DawnPapuga.com — Reality 101

I can’t decide why this bothers me so much, so please forgive the rambling that follows.

I’ve been working on an article documenting the plagiarism use of one of Shakespeare’s most famous speeches in pop culture–particularly in modern media–for some time now, and while finding it in film doesn’t surprise me, finding it a video game commercial does.  Recently a Sony PS3 commercial hacked and slashed the St. Crispin’s Day speech and used it to promote some of their fighting based video games. Actually, it irks me quite a bit.  This may be the academic snob in me, but I just don’t understand the thought process behind using the St. Crispin’s day speech from Henry V to promote video games, even if they are “war games.”  How many viewers know where that speech even originates?  Does that even matter?  I’m torn.

Watch the video above and then, if you’re curious, go watch Aragorn’s speech at the Black gate in Lord of the Rings, Benitez in the rain in Renaissance Man, William Wallace’s speech from Braveheart, Dilios’ final speech at the end of 300, or Mr. Fabian’s performance of the speech in Tombstone.  I could spend the rest of the night listing allusions to the St. Crispin’s Day speech (notably from multiple episodes of Buffy) and adaptations of it, but I’m pretty sure you can recognize the elements of this speech when you hear it.  Take any motion picture with a major battle scene and I’m willing to bet this speech will appear in one form or another.  In fact, it’s hard to find a modern motion picture featuring a battle scene that doesn’t feature it in one form or another. 

It’s a rousing speech, to be sure.  One might argue that it’s the single greatest “locker room” speech ever written.  But the use of that speech in a commercial for video games rubs me the wrong way.  The fact that Sony used it speaks to the notion of Shakespeare’s place as a cultural icon (I have a list of books and articles about this phenomenon that you can read if interested), and while I could bore you to tears with why this is important, and why using his image and half understood lines from plays to try and bridge a chasm between generations, classes, and intellectual hierarchies (perceived or actual) is problematic, I’ll save that for the article.  When it’s finished, you can read it if you so choose and comment away.  I just don’t know which side of the line I fall on.  I can see the logic of using Shakespeare (and this speech in particular) to garner interest and connect to people.  In one respect, it’s marketing genius.  Companies have used Shakespeare in this way for ages.  On the other hand, I find it trite and almost insulting.  To be fair, I have the same response when I’m watching a film and I see a thinly veiled version of that speech rendered, as I did with the second and third Lord of the Rings films.  I have nothing against using effective material, but I do have a problem with using that material without giving the origins proper credit.  I have actually had people who watched Braveheart first, and then Henry V, say to me, “Shakespeare totally stole that from Mel Gibson’s movie.”  Aside from the temporal impossibility of that statement, the problem is clear.  If you don’t know where something comes from, how can you truly appreciate it?  And who says you have to know where it comes from to be able to appreciate it anyway? 

My trouble is in figuring out why it bothers me so.  When I see something like this, I have to fight the urge to tell everyone I see, “You know that is an adaptation of X” or “You know that’s from Shakespeare, right?” Most often, the response is, “uhm, okay.  So?”  And every fiber of my being becomes frayed.  Maybe it’s my need to see past the surface in everything and wanting others to do the same.  Maybe it’s rooted in my habitual criticism of art.  It bothers me greatly when an artist creates something based on someone else’s work and takes credit as though they were divinely inspired and developed those ideas on their own.  It feels false.  It feels like they’re trying to pull one over on the public, and when people applaud those creations without understanding the influences and origins, it bothers me even more.

It just upsets me to know that somewhere there are people who will hear that PS3 commercial and forever think that Sony created those words.  They may never know that it was one of Shakespeare’s greatest speeches, and they may never care.  I think it goes beyond my mere passion for literature, too.  There’s something… else.  So why does it bother me so much?  Excellent question.  If you figure that out, let me know.

Write Well,

Dawn

 While Shakespeare may have written “enterprises of great pitch and moment,” his strength was not doling out advice.

This occurred to me tonight while watching Othello.  Every so often  I’ll get the urge to watch one of the adaptations of an Early Modern play (Okay, so it’s more often than not.  I can’t help it! I’ll shrivel and die without hearing iambic pentameter and glorious prose at least once a week).  It isn’t always centered around any particular mood, but often I find myself drawn to specific plays for dealing with particular emotions, moods, or profound moments.  Tonight’s mood prompted me to watch Othello for various reasons

I was reminded of the comical and popular notion that The Godfather contains all the answers to life’s questions (Incidentally, I’d be taking The Godfather–part 1 of course–on that little island escapade we discussed a while back).  Surely the Bard, whose work has persisted in the minds of the audience for over 400 years, had more to say, right?  Not so much.  It would seem that Master Shakespeare’s major solution to every difficulty in life is Death.  Well, suicide, murder, or (in the case of the comedies) running away to some enchanted forest (social death, if you will).  I’m not really seeing any of these as viable options.

As a Tragedian, this shouldn’t surprise me–it’s not like I didn’t know this before.  Any high school student worth his salt could tell you Shakespeare was full of death:  Want all of your father’s inheritance?  Kill folks.  Want to be king?  Kill your friend(s).  Drive your husband to murder?  Kill yourself (oh, but do go insane first).  Someone took the position you feel was rightfully yours? Destroy their lives, plot their deaths, and then they’ll kill themselves to boot.  The Empress destroyed your family bit by painstaking bit because you took her throne and killed her son?  Hack off your sword arm, Kill your daughter, then cook the empress’ sons in a pie and feed it to her.  Yeah, we know all this.  For some reason, though, tonight’s realization was profound. 

It had to do with Iago in particular.  By far, he is my favorite villain in literature.  Iago systematically plots and executes the downfall of no less than four people (five if you want to count Brabantio’s broken hearted death) with the precision of a Swiss watch.  Every possible obstacle he encountered, he managed to use to his advantage through quick strategy, logic, and even humor.  He understood how people thought, what motivated them, and played the puppet-master to terrifying effect.  What makes Iago so brilliant is his methodology.  He didn’t just rush in and slaughter those who “wronged” him.  He poisoned their minds and let them destroy themselves. 

Of course, he was discovered.  But when, after killing Desdemona and watching Iago kill Emilia, Othello asks Lodovico to “Demand this demi-devil why he hath thus ensnared my soul and body,” Iago speaks his final lines: “Demand me nothing.  What you know, you know: From this time forth, I never will speak word.”

And he doesn’t.  Ever.  Lodovico charges Cassio to punish Iago as he sees fit, but there is no indication of how or whether it was ever done (many could argue that Cassio’s “soft” nature would lead him to take pity on his one time friend, “honest Iago”).  It’s not the punishment that’s so troubling, though.  It’s that Iago takes his reasoning with him and locks it away.  It’s never made clear exactly why Iago does what he does.  He alludes to a handful of possible reasons, but never proclaims any of them as his motivation.  Even those reasons are made as soliloquies and meant only for the audience, so no one in Cypress (except Iago himself) has any inkling of reasoning.  Othello, on the other hand, explains in painful detail why he killed Desdemona (even to her while doing it), and then why he kills himself.  By not answering “Why” Iago retains complete control, even to the end. 

So my troubled thinking comes from the fact that Iago doesn’t lose in the end.  Yes, he’s “caught,” but his power is in his manipulation and control over the thoughts and actions of others.  By refusing to explain himself, he forces everyone else to posit questions, to wonder.  Only he has the final answer and he refuses to give it.  His soul isn’t laid bare.  He retains his pride.  He may have destroyed others, but to him it was a successful enterprise.  He accomplished what he set out to do, and at no point suggests that his own well being mattered a whit in the long run as long as the others were destroyed.  So where’s the justice?  There is none.  None at all.  That is why Othello is, in my opinion, Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy.  It’s not fair.  There’s sad, then there’s tragic.  Sad things have resolution and things go wrong anyway.  It’s a pity. Tragic things are without resolution, without excuse and reason, and they aren’t at all fair.

I’ve often considered writing an adaptation of Othello, much like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead  is of Hamlet, but rather than the work running concurrently with the play, I wanted to set it either before or after the play.  Iago fascinates me in so many ways that I don’t have much of a choice but  to write them. 

Can you think of any other tragedies that are as profound?  I’d love to hear them.

Some folks have asked me why I’m not posting about the J.K. Rowling  and Warner Brother’s lawsuit against  RDR Books and The Harry Potter Lexicon  website creator (and author of the Lexicon in question), Steven Vander Ark.  The problem was that I was trying to decide where I fall in this debate.  Like most things, there are multiple ways of viewing any given situation, and because of this, I’ll be posting two responses:  the one here in this post, and one on Lyrique Tragedy Reviews about the impact the lawsuit potentially has on publishing, academics, and the proverbial line in the sand between free fan based web content (arguably unique and subject to their own copyrights) and a commercially published monolith.  The problem is, that line seems to be erased and moved more often than not.  Here’s an open letter (seeing as this is “letter” month for NaBloPoMo) to Ms. Rowling.

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The Scenario: For those of you who don’t know what’s going on, let me give you a brief run down:  J.K. Rowling published one of the highest grossing series (7 books) in recent memory about a boy wizard, a school, and magic between 1997 and 2007.  As with all obsessively popular works of art (film, books, music, etc), fan sites and fan fiction pops up over the internet.  This, of course, happened with HP.  One site, The Harry Potter Lexicon, became a hugely popular resource for fans–and apparently J.K. Rowling as well.  Not only did she give an award to the site, she admitted in interviews and under oath, that she would use the site  as a reference while writing.  (Because, she claimed, it was embarrassing to have to go in to a bookstore and buy your own book to check facts)  In October J.K. Rowling and Warner Brothers sued RDR for copyright infringement when the owner of the Lexicon announced that he was compiling the site into a book.  Last week both Ms. Rowling and Mr. Vander Ark appeared in court to testify in the case.  Rowling argued that not only was it her material, but the Lexicon book was “sloppy and lazy”.  Also, she had planned on writing her own encyclopedia and donating the proceeds to charity, which the publication of the Lexicon would damage.  She came close to tears on the stand when asked about her struggles getting to where she is, presumably to reinforce just how important her work is to her. 

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Dear Ms. Rowling,

There is so much wrong here that I don’t even know where to begin.  First of all, your HP books have sold over 400 million copies worldwide in 64 languages, and the films pulled in $4.5 billion (that’s with a “B” folks) in the worldwide box offices.  The books are priced at $34.99 in hardback (new) and you can find them for $9.99 in paperback (new).  You do the math.  Your struggle with tears on the stand is no longer relevant and, quite frankly, is insulting.  I get that your work is a part of you, and is important to you–there are few things more violating than being plagiarized–but to somehow drag the experience of your struggle before that first book was published in to the present and think it should sway a judge or the people following your trial is a slap in the face to anyone who has a brain.  Once that first book was published and you raked in your millions, you lost all rights to my sympathies in that regard.  It was a cheap move, executed to sway the trial from a ethos and logos driven argument to a pathos driven one.  Even my Comp 101 students could see that (and have).  Go blow your nose in a hundred dollar bill, honey.

Second, it’s bad.  I’d be annoyed too—especially if I spent 17 years creating a world only to have it hacked apart for publication.  Guess what, though… you can’t stop publication simply because you think it’s bad.  There are plenty of bad books that have been published, and unfortunately, personal standards have nothing to do with it.  If I had my way, I would never have seen The Road or Lord of the Flies published.  If it’s plagiarism, that’s another thing (don’t worry, I’ll get to that here in a minute).  Your literary standards have no bearing on this case.

Third, you want to publish your own encyclopedia, and that, itself, is a valid reason to stop this one from going into print.  (Uh huh. Oh, but you had no problem with the few that are already out there.  Uh huh.)  You want to donate the proceeds to charity (How very nice of you).  You believe the publication of the Lexicon will deter readers from purchasing your encyclopedia. Wait, what?!?   You can’t, in one breath, claim that the Lexicon is sloppy and lazy–implying that it’s not good–and then in another breath claim that it will sell enough copies (the publisher predicted a sale of about 10,000, by the way—A far cry from 400 Million) to significantly diminish your own sales.  You’re talking out of both sides of your mouth here, and again… it’s insulting.  You can’t have it both ways, Ms. Rowling.  Either it’s good enough to endanger your own profit on an encyclopedia, or it’s not–based on the fact that you wrote the books, your acclaim, and your ability to market pretty much anything, I highly doubt this under any circumstances.  Well, maybe now that you decided to throw your weight into shutting it down it might increase those sales for RDR.  What a silly move.  There’s nothing more valuable than bad press.  If you really wanted to do some good for that charity of yours, you would have donated the proceeds you gained from the last movie released, or your last book. 

Fourth, it’s “wholesale theft” and plagiarism.  Uhm, no.  Fair use gives folks the right to create compendiums, encyclopedias, dictionaries, and reader’s guides.  Your contemporaries have had plenty–Anne Rice, Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Terry Pratchett–and prolific writers historically have had plenty–Shakespeare, Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, to name a few.  Not all of the reader’s guides, compendiums, encyclopedias, and dictionaries have had the support of the author, and they don’t have to.  The only case where plagiarism is relevant in this academic tradition of organizing fictional worlds, is if every single entry was directly lifted from the original work with absolutely no unique analysis, explanation, or commentary.  You admitted under oath that you didn’t like the style or the “incomplete analysis” of entries.  In stating that, you just shot yourself in the foot by admitting there was analysis present. 

I hope Mr. Vander Ark merely changes the name to “The Unofficial, J.K. Rowling thinks this is a threat to her profit, Lexicon” but we both know that would inspire another law suit.  So Perhaps “The Unofficial Lexicon” would suffice.  I also hope that the judge sees through the games you, your lawyer, and Warner Brothers are trying to play, and instead chooses to protect academic and fair use freedoms.

Dispiritedly,

~D. M. Papuga