Certainly I do not believe in the existence of a "2-Disc Deluxe Edition." I mean, what the fuck could be on the second disc? Word is, though, that Mekhi Phifer plays "Odin," the black-star of a hopelessly white high-school basketball team, in love with the principal's daughter ("Desi," inevitably played by Julia Stiles), and tragically susceptible to the machinations of the ever-mechanical Josh Hartnett as "Hugo." The team's coach goes by "Duke." What would I do, were I to discover such a farce one evening on some remote cable channel? I imagine I would burst through the screen with a furious hee-haw--spewing bits of thistle everywhere--and chase Phifer and Stiles and Hartnett (but especially Stiles) madly around the inside of the television set, rearing and bucking and kicking and biting until everyone would agree to stop the movie, lest its absurd progress arrive at its intolerable conclusion.
That sounds like Assheaded fustian, but it's pretty much how nineteenth-century theater audiences reacted to the real Othello. In 1822, for instance, a soldier in Baltimore shot and wounded the actor playing the Moor to prevent him from murdering a white woman (make it Bawmer cops n' robbers and this would provide a fine intro to a 21st-c. Wire episode). A few years later, back in the slightly-more-reasonable home-country, some jackass in the audience loudly threatened to throttle Iago after the show. In British Sierra Leone in 1857, the officer playing Othello shot the officer playing Cassio for really diddling his wife, who played Desdemona.
Of course, not every century was as shamefully melodramatic as the nineteenth, but in revolutionary Paris, too, ladies fainted in such droves at Desdemona's death that the translator felt compelled to speed-write a happier conclusion. English audiences sobbed for at least three centuries--young women, old men, the chick Pepys was ogling, and of course crybaby Byron.
All this is cribbed from Michael Neill's entertaining introduction to the Oxford World Classics edition (it's not like I did any research or anything). What matters, though, is that in all honesty I can't imagine throwing any such fit over a work of art. Sure, I misted up at the end of Cinema Paradiso, and grew notably impatient over the indignity of having to read Watership Down in tenth grade, but I remained on this side of grief and rage: I didn't throw myself from the roof; I didn't threaten Hazel-Rah.
It's not that I envy past ages their hysteria; I won't sentimentalize bygone idiocy as somehow more authentic. But I am a bit surprised that the closest I've ever come to such a visceral response to a human performance was raging through the bar after watching the Yankees win the 2003 American League Championship Series. Even then I merely smoked two cigarettes at once and hurled my beer bottle to the curb. Well, as the chief wuss of a wussy culture, my freakouts have never been of much consequence, but I'd still say in our day sport sparks twenty riots for every one caused by mimesis.
In retrospect, I don't think I've ever felt as strongly about much of anything as early audiences acted like they felt upon watching Othello (usually in blackface, for Chrissake) kill Desdemona, who incidentally must've been dressed unprovocatively cap-a-pie in all of these pre-twentieth-century productions, very unlike today's Dezzies:
Or (to take it paragone-style) unlike the two-dimensional Dezzies of the histrionic-ass nineteenth century:
Or that might be a fair depiction of whatever went on in the British camp in Sierra Leone in 1857. Anyway, were I to find that on the early-morning boob-tube I wouldn't sob. I wouldn't shoot him. I'd just watch. Maybe an occasional moan, but nothing more.
Slothrop: You have no empathy.
Koko: 20:1 is pretty generous. I can't think of any mimesis-related riots. Maybe some sans culottes overturned a vegetable cart after seeing David's Antoinette-on-the-guillotine cartoon? Anyway, Hazel-Rah akbar, and please, keep these coming.
Blondie: Early cinema audiences ran screaming from the nickelodeons when they first saw a train on the screen heading their way. Not riots, per se, but authentic fear of mimesis. Also: This O is truly terrible, and I even have affection for Julia Stiles and her difficulties with overcoming inter-racial/species love (she got to learn to dance with Levar Burton Jr. in Save the Last Dance; she mated with a black-haired, oddly-accented monkey named Heath Ledger in 10 Things I Hate About You). We are supposed to be capable of seeing Desdemona through Othello's eyes, and seeing her, even for a split second, as a whore and betrayer. Without that understanding, all tragedy drains, and we're left with Mekhi Pfeiffer in a basketball uniform. Stiles fails at this, even as she excels at table-top dancing to early 2000s hip-hop.
Maybe it's because I hate Josh Hartnett's face, especially when moustachioed. Gross. Or having sex with Kate Beckinsale in World War II parachutes. But they even delayed the release of the film for nearly a year because of anxiety following the shootings at Columbine (and after-shootings across the nation)....so obviously, mimesis was a fear. The film, which was expensive, bombed; Stiles' career never recovered, unless you count appearing with Matt Damon in any role at any point a success, which Slothy so obviously does.
Koko: To be fair, I think Stiles and Ledger never consummated their shrewish love, just courted; which would reduce her felony-grade animal-loving to misdemeanor hobo-loving. Or something. Also, best word in this whole post: "inevitably."
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