Okay okay okay.
I've got some blog-catching up to, and I made some notes today during my boring hours at work that I want to thread together. They read:
Richard III, House of Cards, power & might...
Masculinity? Disfigurement? Lena Dunham
Ugly -- not-conventionally attractive......
Body -- I am not my body --> Othello/selfhate
Old World Warrior/Medieval Warrior --> Same as Hamlet Sr.
Obama/drone strikes
Shooter --> calling dad at parking lot
**Spoiler Alert** If you like going into shows with absolutely no prior information, I'm going to talk about Netflix's House of Cards. I've no intention of revealing sensitive information, but general stuff about the show & its structure. As of today I've only watched through episode 6, so I can't quite go all the way anyway. YOU'VE BEEN WARNED.
So Jess (my girlfriend, whose blog is also worth taking a look at, especially if you like reading) & I started watching House of Cards on Netflix (I'm intentionally italicizing this because it feels like I should, it's like a play, we italicize titles of plays, right? Still? Or is that just for college papers? I'm sorry, I'm still doing it) and it begins with a direct address from Kevin Spacey's deliciously manipulative Machiavellian House Whip character Francis Underwood. From the first minute, I was hooked, and felt so impelled after the first episode to keep watching I all but forced Jess to keep watching even though we were also very tired. She generously indulged in my appetite for Shakespearean machinations, and it certainly paid off.
Francis Underwood is a modern Richard III, and although he's not out for the presidency (AS OF YET), he is out for utter and complete control. He implicates his audience in his schemes, confides in and instructs us in the way things actually get done in Washington. He's brutal, he's ostensibly amoral, and unlike Dr. House or Don Draper or Walter White, he speaks right to us, and doesn't seem to give a fuck what we think. He is utterly seductive, incredibly powerful, hard-hearted and silver-tongued. He does what needs to be done. He is an uncompromising cynic, and tells people exactly what they need to hear.
We started watching House of Cards maybe a day or two after the announcement was made that Richard III's bones were found under a parking lot in Leicester (happy circumstance for Netflix, I'm sure), and I was fortunate enough to read a bunch of excellent articles that talked about the discrepancies between Richard III of Shakespeare's plays and the historical figure. Mainly that he was nothing like Dick the Shit, and that most of what Shakespeare was responding to were the slurs and lies politicians told at the time to keep people on their side. The War of the Roses was an ugly affair, and casting Richard III in the worst light did the most good, for a play seeking favour, and for an audience seeking to forget what had actually went down. Plays then, like plays now, relied a lot on patronage, in this case royal. No one was going to make the crown look bad.
What uncovering Dick's bones did do, however, is affirm him as a warrior. I mean he was out on that battlefield, there are gashes in his bones to prove it. He got hit in the skull with a halberd for Christ's sake -- the dude definitely could've cried "a kingdom for [his] horse!" because he was down and out. One article I read, which I can't find now but I'll try to in the coming days, talked a lot about how Richard III represented the end of an era of medieval kings, who basically killed everyone in their way in order to gain power. Francis Underwood, in this way, is entirely unlike Richard III; he's not killing anyone literally, just gaining power over everyone by whatever means necessary. Richard III died in battle; modern leaders don't do that anymore.
(Incidentally, I'll note that Hamlet Sr. is a similarly medieval warrior; he also fought valiantly in battle against Fortinbras Sr. and was only vainquished by the same kind of modern deceit that medieval times considered evil, insidious, unmanly, perverse -- beneath what was true, noble, honourable. Hamlet Jr. in caught in the middle of this transition, between a medieval notion of what it means to be a man [REVENGE THIS FOUL AND MOST UNNATURAL MURTHER] and his resistance to that)
Today I also read about the shooter who brought down Osama Bin Laden in the SEAL Team 6 raid, and how now that he's out of the Navy he's had absolutely no support. Definitely worth the long read. There's been a lot in the media about drones recently and President Obama's powers in defining what an acceptable target for those drones are. And here's this story about a modern warrior who has been trained, at its heart, in a bit of a medieval way. I mean he's a killing machine, and that's what he was sent to do. Drones didn't take down bin Laden, though they could have. They didn't think they were coming back from this mission. They thought they were going to get blown up. But they hoped to kill the leader of al Quaeda first.
There's a sort of testosterone that is kicked up inside me when I read about this or envision the mission. It came up during Zero Dark Thirty, which Jess & I also saw recently. I don't consider myself a warrior or war-type person at all. I don't do a lot of physical things, I'm not all about guns or killing or military in any way. I'm a died-in-the-wool Canadian, all about peace and passivity. I am very much against American aggression in the Middle East, for whatever reason. Taking down dictators is something I'm not sure we should do, at least not unilaterally. I also wonder about our place in "bringing liberty" to others. I question whether our understanding of liberty works in a culture that's not our own. I also question if "liberty" is something we can ever give to others. It seems like, with the Arab Spring, etc., the people whose rights are in question need to fight for them themselves.
All that being said, there was something heart-pounding and raw and emotional about the depiction in the film of killing Osama bin Laden. Again, he's "the Bad Guy," I get how on some level killing him ends a decade of the open wound of 9/11. I teared up when they said "for God and country." I felt flush with the success of finally beating an elusive enemy that had caused so much suffering of people I cared about, or of a country I cared about. Something about that victory felt incredibly primal, I remember feeling the same way when Obama announced it had happened.
Suddenly I'm thinking again about warriors, and the model of medieval warriors, of men who fight other men face to face. The big debate about drones is that they remove human beings from the killing so far, in the name of keeping soldiers out of harm's way, that they actually can allow for a lot of collateral damage, and some horrible things have already happened at the hand of a man and leader who I otherwise respect and admire. I mean, I don't want to be a liberal-minded person who ignores the fact that President Obama has unilaterally taken/allowed this drone program to continue to kill innocent people, and it is still able to be trained on anyone considered an "imminent" threat. I mean there are problems with that, problems that Richard III, an altogether insidious, deliciously vengeful and manipulative man, had no chance to deal with. Richard III did send assassins to kill Clarence. I don't imagine he'd think twice about sending drones to defeat Lancasters.
But Obama would not ride into the field on horseback and fight hand to hand against his enemy.
And, keep in mind, Richard III, according to his bones, had some INTENSE scoliosis. This dude was, indeed, deformed, though probably not to the extent that Shakespeare dramatizes. Richard III was not a stud muffin warrior, he was not sexy without his shirt on surfing on vacation in Hawaii. Elizabethans reviled those with physical deformities, it was assumed it betrayed a moral deformity as well.
And here's where Lena Dunham comes in, because I think we do that as a society still, too. But instead of an actual deformity like scoliosis, I think we demonize anything in popular culture that is not traditionally or commodifiably beautiful. The most recent episode of Girls, sorry, again **SPOILER ALERT if you're behind on Girls**, deals directly with this pervading sense we have of the inappropriateness of regular looking women hooking up with conventionally/Hollywood-ly attractive men. This Jezebel post talks about this very well. Somehow Lena Dunham, because she is the show's writer/director/star, is completely deluded in thinking this could ever happen in reality. Women with body fat or small breasts or who express desire openly are not only IMPOSSIBLE to be with hot, successful, rich older men, but they SHOULD NOT BE INFLICTED ON THE GENERAL VIEWING PUBLIC. Lena Dunham transgresses everything by being disfigured, somehow, from the standard woman seen on our screens.
I sincerely hope Lena Dunham does not internalize the hate the world presents to her, and becomes a mass-murdering Machiavellian monster like Dick the Shit (you certainly wonder what's motivating Francis Underwood, for it feels a bit more personal than Iago's "just wanting to watch the world burn" brand of destructive manipulations), but it stands to reason that if you're treated one way for your body being ugly and disgusting, but feel you have a better, even perfect soul locked in that cage, that you just need to set free through deeds and grasps of power (see Descartes' mind/body split and many other things I've talked about/will talk about in relation to Othello and my piece Othello, Desdemona, & Iago Walk Into A Bar).
Interestingly enough, though, what's so maddening about Dunham and her character on Girls is that we only get the performance this character makes for her friends and to herself about who she is. She is never authentic. Jury's still out for me as to whether we ever see Richard being authentic, but he does directly engage with his audience, which Dunham & her Girls alter ego never does. Incidentally, neither does Louis C.K.'s fictionalized self, another "grotesquified" man, though never reacted to with quite the same vigor over landing in the bed of a beautiful woman.
Where am I going with all this? I wonder how violence and rage, which is so prevalent in Richard III as a response to the kind of hate that comes from "wrongs" that are un-owned, the kind of vengeance that pervades Richard III & Hamlet, could be anything but inevitable in a medieval world. And if we're still, even in the midst of drone strikes and remote wars, sending man in against man in the name of defeating evil, what ultimately do we say to men? If you kill the bad guy, the killing is okay. If you talk directly to us about what you're doing, if you operate from a position of authority, if you sell us the position you're taking, you make it okay. And you do it because the world has told you that's the only way to gain power. You are ugly, deformed, disgusting, without it. And who have you learned that from?
It strikes me that before the Shooter on SEAL Team 6 went on the mission to Abbottahbad, which he was certain he'd die in, he called his dad. Not his wife, not his kids. His dad.
There's a lot going on here, a lot of associating, but here it is.
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