Othello Film Viewings

Last class, we viewed the final scene of Othello in a move made recently.  I enjoyed watching the film, although like most of Shakespeare's work, I found the scene somewhat cheesily overdramatic.  I find the character of Othello especially to be overdramatic.  He is overdramatic when he accuses Desdemona of cheating on him and refuses to listen to her when she trys to tell him that she has been faithful.  He is equally dramatic when he finds out that she had in fact been telling the truth and feels the need to kill himself.

I am looking forward to watching the move "O" and seeing how that film differs from the one we saw in class and the one we saw on YouTube.  

Othello

Personally, I am not a huge fan of William Shakespeare. Even with footnotes, I really don't understand very much of what I'm reading. And I find a lot of what Shakespeare writes to be extremely depressing. Two people fall in love and one or both of them ends up dying. That seems to me to be the plot of most of Shakespeare's works.

The character of Othello is meant to be portrayed as a hero; someone who is brave, powerful, well-respected by those in his community, and someone who is deeply in love with his wife Desdemona. While Othello admits that he has not had a great education and therefore is not as intelligent as some, I feel as though Iago convinced him way too easily that Desdemona was cheating on him with Cassio. Iago never actually presented Othello with concrete evidence to back up his accusations simply because he did not have to. Othello just completely trusted him, something that I feel should have been obvious that he should not have done. So I feel as though the praise put on Othello by everyone around him was not always warranted.

I also feel that the way that people treated Desdemona was not warranted. People, especially her father, treated her as if she were a piece of glass unable to make any decisions on her own. I think that that perception of Desdemona is not true. I think she is a strong woman, capable of forming her own opinions and making her own decisions. I admire her spirit, refusing to back down and wanting to go with Othello to Cyprus. I like that she did not let her father push her around.

Girl, Interrupted film viewing

I viewed the film "Girl, Interrupted" on Monday evening for class. I had never seen the movie before and while it was not the kind of movie I would normally watch, I did rather enjoy it. I thought that most of the girls portrayed in it were completely nuts, but I also thought, just as Valerie did, that Susanna was not really ill. I think she was more or less just upset and confused about where she was in life and being around all of the other girls made her think she was even crazier. Once she realized this, she was able to help herself get better and eventually be released from the mental hospital.

One thing I found extremely interesting in the film was the appearance of Lisa. She always wore white or beige washed-out clothing, her skin was especially pale, and her hair was even a dull color. I think this was done on purpose to enhance the character. I also think the casting directors made the right decision hiring Angelina Jolie for the part because she played it well.

Something else that I found interesting about the film was a line that Susanna used at the very end of the film: "Was I ever crazy? Maybe. Or life is. . . Crazy isn't being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It's you or me amplified." I think that in their own way, everyone is a little bit crazy whether they show it or not. I think the definition of normal is in the eye of the beholder. Can anyone really be classified as normal? What is normal? What is crazy?

The Yellow Wallpaper

I enjoyed reading Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper". In fact, it was the reading that I have enjoyed the most so far. After I was through reading it, the first question on my mind was "What?" I thought the narrator in this piece was absolutely insane. She just went off on these tangents for the entire reading, mostly about yellow wallpaper, of all things. She imagined that it had an awful smell, that it reminded her of all the yellow things she'd ever seen - "not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things", that there was a woman hiding behind the paper, and that at night the wallpaper had bars across it. Although her husband was not aware of it because such a condition did not exist at the time, the reading talks of a baby that this woman just had. Clearly, she is suffering from post partum depression.

Yesterday, we discussed in class of the relationship between the narrator and her husband John who is a doctor. Although on the surface it appears that John is domineering and does not let the woman have a mind of her own and is constantly telling her what to do, I feel that it is just not that simple. It is clearly obvious at the end of the reading how much John cares about her because he is willing to knock down the bedroom door with an axe to get to her because he fears she is in trouble. I think that, like most men, he truely cares about her and thinks that he is helping her when in fact, because he thinks he knows best, he may be harming her more than helping her.