You All Disgust Me

…but it’s my blog, and I get to do what I like. So there.

Anyone who knows me knows I’m a huge Warren Ellis fan, so I’m following his wishes and passing along this link to his webcomic, FreakAngels. It’s updated every Friday, kick-ass, and free. So why are you still reading this? Go read!

What people fail to understand is that Shakespeare was Spider-Man. And Die Hard, and Something About Mary, and Zoolander…

I hear (and read) a lot of people bitching that summer blockbusters are taking money and viewers away from “artsy” films. They lament that the catastrophic explosions are getting more attention than the character expositions. They hate Spider-Man and want Shakespeare.

I’m going to guess that most of them have never actually seen Shakespeare. Sure… they’ve read his stuff. And they’ve studied his stuff. And they’ve probably dissected it with the sharp scalpel of 400-year hindsight and effete snobbery that they think makes them look all smart and stuff.

But they’ve never actually just sat down and watched a Shakespeare play.

Take away the fancy language and the frilly costumes, and what do you have? Action, sex, and goofiness.

Let’s take a look at Hamlet, shall we? That’s a deep and meaningful play, right?

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;

Emo crap!

He’s sitting in a crypt asking a bunch of dead people whether he’s going to get more attention from moping around all day whining about how “the world is against him”, or by committing suicide. Seriously, Willy-boy had the whole “depressing goth poetry” thing down pat several centuries ago.

Let’s take a look at the body count, shall we? Everyone with a name dies–except Horatio. Quentin Tarentino doesn’t have that kind of a kill ratio. Go look it up. Everybody does. And the only reason Horatio lives is so that Hamlet has someone to babble his last monologue to. Hell, Hamlet Sr. starts off dead! Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are apparently killed just out of spite. And not a one of them dies a natural death. 4 poisonings, 2 stabbings, 2 beheadings, and a suicide (if memory serves me right).

Don’t even get me started on the sexual farce that is “Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

With the exception of the History Plays (which have their own share of death and sex, and were only written to suck up to the Queen so that they could get money) the plays of Shakespeare are the Elizabethan equivalent of Die Hard and Zoolander. They were fodder for the masses. They were summer blockbusters.

The same goes for most of the “classics”. The Greeks? Sex, death, monsters, miraculous escapes… The Romans? The same, only with more blood. Aristotle made a point of praising this kind of entertainment. It was “cathartic; by watching evil be defeated “on the big screen” (to put it in modern terms), it gave us confidence that we have the power to defeat it in real life. “The monster has been killed, so I can now go off and be a happy person.”

Goethe wrote that the definition of “quality theatre” lay within the answers of these three questions:

1. What was the performance trying to accomplish?
2. How well did it do it?
3. Was it worth the doing?

For most movies, the answer to the first question is “Distract and entertain people for 2 hours”. The answer to the 2nd question is usually “rather well”, and the third one is a matter of debate–but $300 million at the box office tends to lend credence to the “rather well” side of the argument.

Take a look around. The world is filled with enough misery, death, famine, war, poverty, evil, angst, and hatred to make Gandhi turn goth. People don’t want to be reminded of how much the world sucks. They want to forget about it for a couple hours. They want fantastic heroes who swoop in with amazing powers, defeat the bad guys, and win the hearts of the fair maidens. Toss in just enough weakness to let us identify with the hero, and feel like we could be him if we really wanted to.

That’s what it’s all about.

Aristotle knew that.
Shakespeare knew that.
Goethe knew that.

Why can’t the art snobs understand that? C’mon folks, your ivory towers out of your assholes and just go enjoy the movies, okay?

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And yes, I know what I’m talking about. I have a degree in theatre, from a small, but intensive, college where a BA was on par with most other college’s MFA programs. No one graduated without passing a comprehensive exam spanning the gamut from the earliest-known theatre through the absurdist movement of the 60s and later. I spent almost 20 years working in the industry, and was involved in somewhere around 1,000 different shows. So… you want to argue theatre? Bring it on, baby.