(Photo Courtesy of The Daily 49er)
Hello, fellow seekers of life and truth,
Sorry I haven't blogged in over a week, but this week, in particular, has been a hectic one. You'll see why over the course of this post. As you know, I have become more involved in theater and play productions over the last year, year and a half. This discovery has been life-changing for me, although I still don't know where I will go from here. Thus, talk about the theater and the stage is something I use a lot on this blog.
Anyway, the reason I have been busy is that I have been rehearsing and preparing this week. Not for a production, mind you, but for an in-depth scene to be done in class. I had been rehearsing this for a few weeks, but this week we did a rehearsal sunday, monday, and tuesday night, to perform the scene Wednesday afternoon.
The scene comes from a play called Quills. The play is set in 19th Century France, when Napoleon was still in power. It presents a melodramatic, chaotic, bizarrely dark and moving fantasy account of the last days of the Marquis de Sade, who died in 1814. For the last decade of his life, he was detained at Charenton Asylum in Saint-Maurice. He was under the care of Dr. Royer Collard, the chief medical officer there, and the Abbe de Coulmier, the main administrator at the asylum.
The latter, as a minister, attempts to change the Marquis, curing him of his sin, and stopping his prolific writings. The asylum leadership is embarrassed by the Marquis's ability to circulate graphic vignettes of debauchery and vice, which are written with eloquent, lyrical verbage. These stories are of people who engage in pedophilia, abduction, rape, bestiality, and necrophilia. As per the Doctor's demands, Coulmier resorts to progressively more drastic measures, ultimately gouging out the Marquis's tongue, dismembering and killing him. Coulmier himself becomes quite deranged, and, to his horror, takes thrill in the Marquis's death. This is the most horrifying revelation of all: that a monster lies even in the most noble of men.
Anyway, in this scene, my role was as this Coulmier, and my "given circumstances" (to borrow a term from actor-speak) were that I had just taken away the Marquis's quill, his writing utensil, and I believed I was on the way to "curing" him. Here, I was being told the Marquis had used the wine he was given to write another story. The doctor was that I step up the physical pressure on the Marquis to stop writing, and I, being the charitable healer, had to defy him, to heal the Marquis my way. The scene involved a flashback to a conversation, and then another flashback to the Marquis writing. My main challenge was to stay reactive, but still, while all these flashbacks were going on.
Luckily, the director had this vision that the girl playing the Marquis using us all as life-size action figures, arranging us all in her liking. It made it fun to be part of her desires, and just go with it, in a way. The best ideas for this came in the last few days. Fortunately, it all ended up coming together well in the scene. Some people though parts of it didn't work, for other people, they really clicked. To a certain extent, that is just part of art: it will click for some people, but not for others. People seemed to think our scene was well-thought-out enough to constitute a worthwhile scene.
Now, when I went to see it the other night, that took the scene and the play to a whole new level. The actors, all grad students and professors of Theater, many of whom I had learned from or am now, had researched it much more meticulously than even I did for this. They pronounced all the French phrases deftly, while we had to go through them a few times to learn how they were really pronounced. Of course, they were able to go all out with the period dress, and they really hammed up the effects of their characters, the broken sadness, the chilling, frightening malevolence, as is the custom in the melodrama in which the play is written.
The playwright, Doug Wright, said that he played up the division between the good and the bad characters, that they were "either kissed by God or yoked in Satan's merciless employ." Even so, I was able to detect qualities in the Marquis, the diabolical one, that were positive, as well as ones in the Doctor, even in Coulmier, that were less than Godly. In spite of the Marquis's resistance to Coulmier, the two actually form a dialectic, in that one's existence actually gives meaning to the other's. There is actually a bond of sorts that connects them, which makes Coulmier's final act all the more painful to behold. All in all, the play pulled out all the stops, and it had more going for it than against it.
Now, onto the implications of Quills. This play had a lot to do with censorship of viciously sexual and violent content in literature. Our instructor asked us to consider why the playwright might have written a play in a given era. Now the play Quills debuted off Broadway on November 3, 1995. In 1989, a homoerotic photo exhibit, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, prompted fears that such expression would degrade society itself. The pressure on the N.E.A. in the ensuing years became an event known as the Mapplethorpe Controversy (after photographer Robert Mapplethorpe).
In the years to come, the debate over what should and shouldn't be seen in art and entertainment became more urgent, and had more dire consequences. On April 20, 1999, two juvenile delinquents in Littleton, Colorado decided to bomb their high school's cafeteria, and then turn guns on the other kids. 13 people were killed, including a teacher, and the two assailants themselves. In the wake of that event, people became concerned about the increasingly violent video games, movies and music that were cropping up. Now art was no longer violent for a purpose, it was violent just for the sake of gorging itself on the gore.
In a 2001 interview with the Advocate, after the movie Quills was released, Doug Wright was interviewed about violent lyrics, specifically in Eminem's music, for which he won an award the previous year. His lyrics were violently homophobic, "My words are like a dagger...that'll stab you in the head-whether you're a fag or a lez." Wright, who is gay, stated concern without scapegoating Eminem or anyone else. He believed that the words in question were a diatribe that had the potential to help move our lives forward. Quoting him,
"Look at something like the Columbine incident, and you see that volatile teenage minds will express themselves with the tools that they are given. Give them a paintbrush, and you might get a painting; give them a handgun, and you might get a massacre. What's really troubling about someone like Eminem is the very purgative nature of art. If he purges his own demons by creating this kind of rhetoric, then it has a certain societal value, you could argue. And yet how can we as a society educate him sufficiently so that the ultimate result doesn't defile us all, collectively?"
I grew up thinking that violent television, movies, and games were not a problem. Sometimes, it hit me wrong, and really bothered me, but I thought it was cool to watch action-packed sci-fi and superhero movies. I thought it was cool to listen to rappers like 50 Cent and Eminem, just for the sake of seeing what it was like. As I got in to my later teens, I got more and more bothered by the violence, the cruelty, of the words. When I was a teenager, if you didn't act like the other guys, you would get called a "fag," a "retard," and all insults were designed to trap you in gay-looking situations. That banter grew to bother me, once I passed the age of about 14 or 15.
I was disgusted by all the gory, horrible movies, video games, and such that other people seemed to think was a game. Seeing people hurt has always bothered me, but as I grew up, I felt like sticking to this drove me apart from everyone else. That said, though, I do not believe in not showing violence or sex to people in art, or literature, or music. Like I said, there is indulgence and gorging in the gore, and horror, and what not. That has an addictive, druglike quality to many people. However, there are some very violent works of art, film, and literature that have lots of artistic merit, and insight into the human condition.
The reason I chose to show the photo from Taxi Driver above is that I believe it is one such example. It was my favorite film when I was about 14. Travis, the hero, becomes raw, violent, and brutal, throughout the course of the film. However, there is this quality about him that strikes you like a boy of about 12 or 13. With an increasing violent or unstable streak in him, and yet, there is still a childlike, earnest quality to the way he acts.
Also, violent artworks are not necessarily supportive of it, or condemning of it. Quills itself offers actions that support both freedom of expression and suppression thereof. Though the Marquis is lionized as a hero of freedom of expression, when he passes a story of his through the asylum, a madman decides to act its content out on Madeleine, a 16-year-old maiden who is taken with the Marquis, and for whom he secretly feels smitten.
I wanted to show you this work of mine because it has to do with a horrible act of violence against the girl in this picture, who is dying, but because it is reminiscent of the fate of Madeleine in Quills. This comes from an idea I had that was about crime, justice, and the victim. To me, neither art glorifying the criminal nor the law is totally correct. Wright himself said that what makes this debate so potent is that "there is truth on all sides of it." I believe what good art does is show the truth on two opposing sides, in two opposing people.
I think Quills definitely succeeds at this. At the same time, it made me laugh with perverted amusement, made my nerves tingle with the creeps, and cringe with sadness and pain for the people involved. This kind of multi-layered reaction is connection to the human condition. For that, Quills is definitely worth reading or seeing. I'll have more material for you tomorrow. Thanks.
See ya, and keep wondering, folks!
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