I wasn't even sure what I was going to get out of this one given that I'd just seen it in August and that had started this whole project, so I began with ambivalence.
The audiobook did immediately catch my ears with Ariel's singing and even the echo that was part of his speech. It was lovely. The rest didn't really register as anything new or exciting.
No lectures with this one.
The movie was uneven. The kings and their lackeys scrambling around did nothing for me. Trinculo and Stephano did their funny thing, but shockingly, the incredibly low budget production in Frederick did the comedy better for me. This might be because the middle-aged drunk man type of comedy didn't appeal to me as much as the millenial, sassy, female humor did.
Prospera in the movie was very good. But she doesn't appeal to me, I can't relate to her, and sometimes I was bored of her. Missy and I talked about how she was "bad." She did not keep her promise to Ariel to free him. I thought this was horrific in the text when I read it. I thought it was a little better than horrific in the movie probably because she was female but also because she did immediately add the caveat of two more days in a way that sounded somewhat sincere. She did have a modern delivery that had me checking the text.
I thought she was "bad" in the way of Marie Antoinette letting the populace eat cake. Disconnected from reality because of power and wealth.
Ferdinand and Miranda were meh. But after all the versions I've seen/heard/read, I feel that maybe they're supposed to be.
There's a scene in which Miranda asks Ferdinand approximately twenty minutes after they meet, whether he loves her. His eyes roll to the back of his head in rapture and I laughed so much, I had to pause the movie.
Sorry. I'm decidedly not fifteen.
Ok, now to the amazing.
Ariel.
Just wonderfully done. The version I had watched previously made Ariel basically Tinkerbell. Blonde topknot, green dress, and twinkly. In the movie, he was sad, but hopeful, taking pleasure where he could, surviving for another day, living as best as he could while he waited.
The sexual subtext that Missy mentioned registered for a moment for me and then I ignored it. I'm not sure why except that I was more interested in the love. It tugged at my heartstrings. It reminded me of the love of parent and child, where in some ways, the two are beholden to each other involuntarily, maybe even reluctantly. Ariel was wistful when he asked whether she loved him and Prospera was resigned when she said yes.
Caliban.
Obviously, Shakespeare was not talking about American slavery when he wrote this so I was taken by surprise when that interpretation was made.
For example, he's a "servant-monster" played by a black man, supposed to be ugly and sulky and obsequious, stupid, surly, resentful. But then he looks like this:
He's actually quite handsome and probably this was a deliberate choice making the point of how racism defines beauty.
There's a line about whipping too that startled me and I had to check the text for it. It's there. He angrily rails about her taking his land, it was his mother's land, and this woman landed here and took his home. Very anti-empire delivery.
But he did try to molest Miranda and so the question then is, do we get to enslave people if they're bad to us? Do we get to enslave people for our own survival?
Ariel and Caliban are opposites. White and black. Grateful, obedient, loving, pleasing versus resentful, vengeful, angry.
And yet. Both of them powerful in ways the humans could not understand.
And yet. When Ariel is given his freedom, he leaves faster than Caliban.
I listened to this song over and over again.
Macbeth, next.
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