Why Julia Stiles?

While I was perusing some of our classmates' blogs, I noticed that Casey inlcuded a clip from 10 Things I Hate About You, an adaptation of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew starring Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles. You can check out both the clip and Casey's thoughts about it on her blog at http://caseyslivesandtimes.blogspot.com/.

Of course, I'm not simply blogging to rave about Casey's blog (which I quite enjoyed by the way). Watching the clip from 10 Things I Hate About You called to my attention that Julia Stiles has been in several movie adaptations of Shakespeare's plays. This got me thinking about the casting choices for O. Was Julia Stiles chosen simply because she has a history of acting in Shakespeare adaptations? What makes her so suited for those roles? Obviously, she plays the leading lady in O as Desi, an adaptation of Desdemona; Casey points out that she also plays the leading lady in 10 Things I Hate About You as Katrina; and check out this clip of her as Ophelia (with Ethan Hawke as Hamlet) in the 2000 movie adaptation of Hamlet:



I wonder if Julia Stiles was chosen for her roles in O and Hamlet because directors believed she performed well in her first role in a Shakespeare adaptation as Kat in 10 Things I Hate About You, or if directors simply see something "Shakespearean" in her as an actress. All three of these movies came out in a relatively short time frame: 10 Things I Hate About You in 1999, Hamlet in 2000, and O in 2001; however, they all had different directors: Gil Junger (10 Things I Hate About You), Michael Almereyda (Hamlet), and Martin Scorsese (O). Why do you think Julia Stiles was cast as the leading lady for all three?

Of course I want to hear what all of you think, but this wouldn't be a true "Sam-style" blog post if I didn't elaborate on my own opinion a bit. First of all, I should probably admit off the bat that anything I say is bound to be a tad bit biased because I love Julia Stiles as an actress, and thus believe she is pretty magnificent in ANY role she plays. However, I think she is particularly suited for Shakespeare adaptations due to both her physical appearance and her acting abilities. First of all, I think (and this is personal opinion) that Julia Stiles has kind of an innocent and unique look. The innocence suits Shakespeare roles very well, as he tends to often paint the women in his plays as victims. The unique quality (which I can't quite put my finger on, but I think it is something about her eyes, perhaps) also suits Shakespeare roles, as his plays usually involve manipulation, and the uniqueness of Stiles's look adds a sense of mystery to her character. As far as her acting ability goes, she is amazing in dramatic situations. Scenes that involve her crying or in a frantic state do not come off as forced, fake or overly dramatic (see the above clip as well as the clip on Casey's blog for two examples). I think these qualitites made her the perfect casting choice for Desde in O. What does everyone else think?

2 Two-Faced Iagos

Okay, so call me immature, but the first thing I thought of when I started reading Othello and saw that the name of the villain was Iago was my all-time favorite Disney character--the parrot in the movie Aladdin (yes, the one with the annoying voice). By the way, Aladdin is undoubtedly THE greatest Disney movie of all time, and if any of you dare to challenge me on that, I am more than open to the idea of starting a blog war regarding Disney movies.

ANYWAY, back to the point of my blog (yes, it does have a point!!). I find a lot of similarities between the Iago in Othello and the one in Aladdin (okay, yes, one is kind of a bird, but trust me, there ARE similarities). I think the easiest way to point these out to everyone is to show you a clip of what is probably my favorite scene from the movie and then to list the similarities I see between our Iagos. So here it is, enjoy!!

Similarities I see:

(1) We will begin with the obvious. They are both named Iago. Quite insightful, I know.

(2) They are both villains (another brilliant deduction).

(3) Note Iago's (cartoon version) ability to imitate Princess Jasmine in the clip. It's uncanny. This reminds me of how Iago in Othello is able to trick everyone around him into believing that he is someone that he's not (i.e. Othello says "Iago is most honest" [2.3.7]).

(4) Iago (cartoon version again) says "And to think we gotta keep kissing up to that chump and his chump daughter." This is similar to how the Iago in Othello seems to always be kissing up to pretty much everybody in the play, including Brabantio.

(5) Cartoon Iago devises an evil plot to take over a position of power when he suggests to Jafar that he marry Princess Jasmine and become Sultan. This is kind of similar to Othello's Iago devising a plan to overthrow Othello because he is upset that he did not get the promotion to lieutenant (even though we are never technically very clear on Iago's true motivations).

(6) Cartoon Iago has persuasive powers that are demonstrated when he talks Jafar into his plan. These powers are mirrored in Othello's Iago's ability to convince multiple characters to take part in his plan (for example, when he convinces Roderigo that he is the perfect candidate for “knocking out [Cassio’s] brains” [4.2.229]).

(7) Cartoon Iago's plan involves murder. 'Nuff said.

I also want to point out that the end of this scene is utterly hilarious, as it ends with Jafar and Iago cackling evilly back and forth. This has absolutely no relevance, but I can't help laughing hysterically every time I watch it.

Displacement: Applying a Physics Perspective to a Literary Concept

You guys are going to have to forgive me: I may be an English Writing Major, but I am also a Chem/Math double minor, so I do have a tendency to sometimes think about abstract or literary concepts in a "scientific" manner. When we started our brainstorming of the term "displacement" in class on Thursday, the scientist in me immediately jumped to the physics definition, which refers to "how far out of place an object is." I know, I know, you are probably all uttering something along the lines of "ummm...duh?!" I realize this definition of the word is pretty much explicitly implied in the word itself: DIS-PLACE-ment; but I think there is more to the definition than what appears on the surface. I started explaining my interpretation in class as taking this to mean a kind of journey, as in how one might actually get from her starting point to her destination. After class, I realized that I had the concepts of "displacement" and "distance" flip-flopped (thank God I decided to go with the English thing, right?), and the difference between the two in physics is actually what allows the scientific definition to be applied for our purposes. So, for a clarification, check out

http://www.glenbrook.k12.il.us/GBSSCI/PHYS/CLASS/1DKin/U1L1c.html.

This is a groovy little tutorial that does a really good job explaining the difference between "distance" and "displacement." And NOW, for my probably over-reaching and annoyingly lengthy interpretation:

I think it's important to note that distance refers to "how much ground an object has covered," whereas displacement refers to where the object actually is in relation to where it began. So, technically, an object (or a person, for our purposes) may travel a great distance, undergo a long, hard, and complex journey, and still find itself right back where it started. I like this idea of displacement being independent of a person's ventures in life. It suggests that we can make mistakes and have regrets but still ultimately have a sense of and be able to return to where we started and where we belong. The only way we can truly be "displaced" is if we venture out, lose our way, and don't find a path that takes us back to where we started; in essence, if we "lose ourselves completely." Also, the website says that displacement is "the object's overall change in position," which we can apply in both a literal and figurative sense. A person may find herself diplaced if her physical location changes, but also if her political, religous, or any other personal belief ("position") changes. For example, I believe that Othello finds himself "diplaced" when his position regarding human nature changes. Iago originally portrays Othello to be of a generally optimistic and trusting nature, saying that "[t]he Moor is of a free and open, nature,/That thinks men honest that but seem to be so" (lines 382-83). Iago then notes a change (a "displacement") in Othello after he as planted the seed of jealousy in his mind: "The Moor already changes with my posion" (line 342). Invoking the physics definition, we interpret Othello's "position" regarding human nature to have undergone an "overall change," i.e., jealously has caused him to lose his generally trusting nature, and we thus consider him "displaced."

Girl, Interrupted: A "Christian" Perspective

I have my own opinions and reactions to the film Girl, Interrupted, which I could easily share here, but I feel as if I have done a sufficient job in shoving my opinion down everyone’s throats in my last few blog entries. Thus, I set out on a quest to find another individual’s response to the film, preferably one which looked at it from an angle or perspective which I had not considered. Low and behold, thanks to my amazing Googling abilities, it took little effort on my part to find what I was looking for…

Now, I realize that just because we happen to attend a Catholic University, not everyone here is Catholic or Christian. However, I think that a review of the film from a Christian perspective may serve as interesting for members of any religion. So here it is: http://www.christiananswers.net/spotlight/movies/2000/girlinterrupted.html.

This article reviews Girl, Interrupted from a Christian perspective. In it, the reviewer, Bob MacLean, comments on how the movie does (and does not) uphold Christian beliefs and values. He makes a lot of bold arguments and often calls the film “offensive,” referencing the profanity, sexual content, frequent drug usage, and the suicide scene. True, from a Christian viewpoint (and probably from a lot of non-Christian viewpoints as well), these things are surely considered “offensive,” but wasn’t that the point? By being “offensive,” didn’t these scenes effectively convey the intensity and difficulty involved in trying to recover from a mental illness?

One of MacLean’s major criticisms of the film, which I believe makes some unfair assumptions, is this:

“Since Susanna is not a Christian, she cannot, and the film does not, offer any real answers to some very important questions. Rather [it] raises the human spirit up as the answer to our problems. I find this solution curious. If we had such great spirit, why do we repeatedly put ourselves into these terrible situations?”

MacLean implies that the only way to recover from a mental illness is through religion, and that “the human spirit” alone is not strong enough to overcome the struggles associated with such disorders. So, according to MacLean, are we to assume that there is no hope for non-Christians who suffer from mental illnesses? If this is the case, then why have so many antidepressant medications been developed by researchers, approved by the FDA, prescribed by doctors, and taken by patients suffering from depression? Would people really be taking them if they were ineffective? Also, in his final question, MacLean basically assumes that those suffering from mental illnesses inflicted the condition upon themselves. To ask “why we repeatedly put ourselves into these terrible situations?” is basically an attack on the identity of mental illnesses as medical conditions. Would you ask a diabetic why he gave himself diabetes? Would you ask a brain cancer patient what she was thinking when she put a tumor in her head? MacLean does admit that “the movie forces one to understand the horror of having to deal with mental illness and does not glamorize being insane,” but then goes on to say that “God knows and deals with the deepest horrors we visit upon one another and forgives us,” which again implies that mental illness is caused by human behavior and something that needs to be “forgiven.” True, perhaps by “the deepest horrors we visit upon one another,” MacLean may be referring to the cruel ways some of the women in the film treated one another, but couldn’t that behavior also be considered a symptom of the mental illnesses they were suffering from?

Do you think that mental illness is an issue that needs to be treated from a religious standpoint, a medical standpoint, or a combination of the two?

Give Me Some Room to Think!!

One idea that seems to be consistently popping up in the literature that we’ve recently been studying is the suggestion that suppression of expression can—and did, in the past—lead to psychological problems. In layman’s terms, some of our authors have suggested that the patriarchal society was responsible for the minds of brilliant women being figuratively “lost.” In Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” we are introduced to a woman who is sick with “temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency” (368). However, as the story progresses, we see that the narrator is allowed very little freedom by her husband, who she also says “hates to have me write a word” (370). She tells us that her husband’s sister “thinks it is the writing which made [her] sick,” (371). However, I would like to suggest the exact opposite: that it was not her writing that made her “sick,” but rather her lack of freedom to do so openly. The narrator seems to have some of the most distinguishable qualities of a writer imbedded in her, but her “imaginative power and habit of story-making” are “a nervous weakness” in the eyes of her husband (371). Like the character of Judith Shakespeare introduced to us by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own, this woman’s gift for writing and freedom of expression are suppressed by the patriarchal society around her. Woolf tells us that “it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty” (49). Indeed, we see that Judith Shakespeare winds up killing herself, and the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” basically loses her mind. Perhaps when Woolf spoke of the imperativeness of “a room of one’s own” to the writer, she was speaking of more than just a physical room. We began exploring this idea in class by suggesting that the mind itself can be seen as a “room of one’s own,” but I would like to take this one step further. I think that the word “room” can be interpreted in two different ways here. It refers to the actual physical space in which an author has to work, but I think it can also refer to figurative space for her mind to wander and explore. A writer’s mind needs “room” to think, or it just might lose itself.

The Writing LIFE???

I have to admit that when Annie Dillard, in her essay “The Writing Life,” mentioned that she had written a “complex narrative essay about a moth’s flying into a candle, which no one had understood but a Yale critic,” a part of me (probably the pride/self-esteem part) wondered if, indeed, the essay was too deep for a mere non-Yaleian (yes, I made that word up) to appreciate. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the article in its entirety online without having to pay for it, but I did manage to find an excerpt at http://poetryparsnip.blogspot.com/2003_05_01_archive.html , in case any of you are interested in checking it out.

So here are some of my raw thoughts and reactions to the snippet of the essay that I was able to read. Granted, I’m not “trained as a critic” (to quote Dillard in “The Writing Life”), but, as a writer myself, I have a natural tendency to analyze anything I read. I’d like to start off by noting that I think Dillard may have underestimated her readers when she claimed that her work is “too obscure, too symbolic, too intellectual…[and] not available to people.” True, the underlying message of her moth essay is a little obscure and perhaps difficult to extract, but I think it is safe to make the assumption that most people who read it realize that it has something to do with death; even the simplest of readers probably realize that Dillard would not devote her time and effort to writing about a burning moth without some kind of underlying message. From there, I think the essay really becomes a matter of personal interpretation. That’s the great thing about writing: its ambiguous nature allows readers to interpret it in different ways depending on what makes the most sense to them. It’s beautiful, really, how one essay, one sentence, one word, can affect so many different people in so many different ways.

That being said, here are some of my interpretations of the excerpt from “Death of a Moth,” and if you disagree with them, I encourage you to refute them with your own. My initial gut reaction (and we are often encouraged to trust our guts) was that Dillard is not being as obscure as she thinks she is. Sometimes in our society, especially among writers, death is kind of glorified. Sanders, in his essay “Writing from the Center,” goes so far as to say that “[w]e have often taken moodiness, madness, or suicide to be evidence of genius.” In “Death of a Moth,” Dillard describes the moth flying into the candle and burning in a descriptively grotesque manner. I don’t want to type out the entire essay for you--if you are interested you can follow the link above--but take the following passage as an example: “[The moth’s] six legs clawed, curled, blackened, and ceased, disappearing utterly. And her head jerked in spasms, making a spattering noise; her antennae crisped and burnt away and her heaving mouthparts cracked like pistol fire.” What is Dillard doing here? I think that she is refuting that glorified image of death by, as the old saying goes, “saying it like it is.” Death is not pretty; it’s as simple as that. My interpretation is either very enlightening or embarrassingly simple-minded. Of course, this is just one tiny aspect of Dillard’s essay; there are plenty of other themes to be analyzed, but for the sake of time (as well as for the sake of not swaying your opinions), I’ll leave that up to you.

I just want to make one quick final note about the “Death of a Moth” essay in relation to Dillard’s “The Writing Life” essay—a connection that I saw between the two. In “The Writing Life,” Dillard compares writing to visiting a dying friend or taming a wild animal, saying, in both cases, that “[i]f you skip a visit or two, a work in progress will turn on you.” This implies the necessity of returning to your writing every day if you want to keep it under control, if you want to avoid “death” (whether it be the death of that “dying friend” or your own death when attacked by the “feral” beast that your writing becomes). Interestingly enough, however, in “Death of a Moth,” Dillard implies that writing every day will also result in death. While the moth is burning, she says its head becomes “a hole lost to time” and that “[t]he moth’s head was fire.” She later adds that “Rimbaud in Paris burnt out his brain in a thousand poems.” It seems Dillard is giving us mixed messages here. We imply from “The Writing Life” that neglecting to write often will result in a “death” of sorts, while “Death of a Moth” suggests that the writing itself results in death. Is Dillard suggesting that the nature of the life of a writer sentences her to a life of misery, a “death” of sorts, no matter how she approaches her work? As you consider this, keep in mind another quote from Dillard’s “The Writing Life”: “The mind of a writer does indeed do something before it dies, and so does its owner, but I would be hard put to call it living.”

I have more thoughts, but this is already getting rather lengthy. I want to hear yours.

Writing Metaphor, Part II

Ok, I am not trying to be some kind of suck up or goody two shoes or what have you by posting two assignments; I realize that I have already posted the writing metaphor assignment, but as I was driving over to swim at Notre Dame this afternoon, inspiration STRUCK (thank God it was inspiration that struck me and not my jalopy of a car striking some innocent bystander as I was failing to pay much attention to what I was doing, so overcome was I with this amazing idea for my HUST blog post). Who am I to deny inspiration an outlet through which it may share itself with the rest of the world? Given the nature of my epiphany, I feel justified in claiming that I am merely acting as a mediator here, a link between that brilliant thought that STRUCK me this afternoon and all of you lovely blog-readers.

Before I share with you that STRIKING thought, I feel maternally inclined to protect my car's pride (and, by extension, my own) from any mockery that may result from this post. I'm sure that several of you have seen it around campus...it's the rust-encroached '85 Buick with a handwritten sign christening it "The Cowmobile" visible from the back windshield. I know it's a piece of crap, but it's my piece of crap, so please refrain from posting any scathing remarks regarding its appearance.

Anyway, by now you are probably wondering if I truly was STRUCK by inspiration or simply
desired a place in which I could ramble aimlessly for hours on end as a means of entertaining myself. I assure you, we will get to the STRIKING part shortly; but first, some brief exposition...

As we all very well know, walking around campus last week was basically the equivalent of trekking through an arctic tundra (all to experience the joys of learning, what dedicated scholars we are!). Not only did this frigid weather affect our health (I am still coughing up massive amounts of mucous), but it took quite a toll on a lot of students' vehicles as well. Now, the Cowmobile is quite aged, and I have the occasional problem getting it to run when it's not -3150 degrees out (an exaggeration? Ok, perhaps, but it was pretty freaking cold), so you have to realize that trying to get my baby running last week was quite an undertaking. It didn't help matters that I have a tendency to get very cranky when I'm cold, or that I had forgotten my snow brush at home and thus had to use my jacketed arm (which I am just now recovering the functionality of...ok, perhaps another slight embellishment) to scrape off the foot of snow that had accumulated on top of my car. By the time I got inside the dang thing, I was very cold, very wet, and very unhappy.

Things got progressively worse (as they often seem to do in these situations) when I realized that I had set my keys on the hood of my car while brushing the snow off of it. This does not seem like a big deal, I know: Why couldn't I just open my car door, grab the keys, and start the engine? I'll tell you why--because God hates me. Well, actually, it's because I'm a moron and, by prying open the frozen door earlier, I had somehow managed to break the door handle in such a way that prevented it from being able to function from the inside. Thus, I had to roll down my window (old-school style--by cranking a handle), subject my already freezing arm to the elements, and open my door from the outside. I then proceeded to grab my keys and attempt (note my word choice there) to start my car.

I could ramble on for a few more paragraphs about my multiple futile attempts to get the thing running, but I'm sure you're all bored with my incessant complaining by now. The bottom line is this: With persistence and a willingness to try different methods when the previous ones didn't work (and, ok, quite a few swear words), I finally managed to get my car running and, subsequently, made it to my desired destination (Starbucks, for some much needed caffeine).

Moral of my story? Writing, for me, is very similar to what happened with my car. Sometimes I get stuck, and it seems like everything is working against me. Sometimes I know exactly where I want to go and just can't seem to get there. But if I force myself to just grit my teeth, work through the issues, and look at things from different angles (and, ok, yes, again, perhaps utter a few swear words), I can usually get things running smoothly. It always pays off in the end.

That, my friends, is what STRUCK me today. Just thought I'd share. :-)