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sublingua | |||||
| The heart with a mind of its own.(Be present.) | The mind with a heart of its own.(It's past.) | The dream that is your waking life.(Go there now.) | |||
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Oh?
Oh? I am in Blockbuster with my twelve-year-old niece. I tell her that I want to rent O. She is excited by this. She says, �Oh, Auntie, it�s such a good movie! I liked it a lot. I would have told you about it, only I didn�t think it was the kind of movie you�d like,� and leads me straight to the shelf where it can be found. I tell her that she should always tell me about movies that she likes. (If she didn�t I might never see another movie starring a teenaged pop sensation or a talking pig.) I tell her that my English teacher has recommended this one and I can do extra credit on it. She�s in the seventh grade. She knows from extra credit. I tell her that it�s based on a play that was written about four hundred years ago by a guy called Shakespeare. She is very skeptical about this. �Tell me about it, Auntie,� she says. I tell her about Othello (�O,� she says) and Desdemona (�Desi,� she corrects) and Iago (�Hugo, Auntie.�) and his lies and the murder. �That�s it,� she says. She hands me the movie and goes off to see if the Sailor Moon videos are checked out. At home she warns me that there is a spot in the movie during which she will have to leave the room. �Sex?� I ask. �Sex,� she answers. We watch up to that spot a movie that includes teenagers drinking, lying, deceiving, fighting. Then there is the sex and she leaves the room. �Call me when this part�s over, Auntie,� she says. I call her back in time for more drinking, lying, deceiving, fighting, only this time with the added bonus of drug use, gun violence and murder. I�m all too aware that my niece has seen worse. I�d actually rather have her want to watch the soft-core porn-style sex between O and Desi and balk at the rest of the film. The movie itself isn�t bad. I note with some amusement that William Shakespeare shares writing credit with young upstart Brad Kaaya. (Who? Yeah.) Josh Hartnett makes a fine, if young, Iago/Hugo. He looks throughout the movie like a dog that�s been tied up to turn it mean. Mekhi Phifer is good as Odin, the isolated young black basketball star. (I despise sports, but I can see how battle to sports is a good translation.) O�s relationship with Desi (played by Julia Stiles) is still, sadly, shocking to me in that Jungle Fever kind of way. The father/coach/Martin Sheen character has been added and Desi�s father subtracted, making fathers in the movie as important as mothers are in Shakespeare�s plays, so that�s fine with me. It adds, too, a concrete dimension to Hugo�s dislike for O that I think teenagers can relate to. Overall, it�s an okay movie. At the end, my niece sighs and says, �You know, Auntie, it�s O that I really feel sorry for.� I am surprised. I liked O, but by the time he was finished strangling Desi, I really didn�t have a whole lot of sympathy for him. Yeah, I�m a little angry at how the film plays O up to be a fallen hero and never mind the whole �killing Desi because he�s jealous� thing. (Little mistake that, you know, let�s just, um, agree that it�s not that important, �kay?). I ask, �Why do you feel sorry for O? What about Desi? He killed her.� My niece responds, �Well�yeah. I feel sorry for her, too. But I feel more sorry for O.� I keep questioning her about why her sympathy for O outstrips her sympathy for Desi. In her answers I hear the echo of classmates who seemed to see Desdemona as so much ballast that could be thrown over when the time came and who seemed to resent her for being �too good.� I question my niece even as I struggle against the admonition to not judge Desdemona (or Desi for that matter, I suppose) from a twenty-first century feminist point of view despite the fact that no one is pretending anywhere else (and especially in this movie) that this isn�t the twenty-first century. (And that, what a surprise, such time-slanted advice will soon be thrown out as we discuss Freudian concepts in �Hamlet�). My niece is not exasperated�yet. She tries to explain about how O didn�t fit in, and how he was so sad, and how because of this she feels sorry for him. With adult wisdom, I decide that I want her to feel the way I do. �Don�t you feel sorry for Desi?� I ask. �She was killed by O and she didn�t deserve to be killed at all.� But I can�t shake her from her opinion. I�m embarrassed to admit that I tried, even going so far as to ask her to put herself in Desi�s place and �how would you feel about that, if people felt sorry for the guy who murdered you?� She knows what I�m doing. The most I can get her to say is: �I�guess. But I still feel more sorry for O, Auntie. I can�t explain why.� It�s an impossible goal really, but I want my niece never to have to know firsthand or too well how expendable women are in our society. I know actual and frightening statistics about how often women are beaten and killed by jealous boyfriends, husbands, lovers. I know that my ethnicity and hers skew these statistics into even deadlier prospects. I also know, sadly, that she has seen evidence (whether she recognizes it or not) of the consequences to women of men who �love not wisely but too well.� I can�t save her from this�whatever �this� is, but in this case, �this� is too close to an education that necessarily include the fine tragedies of William Shakespeare and all adaptations of such. For whatever reason, this makes me very uncomfortable, I guess. I still feel more sorry for women. I can�t explain why. I never thought I�d be so glad to drop the subject in favor of our next film: �Crossroads,� starring the incomparable Britney Spears.
More lies:
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