Blog

"It's theirs now":

A pedagogical review of Voodoo Macbeth (2021)

Call it a New Year's resolution, but I've decided to write here again, and I'm keeping myself honest (at least for a bit) by giving myself homework: this spring, I'm reprising my "Shakespeare's Globe" course for the Canisius University Honors Program. In preparation, I've been revisiting and revising my syllabus full of post-colonial adaptations of Shakespeare's The Tempest, Macbeth, and Othello. As the semester draws closer, I have tasked myself with jotting down some thoughts on the material here, and I am starting in the exact middle of my course calendar, with the 2021 film Voodoo Macbeth. 

First a disclaimer that I will deliver in some form to my students: this film is not Macbeth. It features scenes of rehearsal and production, so many lines will be familiar to those who have just read the play (and many of the lines will be familiar to those who haven't read it in some time), but attentive readers will also take note of how much the film excises for the sake of time and the flow of the movie's primary plot. Nevertheless, I've chosen to give the film a privileged position in the semester. In a way, the story of Orson Welles's ambitious project to direct (at just twenty years old!) the Negro Theatre Company's Macbeth in Harlem in April 1934 highlights a moment of change in American Shakespeare. 

The melodramatically villainous congressman who, seeing about three minutes of rehearsal, becomes determined to undermine and ruin the production funded through New Deal policies declares that setting the Scottish Play in revolution-era Haiti is the kind of subversive ideological track that opens the door to communism in the United States. In the twenty-first century, moving Macbeth out of Scotland is less shocking perhaps - our class discussions on either side of Voodoo will be about Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood (1957) and Vishal Bhardwaj's Maqbool (2004), and the front page of our syllabus features an image from the Umabatha Company rehearsing "Zulu Macbeth" in 2001 - but there is nonetheless something appealing about deconstructing the intensely nationalist play as that nationalism grafts onto other identities. 

Although Holinshed's Chronicles serves as one of two primary sources, Macbeth is not categorized as a history play. Students often balk at this distinction (to them) without a difference, but it provides an opportunity to reflect on the genre conventions undergirding our reading list: comedy (Tempest), tragedy (Othello), and history? What is history? After all, Macbeth is inseparable in the classroom from the historical context of King James and the union of Scotland with England - Shakespeare's project is largely to rewrite history in a way that flatters his new monarch and patron (erasing Lady Macbeth's son who does in fact succeed his stepfather Macbeth, for example, or leaving out the years of Macbeth's reign so peaceful that he was famously able to take a trip to Rome) - but so too do The Tempest and Othello demand our historical contextualizing. The Tempest brings to the stage images (and even words via Montaigne) from the emerging New World, and the violent conditions of Caliban's servitude therein foreshadows chattel slavery brought to the American continent less than a decade after the play is first performed. Othello is considered by some (including James Shapiro) to be "Shakespeare's American play," and students quickly grasp the relevance of the black man in a white supremacist society, but they are equally intrigued by questions of whether Shakespeare would have known any black Londoners. What sets Macbeth apart, then, has to do with the play's ability not only to reach back to early modern history but to all histories. Kurosawa locates the feudal model of eleventh century Scotland in Samurai culture, and, while Bhardwaj tells a contemporary gangster story, the supernatural elements of Maqbool are deeply rooted in India's history. 

Welles, then, does not merely set Macbeth in Haiti but in revolutionary Haiti, costumes and sets evoking a distinctly turn-of-the-nineteenth-century feel. A product of his time and perhaps his youthful ignorance, Welles displayed some troublesome tendencies that the film does not shy away from: in front of reviewers, Welles dons blackface in order to step into the play's title role, for example, a nod to Welles's unfortunate choice to cast himself as Othello seventeen years hence as well as an acknowledgement that local groups protested the production before it opened, fearing that Welles was attempting to produce in Harlem a minstrel show Shakespeare. That Welles actually employed a Senegalese drummer to provide the sort of incidental music for the show internationalized the production, though it also demonstrated the director's inclination to utilize stereotype in a way that anticipates Said's Orientalism. Nevertheless, Welles's production and the film that dramatizes his process highlight the innately historical yet infinitely transferable nature of Macbeth. 

As the trailer indicates, the film makes hay out of Welles's struggles to get the ambitious project off the ground (even being slashed by a protester), and the film not-so-subtly brings his alcoholism into a focus that reflects Macbeth's madness. Other moments in the play feature Rose McClendon winning a skeptical John Houseman over to the idea of a Shakespeare play with Lady Macbeth's "screw your courage to the sticking place." Later she, succumbing to pleurisy, coughs blood into her hand while on stage performing Lady Macbeth washing her hands while sleepwalking. Despite his relationship with his wife who initially pushes Welles to take on the project falling apart, as Macbeth pushes away his own wife mid-play, the film sometimes verges on a twisted hagiography of the great filmmaker Welles, all the characters seem to see this moment for what it becomes - a make or break moment for the man who would be lauded as the most influential filmmaker of the century. Throughout the film, the idea of revolution, ambition, and working in the shadows to achieve what is (since the film is retrospective in nature) fated parallel the story the characters are working to tell. 

Of course, Voodoo Macbeth is not a tragedy (even the demise of McClendon, despite being melodramatically signaled with obvious coughing early in the film, is treated less as individual suffering and more one great actress gracefully passing the torch to a new generation). It is certainly not a comedy, though Welles and his all-too-put-out wife have a moment of reconciliation (that belies their historically imminent divorce). It takes about as much liberty with history as Shakespeare's Macbeth. Nevertheless, the core story being told and even the liberties that the film takes all fit neatly into a discussion of the moveable history Macbeth invites us to explore through adaptation. Thus, at the center of my course is not the theory (we are reading Said among many others) nor even a strictly postcolonial stage (though one can certainly make an argument that 1930s Harlem checks some boxes) but a movie about process. Despite winning numerous festival awards, criticism of the film is as mixed as the reception of Welles's play, which was a success, running for ten weeks, but also partly led Langston Hughes to pen his "Notes on Commercial Theater." This may be owing somewhat to its proximity to Joel Coen's The Tragedy of Macbeth starring Denzel Washington in the same year, but it's also due to some clear rough edges. Nevertheless, I look forward to analyzing what the film sets out to do in order to examine more closely the historical conditions that led to Welles's work of controversial, transformational genius. 

1 January 2024  1:40pm

"To make trial": 

Reading and Judging Shakespeare's Lucrece

What follows below is the rough introduction to a paper I'm sharing with my seminar at the 2020 Shakespeare Association of America conference in Denver this April. This will be incorporated into my dissertation as well, largely in the introduction and second chapter.

Stephanie Jed’s book Chaste Thinking imagines Lucretia in a modern courtroom. Discourse surrounding sex-based violence frequently prompts courtroom imagery, even when the legal system is not involved, yet trauma theorists and jurisprudential scholars now understand that typical justitial procedures can be counterproductive to the goals evidence-gathering (Roeder 18, 23-4). Indeed, an overview of rape’s history in English common law and its global descendants demonstrates that victims are routinely disproportionately scrutinized themselves in an impossible rhetorical (and often moral) cross-examination. As part of a larger project unpacking economic metaphors that sublimate sexual trauma in the early modern imagination, this paper argues that Shakespeare’s Lucrece poem explores the counterproductive scrutiny that further damages the psyche of trauma survivors. While the actual act of rape is elided into the space between Shakespeare’s lines, its dichotomous effect on Lucrece is clearly laid out: the poem’s argument that first casts Lucrece spinning late into the night defines her moral character by her adherence to gendered codes of domestic conduct, and the poem’s second half describes a Lucrece who is repeatedly unable to live up to that measure. A fractured Lucrece navigates a narrow set of acceptable signifiers when she pleads her case to the Roman men, and, even in death, becomes more spectacle than individual subject. In the wake of the #MeToo movement, we might look to Lucrece not as an exemplum of chastity (as early modern women were encouraged to do) but as an example of why narratives of sexual violence should not and cannot be judged in the same manner as other violations.

Early in her seminal book, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, Susan Brownmiller provides historical analysis of the legal understanding of rape and the ways that it has conventionally been adjudicated (or, more often, failed to be). Edward I’s passing of The Statute of Westminster in 1275 marks an inflection in the legal history of rape, since it collapsed the distinction previously drawn between rape of a virgin and that of a non-virgin woman. The updated version of the Statute, passed in 1285, increased the punishment from a two-year jail sentence and discretionary fine to mandatory execution (29-30). The convicted rapist was not able to reduce their sentence by invoking the benefit of clergy, and the state increased its power to bring charges in such matters even in cases left unpursued by the victim of the crime. 

While at first glance the end of the thirteenth century appears to shift in a protofeminist direction, Brownmiller is quick to contextualize the nature of these changes: “the law that evolved was feudal class law, designed to protect the nobleman’s interests” (28). Legal judgements relied on the cooperation of female witnesses, but the courts always operated for the benefit of some male patron. In fact, the laws were careful to consider the extent to which a man--either husband or father, whose property the woman was commonly considered to be--was harmed by the act of rape: a wife, for example, who “did not object strenuously enough to her own ‘defilement,’” Brownmiller notes, was implicated in a misdemeanor crime along with her rapist (29). In such a case, she would customarily forfeit her dowry to her husband, whom the courts recognized as the primary aggrieved party. 

Revisiting the penultimate section of Brownmiller’s book four and a half decades after its publication is both inspiring and disheartening. The systematic way in which the author reveals inherent bias in the legal system against women who come forward to give testimony about their rapes is reveletory, but it is also an unfortunate reality that those biases remain intact both in the legal system and in the public consciousness. Even as the #MeToo era shifts from narrativizing to prosecuting traditionally untouchable abusers, the backlash against women who seek legal redress for their experiences remains ingrained. In a recent interview with The New York Times, Donna Rotunno, a lead attorney on the team defending Harvey Weinstein, resorted to conventional tropes of victim-blaming against the women who have brought this high-profile case to the fore. In a memoir reflecting her experiences with sexual trauma, Sohaila Abdulali remarks on the absurdity of her being dismissed from a jury pool due to her past experiences: “... in the US legal system, if you are invested, informed and interested in [the] subject, you’re not fit to judge your peers. If you’ve been raped, then you can’t have an opinion about it because you’re too biased, too emotional, too close to it” (79). Jed, likewise, poses jury-selection questions in the opening to her book, and these questions are meant to discomfit her readers by eliciting the very emotions--whatever they may be--that renders them insufficiently objective to judge the story of Lucretia. 

Unfortunately, such attacks are commonplace even in the twenty-first century partly because they have been an essential part of jurisprudence around rape since the thirteenth. Continuing her project of historicizing legal interpretations of rape, Brownmiller turns to jurists like Matthew Hale, who referred to rape as “an accusation easily to be made, and hard to be proved, and harder to be defended by the party accused, tho never so Innocent,” and William Blackstone, who commented:

If [an accuser] be of evil fame and stand unsupported by others...if she concealed the injury for any considerable time after she had the opportunity to complain, if the place where the act was alleged to be committed was where it was possible she might have been heard and she made no outcry, these and the like circumstances carry a strong but not conclusive presumption that her testimony is false or feigned (qtd. Brownmiller 30).

It is with this historical clarity that I argue we might read early modern interpretations of the Roman Lucrece myth as they inform and reflect our modern society’s view of rape and women more broadly. 

When Jed imagines a court to try the mythical case, she conspicuously excludes Shakespeare’s Lucrece from her analysis of the birth of humanism; it is Lucretia, not Lucrece, that Jed imagines on the witness stand. Nevertheless Shakespeare’s poem provides a lens through which we might see what his antecedent authors took for granted or left in the dark corners of the story. For Shakespeare too, the actual act of rape occurs somewhere in the darkness the poem provides to obscure it--amid phrases like “blind-concealing night” and “most unseen”--and both Lucrece and Tarquin are metaphorized as animals--“the wolf has seized his prey, the poor lamb cries”--denying the reader any semblance of that voyeuristic posture with which the poem opens (675, 676, 676). Nevertheless, following the rape, Lucrece feels that the act has rendered her hypervisible and subject to the moral judgement of a societal panopticon: “They think not but that every eye can see / The same disgrace which they themselves behold; / And therefore would they still in darkness be” (750-752). Prior to her rape, this had been the case despite the fact that she was not conscious of it or aware of its effect on her, but the poem’s argument introduces Lucrece as a woman defined by her adherence to chastity, and that chastity manifests as a commitment to the household (as opposed to Collatine, whose commitment is to state business explicitly outside of the home). In the poem’s second half, Lucrece is forced out of her role and made into a political rather than domestic object.

17 February 2020  12:55pm

Teaching the Controversy

This morning, in each of my two classes, I did something that I've always considered to be irresponsible. I did it for responsible reasons however. I taught a lesson on the so-called Shakespeare Authorship Question. 

Although I am teaching a Shakespeare course this semester, my lessons this morning fell under the purview of my Academic Writing courses at Canisius College. As my students begin their research projects this week, we spent Wednesday morning in the library instruction room with a librarian who taught us about all of the deeper-than-surface-level resources on the library website. This lesson on the library's digital resources was an excellent follow-up to our earlier lesson in which I led my students on a brisk jog through the stacks and tasked them with engaging the physical resources. Today, however, I wanted to take a step back and get my students' perspectives on where to find information, how to ask questions, and generally how to get to the bottom of an intractable question. 

The meat of the lesson on information literacy is the CRAP Detection Method, borrowed with gratitude from Dominican University Librarian Molly Beestrum:

Currency: 

• • • • How recent is the information?

      • How recently has the website been updated?

      • Is it current enough for your topic?

Reliability

• • • • What kind of information is included in the resource?

      • Is content of the resource primarily opinion?  Is is balanced?

      • Does the creator provide references or sources for data or quotations?

Authority

• • • •  Who is the creator or author?

      • What are the credentials? Can you find any information about the author's background?

      • Who is the published or sponsor?

      • Are they reputable?

      • What is the publisher's interest (if any) in this information?

      • Are there advertisements on the website? If so, are they cleared marked?

Purpose/Point of View

• • • • Is this fact or opinion? Does the author list sources or cite references?

      • Is it biased? Does the author seem to be trying to push an agenda or particular side?

      • Is the creator/author trying to sell you something? If so, is it clearly stated?

While I appreciate the mnemonic and certainly value the content, I also recognize that my students might not have appreciated a dry lecture on the same. Therefore, I did today what I have never wanted to do in class: I played the trailer to Roland Emmerich's 2011 film Anonymous. 

After a brief rant on the fact that Shakespeare's Globe would not have needed candlelight illumination - the open roof in the middle of the afternoon would have sufficed - and would have avoided fire like the plague - after all, the Globe did burn! - I turned our attention to the question at hand: Who wrote Shakespeare's plays? I answered immediately, with a quick endorsement of James Shapiro's extensive and thrilling treatment in Contested Will, "Shakespeare did." Nevertheless, the question persists. 

A recent meme pits the search engines Google and Bing against each other. Bing's results tend to be more straightforward, whereas Google answers search questions with nuance. A darkly humorous example is the side-by-side results for "best ways to commit suicide": Google prominently displays the Suicide Prevention Helpline, whereas Bing merely presents links to articles answering the query. In our case, however, I was heartened to see that Bing prominently displays information about the origins of the "controversy," telling readers that the question was not raised until more than a century after Shakespeare's death. Google does bring the reader down a rabbit hole, but this was illustrative. 

The Wikipedia articles for Shakespeare and the Authorship Controversy, for example, helped my students add nuance to the old line that Wikipedia can't be trusted because of how easily it is edited. Taking note of the lock in the righthand corner of Shakespeare's page, I was able to show students that, while the "controversy" page allows them to edit it, the Shakespeare page is curated by verified experts. 

Although my students instinctively trust .org and .edu domains over those ending in .com, a quick trip to NPR.org led to a discussion of how to read news articles. After discussing the fact that Renee Montaigne is not a Shakespeare expert and we therefore need to rely on the fact that she cites her sources, I also cautioned my students to question inherent biases. Although NPR consistently ranks among the most trusted source of information in this country, there are notable qualms with how the organization treats sources uncritically. 

Professor Koenig's faculty blog at Marquette Univ. Law School provided us an opportunity to talk about what a "blog" is, and to delve deeper into sources, the reputations of faculty, and the responsibility of institutions. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust is certainly trustworthy as a source of information, but it does also have a vested interest in keeping Shakespeare Shakespeare. On the other hand, they do acknowledge the so-called controversy, whereas the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship seems more interested in evangelizing and soliciting membership/donations than even acknowledging any information that undercuts their narrow conclusions. 

While I hope that today's lesson will aid my students as they begin their research for this class, I am also conscious that information literacy is important far beyond the classroom. To that end, we clicked around on other resources like elizabethan-era.co.uk and continued our discussion in an academic vein, but I shifted to spend the last few minutes talking about other topics. Although everyone had heard of Jenny McCarthy, Jim Carrey, and Tom Cruise, few had heard of Andy Wakefield; no one had heard of the propaganda campaign that helped fan the flames of unrest in Ukraine; deep fakes seemed funny at first... until they turned kind of creepy; and finally, I gave a warning about what liking and sharing can lead to and just why we, as informed citizens of the world, need to be wary of where we're getting our information in the first place. 

18 October 2019  12:15pm

Robert Mueller's relation to John Gower

As many (though surely not enough) Americans are, I am making my way through what there is to read of the report submitted to and subsequently published by the Department of Justice originating in the Office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. While the whole saga of our country's history over the past few years has the general aura of an early modern tragedy (or, perhaps, a history, since we are coming to recognize more and more that we've been through this all before), and while there have been countless connections made between current events and Shakespeare - from high-profile Trump-Caesar productions to news of Steve Bannon's previous ambitions to set Titus Andronicus in space - I'd like to enter into the record one more instance that I can't help turning over and over in my mind for its canniness: The Pericles Emerging Market Fund, L.P. 

Pericles, Prince of Tyre opens with a tale of corrupt government and an attempt to silence those that would expose the ruler's secrets: Pericles, seeking to marry the daughter of Antiochus, submits to the test that so many other suitors have lost their lives in failing. The king poses a riddle:

                    I am no viper, yet I feed

On mother's flesh which did me breed. 

I sought a husband, in which labor

I found that kindness in a father.

He's father, son, and husband mild; 

I mother, wife, and yet his child. 

How they may be, and yet in two,

As you will live, resolve it you (I.i.66-73)

There is little mystery in the riddle, but the peril is lodged in the catch-22 of knowing that answering correctly means challenging a fatal authority. Pericles is cunning enough to suggest that he needs more time to formulate his answer, but not wise enough to avoid signalling to the king that he knows the "sins [Antiochus loves] to act" (95). He flees and is pursued by Antiochus's assassins, meaning that Pericles cannot stay long in his home of Tyre. This sets off a picaresque hagiography of Pericles proving again and again his mettle in a way more suited to the medieval rhymes of John Gower (whose Confessio Amantis contains part of the tale, and who acts as the play's Chorus) than to the pen of Shakespeare (though I won't rehearse the question of play's authorship here). At the heart of the play, however, one should keep in mind the central problem of being an upstanding, noble man like Pericles making his way through a world in which fate lifts rulers like himself and Antiochus seemingly indiscriminately. Certainly the play does not embrace an amoral universe - we, I think, are meant to be as appalled by Antiochus's brazen incest as Pericles is - but it demonstrates the bind that moral men find themselves in when confronted with a world that can sometimes be ruled by their immoral, underhanded counterparts. 

What, then, do we make of recent news that investigations into Paul Manafort, Donald Trump's one-time campaign manager, received huge undisclosed cash sums through a vehicle named the Pericles Emerging Markets Fund. Granted, I am far out of my depth trying to keep up with the work of prosecutors looking into financial crimes (let alone the FARA violations inherent in Manafort's alleged acts in the Ukraine), but I am nonetheless tickled by the thought of the man in the ostrich-skin suit convincing Russian oligarchs Oleg Deripaska and Konstantin Kilimnik to take up the banner of the ancient Prince of Tyre.  

The fund was created in the Caymen Islands in 2007, so one might immediately think of poor Pericles shipwrecked after the storm early in Act II. I might suggest to Manafort and his partners that "Prospero" might have been a better choice. After all, the marooned Duke of Milan and central figure of The Tempest is much more openly manipulative and wields a sort of theatrical magic that seems more in-line with the fund's ostensible ends, to wit funneling laundered cash to its named principal(s). Prospero, too, has a much more robust name for an investment fund, showing "prosper" rather than the risk and bad fortune conjured by Pericles whose name is dangerously close to "peril."

While the whole saga of Pericles L.P. is more winding and twisted than - and at least as entertaining as - Pericles, Prince of Tyre, the similarities in structure and content aren't enough for me to keep writing. Anyone interested, however, should certainly read the extensive reporting on the matter. Perhaps I'm optimistic, but I can't help but think that it should bring us some solace amid the ongoing struggles to shed daylight on the goings-on of this administration that Pericles does have a happy ending. The prince is reunited in the end with his daughter and Antiochus comes into a bad death. Likewise, it seems that justice - that of the US Judiciary, rather than some cosmic balancing of fortunes - has solved the riddles through which Mr. Manafort and his Russian backers sought to obfuscate their crimes. 

10 May 2019  3:30pm

Anticipation

I am getting married this week. 

This monumental event is the reason that I decided to theme my literary survey course on the idea of “love” this semester. We were reading Much Ado About Nothing in that class not too long ago - though I’m increasingly convinced that teaching As You Like It last semester had more to do with the theme - but I do not really want to write in this blog post about a play obsessed from beginning to end with horns and cuckoldry. Rather, I’ve decided to revisit some texts that I haven’t read since studying for my comprehensive exams, another time in my recent life when I remember the build-up of anticipation a week prior that was full of contradictory feelings of anticipation and unreadiness (at least in terms of preparation).  

Edmund Spenser’s “Epithalamion” pivots at its midpoint and shifts from the groom’s anticipation of his bride’s presence at the altar to the groom’s anticipation of his bride in the marital bed. Nonetheless, it is anticipation that colors the song; ceremony is secondary. Although the first half of the poem gives all of the wedding participants instructions, those instructions are prefacing the moment of the bride’s arrival, and even the moment of the actual nuptials – that moment that occasions Spenser’s writing the poem – is not made explicit (although, I hesitate here, after missing Redcrosse and Una’s union in my last post). Instead, Spenser jumps from teasing his coy bride to give him her hand, since she has obviously not yet done so, to “Now al is done” (242). Consummation is deferred poetically to highlight the anticipatory excitement, first of the bridal procession and then of the marriage bed, which Spenser awaits rather impatiently:

                    Ah, when will this long weary day have end,

                    And lende me leave o come unto my love?

                    How slowly do the houres theyr numbers spend?

                    How slowly does sad Time his feathers move? (298-281)

After chasing off the peeping goddesses, as he approaches his final goal in the poem, Spenser still seems in haste, and he breaks off his final stanza eleven lines short of completion. Hopefully the “endlesse moniment” to which he refers (and indeed which has survived) is not meant to be to his haste and the premature end he has performed.

Britomart, in Book III of The Faerie Queene, likewise seeks her marriage partner with some haste, but she approaches the idea of love with patience and virtue. Indeed, Book III is filled with examples (and counterexamples) of persons who cannot immediately come to the consummation of the love they pursue and bear that fact with varying degrees of patience. Britomart, we are told even in the prologue to the book, is such a figure, but we are also reminded, in Canto IV, that Arthur is still pursuing his Faerie Queene. Pursuing damsels running through the forest, Arthur seems to have an existential trial throughout the book, and his once inspiring dreams of his lady now evade the vexed knight:

                    But gentle Sleep enuyde him any rest;

                    In stead thereof sad sorrow, and disdaine

                    Of his hard hap did vexe his noble brest,

                    And thousand fancies bet his idle braine

                    With their light wings, the sights of semblants vaine:

                    Oft did he wish, that Lady faire mote bee

                    His Faery Queene, for whom he did complaine:

                    Or that his Faery Queene were such, as shee:

                    And euer hastie Night he blamed bitterlie. (IV.lv.1-9)

Timias falls in love with Belphoebe as she nurses him back to health, but his inability to court the maid that he initially mistakes for an angel or goddess (V.xxxv.3) is a source of frustration for him. Despite his convalescence in “an earthly Paradize” (xl.5), Belphoebe’s “matchlesse beautie him dismayed” (xliii.7). He, another emblem of good chastity and chivalry in this book, chooses to suffer rather than offend his lady by being too forward (xlix.7-9). He is unlike the slew of ravishers and rapists that serve as the foil in Book III to the bright gems of chastity.

Britomart, like Timias, suffers physical wounds as well as the anguish of anticipation. Even before she is struck with an arrow in Canto I or stabbed in Canto XI, she has an inward wound that seems to grow greater with her love – this recalls Arthur’s inward wound after his dream of the Faery Queene in Book I (IX.vii.3). Her inward wound (which Spenser may intend as double entendre) is affected by her psychological longing and lack. If time drags on for Spenser in “Epithalamion,” too, so Britomart’s relation to time in Book III seems to intensify her longing and thereby underscore her sublime chastity.

Spenser plays with time in this book by beginning in medias res and having Britomart reveal her origin to Redcrosse only in Canto IV. But even her story of how she came to Faery Lond is not structurally insignificant since it begins long after the two knights have travelled together and yet ends at the moment of their meeting (lxii.3). Britomart, in her pursuit of Arthegall, must seemingly start from the beginning and bear this patiently. Embedded in the story of Britomart’s past, however, is Merlin’s prediction of the future of Britain from her lineage, and thus, even in looking backward, Britomart is given more to anticipate. Spenser intensifies this temporal longing, too, when Paridell tell tales of the fall of Troy in Canto IX. Britomart seems almost outside of time while listening to Paridell describe the founding of New Troy (xxxviii.8-9) by Felix Brutus (xlvi.1), since she knows both the history and the future of Britain, and since all the glory that she can imagine for that land depends on the marriage she anticipates with Arthegall.

By the end of the book, Scudamore and Amoret are reunited and entwined. This is one happy marriage toward which the comedy-driven book was pricking, but, as with Arthur still questing for Gloriana, Britomart is left singular. Although the hermaphroditic entangling of bodies prefigures her desire to be with her future husband, it also serves, as the book closes, to torture her (XII.xlvi.6-9) by drawing her anticipation onward into the books to follow. Even Spenser's enigmatic final couplet points to deferral when he begins each line with "now," pointing to the present imperative to "cease your work," but nonetheless it is only in anticipation of the future - "tomorrow is an holy day."  

13 Apr. 2019  5:10pm

Take a Break!

Amidst the busiest part of last semester, as we were both wrapping up the semester and bracing for final papers before visiting multiple families for the holidays, my fiance and I took a night off to go see Hamilton: An American Musical. While I have much to say and my fiance, who is much better versed in the nuances and nods of the musical's hip hop influences, it will suffice here to say that we both loved the performance. 

I have been meaning to write this post since then specifically because I was fresh off teaching Macbeth and recalling my previous post ("Alas, poor country! Almost afraid to know itself," see below). As a final project, I asked my students to re-imagine one of the scenes we had read for class and to address a number of points - setting, medium, set and costumes, etc. - and to connect each interpretive choice back to the original text. While students found this challenging, they produced good results for the most part. One student in particular wrote a House of Cards-esque reinterpretation of Macbeth's first three scenes. It seems that Macbeth is on the minds of many Americans as a valuable tool for contextualizing the realities of our political system. 

While Lin Manuel Miranda wrote his Broadway hit before President Trump entered our lexicon, he was not immune to this line of thinking, and one song in particular caught my ear above the others: "Take a Break" in Act II of the play consists Hamilton rebuffing his wife's pleas to vacation with the family while he simultaneously corresponds with her sister, his complicated first love interest, about the political situation at hand. Hamilton is proposing his idea of repaying the Revolutionary War debts of the states in exchange for vesting credit in a new federal bank, an idea strongly opposed by Thomas Jefferson and his faction in Washington's feuding cabinet. In his letter to Angelica, his sister-in-law, he writes: 

“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day”

I trust you’ll understand the reference to

Another Scottish tragedy without my having to name the play

They think me Macbeth, and ambition is my folly

I’m a polymath, a pain in the ass, a massive pain

Madison is Banquo, Jefferson’s Macduff

And Birnam Wood is Congress on its way to Dunsinane.

Angelica responds with wise advice before turning to a preoccupation with a former letter punctuated by intrigue. When she arrives in person to help her unsuccessful sister convince Hamilton, she sings the line "screw your courage to the sticking place." 

The cleverness of these allusions is precisely the playfulness that characterizes the relationship between the two that also invites the audience into the intimacy. Hamilton does not want to "[have] to name the play" for multiple reasons: it tells us that Angelica is well-read and also lets us feel like the sophisticated theater-goers we are if we catch the reference, but it also invites into the narrative a knowing nod to the theater itself. After all, the reason to not name the play is because of a supposed curse, leading "the Scottish play" to be a sort of thespian shibboleth. The audience probably does not need at this juncture to be reminded that what they are watching is theatrical more than historical - cabinet meetings probably did not actually take the form of rap battles, for instance - but bringing Shakespeare in at this moment can be read as serious structural under-girding rather than simply a reference among many others. 

Beginning with Macbeth's final soliloquy and ending the references with Angelica quoting Lady Macbeth signals the approaching darkness of the play, and indeed the next moments are a pivot away from the global history of the first act and into a narrowly focused look into the personal. The second act deals with Hamilton's inner turmoil after he takes a mistress in his wife's absence, is subsequently extorted first by his mistress's husband and later by Jefferson who happens upon the information, the Reynolds Pamphlet, and finally when his son is shot and killed in a duel after demanding satisfaction from George Eacker . So much oxygen is burned in these emotional sections that Jefferson even breaks in at the start of "The Election of 1800" to beg, "Can we get back to politics?"

The other "Scottish tragedy" is not complete with these events however. Like Macbeth who must "bear-like...fight the course," Hamilton staggers on through the election in the lead-up to his fatal duel with Aaron Burr. Few who would go to see this musical would be ignorant of the Hamilton-Burr duel, and yet the play does an excellent job of building to a climax that makes you reinterpret the previous two hours of music. "I am not throwing away my shot," for example, changes meaning after Hamilton fires his pistol at the sky rather than at Burr. So, too, can one come back to the pivot point of the play and read the knowing historical/theatrical parallels prognosticated in the lyrics. If Hamilton is Macbeth, Madison Banquo, and Jefferson Macduff, we have in fact a triumphant Jefferson at the end of the play, Madison fallen by the wayside politically, and Hamilton defeated. Perhaps Jefferson ought to be Malcolm, since he ends up on the proverbial throne at the end, but Hamilton could be forgiven for not seeing Burr as Macduff, the man who will kill him, at that point in the play. 

9 Jan. 2019  2:10pm

Teaching Richard III in 2018

This afternoon I taught two sections of my Literary Perspectives course at Niagara University and listened to NPR during my drive home. In 2018, it is hard to avoid political news; even what we now think of as slower news days still provide occasions for outrage, hope, or despair. My aim in writing here, however, is not to detail the news of the day but rather to reflect on the ideas that came up in my class discussions around Richard III and specifically how my college students put elements of the play into their own perspective. 

To begin with, in our last class meeting on Monday, my students all found the third scene of Act Two to be strange. We had focused so much of the preceding classes trying to make sense of the dramatis personae, a tangled web of post-civil war fractures within the Plantagenet dynasty. My whiteboard family tree didn't help matters, but we got the rough outlines of the House of York and at least all of the key players and all of their names (George being referred to as Clarence gave particular difficulty). So turning to this scene set not in a royal palace but in the London street and not containing the conversation of noble peers but of ordinary, unnamed citizens was a moment of pause. It is a good moment to remind students that the Elizabethan theater was indeed located on a London street, and that the audience would be made up of unnamed citizens, so the actors on stage are imitating the audience and thereby drawing them into the story in a different way than Richard's playing the Vice. But what these characters are discussing - political intrigue - was even more apt to September 2018 than it might have been for audiences in 1592. 

Monday was the first day of class after the now infamous publication of an anonymous OP-ED in the New York Times, whose author claims to be a high-level member of the Trump White House. Queen Elizabeth had been on the throne for 34 years when the play was being performed, and the frightful Spanish Armada of 4 years prior was a fading memory; Elizabethan citizens might've known what it was to talk about palace intrigue, sure, but the "troublous world" that the citizens speak of would not likely spark succession anxiety in any real sense for Elizabethans (6). Thinking through a "troublous world" of uncertain politics after a weekend of pundits opining on the chaos of the OP-ED and Bob Woodward's forthcoming book, on the other hand, was quite easy to understand. 

When we came to Act Three this afternoon, I asked my students what they thought of Richard telling his nephew Edward that the boy's missing uncles were dangerous (i.12). On of my students responded that it was "fake news." Indeed, claims of fake news and psychological projection seem to be common themes for the ruler that my students know and the one they are learning about. But the more striking thing about Richard in the middle of his play is not how boldly he plays Iniquity, but rather how shrewdly he plays the politician. This, I mentioned, is why Kevin Spacey's choice to play Richard shortly before creating his Frank Underwood seemed such a natural choice. 

In understanding the scene in which Richard condemns Hastings, I had to demonstrate how that scene ought to be read. Rather, I told my students, than thinking of the stereotypical Shakespearean actor "[sawing] the air" (to quote Hamlet), one must see Richard making very practical use of the theater. He cannot show his shriveled arm long for fear that his deceit will be uncovered (and, really, how long does Richard keep up the farce that his arm has been shriveled? Does he go about in a sling the rest of the play? Spacey played a Richard whose arm was shriveled as part of his natural deformity, but this made the accusation that Mistress Shore is a witch all the more ridiculous). Instead, Richard relies on urgency, an urgency he is manufacturing. When Hastings speaks his damnable line - "If they have done this thing my gracious lord" - it is only damnable because Richard prevents the man from finishing the clause and seizes instead on "if" (iv.76). Richard leaves no room for Hastings to correct the mistake but exits the room demanding the execution be swift. How many manufactured outrages have been the hallmarks of our political discussion in recent years? Although Richard is more cunning than to just create a strawman here, I always like to bring my composition students into the world of fallacies with George W. Bush's favorite phrase circa 2003: "To those who think we should cut and run." Of course few politicians did advocate a huge deal of restraint - hence Iraq and Afghanistan - but the very public accusation of no one in particular cut off any would-be opposition before it could begin and it gave warhawks all the space they needed to plan. 

Fastforwarding back to our current climate, Buckingham in the guildhall provides more excellent political theater, and this time we return to a public venue. The comedy of having none in the hall rise to cheer for Richard at the end of Buckingham's speech might trouble Richard like low poll numbers, but Buckingham is too clever. He employs his own version of 2016's Russian bots spouting meaningless support in order to make his message seem more palatable to the average citizen than it is. Buckingham starts the snowball rolling. 

Richard himself takes on a Trumpian aspect when he spreads rumors akin to birtherism: he does not imply that Edward IV was born outside of the country, but he does imply that Edward was born outside of lawful marriage, throwing his pedigree and divine right into question. This of course touches only Edward V, since the older Edward is already dead, but to this day our President maintains the unsubstantiated (unsubstantiatable) claim that his predecessor's right to hold office was illegitimate. The lie, Richard might think, need not be widely believable, but only enough that some will believe it and the rest will follow the support of the cult that grows out of the lie. Indeed, Richard knows that he needs the consent of the governed, even if the concept doesn't exist in medieval political philosophy. Richard's appearance between two bishops in the seventh scene, then, as ridiculous as it seems to a reader, makes sense when one thinks of American Evangelicals endorsing candidate Trump and others claiming that Trump would be deigning to be President. Richard, after all, claims only to take up the garland of the realm under duress in order to save the citizens a worse fate. So too have many supporters of our president made excuses when necessary out of the idea that Trump is some lesser of inevitable evils, a claim that relies on the impossibility of proving the counterfactual rather than on any actual evidence. 

But Richard's feigned refusal is not surprising. Julius Caesar denied his garland three times before becoming Rome's emperor, and Shakespeare knew that. Perhaps a better understanding of this move is to be found in the question I posed to my students at the end of class: is Corey Booker running for president in 2020? Is Elizabeth Warren? Kamala Harris? All three will tell you (and have) that they are focused on doing the important work of the Senate, focused on the midterms, seeking to represent their constituents, and yet everyone knows what lurks just behind that denial that has become almost pro forma for serious future candidate. It's as old as Caesar, and certainly Richard would be quite at home in our political rhetoric today. 

I have warned my students that there was no 25th Amendment nor any civil procedure for impeachment in the fifteenth century, but, as we continue this week with the play, I look forward to seeing how they characterize Richard as cunning politician as well as vice. 

10 Sept. 2018  4:15pm

Silence is the Perfectest Herald 

As I continue to begin my chapter on Lavinia in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, I find myself reflecting on the role of silence. I've noted that Lavinia speaks only around 60 of the play's lines, and yet her presence on the stage perhaps the most powerful in all of Shakespeare. At once commanding the audience to "gaze upon her" as her uncle instructs, and also causing so many to avert their eyes to the abject, bleeding body (Marcus tells Titus to look upon her and blind himself with the sight). Productions have taken macabre pride in recent years in keeping a "body count," tallying those who have fainted or had to leave the theater, and Julie Taymor's Lavinia sticks in people's minds because of the iconic branches protruding from her bloody arms. Beyond the spectacle of the violated woman, however, I want to argue that what makes Lavinia a figure that so demands our attention is in fact her silence. 

In her book, Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare's Stage, Carol Chillington Rutter reflects on another body that commands our attention: Lear almost teases us with Cordelia's body, at once telling the audience that she's gone and then perhaps a feather stirs indicating her breathing. The promised end that Kent questions leaves us with a corpse, a silent Cordelia (which Rutter reminds us Cordelia was decidedly not when she was alive) onto which Lear can map his inherently patriarchal narrative. Lavinia, spending much of her stage time in limbo between life and death, is not so easily pinned down. 

For one, as Carla Mazzio notes in her book The Inarticulate Renaissance: Language Trouble in an Age of Eloquence, and Emily Cockayne writes in her article "Experiences of the Deaf in Early Modern Engalnd," not all those rendered dumb are silent. The prelingually deaf, early modern commentators recognized, often made inarticulate vocal sounds. Lavinia too, we might expect, would register her nonlingual sounds: moaning in pain at times, indicating that her father or uncle has said something correct regarding her state, or even registering her frustration when she cannot catch her nephew to borrow his book of Ovid. My point here is that Lavinia is not perfectly silent, that when she is taken off in the middle of her line "let confusion fall," she is not rendered as helplessly dumb as critics have persistently painted her. A reparative reading might recognize that mutilated Lavinia has more agency than does a dead Cordelia. 

Of course, that is the point Shakespeare himself makes - Lavinia's story is an evolution of Philomel's, and she is able to relate the story of her rape through her precursor's. It may be true that we are confronted with a "disappearance of subjectivity into a gulf of silence" as Cynthia Marshall writes, and "The male characters in the play construct sympathetic responses to her, claiming her story and then, uncannily, her mutilation, as their own," but that gulf shrinks as Lavinia works to invent a new form of communication for herself (108). Although critics have noted that Marcus' intervention symbolically reenacts the rape by forcing Lavinia to hold a phallic stick in her mouth to write, and I would add that the fact that a male character must read out to the audience what Lavinia has written both stymie any feminist triumph in this scene, nevertheless it is important to recognize the attention demanded by Lavinia's silence even there. 

If she makes any sounds at all while writing, they are surely grunts in effort or moans in pain, and we are captivated by them. It is not that we in the audience desperately want to know what Lavinia has to tell us - we already know, even if Titus and Marcus don't. Even when the words are read to us, they are in Latin and not immediately recongizeable. The words themselves don't matter; Lavinia's body being able to recoup a form - any form - of communication is what matters, and it matters because by this point she has gone so long without one. 

I began this line of thinking by considering a much more recent example of a powerful silence. As Mazzio writes, silence can be a powerful rhetorical position, and just a few days ago Emma Gonzalez, a survivor of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting in Parkland, Florida demonstrated this by standing silent and still in front of nearly one million people for over four minutes. Her point, made without a single word, was clear. Her six minute speech, two-thirds of which was non-speech, drove home the duration of the shooting and spread the kind of uncomfortability that demands political action. During her silence, some began impromptu chants, some wondered if she was overcome with emotion, and others simply stood there in silent solidarity recognizing that Gonzalez was making a powerful point: nothing said at that microphone could be more powerful or harder to ignore on the national level than a young woman refusing to yield the stage on which she confronts all of us with her persistent silence. 

26 March 2018  1:45pm

Alas, poor country! Almost afraid to know itself

There arose some controversy at the beginning of this summer over the Public Theater's performance of Julius Caesar in Central Park. The focus of criticism was on the company's choice to dress the title character in a golden/blonde wig, an ill fitting suit, and a too-long necktie cheaply made in China. Affecting a Queens accent, the famously assassinated first emperor of Rome was notably meant to resemble President Donald Trump. 

I will not rehash the myriad comments on how the play decries assassination since it is what ultimately destroys the republic much more than the election of Caesar, nor will I re-remind readers that Trump's 2016 opponent had previously been portrayed in the same role. I will not make this a defense of First Amendment rights, nor will I suggest that American performances of Shakespeare's plays have often had much more biting things to say about American politics - see, for example, any performances of Henry VI during the 1850s. 

Rather, I'd like to suggest that directors missed the mark this summer by clamoring to put Trump in such a role as Caesar when his administration is so much better suited to the rise and fall of Macbeth. 

Notable adaptations have set the Scottish tragedy in Stalin-era Soviet Russia, the world of Mumbai's organized crime, and Samurai-era Japan. Blending the world of politics and the mafia (in it's various forms around the globe) has been a compelling overlay for Macbeth over the past six decades, but nothing compares to the takeover of Washington D.C. arguably by the same category of forces. 

"Doubtful it stood" may not be the takeaway line of Act I in a Trump-Macbeth mashup, seeing as how the 2016 race was all but announced for Clinton until the moment it wasn't. Nevertheless, one cannot but note the bloody themes of the play. Unlike Orson Welles's film's clean and respectful swordplay, the true Scottish battles in both Hollinshed and Shakespeare are written dirty and gory:

Disdaining fortune, with his brandish'd steel,

Which smoked with bloody execution,

Like valour's minion carved out his passage

Till he faced the slave;

Which ne'er shook hands, nor bade farewell to him,

Till he unseam'd him from the nave to the chaps,

And fix'd his head upon our battlements.

Chants of "Lock her up," creating a conspiracy around the murder of Seth Rich, and spreading stories about the health and ethics of his opponent may not have been bloody, but they is the tip of the poisoned spear that changed politics for the worse in this country last year. 

Lady Macbeth is one of my favorite characters of Shakespeare's creation, so I cannot claim any parallel between her and the current First Lady, but I will suggest that she is the quintessential advisor. The obverse of the old fool Polonius, Lady Macbeth is able to use masculinist rhetoric to persuade her husband toward the means of getting his crown. One wonders who she might parallel - Bannon? Manafort? Flynn?... ooh, let's come back to Flynn. 

The rest of the play remarks upon Macbeth's growing isolation and failure to put in "the best people" around him: "none serve with him but constrained things / Whose hearts are absent too." After all, he hires two cutthroats to dispatch Banquo, and he refuses to let Lady Macbeth in on the plot until she might "applaud the deed" after it is done. Those good men who stay - the proverbial "adults in the room" - do so at the peril of their conscience like Ross. Ross must know what is to come to Lady Macduff when he says "I am so much a fool, should I stay longer, / It would be my disgrace and your discomfort: / I take my leave at once," and after all he is able to equivocate with the Thane of Fife, telling him first that his wife and children were alive and well when he left them and then breaking the news of their deaths a few lines after.

Seyton is perhaps a true believer who helps to arm Macbeth against the coming onslaught, but there are plenty of men who fear what it would mean to stay. Malcolm and Donalbain fly when they see that Macbeth is willing to murder - Duncan's grooms (and later Banquo) - to cover up his initial murder, and Macduff might be thought of as a sort of special counsel when he runs off to England to rally forces in opposition. 

Macbeth's outbursts at seeing Banquo's ghost at his banquet are excused away as a malady. Here Lady Macbeth takes on the Sean Spicer role suggesting that her husband's "covfefe" moment is something other than it is, even though everyone around him can read the writing on the wall. While we're back on Lady Macbeth, the fact that Macbeth dismisses her just before this outburst, even though she is loyal to him, makes one wonder. Could she be the General that got him elected only to be cast off shortly thereafter (though none too soon)? She is out of the picture but still telling us something about the murder/ascension through her loose lips and news leaks while she wanders the castle in her sleep. 

This week's political upheavals have led news media to conjecture that the relationship between Trump and Putin is strained, but much like Macbeth's second meeting with the weird sisters, Trump still has confidence that the arrangement can work, stating that it is all Congress's doing and none of his own, relations can still improve. The weird sisters might have planted the plot in Macbeth's head, but they have no great love for the Thane, whatever he makes of their equivocal assurances. 

There is surely more to write and surely more to come, but for now this is about as much musing as I want to jot down. The parallels are not perfect, and the conclusion has yet to come, but Ceasar's head was full of well-earned ambition; Macbeth's ill-gotten crown weighs heavy on his head and leads him to know that it is ultimately "signifying nothing." I think one seems much more fitting for this current administration than does the other. 

3 Aug. 2017  1:45pm

Update on my previous excursus: The Santa Clarita Diet

I just wrapped up class about thirty minutes ago and felt compelled to make some notes to myself regarding my previous evaluation of the newest Netflix foray into the comedy-horror genre. As almost always happens, discussion with my students helped me think through a lot of things that I hadn't seen previously. The class pretty much unanimously rejected Teeth, citing not so much the premise of violent sexuality - rape being the recurring catalyst for the horror movie's horror scenes - but that the film fails in its attempts to redress traumatic sexual encounters via control. 

Our discussion took us into areas such as practicality of devices like Jaap Haumann and Rape-aXe, the juxtapositioning of phallic nuclear plant cooling towers with the yonic (I learned a new word tonight!) image of the cave, and the illogic of abstinence only education as a means of regulating normative sexuality. The last of these was particularly interesting because it not only had to do with Teeth but it provided a nice conclusion to our class as well: the ending of Teeth and the ending of episode one of The Santa Clarita Diet could not be more dissimilar. 

In Teeth, the female protagonist hits the road as a hitchhiker. When she is woken up by her driver at a rest stop, he giving her a suggestive, extortionate stare, she returns his gaze with her own knowing smirk. Having vanquished her step-brother with her mother's makeup (which she applies like war-paint) and her newfound control of her mutation, the young lady seems poised by the end of the film to wander the earth ridding it of bad phalluses one at a time. Her compulsion to repeat her trauma is straight out of Freud, and director Michael Lichtenstein demonstrates the control over her trauma she feels in those moments; nevertheless, it is this repetition compulsion that she pursues at the end of the film--not the repressive purity that she fetishizes in her cult-like sex education leader role. She has abandoned the aims of what she previously coveted, normative heterosexual coupling within the bounds of marriage. There is no indication in the final moments that she cares one bit about finding "good" sexual experiences (and the film really questions what that would look like for her, since her only experience that comes close involves her being given pills to calm her down), let alone any thoughts of marriage. 

Thinking about horror as a generic outgrowth of what used to be lumped into the catchall "Tragedy," it makes sense that the bloody film ends with a protagonist solus (or sola, in this case). The structures of society are reified only in the bleak hope that they can be rebuilt, but, of course, the lone protagonist's future is uncertain outside of the feeling we are left with that she will continually meet sexually aggressive partners. 

Against this, pose Drew Barrymore eating Nathan Fillion as Timothy Olyphant comes home to discover the bloody scene, aghast. Cue low-toned instrumentals, and the comedy falls apart; but roll credits to an upbeat, catchy song, as the show does, and have Olyphant's face turn briefly from horrified to quizzically enchanted by his quirky wife, and the comedy rises to a crescendo. What remains intact, even if you don't allow Netflix's quick timer to bring you automatically on to episode two, is exactly what is left behind in Teeth: normative sexuality and heterosexual marriage. When Barrymore looks up from her half-finished canabalistic meal, she delivers the episode's final line, "I really want to make this work."

The comedy works, my students asserted tonight, because Fillion never gets past the point of threat to enact the actual rape. While I think they have an excellent point, I also think it would be a mistake to talk about the failures or successes of the genre without talking about the aims of the genre themselves. To that end, we read for tonight's class a selection from John Limon's Stand-up Comedy in Theory, or Abjection in America, the thesis of which, born out through discussions of Lenny Bruce, David Letterman, Ellen Degeneres, and Paula Poundstone, is that stand-up confronts us much the way a Kristevan abject corpse does. 

Laughter, like gagging or vomiting in response to the abject, is involuntary and a kind of projection in the face of something we cannot put at a safe distance. Comedians, Limon argues, do not construct jokes; rather the joke is constructed through the process of reception by the audience--take away the live audience or think too hard about the joke (or, as he does, write the joke down on paper) and it falls apart. Likewise, take Poundstone's choice to wear a suit and talk about her asexual preferences or, as I wanted to do tonight, take Eddie Izzard in drag, and you have a comedian constructing a subversive joke that the audience is in on but is never invited to think too hard about. If Izzard made his entire Dressed to Kill Tour about the clothes he wore, it would stop being comedy and start being more of a lecture on drag. While I wouldn't mind that, and I'm actually going to a lecture on drag this Thursday, it wouldn't be comedy. We have to be confronted on a less intellectual level in order for the joke to land, and we need the joke to land in order to want to go back an intellectualize it. 

So, with Teeth, which verges on preachy in the scenes of Christian sex ed or the dog named "Mother" being kept in a cage until it escapes to eat its castrated owner's dismembered member, I can see why my students didn't feel the horror landed. Overact in a horror film and you may come away with a successful B movie; but make an overwrought horror comedy, where the suspension of disbelief is already gone, and you risk alienating those already primed to be reading the jokes intellectually. If Santa Clarita is to be successful, it will have to keep toeing that line, and, ultimately, if it is successful, I think it will remain problematic. 

Take the Teeth protagonist and queer her desires: if Lichtenstein had represented repression not of sexuality proper but of "proper" sexuality, and made his protagonist a lesbian or asexual or any number of things, the result would still work. The nature of the monster would be different, but the moral in which she is constantly pursued rather than being the aggressor, would remain the same. Take her gynecologist and make him a relatively unthreatening female doctor, and you end up with a very different scene. But take Barrymore out of the heterosexual marriage and all of its suburban trappings, make her a budding lesbian or a swinger or anything else, and the aggression she finds within herself at the end ruins the joke rather than making it. Her joke is only something we can safely laugh at because, for all the viscera and blood in the scene, it reinscribes social norms, and she and Olyphant will ultimately make their marriage work based on the absurd premise that they need to first cover up her murdering Fillion and then work on the project of righting her zombie appetite. The Netflix show skews comedic generically, since we end with a renewed marriage and the promise of healthy, normative sexuality even as the show portends more non-normative gluttony on the horizon. 

                                                                                        6 Mar. 2017  9:00pm

The Santa Clarita Diet is Nothing New

As I prepare my lesson for tomorrow's course in horror, I've been doing a lot of digging into what Deborah Covino calls our "makeover culture." In her book, Amending the Abject Body: Aesthetic Makeovers in Medicine and Culture, Covino attempts to demystify the ancient practices of bodily mutilation for aesthetic purposes, especially in today's society where we take a different approach. Whereas bodies were once cut into in order to form scars, today's plastic surgeons take pains to hide scars - the magic of the industry is that it works through it's own erasure; the "imperfect" body is mutilated in order to become "perfect."

Since I am trying to instill in my class a sense of everyday horror, rather than relegating that genre to knife-wielding maniacs or other creatures composed of nothing but pure id, I thought I'd look to the first few episodes of the early 2000s show on FX Nip/Tuck. Never exactly highly acclaimed, the show was an early foray into world-probing that networks like AMC has since developed into an art form by taking us into the world of meth production in Breaking Bad or the gore of The Walking Dead. What stands out for me in the show, however, is how the plot eventually turns on it's own psychic premise: the earliest memorable line "tell me what you don't like about your body," eventually catches up to the main character when his enemies kidnap and undo all of the surgeries he performed on his (artificially) beautiful wife throughout their time together. She is monstrous only because the enemy of the plastic surgeon makes visible the scarring he sought to hide. 

We'll see how many of my students care to pull on that thread, but the focus of the class is not so much the psychic horror of that show's overarching plot in later seasons. Rather we want to focus on other areas, like the undeniable utility of reconstructive surgery or the inaccessibility of universal beauty ideals. 

When I was stumbling around the usual channels to try to find clips to show in class, I turned to Netflix. On their homepage, they happened to be promoting a new original series, The Santa Clarita Diet. With a rather high-billed cast - Drew Barrymore stars alongside Timothy Olyphant, and Nathan Fillion and Andy Richter (of all people) make promising appearances in the first episode - and certainly a provocative premise, I figured it was worth skimming through. 

It's terrible. 

Nevertheless, as the drippingly contrived dialogue is acted sans chemistry, we learn two things in episode one: Drew Barrymore is undergoing some weird mutation that makes her zombie-like with congealed blood and an insatiable hunger for raw meat, and Nathan Fillion won't take "no, stop, I'm married" for an answer. 

The episode culminates in Fillion's character pressing himself on the politely declining Barrymore in her backyard. Each time she resists, he brings her in closer. When she raises her voice to say "Listen, Gary," Fillion puts his hand over her mouth. He tells her, in a deep, somber tone, that they should have some fun and no one will be the wiser; if she refuses, he will tell her husband that they "screwed four times last night in [his] beemer." Barrymore gives him eyes that let him cautiously remove his hand, and she feigns a newfound willing eagerness, taking his fingers and licking them. Then she bites, and she crunches two fingers off. The two have some brief dialogue (which aims at comedy) before he passes out and she rips off his shirt to begin devouring him with the camera shifting to an overhead shot. 

While I don't know where the show goes from here - though it's predictable that Olyphant comes home to find his wife in such a state and the two will need to conspire to cover up the murder before either of their law enforcement neighbors get home - I am intrigued that Netflix is attempting to make comedy out of this trope that has existed for a long time now. Of course, they meld it with other things like zombie tropes and Barrymore's signature sincere naivete, but the final scene is a long worn fantasy. 

The would-be rape victim luring her aggressor in before devouring him draws on vagina dentata. Netflix may not want to exactly cross that line (they're not HBO), but director Michael Lichtenstein did just that in 2007 (and we're watching Teeth for next Monday's class - I can't wait). Moreover, I couldn't help note the interesting (yet surely coincidental) echoes of an early modern blockbuster. 

We don't know who wrote The Bloodie Banquet. Gary Taylor claims that there is strong evidence that Thomas Middleton wrote it, but what would you expect a Middleton scholar to say? Regardless, T.D., as the title page lists the author, wrote a fascinatingly horrific scene in the play: 

The Young Queen carries out a lustful affair with a courtier under the condition that he never see her face (so he doesn't know she's the queen). The courtier goes to their secret meeting place early one night, catches her sleeping, and removes her veil. She is horrified. She eventually leaves off her indignation and tells the courtier to spend an hour in repentance and then she will bed him again, but really she uses this as an excuse to leave the room and return with two pistols. As soon as she has killed her lover, the Tyrant her husband springs out of hiding and has caught her in the murderous affair. He, being a Tyrant, devises a cruel punishment: she will be locked in her room and given nothing to eat until she consumes the entirety of her lover's corpse, which he has quartered and given to his cook to prepare. 

This Thyestean Banquet reveals a lot about the way early moderns viewed the boundaries of normal sexuality and the extent to which their regulation was required, but surely audiences of the play were just as horrified as we might expect. Staging the larder scene in which body parts are strung up from the ceiling with other cuts of meat is an innovation that follows on the heels of the wax figure corpses in The Duchess of Malfi, but of course those were only supposed to be believed by the Duchess, not by the audience. 

Making Fillion's corpse the object of a comedic horror is different. Comedy and horror share a lot of attributes, and they are not easy to pin down, either in their own right. So it makes sense to combine them occasionally, and I think this is the intent behind Santa Clarita. In a long line of comedy-horror, it is interesting; but in a long line of narratives that either paint women's sexuality as monstrously consuming or else excuse vagina dentata as a necessary evil to defend against masculine aggression, I just don't think the comedy of that last scene lands. Making sexual assault a vehicle for plot in a comedy feels wrong if Barrymore's agency comes only from her monstrousness, a trait that has long been a tool of disparagement rather than empowerment. I realize that I have outlined a fine line, and some may claim that her bizarre action actually makes her her own superhero, like the unfortunate heroine in Teeth, so it is up for debate. I just don't think it came down on the right side of that line, and, with the rest of the show being what it is, I'm not inclined to go on to episode two to see if the writers even come back to try and address it. 

I must say that I am excited to be exploring The Bloodie Banquet for my concluding chapter. When I turn to start writing that one, I don't think that I'll come back to watch The Santa Clarita Diet though. There are a few things about it that I just can't stomach. 

                                                                                        26 Feb. 2017  5:00pm