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We spent time is class last Thursday in groups laying out what we thought the scene would be for the final act of the play Othello. Above is a picture that I found online that resembles the one my group drew. I thought this was a very interesting exercises. Each group had a different interpretation of how the furniture laid out and what was included or not. Each group also had different takes on the lighting and music, which sets the mood, for their scene. After listening to the groups explain their layouts we were asked to watch the scene on YouTube and then next class we watched a more modern take of it. I was interesting to see how the scenes my classmates and I laid out compared to the two film takes. There were many creative differences between the two films and even more between the films and our drawings. It is fascinating how many different interpretations there are for one scene. The scene is written out, but how the directors decide to have them play out on screen was different. Lines were cut out, angles were taken by the camera, lighting was done, and music was played in the background. All of these lead to very different outcomes. How can there be so many different takes on one piece of writing? The writing doesn't change. The language is the same for every person that reads it. It boggles my mind how different each person's take is. I have to wonder why this is. All I can come up with is people see different events in different ways. Certain events provoke certain emotions in people and it was the emotions of the directors of the films that were portrayed in the two different Othellos.
In the play "Othello", one of the characters is named Iago. Iago is the most cunning and manipulative character in the play by far. Reading some of the things that Iago makes the other characters believe made me wonder if there were people like that in the real world. I am fairly certain that there are some people like that, but then I questioned if I knew any of them. None of the characters could really know the true Iago because he acted differently when he was in their presence and when he was not. It was not until the end of the play that the other characters came to know the true Iago and his ways. But if it were not for Emilia, then the characters would have never know Iago's true character. I can only hope that there are people like Emilia in the world that can catch the people who are manipulating people and call them out on it.
Girl, Interrupted, was a very interesting and strange movie. The title, "Girl, Interrupted" is very strange itself. We ended class on Tuesday with the question of why it is titled that. Here is my interpretation. An interruption is something that is not planned. It is something that changes the course of your original thought and can sometimes make you forget where you were going with your original thought. An interruption also has the ability to be either a good or bad thing. Winona Ryder's character's Susanna Kaysen, who is also the main character, has a lot of interruptions in her life, both good and bad. One of the first interruptions is when she sleeps with a family friends' husband. This interruption is what makes her close herself off to everyone and leads everyone to believe that she is going crazy. She is sent to Claymoore, a private mental hospital, where she has an eighteen month stay. This interruption starts out as a bad one but becomes the best interruption in her life, in the movie. As a result of this interruption, Susanna learns how to make herself into a better human and how to deal with things without taking them to the extreme. Throughout the movie, the audience sees the results of all of the interruptions in her life. That is why i believe the movie is titles "Girl, Interrupted".
The main character in The Yellow Wallpaper, as with the author Charlotte Perkins Gilman, suffered from a disease of depression. In the story, the woman suffers from postpartum depression and Gilman suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia. Gilman, and the woman in the story, were prescribed the "Rest Cure" which involved them doing absolutely nothing. The women were not allowed to write, paint, or do anything creative and they were told spend much of their time just lying in bed. This does not seem like a smart cure to me. We touched on this subject in class and one of my classmates brought up the fact that if the women were told to lay in a bed all day by themselves, all they would have to keep them company would be their thoughts, which were one of the main causes of their depression. The "rest cure" to me does exactly the opposite of what it was aiming to accomplish. It is evident in The Yellow Wallpaper when the main character starts believing that there is a woman trapped behind the wallpaper and at the end of the story she believes that that woman was her and she was not going to be put back into the wallpaper. The "rest cure" could possibly be the worst thing to prescribe to someone suffering from depression.
