer appreciating art in a vacuum--I have another hand I want to gesture with. Removed from that cultural moment, Wonder Woman absolutely loses power. In terms of raw filmmaking, it is well done. I'd say that the editing and color palate are more dynamic and intriguing than, say, Batman Begins, but it can't compete with the filmmaking mastery that Nolan demonstrated in The Dark Knight. In that sense, Wonder Woman isn't as good of a movie as TDK. So is that a satisfying analysis? Do we strip out the context of the world--with everything that has happened to America in the past two years--and allow the caliber of moviemaking dictate the worth of the film? I'm sure some people would say yes, thinking that a reliance on a supposedly objective rubric can demonstrate the quality of a piece, as if criticism is algorithmic. To a certain extent, that is worthwhile, but I don't think that extent goes to the extent that Morris is implying in his text. One of the things that Morris mentions that I agree with fully is the consequence of the type of criticism we have at our disposal. "The goal," he writes, "is to protect and condemn work, not for its quality, per se, but for its values." Morris believes that this makes sense and he celebrates those who were once marginalized now have a voice, though he acknowledges that such stretching does "start to take a toll". Morris pushes this idea further (after a quick recap of social history from the past three decades that is quite interesting. Here's a taste: "The culture wars back then [in the previous 30 years] always seemed to be about keeping culture from kids. Now the moral panic appears to flow in the opposite direction. The moralizers are young people, not their parents. And the fit is no longer over what we once called family values. It's for representation…") when he gets into his final quarter of the essay. Morris explains his difficulty with The Cosby Show in light of the decades of abuse that Bill Cosby has been convicted of. After exploring the impact of having Cosby's true nature come to light, Morris notes that the corporations erased "it from all platforms", a kind of cancellation of the art that a (monstrous) man made. But, Morris argues, "the show is innocent of Cosby's crimes". Yes…and no… Morris' claims about the quality--something he never gives us as a rubric, so we're again running on the intuitive feeling of what that means here--is what he's after. The show was well done. The man who made it was a monster. They aren't the same thing and ought to be judged separately--that, at least, is what I got out of Morris' argument. The twist is that Morris argued against that position earlier when he asks "Why not keep those things [historical context, the history of the author, cultural norms of the time] in mind as you consume it?" Like me, Morris was trained in a Barthesian approach to textual analysis: The death of the author. That is, he was trained to rely on textual evidences for interpretation, rather than for diving into the past of the writer/artist in order to extrapolate (or, sometimes, infer) the meaning of a text. Since college, I've eased up on the absolute use of this technique, but I think it's a mistake to turn every interpretive exercise into a biographical research (even if it is just a quick look up on Wikipedia). Sometimes, it can be helpful: I was better able to understand 10 Books that Screwed Up The World when I learned the author was a Roman Catholic apologist. "Methough I Saw My Late Espoused Saint" by John Milton gains exponential value when you learn about his rough marriage and the fact that he was blind. I think the danger of relying too heavily on the biography is that it can "botch the words up fit to their own thoughts", as the Gentleman warns Gertrude in Hamlet 4.5. It's from trying to read biography into Shakespeare, after all, that we get the nonsense from antistratfordian "scholarship". With modern art, however, the risk is lower: In some cases, we can simply ask an artist what she meant by a piece. (Whether or not she answers is up to her, of course, and provides its own type of interpretation.) Maybe it's the fact that there is an attempt at monopolizing meaning that such reliance on authorial intent engenders that has me pushing against some of Morris' piece. I think particularly of the (and this is a subjective judgment on my part) laughably bad artwork of Jon McNaughton. I first learned about him during the Obama years during which time he painted "The Forgotten Man" (and, yeah, the Forgotten Man is a white guy, so there I go, justifying exactly what Morris was describing in his paper). What makes this piece particularly egregious, I would argue, is the copious amount of writing that McNaughton does to explain his artwork. I think it's elsewhere on his site where a person can mouse over any part of the picture and have McNaughton explain that section of the painting to you. That, to me, smacks of 1) a failure to trust in the artistic ability to communicate within its own medium, and 2) a desire to dictate what's received. Both of those possibilities--and there are more--strike me as a "have my cake and eat it, too" mentality that, frankly, isn't possible. Interpretation is a personal act, and being told what to think or what a thing means by virtue of appealing to the author(ity) is unconvincing. If "correct" interpretations were simply a matter of an artist's explanation, then we wouldn't need the art in the first place. Let McNaughton write an essay about how he hates Obama's policies--why bother with his "fine art" at all? I think there's something about art that is different, and perhaps it's that democratization of meaning that I find so crucial. I don't think McNaughton is the sole arbiter of meaning of his piece, and the fact that he interprets it is fine. But there's so much more going on with the art than what's on the canvas. And that's the tension: Sometimes we want to strip things of context (e.g. Wonder Woman as a "bad" movie), but not others. Morris is guilty of this paradox, as am I: I want to add in McNaughton's comments, his politics, his other artwork to better understand "The Forgotten Man", but I don't think it's fitting to squeeze Edward DeVere into Shakespeare's plays simply because Oxford stabbed someone behind a curtain. I had this issue a few years back when people were bagging on Cars 2. It's not a particularly memorable film, but the issue was that we were judging it by the other work that Pixar has done. In comparison to the entire Pixar catalogue up to that point, Cars 2 was a bit of a wreck (lol, pun). Should Cars 2 be judged simply on its merit? That was the argument I was trying to make. But its merit isn't found in just that film alone; it's packaged up as a single part of a much greater whole. And that leads back to the Cosby connection. I've been struggling with this concept for some time--not the Cosby side, as I didn't watch his show and he wasn't much of a presence in my mind as an entertainer--because I don't know how to parse the problem. Back when I was a kid, my dad got really upset at my brother because my bro had bought a Nu-Metal album with a parental advisory sticker. Dad was mad because the purchase of the album showed the support of what was on the disc, regardless of whether or not my brother listened to the songs with bad words in them or not. That has stuck with me for a long time, as has this Mormonad* from many years back. Since I write some things that might be considered objectionable (my characters are violent and swear, among other things), I've often wondered if that ad is accurate. If there's something bad inside, doesn't that affect the whole?
When it comes to art, I'm sad about the misogyny that's easy to find in Shakespeare and Paradise Lost. It's hard to really venerate the Founding Fathers when some of my brothers and sisters of the human family were viewed by them as subhuman (three-fifths human, as a matter of fact) and enslaved. The failure of the Catholic Church (specifically, though others can be put in) to stop clerical abuses likewise shatters conceptions about the holiness of an institution. So do I stop enjoying or appreciating the contributions of those entities? I know that we're all human and we all have foibles. The issues here are deeper than just "We all make mistakes," though. What Cosby did wasn't a "mistake", it was calculated and abusive. Same with the Founding Fathers. They didn't accidentally import humans. And Shakespeare's progressiveness is all a comparative thing anyway: He says some pretty horrible things about women in his plays and that wasn't by accident. Ah, but the times change, yes? So that's why! We can excuse the past for being more benighted because it was more benighted. Except…the culture accepting the horrible things has changed, but the horrible things are still horrible. Sometimes, moral relativism will try to insert itself as meaning that everyone feels differently, so therefore there's nothing to worry about. I disagree: I think that morals are the same, but our willingness--societal and personal--to allow their breakage shifts. Women have been saying for centuries that the way men treat women is inappropriate and illogical. The stories brought up in the #MeToo movement aren't a sudden uprising--they're long-embedded realities from generations of our past. They weren't talked about, maybe, but they were still wrong "back then". Societally, we've started to say, "It's wrong now, too." So, does that mean that art's quality is being lost? Well, again, I don't know where Morris was looking for his definition of quality, so I can't answer that. I do know that I don't disagree with much of his stuff. That shows me that I still have more to think about, more to process. I don't know what to do about liking a piece of art whose artist is "problematic". I don't watch Louis C.K. stuff anymore, despite having previously enjoyed many of his routines. I don't know if that's the right choice. One thing is certain, though: Morris definitely gave me a lot to think about. I liked his approach and I wish that I had more answers. Of course, if I did, we'd be able to move past this problem, wouldn't we? --- * For those not in the know, a Mormonad is a pithy piece of advertising that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints would put into its monthly youth magazine. They were popular when I was growing up, though I don't know if their popularity has remained these days. I guess I could ask someone. Maybe I will. Note: I have finished my paper for the Wooden O. I've shown pieces of this on the website before, but this is my final draft. The formatting is weird, I know. Also, there are asterisks everywhere. Those are to let me know when to advance the slides during the presentation. Feel free to ignore them.
*Jacques Derrida: "There's no racism without language…The point is not that acts of racial violence are only words, but rather that they have to have a word. [Racism] institutes, declares, writes, inscribes, prescribes."[i] *Othello: "I know thou'rt full of love and honesty,/And weigh'st thy words before thou giv'st them breath." *Iago: "I hate the Moor." In his eponymous play, Othello is called by his own name twenty-seven times. He is referred to as "the Moor" forty-three times. This statistic underscores the use of nomenclature as violence against aliens, the way the most fundamental system in which people operate and learn and grow--namely, language--can be sharpened as a tool of oppression against the Other. From Derrida's perspective, that is the only way that racism germinates. (For context, I am using Vron Ware's definition of racism: "[that which] encompasses all the various relations of power that have arisen from the domination of one racial group over another."[ii]) We can perhaps interrogate Shakespeare's motive, but, like Iago's, it is as allusive as it is elusive. Certainly, meter plays a part of Shakespeare's decisions. *"The Moor" has two syllables, while Othello does not. And though *"uh-THELL-oh"[iii] contains a full iamb, on its own it's an amphibrach. The Bard could not end a line with Othello's name without pushing it into a feminine ending (with the stress on the penultimate syllable). This is not to say that Shakespeare doesn't rely on feminine endings. Desdemona completes her husband's line: *"I'll not believe't./How now, my dear Othello?" (3.3.282) Always keeping in mind that perhaps Shakespeare was less worried about his lines than we are, we can see all three of Desdemona's lines in this section are feminine. The extra syllable is necessary, of course, to express all of the words that she's using, but there could also be an additional tension, an indication that though she's innocent of the crime Othello assumes of her, she senses something wrong in him. The lines throughout this middle section of the scene scan differently. Lines with too many syllables, others with too few--Desdemona's words and actions, all orbiting around the napkin that proves to be the false evidence her husband needs to commit murder, interact with the tension of something being wrong. The relationship, much like the scansion, is falling apart. There are other times where the language of oppression is subtly attuned via the euphemism. For example, when Iago expresses his enmity toward the hero (1.3.375), the line also scans differently than the norm: *But for my sport and profit. I hate the Moor. Not only is it eleven syllables, but the inclusion of the *pyrrhic foot between the ultimate syllable of "profit" and the monosyllabic "I" is what causes the line's extension. "Othello" could not be simply swapped into this line's current structure. It would become hexameter instead of feminine pentameter and gain an unstressed ending. The deterritorialization of humanity and Othello's ontological beinghood that is perpetrated by means of the euphemism thus stands within the poetic system as being integral, yet at the same time uncouth, out of place, and indicative of a deep problem. We can read this, then, as a poetic excoriation of racism. Shakespeare tends not to take sides and it would be too much to say that a bonus syllable on a line early on in the play is his way of subverting the oppressive system which allows the continuation of racism. Rather, it may be better to consider this as symbolic, a recognition of the ways in which something that is wrong can nevertheless be explained away, incorporated into the system, and--as is especially the case of Iago--thought of as "the way things are". There's nothing too extreme about having an eleven-syllable long line--Othello is replete with them. So, too, do racists in Western culture often justify the small expressions of white supremacy with which they vocally oppress minorities. Snide comments, failure to listen to those whose lived experiences are filled with examples of the very real ramifications of racism, or jokes that only operate by assuming the worst of a stereotype are all "eleventh syllable" versions of racism--tiny things, operating on the fringe, yet allowed within the system. Othello--both the man and the play--exists in a world where the whirl of words underscores and expresses the depth of the anxieties within the Venetian society. Iago as Othello's foil is foul, his mind at its starting point in the gutter and only descending lower. Iago's *vileness is sketched at *first with hasty lines about what Othello and Desdemona are doing--a married couple's consummation seems to fill him with revulsion and disgust. And though *his (in)famous line about the "old black ram/Is tupping your white ewe" (1.1.88-89) equates the act among the same species, his implication is only a matter of degree away from Horace's "snakes do not mate with birds, or lambs with tigers" (qtd. Neil 41). That these are racist "undertones" is clear: To imply that there are gradations of humanity, that the Human Race can be subdivided into separate species, some of whom are inferior to another, is visible inside of how almost everyone sees, treats, and speaks to Othello. The frequent allusions to him being of demonic breeding, hell-sent, or animalistic serve to enhance this reading. Othello even has to struggle against the internalized racism, which slips out in some of his moments of distress. *Consider: "Her name, that was as fresh /As Dian's visage, is now begrimed and black /As mine own face" (3.3.388-390). Equating the color of his skin to an inherent filthiness is perhaps not surprising when one recalls that Othello is a former slave (1.3.138), or that his father-in-law is so openly hostile that he accuses Othello of having charmed his (Brabantio's) daughter, a piece of witchcraft that could be the only explanation for the miscegenation: I therefore vouch again That with some mixtures powerful o'er the blood, Or with some dram conjured to this effect, He wrought upon her. (1.3.104-107) Certainly there's something about Othello's society that has seeped into him. We see his words degrade the longer he spends time with Iago. By the end, it seems as if he's swearing almost as often as his ensign. Perhaps the endless assaults on his basic humanity, the innuendos and the prejudicial barriers, the need to justify a behavior as fundamentally human as falling in love with a woman and, seeing that love reciprocated, marrying her--perhaps it's not surprising to see Othello is crippled with doubt. Othello's eventual downfall is done because choosing a beautiful woman as a wife without it being called into question is a denied privilege for a Black man. We hear this pitiful pathos when he says, as much to convince himself as Iago, "For she had eyes and chose me" (3.3.192). Iago uses the verbal tools of his own demoniacal brilliance and the linguistically saturated assumptions of the racist society in which he lives to leverage that gift in order to extract all would-be meaning from the life and marriage of Othello. Though Shakespeare doesn't always imbue deep significance in the final words of many of his creations, he does do so on occasion. In the case of the end of Othello, there is great meaning in Iago's final lines: "Demand me nothing: what you know, you know; / From this time forth I never will speak word." Sadly, the silence of Iago cannot undo the damage that his words have done. "There's no racism without language," meaning that, sometimes, silence comes too late. *The Merchant of Venice *"In early modern anti-Semitism…the Jews were denounced for their limitation, for sticking to their particular way of life...With late nineteenth-century chauvinist imperialism, the logic was inverted: the Jews were perceived as cosmopolitan, as the embodiment of an unlimited, 'deracinated' existence, which, like a cancerous intruder, threatens to dissolve the identity of every particular-limited ethnic community." --Slavoj Žižek[iv] *"Jews have never been grafted onto the stock of other people." --Andrew Willet, 1590[v] *"Just as it is often hard to tell a toadstool from an edible mushroom, so too it is often very hard to recognize the Jew as a swindler and criminal..." --Der Giftpilz (The Poisoned Mushroom)[vi] *"Certainly the Jew is the very devil incarnation." --Lancelot Gobbo Modern audiences of any of Shakespeare's works see a different story than what the Elizabethan/Jacobean audiences experienced at the Globe Theatre. Nowhere is this more visible than with The Merchant of Venice. Reading this play in our post-Holocaust world means that we access the story through Shylock--an avenue that likely would have baffled the original audiences. In some ways, our extratextual sympathies for Shylock come as a type of cultural allergy to anything connected to Nazism. In my view, such an allergy is important, and in the case of The Merchant of Venice, it serves to urge a cautiousness on the readers. After all, Germany had, for many years before the rise of the Third Reich, called the Bard "unser Shakespear", or "our Shakespeare".[vii] Hitler is said to have declared that "Shylock was a 'timelessly valid characterization of the Jew'."[viii] In some ways, audiences want to sympathize with Shylock simply as a way of, as it were, striking back against the horrors that Nazism unleashed on the Jewish people. Shakespeare makes it easy for us to sympathize with his villain. There is, after all, his *stirring speech about the shared humanity of all: *"Hath not a Jew eyes…?" (Harold Bloom argues that he is "not moved by [Shylock's]…litany, since what he is saying there is now of possible interest only to wavering skinheads and similar sociopaths"[ix], perhaps mistaking the specific for the general.) And, read in this excerpted sense, it's easy to see how sympathetic Shylock's plea is. *Read in further context, however, we see that Shylock's words also spell out his justification for a legalized murder. The difficulty of critiquing this sort of behavior is that Shylock is himself a victim of oppressive systems--if not through Shakespeare's version of Venice, but through the centuries of anti-Semitism. Shylock, then, is a different villain than Iago. What would Othello look like if the Black character were Iago? The villain? That is what we get with Shylock, and yet he manages to gain the sympathies of the audience more fully than perhaps any other antagonist in Shakespeare's canon. But what of the language itself? When the words are on stage, what do they say? Almost all of the Christians in the play have a racial bias, if not against Jews (as Antonio, Bassanio, the Salads (Salarino and Solanio), Lancelot, and Gratiano all show), then against any who look different to the Christian society (consider Portia's snort, "Let all of his complexion choose me so" (2.7.79)). *To pursue but one example of many: Consider this conversation between the Salads and Shylock (3.1): SALANIO Let me say 'amen' betimes, lest the devil cross my prayer, for here he comes in the likeness of a Jew. Enter SHYLOCK SALANIO …And Shylock, for his own part, knew the bird was fledged; and then it is the complexion of them all to leave the dam. SHYLOCK She is damned for it. SALANIO That's certain, if the devil may be her judge. SHYLOCK My own flesh and blood to rebel! SALANIO Out upon it, old carrion! rebels it at these years? SHYLOCK I say, my daughter is my flesh and blood. SALARINO There is more difference between thy flesh and hers than between jet and ivory; more between your bloods than there is between red wine and Rhenish. The racial lines are clearly staked in color, flesh (with attendant connotations of sexuality), and animalistic metaphors, but there's an unambiguous intonation, too, one that we've seen time and again throughout the play: The equation of Jewishness to the devil. *As demonstrated by the colors on the slide, you can see the interplay of assumptions, contradictions, puns, and insults mounting on top of Shylock and, in many ways, the Jewish nation in general. Shylock's explanation for such hatred and scorn is never denied by the Christians: They do hate him, it seems, because he is a Jew. The manifestations of the racial animus are heard throughout the play, then most clearly seen in the climactic trial scene (4.1). When Portia first arrives, she asks a question (that can be read in many ways): "Which is the merchant here, and which the Jew?" (169), a question that can be comedic if the merchant is in chains and the Jew is wearing his gaberdine and yarmulke, but points to the possibility of Portia's disinterest in the case. Yet Shylock's assertion when he completes the brief *chiasmus ("Is your name Shylock? / *Shylock is my name" (171)) points toward what David Suchet observed: "He's only called by his name, Shylock, six times; Jew, twenty-two." In a world where the removal of a Jew's name carries with it dark undertones, it's difficult not to see the significance these words carry. *Perhaps it is *poetically rational, as it was with Othello: *the Jew as opposed to Shylock (the one being an iamb, the other a trochee). *Portia's split line (177) "Then must the Jew be merciful" can't fit the meter with "Shylock" in place of his euphemism. Still, Shakespeare is not always consistent with his verse. No, this subtle form of racism--of "deracinating" or, more largely, "dehumanizing"--is encoded in the words which are spoken and support the system which is designed to oppress and deny those deemed subhuman. Maybe we should say that Shylock's eventual--perhaps even inevitable--defeat is the largest indictment of a racially unjust society. His goal of murder is hardly laudable, and there is much to be said about the way in which the Venetian government got out of the curse he laid on them ("…fie upon your law" (100)), but the point still remains that, in a racist, anti-Semitic society such as the one we see on the stage, Shylock never had a chance. He tried to show the Christians their "villainy", only to be subsumed into Christianity. His rebellion turned into submission with the heart-breaking lie, "I am content" (389), and we see, yet again, how those exploited by the system which oppresses them is designed to keep them in their so-called "proper place". *1 Henry VI *"The female loves to play man against man, and if she is in a position to do it there is not one who will not resist. The male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love. The female is skilled at betrayal and torture and damnation. Never envy a man his lady. Behind it all lays a living hell." --Charles Bukowski [x] *"Foul fiend of France, and hag of all despite…" --Talbot *"These women are shrewd tempters with their tongues." --Alençon Intersectional feminism--a term first coined in 1989 by Kimberlé Crenshaw--shows us how the previous examples of racist coding that support their oppressive systems is also at work in patriarchal constructs. Though there are many Shakespearean examples of female disempowerment at the hands--and language--of men, we will focus on Joan la Pucelle. Before we go too far, a word on women in Shakespeare. From the beginning, Shakespeare was interested in the feminine. Adriana points out the double standard of masculine versus feminine behavior in The Comedy of Errors, and it is drawn in more nuanced terms late in his career in the conversation between Emilia and Desdemona in Othello. This rendering of women in sympathetic light is made more remarkable when we remember the Tudor's restrictions on female representation prevented Shakespeare from exploring the feminine more frequently than he otherwise could have. Without being able to allow women on stage, it is, in some ways, exceptional we have as much from him as we do. *Statistically, women are severely underrepresented in his plays (though I would disagree with Ray Bradbury when he says "all the best lines went to the men"). This is explicable in that much of the subject matter Shakespeare discusses has to do with monarchies--historically masculine, particularly in these history plays. However, Shakespeare had no compulsion to render women in anything other than stock characters or stereotypes. So it is surprising to see how often women are given a great deal of lines within the broader context of the society and limitations in which the plays were written. In fact, there are a handful of plays in which the lead female character has a greater percentage of the lines than any other single speaker. These include Cymbeline (Imogen 16%), All's Well that Ends Well (Helena 16%), As You Like It (Rosalind 25%), The Comedy of Errors (Adriana ties with Antipholus of Syracuse at 15%), The Merchant of Venice (Portia 22%), The Merry Wives of Windsor (the two Mistresses make up 22%, though Falstaff has the largest single chunk at 17%), and Twelfth Night (technically a three-way tie among Belch, Viola, and Olivia at 13%). [xi] That being said, let us consider Joan of Arc. Though the other two plays discussed likewise have sources, Joan la Pucelle is a real-life historical character--as are the others throughout the play--and Joan's treatment by Shakespeare is worth observing. As she's allied with the French cause and Shakespeare seems more sympathetic to the British, her character falls within the Madonna/whore trope: She's a *"holy maid…Ordainèd is to raise this tedious siege" (1.3.30, 33) when first introduced by the Bastard of Orléans and *tried as "Wicked and vile" (5.6.16) by the English. The trope is pushed even further at the end of the play when she throws out names of would-be lovers in the hopes of gaining clemency. This binary is familiar to *feminist critical theory as it's one of the most frequent tropes women are cast in throughout Western literature. Joan's complexity as a character--marred as it is by Shakespeare's burgeoning talent during this early play--does suffer from the lack of nuance that other Shakespearean women enjoy. The Madonna/whore trope seems ridiculous when applied to someone as conniving, manipulative, and textured as, say, Lady Macbeth. Nevertheless, Joan la Pucelle works well throughout the play as a relative trope: She is both halves of the trope to each side. For Tina Packer, this is indicative of Shakespeare recognizing that he'd created someone charming, but Joan had to be "evil" for his version of the story to work. Packer says, *"Shakespeare's first impulse toward Joan was a generous one…He liked that she dressed as a man, had visions from God and God's mother, wielded a sword…This is Shakespeare at his most natural. It's only when he followed Holinshed's story that he turned…" (20).[xii] (Marjorie Garber points out that even Joan's name is pointing toward this ambiguity: *"Joan, known as La Pucelle…represented the paradox of purity/promiscuity, since 'puzel' and 'pussel' meant 'slatternly woman' or 'slut'" (95).[xiii]) This play is also encoded the way the cross-dressing comedies were: We have a male actor playing a woman's part, who is, in turn, behaving like a man. While Joan never pretends to be a male in the way Portia does, she acts masculine, thereby playing a part that others, sometimes against their own instincts, choose to believe. Consider, for example, the English shock at a woman behaving in a man's role (2.1.22-23): *LORD TALBOT A maid, they say. DUKE OF BEDFORD A maid? And be so martial? DUKE OF BURGUNDY Pray God she prove not masculine ere long. *The first line is split, with Talbot's reference to Joan setting up Bedford's dismay. Interestingly, the line itself is feminine, in part because of the word *martial being the final foot. Read in this light, the feminine ending of the line works ironically against a word normally associated with masculinity. The feminine has usurped and taken over the masculine. Burgundy's *follow up line, therefore, becomes a patriarchal reassertion, invoking both God (patriarchy par excellence) and masculinity. This line is regular verse, alternating its stresses in an iambic pattern. Even the trisyllabic masculine fits into the meter, drawing attention to itself as the only polysyllabic word in the line. The expectation--societal, religious, poetical--of masculine dominance is thus subtly restored. The men about her are quick to doubt, anxious to find fault. In similar ways that women in the twenty-first century are often given half as much a chance to do twice as much, Joan la Pucelle is first called an "Amazon" (1.2.106), but, when the English surprise the French, the men almost immediately lay blame on her for her "failings". *DAUPHIN Is this thy cunning, thou deceitful dame? Didst thou at first, to flatter us withal, Make us partakers of a little gain, That now our loss might be ten times so much? JOAN DE PUCELLE Wherefore is Charles impatient with his friend? At all times will you have my power alike? Sleeping or waking, must I still prevail, Or will you blame and lay the fault on me? Improvident soldiers, had your watch been good, This sudden mischief never could have fall'n. (2.1.53-62) Joan adroitly points out the truth of the situation, and to his credit, the Dauphin recognizes that she's right. After some more scapegoating, it is Joan who pulls the squabbling French nobles into the more important enterprise of escape. Joan's speech, however, shines a light on masculine expectations. Her cry, "At all times will you have my power alike?" can remind us of how much is demanded of women in our Western society even in our day. Part of the Shakespearean difference is his acknowledgement that women are, perhaps shockingly to his audience, people, too. When Joan protests her treatment and the unrealistic expectations placed on her, she is part of an ages-old refrain critiquing the double standards of so-called standard. Nevertheless, she is, from Britain's view, "the bad guy (or girl)", necessitating the eventual terror of Act 5 scene 3. This, perhaps, goes along with Packer's assertion about Shakespeare's interest in Joan. It certainly helps to explain the inconsistencies the character can have, vacillating from humble servant to militant Amazon to ungrateful child to pleading prisoner. Perhaps the Bard didn't quite know what to do with a character who wanted so much to be her own person--a lesson that he learns throughout his career--so we don't see any attempt at making her sympathetic to the Elizabethan crowd when 5.3 opens. Joan explains that the "Frenchmen fly" (5.3.1) and then invokes the minions of the "Monarch of the North" (5.3.6)--a euphemism for Satan, who was believed to inhabit the north (see, for example, the placement of Satan's pre-Fallen headquarters in the northern part of Heaven in John Milton's Paradise Lost)--and she then attempts to do anything she can to save herself and reputation. This desperation goes far in this scene, all the way to whoring herself to the fiends, who refuse. She will then compound her sins by lying in order to avoid the pyre. Joan is led off with her *final hex echoing: A plaguing mischief light on Charles and thee! And may ye both be suddenly surpris'd By bloody hands, in sleeping on your beds! …I prithee give me leave to curse a while. (5.3.39-44) Metrically this is all solid, strong, and effective. What's most significant here is the idea of the curse. More fully explored in Richard III (see 1.3 and their "fulfillment" in 3.3), the women that people the history plays often rely on "curses" as an equalizing form. It's linguistic--they're mere words, after all--but they also strike the hearers with a usurpation of the linguistic status quo of masculinity and patriarchy. In a world where martial, political, and religious powers are all monopolized by one gender, and being without any other power given to her, the unuttered curses of Joan stand as her last attempt at retribution. Thus we can return to Derrida's assertion that racism--and, I would argue, sexism or even all modes of Otherness--are embedded inside of language. Shakespeare demonstrates that these methods of dehumanizing our fellow human beings do rely on being able to "institute, declare, write, inscribe, prescribe" the oppressor's will upon the oppressed. We see time and again the poetry of Shakespeare's words implicitly condemning the status quo, even if we can be certain that Shakespeare's words have directly been used to further causes of racism and misogyny. That, perhaps, is the greatest indication of Shakespearean prowess and power: He always gets the last *word. ---- [i] As quoted in "Othello's African American Progeny" by James R. Andreas. Materialist Shakespeare: A History. Verso Books. 1995. [ii] Ware, Vron. Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History. Verso Books. 2015. [iii] See http://www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/characters/charactersO.html for a pronunciation guide. [iv] Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. The MIT Press. 2006. [v] As quoted in James Shapiro's book, Shakespeare and the Jews. Columbia University Press. 1996. [vi] As quoted at https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/der-giftpilz where the Nazi children's book The Poisoned Mushroom is discussed. [vii] As quoted in "Shylock and Nazi Propaganda" from The New York Times. 4 April 1993. [viii] Dickson, Andrew. Worlds Elsewhere. Henry Holt and Co. 2015. [ix] Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Riverhead. 1998. [x] Taken from http://flavorwire.com/417099/7-breathtakingly-sexist-quotes-by-famous-and-respected-male-authors/8. [xi] Statistics taken from the Shakespeare300 app, which uses Dave and Bill Crystal's calculations, also available in the Shakespeare Miscellany. [xii] Packer, Tina. Women of Will. Knopf. 2015. [xiii] Garber, Marjorie. Shakespeare after All. Anchor Books. 2005. Note: I'm trying to get the second part of my Wooden O presentation put together. This is what I managed to write after about four hours of work. Also, ignore the footnote links. They don't work right.
"In early modern anti-Semitism…the Jews were denounced for their limitation, for sticking to their particular way of life...With late nineteenth-century chauvinist imperialism, the logic was inverted: the Jews were perceived as cosmopolitan, as the embodiment of an unlimited, 'deracinated' existence, which, like a cancerous intruder, threatens to dissolve the identity of every particular-limited ethnic community." --Slavoj Žižek[i] "Jews have never been grafted onto the stock of other people." --Andrew Willet, 1590[ii] "Just as it is often hard to tell a toadstool from an edible mushroom, so too it is often very hard to recognize the Jew as a swindler and criminal..." --Der Giftpilz (The Poisoned Mushroom)[iii] "Certainly the Jew is the very devil incarnation." --Lancelot Gobbo It is fairly well established that modern audiences of any of Shakespeare's works see a different story than what the Elizabethan/Jacobean audiences experienced at the Globe Theatre. Nowhere is this more visible than with The Merchant of Venice. Reading this play in our post-Holocaust world means that we access the story through Shylock--an avenue that likely would have baffled the original audiences. In some ways, our extratextual sympathies for Shylock come as a type of cultural allergy to anything connected to Nazism. In my view, such an allergy is important, and in the case of The Merchant of Venice, it serves to urge a cautiousness on the readers. After all, Germany had, for many years before the rise of the Third Reich, called the Bard "unser Shakespear", or "our Shakespeare".[iv] Hitler is said to have declared that "Shylock was a 'timelessly valid characterization of the Jew'."[v] In some ways, audiences want to sympathize with Shylock simply as a way of, as it were, striking back against the horrors that Nazism unleashed on the Jewish people. Shakespeare makes it easy for us to sympathize with his villain. There is, after all, his stirring speech about the shared humanity of all: "Hath not a Jew eyes…?" (Harold Bloom argues that he is "not moved by [Shylock's]…litany, since what he is saying there is now of possible interest only to wavering skinheads and similar sociopaths"[vi], perhaps mistaking the specific for the general.) And, read in this excerpted sense, it's easy to see how sympathetic Shylock's plea is. Read in further context, however, we see that Shylock's words also spell out his justification for a legalized murder. The difficulty of critiquing this sort of behavior is that Shylock is himself a victim of oppressive systems--if not through Shakespeare's version of Venice, but through the centuries of anti-Semitism and racism that he and the Jewish people have suffered. Shylock, then, is a different villain than Iago. What would Othello look like if the Black character were Iago? The villain? That is what we get with Shylock, and yet he manages to gain the sympathies of the audience more fully than perhaps any other antagonist in Shakespeare's cannon. In order to try to transmit the feelings of the anti-Semitic Elizabethan past--a past in which, legally, no one could have known a Jew, as it was illegal to be one and live in England since the late thirteenth century--I once was the dramaturge for an ensemble piece performed here at the Utah Shakespeare Festival high school drama competition. In it, we aimed to invoke the anti-Nazi allergy of our modern audience and translate it into something that would have been familiar to the first audience of The Merchant of Venice. Using the language of Nazism in the form of uniforms, swastikas, and goose-stepping actors, we cast Shylock as the Fuhrer and had his claims for the "pound of flesh" to be coming from our concentration camp survivor, Antonio. By putting the inherent sympathies of a concentration camp survivor onto the "Christian", we created a dissonance between the text and our shared history. This sort of verbal/visual language transported the emotional reactions from the original audience to the modern one. (As an aside, the judges reacted very negatively to the piece, with the forcefulness of our deliberate inversion so powerful that they didn't have time to dwell on any of the nuances or potential purpose of such a choice.) But what of the language itself? When the words are on stage, what do they say? Almost all of the Christians in the play have a racial bias, if not against Jews (as Antonio, Bassanio, the Salads (Salarino and Solanio), Lancelot, and Gratiano all show), then against any who look different to the Venetian society (consider Portia's snort, "Let all of his complexion choose me so" (2.7.79)). To pursue but one example of many: Consider this conversation between the Salads and Shylock (3.1): SALANIO Let me say 'amen' betimes, lest the devil cross my prayer, for here he comes in the likeness of a Jew. Enter SHYLOCK SALANIO …And Shylock, for his own part, knew the bird was fledged; and then it is the complexion of them all to leave the dam. SHYLOCK She is damned for it. SALANIO That's certain, if the devil may be her judge. SHYLOCK My own flesh and blood to rebel! SALANIO Out upon it, old carrion! rebels it at these years? SHYLOCK I say, my daughter is my flesh and blood. SALARINO There is more difference between thy flesh and hers than between jet and ivory; more between your bloods than there is between red wine and Rhenish. The racial lines are clearly staked in color, flesh (with attendant connotations of sexuality), and animalistic metaphors, but there's an unambiguous intonation, too, one that we've seen time and again throughout the play: The equation of Jewishness and the devil. As demonstrated by the colors on the slide, you can see the interplay of assumptions, contradictions, puns, and insults mounting on top of Shylock and, in many ways, the Jewish nation in general. Shylock's explanation for such hatred and scorn is never denied by the Christians: They do hate him, it seems, because he is a Jew. The manifestations of the racial animus are heard throughout the play, then most clearly seen in the climactic trial scene (4.1). When Portia first arrives, she asks a question that can be read in many ways by inquiring "Which is the merchant here, and which the Jew?" (169), a question that can be comedic if the merchant is in chains and the Jew is wearing his gaberdine and yarmulke, but points to the possibility of Portia's disinterest in the case. Yet Shylock's assertion when he completes the brief chiasmus ("Is your name Shylock? / Shylock is my name" (171)) points toward what David Suchet observed, as mentioned earlier: "He's only called by his name, Shylock, six times; Jew, twenty-two." In a world where the removal of a Jew's name carries with it dark undertones, it's difficult not to see the significance these words carry. Perhaps it is poetical rational, as it was with Othello: the Jew as opposed to Shylock (the one being an iamb, the other a trochee). Portia's line (177) "Then must the Jew be merciful" can't fit the meter with "Shylock" in place of his euphemism. Still, Shakespeare does not always fit in with his consistent blank verse, and a shift could have been orchestrated in some way. No, this subtle form of racism--of "deracinating" or, more largely, "dehumanizing"--is encoded in the words which are spoken and support the system which is designed to oppress and deny those deemed subhuman. Maybe we should say that Shylock's eventual--perhaps even inevitable--defeat is the largest indictment of a racially unjust society. His goal of murder is hardly laudable, and there is much to be said about the way in which the Venetian government got out of the curse he laid on them ("…fie upon your law" (100)), but the point still remains that, in a racist, anti-Semitic society such as the one we see on the stage, Shylock never had a chance. He tried to show the Christians their "villainy", only to be subsumed into Christianity. His rebellion turned into submission with the heart-breaking lie--his penultimate utterance of the play--"I am content" (389) and we see, yet again, how those exploited by the system which oppresses them is deliberate designed to maintain them in their so-called "proper place". [i] Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. The MIT Press. 2006. [ii] As quoted in James Shapiro's book, Shakespeare and the Jews. Columbia University Press. 1996. [iii] As quoted at https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/der-giftpilz where the Nazi children's book The Poisoned Mushroom is discussed. [iv] As quoted in "Shylock and Nazi Propaganda" from The New York Times. 4 April 1993. [v] Dickson, Andrew. Worlds Elsewhere. Henry Holt and Co. 2015. [vi] Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Riverhead. 1998. I watched a video essay for screenwriters about writing interesting characters. The essayist, Henry of The Closer Look, has an excellent tripartite analysis of what people look for when deciding if a character is interesting or not. If you're not willing to watch the ten-ish minutes of the essay, I'll spoil it here. A good character is one that has likeability, competency, or activity. That is, you like the character, the character is good at something, or the character acts (instead of reacts) and chooses throughout the story's world.
This makes a lot of sense for a good chunk of characters. His examples of Batman and Sherlock being competent and active, though not particularly likeable, are good ones that really illustrate his point. And his conclusion that having a character excel in all three gives you someone like Superman is an excellent conclusion. But there was something about his analysis that bothered me. Not, like, foaming at the mouth irritated. No, I couldn't get it to sit quite right, rather. Then I realized why, and it's a massive part of the next video: How to make a strong female character. (I disagreed with him even more on that video, though I appreciate his points and think he has a lot of good arguments.) In that video, he talks about assigning the gender (in fiction) after the character has been conceived, because a "strong female character" uses the same traits as a "strong male character". And while I don't disagree with that basis, I don't see it as the conclusion he does. Why? Well, it's in the video: Wonder Woman. Having clips of Wonder Woman on the screen whilst Henry talks about the aspects of the character that make her (or him) interesting and "strong" and simultaneously considering his previous arguments about the tripartite form of interesting characters, and I realized that Wonder Woman violates his rule of having only two of the three aspects. Now, I'm not the first to notice that Diana Prince is a better Supergirl than Supergirl is, nor that she closely parallels Kal-El in a lot of important ways. But she fills all of the three "boxes" of being likeable, competent, and active. She spends the whole movie pushing onward toward her goal. She fights incredibly well (that battle in the trenches…wow). And hardly anyone who meets Wonder Woman isn't instantly smitten by her--and not just her good looks. Wonder Woman, however, doesn't have a video essay by Henry talking about how it's hard to write for Wonder Woman, the way he does with Superman. There are likely many reasons for this. Not being Henry, I don't know them all. However, I think that one of the fundamental differences between Superman filling Henry's three boxes versus Diana filling the three is that Diana is a woman. Story time: A few years back, during the annual trip to Cedar City for the high school competition, we were "treated" to the SUU version of Hamlet. Normally, I'm always really excited for any version of Hamlet. (As a friend says, "Shakespeare is like pizza: Some is better than others, but you're always excited to have more pizza.") When I sat down, the director's notes said that, because of the way his cast was set up, the play worked a lot better if the entire production were gender bent: Female Hamlet and her father, Queen Claudia. Killed Queen Hamlet. Father Gertrude. Male love interest Ophelio (pronounced "Oh-FELL-e-OH", so it sounded like they were saying "Fellow"). Sister Laertes. Male Polonius (which…um, kinda broke that motif). Female Horatio. There are plenty of valid reasons for gender bending a Shakespearean play. The fact that sometimes that's how the casting works out makes sense. I've seen female Hamlets (always playing as a male character, though), and female Guildensterns and female Horatios. It can make a subtle, but not particularly significant, difference in the way that I feel about the character…for about two seconds. Then it stops mattering. But this play? Whoo, boy. It was a train wreck. Almost every choice was bizarre and out of sync with potential themes. The words were all there (almost all said correctly, save the pronunciation of "union" as "onion"…I kid thee not), but nothing fired the way it was supposed to. For example, Ophelio, by far the strongest actor, sold his position well--so well, in fact, that his version of the character didn't seem the type to walk around with flowers at the end of his time on the stage. I try to be generous and the best I can say that isn't some sort of self-perjury is, "They had very pleasant weather that night." I have thought about this version of the play a lot (which was one of the director's goals, so…hey, mission accomplished). And the reason that Hamlet: Princess of Denmark doesn't work is because there are aspects of the relationship that are built around masculine points of view. This might get my feminist card revoked, but some stories are masculine. Much like a gender-bent Pride and Prejudice will lack the import and nuance of its original, so, too, does Hamlet in which she laments the passing of her Queen Mother. I'm not here to probe the intricacies of this rabbit hole, but would rather pull it back to where I started: Wonder Woman is all three of the things that make for an interesting character and her film relies upon her femininity. Now, you could make a case about how competent she is, or when she switches from active to passive roles, but those are vicissitudes of the film, not fundamental aspects of her core character. At her heart, Diana is a likeable person who is incredibly competent and never sits around when she sees there's something she can do to make the world a better place. And I think that part of what sells that is because she's Wonder Woman. I'm not keen on relying on stereotypes or broad generalizations when it comes to genders: We're all individuals and have a distinct approach to the spectrum we choose to manifest. So I say this next part less as a requirement and more as an observation that often proves true: The way a woman processes a situation is distinct from how a man does. In the case of Wonder Woman, her femininity "allows" her leeway in the ways we like her. Even Eta Candy is impressed by her looks*, whilst her innocent appreciation of babies (whom she loves) and ice cream are all humanizing signifiers that the audience is given permission, through character response, to incorporate. Diana's story and the world she's navigating and her reactions to it are all dictated by her gender. It's a crucial component to the movie. On the whole, I agree with Henry: Characters that have two-thirds of the checklist make for interesting characters, as it builds in a flaw that makes them feel like there's room to grow, or an excuse/explanation for their behaviors. But I disagree that writing "strong** female characters" is about writing agender characters and then assigning them a gender afterwards. That, to me, doesn't work.*** I still like the videos though. They made me think. --- * This is a great example of what I mean, by the way: Gender bend the scene of Candy, Diana, and Steve in the department store. You have an Arnold Schwarzenegger style hero with a pretty guide and her overweight, British butler. The butler says something about how handsome and ripped the hero is. Even if the characters don't bat an eye at the honest remark, the audience will likely code it as a homoerotic comment (which it isn't). Women more often comment on a woman's good looks than men will of a fellow man. ** I get what the phrase is trying to say. I disagree with what it implies. It's a term that we'll be better off once we drop it from our lexicon. *** J.K. Rowling said that Harry Potter was always male. He walked into her mind pretty fully formed. I've had that sort of experience: A character shows up on the page, and it's clear that she's supposed to be female (or vice versa). On occasion, I've tried switching the character's gender to see if it still fits. Sometimes, it doesn't make a difference (so I make her female). Other times, it matters a great deal, and the character "rebels" in my mind until I put the correct gender/orientation into the hard drive (as it were) of the story. I'm willing to bet this is a similar process for a lot of other, though by no means all, writers. Note: Every year, the Utah Shakespeare Festival has a symposium, called The Wooden O, in which scholars and aficionados of the Bard get together and, well, sympose, I suppose. This year, the three plays that are being put on during the summer season are The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Kind of like I tried to do last year, I'm going to write an essay that I want to submit to the symposium. Last year, I missed the deadline for abstracts, so I'm jumping on this right now in the hopes that I can generate some sort of thesis of this essay and then get an abstract out of it. Additionally, these are preliminary thoughts, so there's a chance that this might crop up again Jacques Derrida: "There's no racism without language…The point is not that acts of racial violence are only words, but rather that they have to have a word. [Racism] institutes, declares, writes, inscribes, prescribes."* Juliet: "What's in a name? that which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet." Othello: "I know thou'rt full of love and honesty,/And weigh'st thy words before thou giv'st them breath." Iago: "I hate the Moor." In his eponymous play, Othello is called by his own name twenty-seven times. He is referred to as "the Moor" forty-three times. David Suchet makes a similar observation about Shylock in the trial scene in The Merchant of Venice: "He's only called by his name, Shylock, six times; Jew, twenty-two." These two statistics underscore the use of nomenclature as violence against aliens, the way the most fundamental system in which people operate and learn and grow--namely, language--can be sharpened as a tool of oppression. From Derrida's perspective, that is the only way that racism germinates. We can perhaps interrogate Shakespeare's motive, but, like Iago's, it is as allusive as it is illusive. Certainly, meter plays a part of Shakespeare's decisions. "The Moor" has two syllables, while Othello does not. And though "uh-THELL-oh"** contains a full iamb, on its own it's an amphibrach. The Bard could not end a line with Othello's name without pushing it into a feminine ending (with the stress on the penultimate syllable). This is not to say that Shakespeare doesn't rely on feminine endings. Desdemona completes her husband's line in 3.3.282: "I'll not believe't./How now, my dear Othello?" Always keeping in mind that perhaps Shakespeare was less worried about his lines than we are, we can see all three of Desdemona's lines are feminine. The extra syllable is necessary, of course, to express all of the words that she's using, but there could also be an additional tension, an indication that though she's innocent of the crime he assumes of her, she senses something wrong in him. The lines throughout this middle section of the scene scan differently. Lines with too many syllables, others with too few--Desdemona's words and actions, all orbiting around the napkin that proves to be the false evidence her husband needs to commit murder, interact with the tension of something being wrong. The relationship, much like the scansion, is falling apart at this crisis moment. There are other moments where the language of oppression is subtly attuned via the euphemism. For example, when Iago expresses his enmity toward the hero (1.3.375), the line also scans differently than the norm (emphasis mine): But for my sport and profit. I hate the Moor. Not only is it eleven syllables, but the inclusion of the pyrrhic foot between the ultimate syllable of "profit" and the monosyllabic "I" is what causes the line's extension. Rather than pretend to know a viable alternative for the line, it's clear that "Othello" could not be simply swapped into this line's current structure. It would become hexameter instead of pentameter and gain an unstressed ending. The deterritorialization of humanity and Othello's ontological beinghood that is perpetrated by means of the euphemism thus stands within the poetic system as being integral, yet at the same time uncouth, out of place, and indicative of a deep problem. In a word, it is a poetic excoriation of racism. Shakespeare tends not to take sides--his urge to editorialize in any particular area is countermanded by some other aspect of his work--and it would be too much to say that a bonus syllable on a line early on the play is his way of subverting the oppressive system which allows the continuation of racism. Rather, it may be better to consider this as symbolic, a recognition of the ways in which something that is wrong can nevertheless be explained away, incorporated into the system, and--as is especially the case of Iago--thought of as "the way things are". There's nothing too extreme about having an eleven-syllable long line. So, too, do racists often justify the small expressions of white supremacy with which they vocally oppress minorities. Snide comments, failure to listen to those whose lived experiences are replete with examples of the very real ramifications of racism, or jokes that only operate by assuming the worst of a stereotype are all "eleventh syllable" versions of racism--tiny things, operating on the fringe, yet embraced and allowed with the system. That Othello--both the man and the play--exists in a world and whirl of words underscores and expresses the depth of the anxieties within the Venetian society (as well as subsequent generations). Iago as his foil is foul, his mind at its starting point in the gutter and only descending lower. Much has been made of the various possibilities of his motivations--so much, in fact, there's no reason to repeat them here. Iago's vileness is sketched at first with hasty lines about what Othello and Desdemona are doing--a married couple's consummation seems to fill him with revulsion and disgust. And though his (in)famous line about the "old black ram/Is tupping your white ewe" (1.1.88-89) equates the act among the same species, his implication is only a matter of degree away from Horace's "snakes do not mate with birds, or lambs with tigers" (qtd. Neil 41). That these are racist "undertones" is clear: To imply that there are gradations of humanity, that the Human Race can be subdivided into separate species, some of whom are inferior to another, is visible inside of how almost everyone sees and treats Othello. Othello has to struggle against the internalized racism, which slips out in some of his moments of distress. Consider: "Her name, that was as fresh /As Dian's visage, is now begrimed and black /As mine own face" (3.3.388-390). Equating the color of his skin to an inherent filthiness is perhaps not surprising when one recalls that Othello is a former slave (1.3.138), or that his father-in-law is so openly hostile that he accuses Othello of having charmed his (Brabantio's) daughter, a piece of witchcraft that could be the only explanation for the miscegenation: I therefore vouch again Certainly there's something about Othello's society that has seeped into him. We see his words degrade the longer he spends time with Iago. By the end, it seems as if he's swearing almost as often as his ensign. Perhaps the endless assaults on his basic humanity, the innuendos and the prejudicial barriers, the need to justify a behavior as fundamentally human as falling in love with a woman and, seeing that love reciprocated, marrying her--perhaps it's not surprising to see Othello is crippled with doubt.
This is the reason why the race issue can't be ignored. Othello's eventual downfall is done because the privilege of choosing a beautiful woman as a wife without it being called into question is a privilege that is far too often held in abeyance for a Black man. It's certain that Shakespeare didn't see race the way that we do, as the four hundred years of static between our cultures has seen monumental and significant shifts. Nevertheless, his words about the ways in which the words we use to classify--and, more importantly and painfully, separate--the many beautiful varieties of the human race are earnestly and urgently needed. Iago uses the verbal tools of his own demoniacal brilliance and the linguistically saturated assumptions of the racist society in which he lives to leverage that gift in order to extract all would-be meaning from the life and marriage of Othello. Though Shakespeare doesn't always imbue deep significance in the final words of many of his creations, he does do so on occasion. In the case of the end of Othello, there is great meaning in Iago's final lines: "Demand me nothing: what you know, you know; / From this time forth I never will speak word." Sadly, the silence of Iago cannot undo the damage that his words have done. "There's no racism without language," but sometimes silence comes too late. --- * As quoted in "Othello's African American Progeny" by James R. Andreas. Materialist Shakespeare: A History. ** See http://www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/characters/charactersO.html for a pronunciation guide. |
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