Hamlet and beer

I didn't think about this until right after the second group presented today, but has anyone watched Strange Brew? The movie is about Bob and Doug McKenzie, two beer-guzzling, tuque-wearing Canadian hosers who travel to the Elsinore brewery in hopes of free beer. Of course the owner of the brewery has been killed by his brother who is in the process of usurping the company from the original owner's daughter. That's right, Hamlet is a woman in this adaptation. I could draw more parallels, but I haven't seen the movie in a few years, and it isn't too important; I just wanted to point out yet another reference to be found in this group's presentation that we hadn't said yet. Their presentation and Strange Brew, both highly amusing adaptations, are inspired by Hamlet and beer.

Friday's presentations and page 26

Johnny's Dr. Sexson in his presentation in Emergent Lit on Friday reminded me of something I saw in a book once. I don't have the book here, though, so I asked my mom to send me a picture. Mom couldn't figure out how to use the scanner or a camera, so I just got it now. I want to share it here.

The book is The Magician's Nephew. It's the first in the Chronicles of Narnia books. I first started reading these books in the fourth grade or so, when I received the set as a Christmas gift. Mom told me that she started to read them at the same age, but she only made it to page 26 of The Magician's Nephew. Mom can't remember our dog's name half the time. The fact that she remembered the exact page she had read to all those years ago must have meant something. I asked why she had stopped and how she remembered where. She opened the book and showed me this page, page 26:

Apparently the picture of the magician so terrified my mother that she could not continue reading any more into Narnia. When I saw Johnny last week with the coat and the wig, this was all I could think of.

494 Paper

This is my paper for capstone class:

“We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time,” writes T.S. Eliot in his poem “Little Gidding.” We toss this quote around in class now as if it were meaningless—just something you say in certain situations. So it goes. I have, however, found that this quote is very meaningful in the story that is my life.

When we explore, we are interested in something new to us. We invest our time in examining, searching, digging deeper, and completely immersing ourselves in this thing. To me, exploration and education are meant to serve the same purpose. My exploration is my college career. Now, I concern myself primarily with exploring English Literature, but this was not always the case.

When I came out here for school was my first time in Montana. My major concentration was in film. All of my professors were eccentric and quirky. One of them, Walter Metz, would stand in an awkward position with his hand on his chin. He would say, “um” and then he would tell us about intertextuality.

Intertextuality is the relationship between pieces of art that have anything in common. As this was a film class, he usually discussed it in terms of film. Say, for instance, that someone liked Happy Gilmore with Adam Sandler. He would probably like The Waterboy, too. They are basically the same movie. Anything else with Adam Sandler that he saw thereafter would remind him of these films and affect the way he thinks about the new film. Sometimes Metz’s ideas about intertextuality were reasonable, like with Adam Sandler movies. Another time he compared Greek mythology to an episode of South Park. Looking back, I think I agree with him. But other times these connections he made were ostensibly more loosely based. He told us that Gilligan’s Island was the same as Shakespeare’s The Tempest. He said that while Gilligan gives us crude humor, Shakespeare gives us both eschatological content and that which challenges and stimulates our minds on a higher level. We watched clips of Gilligan and film adaptations of The Tempest to justify his claims.

We read Hamlet and watched two adaptations—Olivier’s and Kozintsev’s. Having read the play, I knew that Shakespeare’s original was much longer than either film. In order to condense the text, the directors removed many scenes. Because Olivier’s adaptation investigates the psychological tolls taken on Hamlet caused by his options of taking revenge or forgiving his uncle and Kozintsev’s examines the political workings constituent in the play, the directors removed almost exactly the opposite scenes. That is, almost all scenes in Olivier’s Hamlet do not appear in Kozintsev’s Гамлет and vice versa. For this reason, without a crippling obsession with intertextuality, which is to say, to most freshman film students, these were two totally unrelated films that just happened to fit into Metz’s category of the mentally rousing.

Around the same time, however, I came to my own conclusions about intertextuality. In Paul Monaco’s class, The History of Film in America, we watched Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca. I had seen the film once as a child because it is my father’s favorite movie, but I could not remember it well. When Ingrid Bergman’s character, Ilsa, told Sam to play “As Time Goes By,” though, I remembered it fully, but not because I remembered Casablanca per se. Rather, I remembered a snowboard comedy called Out Cold with a similar scene where a girl wants Sam’s counterpart to play a song from a jukebox. It was during that scene that I had two epiphanies. First, I realized that these movies had the same plot, the differences were only that in Out Cold, the characters had snowboards, Rick hangs out in El Matador instead of Rick’s Café Americain, and the major was no longer in the military: instead he had been renamed as Mr. Majors and had performed not martial but sexual conquests through Europe. Secondly, and more importantly, I realized then that intertextual relationships are just as real as Professor Metz believed—that certainly all texts are related. Without this belief it would be impossible to compare or contrast any works of literature.

Imagine Columbus arriving in America and believing himself to be in Asia. The feeling I had was likely similar to his when he realized that his exploring had led him to discover a whole new world. The difference is that Columbus was able to travel from world to world at will. I could no longer return.

When I was in film school, I found that nearly all my electives were in the subjects of philosophy and religious studies. In an introductory religion course, we read texts from major religions around the world. We read bits of the Gospels and the Hebrew Bible to learn about what the followers of Christianity and Judaism believed. When we learned about Hinduism, we read from the Bhagavad-Gita. Because it was only an introductory class, our exploration of the Gita was slight.

Not all my exploration happened in school, though. Perhaps the reason I had such an aversion to Montana was my roommate. Eric was not a bad person. Living with him just made me uncomfortable. He was socially awkward. He had poor hygiene and smelled something like the horses that lived across the street from our dorm room. For several months, I was convinced the only thing he did was play minesweeper. I began reading to distract myself from Eric. After concluding that my textbooks left me unsatisfied, I had a small epiphany. My problem was, never having been a reader, I had no idea what I wanted to read. I did not know what was good. My epiphany was my solution.

It came to me; I went to the bookstore. If I did not know what to read because I did not read, the people who do know what to read are the people who do read. I went to the textbook department in the bookstore and found the English section. These should be the best books, right? I picked out a few with titles I recognized. I also asked people what they were reading for school. Then I found series of what were called ‘classics.’ If books had survived over time, there must be a reason, I figured. Again, I recognized many titles, but now I had read most of the titles I knew. I had moved on. I read all of the classic books I could get my hands on. I read any suggestions I got, and I sought suggestions sedulously. Most of what I read was required reading in upper division literature classes. Sometimes I did not care for a book, but because the purpose behind my reading was to keep occupied, if I stopped reading a book, I would no longer have anything to keep my mind off of Eric, so I persevered through seemingly endless lists of descriptions of fish in varying habitats and how many times Dean Moriarty drives across the country. Despite my frustrations, I fell in love with my reading.

After that year, I realized film was not for me. Soon, in fact, I questioned whether I belonged here at all. I applied to transfer to the College of William and Mary, a prestigious university much nearer to home. I had been taking Arabic classes, and William and Mary has the best foreign language program in Virginia, where I live. Arabic is becoming an increasingly useful tool in today’s world, and I thought it would benefit me to further my exploration in that discipline.

I was waitlisted, but ultimately I was not accepted to William and Mary. I had no choice but to quit my exploration of the Arabic language. I knew I did not want to study filmmaking, but I did not know what I did want to study. I decided that I would explore as many things as I could and eventually I would find not only where I was, but where I was going—little did I know…. I took math courses, psychology courses, anthropology, sign language, stats. I took biology classes on plants and on microorganisms. I took English classes, and I continued to take philosophy, too.

After one of my religion courses, I rejected philosophy as a potential major. Looking in the course catalog, I found I was closest to graduating in English literature. At the end of my junior year, I finally switched out of film.

Maybe English literature is not a perfect fit for me, but I get to explore more deeply the literature I used to enjoy only for its aesthetic value. I am even reading some of the same texts that I encountered back in film. In English, I get to see the texts from an entirely different perspective. In the capstone class, for instance, we read Hamlet and the Bhagavad-Gita. We did not discuss Kozintsev’s use of lighting in the ghost scene like when we watched Гамлет in film class at the start of my exploration, nor was it too important how the Hindu beliefs formed from and influenced neighboring religions and philosophies. Instead our focus was on epiphanic moments and how they function in the texts.

Other times we read books, and I recognize them from films I have seen, like when Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. They have the same relationship that Casablanca had to Out Cold. The Emergent Literature class is even structured on this relationship. There we deal with a number of themes from “highbrow” literature and we see the themes again in the texts’ “lowbrow” counterparts. One of the very last courses in my college career is based on this idea I discovered where I started my exploration those years ago.

One of the themes from Emergent Literature is what we have called “Dulce Domum,” which we have translated as “Home Sweet Home.” The idea here is that of return. The boy in The Alchemist, for example, travels from Spain to the Pyramids of Egypt in search of treasure only to learn that the treasure is buried next to a church in Spain: the very place he began his journey.

In this story, I am the character who returns back where he starts. I traveled through this never-ending cross-reference to return to themes, ideas, texts, concepts, and motifs that I started from at the beginning of my college career. Like the characters in any other work, I, too, have come to see these things in a new way—from new perspectives, with deeper knowledge and understanding. Whether I am watching a movie I swear I have seen before—déjà vu—reading a book for school that I read to ignore my roommate, or even just coming back to Montana to learn, my life is intertextuality, and no one could describe my life better than when Eliot said, “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”

Videos from my presentation

This is a clip from Casablanca. Then Frank Sinatra sings. Here I am interested in the first two minutes or so, that is, the part from the classic film.

Casablanca

These are clips from Out Cold. The scene I wrote about happens at 1:34 and ends at 2:33.

Out Cold

Clyde Bruckman's even more final repose

When you roll a pair of dice, the dice are acted upon by your hand, by gravity, by the forces and friction exerted by the surface on which they land or strike. Similarly, when a card is chosen at random, the cards, having been shuffled, are arranged in a particular and set order. Shuffling creates unpredictability, but, like with the dice, no true randomness.

A while back I was being distracted by television, and I watched an episode of The X-Files. The title of the show was Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose, and it features Peter Boyle as a psychic insurance salesman named after the late movie writer Clyde Bruckman. A list of his works can be found here. Like the writer, Boyle's character commits suicide by the end of the episode.

TV Guide rated the episode the tenth best television episode of any show. The reason I found it so interesting was because of T.S. Eliot.

The show begins with a man visiting tarot card readers and crystal ball gazers. He asks them not what he will do in the future, but why he is going to do these things. Then he kills the psychics. Bruckman reports a dead body he finds when taking out the trash. Mulder and Scully realize that Bruckman knows more about the murder than he should, and they question him. It turns out that following the plane crash killing Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper, he became obsessed with how so many things have to work out exactly a certain way so that the fateful coin toss could have happened to lead to a man's death. Soon he is able to see the events and how they work together to form the conditions for anyone's death. When the murderer asks Bruckman why he kills people, Bruckman says, "Don't you understand yet, son? Don't you get it? You do the things you do because you're a homicidal maniac." The murderer doesn't kill Bruckman, who soon kills himself, and the FBI catch the murderer after Mulder steps in a pie as foretold by Bruckman.

The usage of so many psychic characters enable the episode to explore the future as well as merely the past and present. Here time--past, present, and future--exist in a constant way and are as set as time as represented in Dry Salvages. That is, it follows a set course, like a river or train tracks or any other symbols from the poem. Unlike most people, Pocahontas, for example, Bruckman (and any other legitimate psychic on the show, though only Bruckman's abilities were verified) can see what's around the river bend.

All the choices you make are set. In the future, they've already been decided. The murderer doesn't kill because he chooses to but because he is a homicidal maniac. He doesn't do anything. It already is. When Sanjaya tells of the conversation between Arjuna and Krishna, Arjuna's decision is already made. Actually, there's a scene from the movie Waking Life where a guy explains it another way. That is, scientifically. This is that scene.

Another thing that happened to me recently to make me believe this fatalist view is that I joined an internet community at http://www.timetravelfund.com/. The time travel fund charges $10. Some of this is deposited into a bank account that grows interest until time travel is not only discovered but made economically feasible. Then, a group will come back and pick me up from some point in my life (near the end virtually eliminates foreseeable time travel paradoxes) and takes me to live in the future. With the money I make from my interest, I can comfortfully live in the future for several centuries. Of course there is also the possibility that it doesn't work, and I never get picked up by future time travelers. It's a Schrodinger cat situation. Either I exist centuries in the future, or I do not. There is no likelihood or chance involved. I either do or do not. It is not random but merely unpredictable. The course of time dictates one or the other, and it is already set in that direction. Someone like Clyde Bruckman could tell you that.