but ....

[calimac]

1. Review of the Thor movie. I really liked Tom Hiddleston as Loki; he doesn't make the mistake a billion actors playing Iago have made, signalling to the rafters, from his first line on, that he's the bad guy, just because everyone in the audience already knows that he's the bad guy. Thanks to his choice to soft-pedal the oily duplicity, there was the totally unanticipated effect of making the people in the movie who didn't know from the start that he was the bad guy not seem like total idiots.
I've been avoiding the recent crop (by which I mean, within the last 20 years) of superhero movies, until I made the mistake of listening to the people who kept saying, "See Iron Man; it's actually good," and if that one's good, how truly execrable must the rest of them be? One of its lesser problems was, in fact, that the bad guy did not signal from the beginning that he was the bad guy, because it raised the question of what made him turn into the bad guy? At least Iago had a motive, if one insufficient for the cause.

2. Referendum on Scottish independence. Officials in the last Labour government insist a referendum would breach the Scotland Act 1998, which established the devolved parliament, since the constitution is reserved to Westminster. Salmond is adamant that as the referendum will be consultative, and not legally binding, it is lawful.
So ... he plans to consult the voters over whether they want to do something unconstitutional?

3. Critic going ga-ga over Citizen Kane. Author and one-time film critic Jorge Luis Borges, who loved Citizen Kane, thought the Rosebud motif its single major weakness. The film, he wrote, "has at least two plots. The first [is] of an almost banal imbecility ... At the moment of his death, [Kane] yearns for a single thing in the universe: a fittingly humble sled that he played with as a child!" Welles himself dismissed Rosebud as a "dollar-book Freudian gag." (For my disagreement with Welles and Borges, read on.)
No, I don't think I will read on. I'm delighted to discover that somebody else finds that plot gimmick as stupid as I do. Ruins the film, actually.

4. The Mississippi flood. And downriver in Louisiana, officials warned residents that even if a key spillway northwest of Baton Rouge were to be opened, residents could expect water 5- to 25-feet deep over parts of seven parishes. Some of Louisiana's most valuable farmland is expected to be inundated.
That's a good thing, actually. How do they think that farmland got so valuable in the first place? Centuries of Mississippi mud dumped onto it by repeated floods. Anything built in zones like that ought to be designed with the expectation that it'll get flooded at least a couple times a century. (Jack it up or move it away or tear it down and rebuild, whatever.)

Comments

[barondave.livejournal.com]

I didn't like Thor very much, but did like some aspects. The name "Loki" wasn't said until several scenes after his initial appearance, iirc, and much of the Norse mythology wasn't explained, or explained with reasonably ok technobabble. On the other hand, Loki wasn't oily enough, or perhaps not glib enough. They're gods, they should be larger than life.

I really like Citizen Kane, but not because of the Rosebud "motif". Kane's roots to his past serve as link, and the first scene established part of the thread of his life story. The seeds of the final reveal are scattered throughout the film.

[gold-alarm.livejournal.com]

At least Iago had a motive, if one insufficient for the cause.

I've always wondered about Iago too, the insufficiency of his motive for the magnitude of what he does. I remember saying something clever about this in the discussion section where we talked about Othello but I can't for the life of me remember what it was!

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

I've decided that because so many explanations are possible but no one seems sufficient, Iago's motivation really depends on how he's played. I do not like the just-plain-bad approach. My favorite interpretation, which I'd do if I played Iago (if I were an actor and could convincingly play a male character and all) if that he's mostly just annoyed at Cassio's being promoted instead of him, and then the whole plan gets way beyond what he can handle.

[gold-alarm.livejournal.com]

Hey, what are some of the explanations that are possible or have been advanced ? (Google is my friend, but sometimes I get tired of my friends.)

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Some of them are: a) jealousy of Cassio's promotion, as above - quite possibly with a dash of class resentment as well; b) repressed homoerotic attraction to Othello; c) jealousy of Othello's success with Desdemona, whom Iago fancies himself.

I think that Iago probably also feels that anyone who can be fooled in the way Othello can, probably deserves to be. We could call that the W. C. Fields option.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The question that always gets me about Othello is: why is Othello so stupid? I have no trouble understanding why Lear is so stupid, but Othello defeats me.

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

I see O & D's lack of communication as tragic rather than stupid--and I'm quite critical of what I see as stupid lack of communication in writing. (Don't get me started on "The Gift of the Magi.") He wants her to declare her innocence and explain, and she is so innocent that she never thinks of that as an option, let alone a necessity. I guess it is Shakespeare's genius that I reacted with sympathy for two people working to the limits of their ability to communicate, rather than with disdain of two people who should just talk to each other, damnit.

Lear, OTOH, is a self-righteous egotist who needs to be humbled and is.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

It isn't the lack of communication that's stupid. It's Othello who's stupid for letting Iago get him so frothed up over the (as you point out) transcendentally innocent Desdemona's supposed infidelity in the first place.

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

Again, when I reread the play to teach it, it all unfolded very reasonably. Iago doesn't really say anything--he insinuates, gets Othello thinking, until Othello says it himself.

Oddly, this circles back to the movie Thor, because there too, Loki's trickery works best on innocent people. It really does seem that honest people can be mostly helpless against people who flat-out lie, or insinuate well, about things that are totally untrue. I remember first reading about Hitler's theory of "the big lie," and I didn't see how it could actually work. But it's not being credulous--we can't go through life verifying everything, and we depend on a social contract that lets us assume honesty unless there is some reason to be suspicious.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

How it happens is beside the point. Change "It's Othello who's stupid for letting Iago get him so frothed up" to "It's Othello who's stupid for getting so frothed up" if you want. Doesn't affect the argument. Wherever it comes from, Othello buys it with impossible credulity.

Nor is Othello a true innocent like Desdemona. He's a general, depicted at the beginning as a fairly worldly and savvy guy, until he has this brainectomy as soon as the plot gets rolling.

True enough that the big lie works like gangbusters in Shakespeare. I think I've mentioned before that much of Shakespeare's plotting, especially in the history plays, is generated by people's reactions to other characters walking onstage and telling them about something that's just happened offstage. This is always implicitly believed without question, and most of the time it's justified. But it opens a huge hole for the occasional shameless liar like Edmund the bastard or Richard Gloucester to exploit.

The thing about Othello, though, is that he doesn't just buy what's said because someone says it. As you note, Iago insinuates rather than declares. He wholeheartedly dives into the pool of his own volition.

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

Yes, all those and jealousy of Othello's military success and fame, with some racism thrown in.

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

In #1, is the "it" in "one of its lesser problems" the Iron Man or the Thor movie? womzilla and I saw Thor tonight, and I liked how Loki was played; and from his own perspective, he has motive to heck and back. He's a bad guy all along, but you find it out gradually, which I feel really worked.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Iron Man. I haven't seen Thor. (Cue joke: "You think you're Thor ...") Ask B., later: she wants to go see Thor next weekend. I shall refrain.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I think the point about the referendum is that it would have to be the Westminster parliament that passed any resulting legislation. And of course it would be very difficult to refuse the Scots independence if they'd just shown that they wanted it, without turning Scotland into the East Timor of the North Atlantic.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

So then what would make the officials of the Brown government say the referendum is unconstitutional?

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I guessing (I can do no more) that they mean it would be unconstitutional for the Scottish government to secede unilaterally from the union, and therefore any referendum that was held to decide whether or not it should do so would be unconstitutional by extension.