May Contain Drama
Or, Shakespeare For The Tremulous And Neurotic:
Readers will doubtless recall the Chichester Festival Theatre warning patrons that its production of The Sound of Music, one of the most famous and widely-seen musicals in the world, would contain references to Nazis. Which, for some, would apparently come as a surprise.
More recently, the Royal Shakespeare Company felt it necessary to forewarn visitors that its production of Hans Christian Andersen’s dark fairy tale The Red Shoes features both loud music and “haze.” Because in a tale of mind-controlling shoes and amputated feet, the haze is the thing you really want to watch out for.
And because you can never have enough of this tiresome contrivance:
Presumably, it was felt to be a shocking twist. Mind-wrenching stuff.
Ah, these fearless correctors of our history and culture. Whose weird mental twitching we’ve seen before.
And so, the modern sensibility, the approved outlook on things, is one in which we are to view cross-dressing perverts striding into schoolgirls’ toilets and changing rooms as in no way provocative or untoward, and regarding which one mustn’t bat an eye, while simultaneously trembling at the prospect of Shakespeare’s Tempest containing scenes of bad weather.
A mindset in which almost any dramatic work that predates Instagram must now come with spoilers. Which does rather appear to defeat the object.
I thought students were the clever ones.
Well, yes. But expecting drama students, would-be sophisticates and intellectuals, to grasp that drama tends to involve scenes of a heightened emotional nature – pretty much by definition – is, it seems, simply too much to ask.
And so we get endless glorified spoilers. Which, again, does rather undermine the whole point of the exercise.
“Oh, by the way, the hero and heroine both die.”
DARTH VADER IS LUKE’S FATHER.
OK, then, I’ll laugh from the front of the room.
Heh. Quite.
Many years ago on the now-defunct Turner Classic Movies message board, somebody was virtue-signal complaining about racial stereotyping in Hollywood movies. Finally getting sick of it, I suggested the poster try watching British movies instead, such as The Dam Busters.
And to think that Shakespeare’s audience, so used to early deaths from plague and general skullduggery, ate these plays up. Murder? Let’s have more! Ghosts? Yes, Please! Elongated death scenes? Love ’em! Lewd references to sex? Hilarious!
Have you noticed that the theater masks show drama and comedy? I don’t think Renaissance folk were immune to grief and the loss associated with death. What helped them cope and continues to help us cope today is that by exaggerating the drama we can find some comedy to keep us from utter despair. I wager that in Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio’s “They have made worm’s meat of me!” is his day’s equivalent of Monty Python’s “‘Tis but a scratch.”
I am reminded of St. Thomas More’s quote: “The devil…that proud spirit…cannot endure to be mocked.” We could all benefit from facing the fact that yes, we shall die, and for some it won’t be pleasant, but despair can be kept at bay with some laughter and over-acting, if faith alone is inadequate.
“I know! Let’s instill, encourage and normalize mental illnesses in our enemies’ countries under the guise of niceness!”
I suppose a more recent equivalent would be excitedly arriving at the cinema to watch Avengers: Infinity War and being pre-emptively warned that the film you’re about to see “includes scenes of our heroes losing, catastrophically, and half of all sentient life in the universe being rendered unto dust.”
It would, I think, diminish the film’s impact somewhat.
Two months prior, the same university also banned the term Anglo-Saxon from its module titles
Trigger warning: may contain residues of white ethnic consciousness.
And let’s not forget the trigger warnings that now accompany Constable’s landscape paintings:
This is where we are now. It is not a good place to be.
Professors renamed a master’s course in Viking and Anglo-Saxon studies to “Viking and early medieval English studies” in a move to “decolonise the curriculum.”
I am confused, Anglo-Saxons bad because they stayed, but Vikings are OK because despite all the raiding, pillaging, and aggravated mopery they eventually left even though they didn’t quite get the complete message up in the Shetlands?
Are there a bunch of pissed off Picts that need to be appeased?
Put yourself in the frame of mind you had in…let’s say 1998. Pretty sure most of us were somewhat adults by then but the rest of you should just ok-boomer to the next comment. You have no idea 9/11 is coming, Donald Trump is just a business man who teases about running in politics, generally in opposition to GOP policies. But that’s just talk show BS. Entertainment and sports and such are for the most part relatable and enjoyable. Sure there’s a few whacky people but (mostly) no one takes them too seriously. Now imagine someone comes along and tells you that in your lifetime, warnings will be placed on Shakespeare plays, just like the warnings about cancer that can be seen on cigarette boxes. About what you ask? Oh, a shipwreck is coming. Characters die. That sort of stuff. Muslims will be running roughshod over Europe and half the native-born (in 1998 sense) population will welcome even more of them in. Many of them will rape women, to which the response from one European government will be that silly this is my no-no square video. A united states congress woman from Somalia will have married her brother and everyone, the official everyones anyway, will pretend otherwise. Oh, and also mothers of little boys will have their dicks chopped off by doctors in hospitals and the government will vaguely (or not so vaguely) threaten those medical facilities that refuse to do so.
Then someone tells you that even half of this is coming, maybe it being only half as bad as I describe. How would your 1998 self have reacted to such a person when everyone else was touting technology that was all for the good, leftism was somewhat abated if not retreating, and everyone was saying that the future’s so bright you have to wear shades*?
*Yes, I understood the original meaning of that song.
Lest we forget that great cultural moment.
Heh. My eighth grade English teacher taught us that comedies were called that back then, not necessarily because they were funny but because they were plays where no one dies. As opposed to everything else.
Whom the gods would destroy…
Could easily be the theme of this blog’s quoted content.
How the hell can a drama student not know there’s blood in Macbeth – or storms in The Tempest? (Clue – it’s in the title.)
Well, indeed. I mean, if you picture Macbeth, one of the more obvious images is of Lady M dementedly scrubbing the hallucinated blood from her hands. And it occurs to me that drama students who recoil from tales of plotting, scheming and bloody political intrigue may want to rethink their career choices.
I’m now trying to imagine the list of trigger warnings that could be attached to a Modern Audience viewing of I, Claudius.
Why don’t they just bang the students into a padded room & subject them to erratically flashing lights, random noises, and the occasional electric shock for six months or so? Be ever so much simpler and it’s not like they’d be any less ignorant and neurotic for it.
Well . . . the ‘students’ think they are.
Further South and East. And they’re not looking to be appeased, they’re looking to be entertained by ever more convoluted self-abasement . . . which the self-anointed delight in providing.
They’ve likely never been exposed to any Shakespeare, except in the form of cautions about sexism, racism, colonialism, or some other fashionable ‘ism’ that allows the teacher to be derelict in his duty.
And, honestly, they likely have never been exposed to the word ‘tempest’, let alone the meaning of it.
Modern pedagogy is much worse than you can imagine.
Even better, imagine the looks of bafflement on their little pudding-like faces at a screening of The Lion in Winter.
I’m now trying to imagine the list of trigger warnings that could be attached to a Modern Audience viewing of I, Claudius.
I, Claudius debuted in the States during my senior year of high school (1978). We were absoliytely mesmerized by it and every Monday monring, the cafeteria was abuzz with discussion about the previous night’s episode. Derek Jacobi became my favorite British actor then.
The madness of Caligula! The perfidy of Livia! [SPOILER ALERT: don’t eat the figs]
I don’t understand why Viking = good and Anglo-Saxon = bad.
Aren’t they both rather pasty? Both known for rampaging around, raping, pillaging, and burning? Didn’t the Vikings colonize Greenland for awhile (at least until the climate cooled off and their crops failed)?
Heh. Boomers watching the Super Bowl halftime show. Not for hyper-sensitive people but…
Trigger warning: Alien includes a creature bursting out of a chest. If people are triggered by the term “anglo-saxon” (a valid ethnic designation) then…words fail me.
I remember a few years ago, a guy went to Scotland and reconnected with his scottish clan and mentioned it at work. A black woman heard “Klan” and got him fired even though he protested that it was scottish “clan”.
The institutions in England are Anglo-Saxon in origin & therefore must be eliminated root & branch. From the self-abasing videos available it seems likely something similar is occurring in Scandinavian countries. The demographic shift is, in part, driving a cultural shift that rejects the foundations of what is left of Western culture.
That indigenous knowing in action.
Heh. Boomers watching the Super Bowl halftime show.
On the flip side, It’s Not Racist When We Do It™.
I’m thinking of the whole works of Mel Brooks would be locked away in a vault somewhere with a radioactive label slapped on the door.
Add in films like Full Metal Jacket, Alien, The Godfather, Chinatown …
There’s not one film that can’t fall to these uber-Carrie Nations and their obsession with people’s entertainment choices.
At which point, this came to mind:
As Instapundit puts it, “Perhaps allowing the enemies of our civilisation to educate our children was a mistake.”
That reportedly happened to someone at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, if I correctly recall what I was told years ago. Except that he didn’t bring up his Scottish heritage; rather, someone asked him about the Scottish clan pin he wore and when he answered they got all Deranged Black Racist on him.
Now you’ve gone and done it. You’ve made me nostalgic for the punk and new wave clubs of the early 80s.
Would watch that movie.
I’ve mentioned it before and Daniel Ream has also given many examples of our Canadian Stratford Festival which celebrates all things Shakespeare. For a long time it has tried to position itself as “cutting edge” and has presented the Bard in numerous alternative styles. One production that stands out in my mind was a version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream–a play which predates 60s psychedelia by several hundred years–where everyone was gay and all the marriages were gay marriages. It taught me just how banal “cutting edge” could really be.
Absolutely. Hers is a position clearly arrived at via contrivance and pretence. It bears little relationship to reality. Yet it’s a signature gesture of progressive arm-waving.
As I’ve said before, for someone less dishonest than Ms O’Toole, it would, I think, seem pretty obvious that a civilisation capable of long-distance colonisation – capable of global seafaring, cartography and navigation, and of exploring unknown continents on the other side of the planet – would be somewhat more sophisticated than the ossified Stone Age foraging culture discovered upon arrival.
Now imagine belonging to a supposedly elite academic in-group in which that simple, rather obvious line of thought is carefully avoided and effectively taboo. In which unrealism and not thinking are considered the primary virtues. A measure of superiority.
Random Livia:
Why? Because, that’s why.
Alert Idris Elba.
I sometimes wonder if the absurdity we see is in part a result of the situation being so dire, and the motives in play so perverse, that any attempt at a realistic appraisal has, for some, become unthinkable. To concede the obvious would imply many things about those who brought us to this unhappy situation, whether directly or by endorsement. And so, instead, our progressive betters look for something else on which to have opinions.
The sharpness of knives, for instance.
OT: Remember when all the ruling institutions pushed the lie that everyone was equally in danger of getting AIDS? Michael Fumento’s work debunking that claim was actively suppressed by “progressive” people. So much for the left’s commitment to free speech and the untrammeled publication of factual information.
“No teapots were harmed in this production of ‘The Tempest’.”
Instalanche.
Yeah. That one. I would try to point that out with the observation that it was predominantly a disease of homosexual men, “heterosexual” men, heterosexual women, heterosexual men, and a few “lesbians”. It was virtually unknown amongst lesbians. My attempts at wink-wink, nudge-nudge were met with blank stares. When I would hint at what the numbers might be for pitchers, catchers, and switch hitters and…still…nothing. But yeah, everyone was equally at risk. Didn’t Fauci say so on that as well?
To me, the most shocking thing about MacBeth was how ineffective cleaning products were in that day. I was traumatized.
Identifying the at-risk groups/activities was condemned as demonizing gays.
Many gay activists (not all, fortunately) were fanatically intent on demonizing and silencing those who spoke the truth. And the left–everyone far left to squishy liberal–quickly joined in. Money for an HIV cure was fine; talking about the necessary behavioral changes was not.
It is curious that the pre-AIDS gay world is described as “innocent”, as there were plenty of other STD’s, some incurable.
As a matter of fact I do. But you know what they say about statistics. The study you mention assumes randomness across the populations measured. The odds go up substantially when sex occurs within higher risk groups.
How do I know? I got a phone call from my ex-wife five years after we separated and three months after I married my second wife. She called to inform me that she was HIV positive. You can imagine how that went over with my new wife. Now, one of the reasons we divorced was because, my first wife, to put it bluntly, was a bit of slut–something I discovered long after we married and separated. But even she wasn’t having the number of encounters shown in the research. But she was having sex with people in high risk groups. The tragedy is, the same man who gave her HIV got her pregnant and her son was born with HIV. Fortunately, for me these encounters occurred after our separation and I was never exposed.
A recent post in Bastiat’s Window illustrates how seemingly improbable outcomes become highly probable under the right circumstances. Unfortunately, with HIV you don’t know what you don’t know.
Good Lord. Awful. My sympathies.
I sometimes wonder about the teen girls I ran into in the 70’s at parties and fan events who described themselves as fag hags. What happened to them?
The group my ex was “hanging around” with were promiscuous, intravenous drug using, West Africans.
Her mother tried to blame it on a non-existent blood transfusion in Mexico. But I was in the operating room in Mexico for her surgery and there was no blood transfusion.
Not admitting for at least a decade which sexual behaviors might give you AIDS falls under the category of “better dead than rude”–with the dead in this case being mostly gay men from whom life-saving information was withheld.
During COVID, the use of medications was strongly discouraged because…wait for it…it might give people an excuse to not get vaccinated. So probably tens of thousands died because hospitals would not use ivermectin and other drugs. Why, yes, Fauci was behind this, why do you ask?
One of the local universities was named after an early European explorer, Simon Fraser* – a Scot by decent (although born in what was becoming the US, as it happens). The university wnted to play on the Scottish heritage, and so the athletic teams became the “SFU Clan,” and the players were “Clansmen.” For various resons SFU played athletics in the US, but was having increasing problems with US schools (and especially their players) objecting to playing against the Clan, with the KKK connotations. They have since changed their name to the “SFU Red Leafs” – a truly insipid moniker
In fact, the plan was just to name the university after the most notable geographic feature of the region – the Fraser River, which bears Simon’s name. For whatever reason, the government of the day decided that “Fraser University” didn’t have sufficient cachet, so ol’ Simon was dragged into the picture. At least it gave those of us who didn’t attend the opportunity to refer to them as “Some Funny University”
I believe the main reason for the use of medications being discouraged was it would violate the terms of release for the “vaccine”. It was released under “emergency” conditions and circumvented the normal approval process. It’s my understanding that if other treatments were available then the vaccine would have had to go through due process.
It’s unbelievable that Fauci will escape justice twice. I hope he has his own personal circle of Hell awaiting him.
Drama: bipedal animal screams “I can’t fuckin breathe!” as he is detailed by Macy’s security personnel.
I don’t think the trigger warnings are there to remedy ignorance. Some students don’t know and others do, but those who place the warnings would do it even if all students knew.
It’s a full-on Cordyceps infection, and the infected are no longer in control of themselves.
I heard that podcast, too. Was it Dr. Simone Gold?
I’ve heard it from multiple sources. I’ve got to start bookmarking them because google is still hiding them in the search.
Re: sharp knives
Apparently the version of “Crocodile Dundee” currently available streaming in the US has been sanitized. Including the removal of the one line everyone knows “That’s not a knife. THIS is a knife!”
Tragically, obscenely, you are correct. The vaccines were loosed on the public here by the FDA via Emergency Use Authorization which had at least two terrible corollaries: it allowed the public to access a treatment that had undergone little — if any — actual testing, and completely insulated the manufacturers from any consequences. The primary requirement for an EUA is that the illness for which the treatment is designed CANNOT have any other reasonably-available therapies. Which is precisely why both HCQ and Ivermectin were rejected across the board by medical authorities (and most practitioners, mine included.) Both drugs were demonstrably helpful, especially with early application, but if they had been accepted as allowable COVID therapies Pfizer, Moderna et al would have immediately lost their EUA.
It wasn’t just the bureaucrats, either: the research and treatment arms of the medical community itself were complicit. All you have to understand is that according to their proponents either drug should be used at the earliest possible stage of illness, and could be used as a preventative even. The researchers and hospitals, as one, designed experimental treatment protocols that applied almost toxic doses of the drugs ONLY once the patient had reached a crisis stage and was effectively dying. And then chorused, SEE, SEE, the drugs don’t work.
I saw it happen, again and again, and was indelibly ashamed.
David: Yes. That. Unless, of course, their actual Life Plan consists of a lifelong uninterrupted run of “Waiting for Godot.”
Shudder.
Dr. Simone Gold relates how utterly incurious her colleagues were. She’s an emergency doctor at the time, here comes a “novel” coronavirus, and she’s the only one reading up on it.
She finds out this SARS2 has 78% in common with SARS1, against which Ivermectin and HCQ are proven effective, but instead of going with that actual knowledge, they went by the headlines. Before Trump suggested HCQ, they were open to trying it. As soon as he mentioned it, it was verboten.
It’s utterly discouraging how easily Pharma bent everyone to their will. I guess there really are only a few pressure points — CDC, NIH, AMA — and when they are all saying the same thing, it’s over.
Here we’ve built this enormous machine — modern medicine — but those entrusted to make it run cannot be trusted to tell the truth. Of all things to lie about…
…but Pharma got something like $88bn out of it, and they behaved like mafiosos: anyone challenging the lie had to be destroyed.
I hope RFK does to those people what Elon is doing to USAID and Treasury and stuff. They all need to be exiled to a remote island and left there to survive on whatever they can catch.
Should have got a recording of Michael Fish for that one!
There are so many good lines. And despite the limitations of budget, it has a distinct atmosphere. And as I’ve said before, if anyone compiles a list of entertaining and quotable female villains, Siân Phillips’ Livia would have to somewhere be near the top.
When it first aired, I remember being sent to bed as soon as the wonderfully creepy theme music started. I first saw it properly, in full, in the ‘90s when we ended up binge-watching all 12 episodes over a weekend. We dug it out again a decade later and I’m glad we did.
Dicentra: Amen.
A deeply disturbing aspect of the whole yearslong mess was how quickly every aspect (Government, press, medical researchers/practitioners) of the COVID response metastasized to meet every threat to the vaccine therapy. HCQ was at least demonstrably helpful, per the research of the Frenchman Didier Raoult, who was immediately vilified despite promising reports from actual practitioners, quite a few in institutional settings where you would expect numerous deaths. Then, suddenly, while the Clinical Trial mafia got their act going, suddenly the press was mobilizing its Concerned Handwringers, wailing that HCQ was widely used for rheumatoid arthritis, and if it suddenly disappeared from shelves because it was saving Covid lives, what about the wretched RA patients who would then be untreated/woe is they, and so on. Sounds stupid, yes (especially since some drug manufacturer with access to an unused facility announced that he could start turning out HCQ in a matter of days/weeks from a government go-ahead) but his proposal died on the vine and the RA sufferers were saved. Too bad if you had Covid…sucked to be you.
I tried to watch I, Claudius.
In the opening scene, a woman is chatting away about various points of palace intrigue, and in the background was the sonic vacuum of a BBC soundstage.
I don’t much like intrigue, and for some reason I cannot abide the audible void that marked British dramas of that time. Couldn’t the sound guy record some warm ambient noise and loop it under the other tracks?
Apparently not.
I turned it off.
Sociopathic, is what. Maybe not everyone who went along, but there are definitely sociopaths in the high places, dictating the message. They do not give a flying rip if people died — they got their vaccine revenues, free and clear of real scrutiny.
It used to be the Left who cried out anytime Big Pharma stood to make a buck, and suddenly they’re dead silent in the face of the obvious potential for greed and abuse.
If COVID had happened in 1980, I don’t think it would have played out nearly the same as it did in 2020. I think there would have been a lot more skepticism at all levels, and the dissenters would have gotten more traction.
Or at least I hope that would have happened. There was no internet. How many times have scientists tried to speak out against bad a consensus but we never heard about it?
Granted, it’s stagey and slow-paced, at least by modern standards. And the first episode is probably the toughest to digest. But once you get into it, and overlook the limitations of a 1970s BBC budget, there are rewards to be had. There are scenes that will linger.
And oh, what intrigue.
Speaking of corruption, Elizabeth Warren is having her little fiefdom torn away from her.
I used to cringe at the petty insults, but the woman is a sociopath. She doesn’t deserve respect.
Speaking of sociopaths, listen to Elon say that Sam Altman is a sociopath without using the word “sociopath.”
As Marc Andreessen explained, vividly, not too long ago.
Well, it’s difficult to convey the scale of the dishonesty and corruption, the sheer hubris and malice of those involved. Say, by making illegal use of taxpayer dollars to de-bank and abuse political opponents and those deemed an obstruction to the acquisition of further power. As Mr Andreessen revealed.
I recently had a discussion with someone who simply could not, would not, process the possibility that one might regard senior Democrats as participants in a vindictive criminal organisation. As if their being Democrats were some default shield of piety. And it was made quite clear that offers of evidence to the contrary were futile and entirely unwelcome.
An attitude that in no small part enables the above.
And so, we have a situation in which the assumption that it couldn’t possibly happen – in part, because of what that might imply about the person doing the assuming – is precisely why it can.
I recently wondered how the person I was speaking with, the one who emphatically refused offers of evidence, is processing the corruption now being revealed.