The Cheap Seats

I just finished torturing my freshmen with Romeo and Juliet. I say torture, but a lot of them loved acting out the first scene and learning to stage fight. Some of them didn’t even seem to mind learning about poetry. A handful of them cried when we watched the final scene of the Baz Luhrman movie.

But this year, for the first time since 1996, I had a few students wondering why we were watching the “old” movie.

Now I’ll just let the whole 1996-equals-old business go, and focus instead on the shiny new Romeo and Juliet flick these girls told me about. It came out last year. I’ve seen the trailer a few times.

The thing is, this movie doesn’t really seem all that different from the 1968 Zefferelli version: Romeo is still way too pretty—seriously, you could cut glass on this kid’s cheekbones. In common with the also very pretty Leonard Whiting from the classic flick (who, incidentally, is a dead ringer for Zac Effron—see the proof below), this handsome lad seems to have been selected more for his facility with hair gel and eye sparkle than emoting in iambic pentameter. But, I admit, I only watched the trailer. That’s right, I couldn’t get past the three-minute mark. Because what they seem to have done is, they CHANGED ALL THE WORDS.

When I realized this while showing the trailer to class, one of my students was like, it’s okay, Ms. H—the story’s still the same. And then I freaked out more, because the story itself is actually pretty stupid. For example, our heroes were apparently too dense to figure out that a rope ladder can actually be used to transport more than one person. Everybody knows Shakespeare copied most of his stories anyway. It’s the language that makes this play, and all his others, beautiful and memorable.

But based on what I've seen, this version seems to have eviscerated the play. For one, some lady at the Capulet ball plays Commander Obvious, and explains, for those too dense to grasp this complex, world- famous story that, “Juliet is a Capulet. The  Montagues and the Capulets are MORTAL ENEMIES.”

Oh, good. Because almost nobody has heard of this play, so let’s just make it EXTRA clear.

Then, I guess after he’s murdered Tybalt and all that, Romeo kneels in a church and says,

"What have I done? I've murdered my tomorrow!"

What’s that, Cheekbones? You murdered your tomorrow? Is that what you did? Because nowhere in the play, or anywhere else in Shakespeare that I know of, does anybody murder a tomorrow. This screenwriter has some major cajones: it’s one thing to simplify Shakespeare. It’s quite another to try to out-poetry him. Especially with a line like that.

Some folks may say I’m being too big of a fancy-pants here. But here’s the thing—I love the 1996 version, and not just because Leo DiCaprio can seriously act. It’s modern, and trashy, and not really highbrow at all.* But they kept what was special about the play—the words. It’s worth noting that the cheapest tickets to Elizabethan theatrical performances also offered the best view, right up by the stage. The best seats were in the gallery, which afforded a better chance to hear the words. Today, the best seat in the house is always about being the one with the best view. We make everything look good, but sometimes forget there's more to life. 

I don’t care if you act out Shakespeare’s plays in a modernized Hollywood movie or in your backyard—it doesn’t matter what it looks like—it’s still poetry.

*I have more piece of evidence of my lack of snobbery—if I do end up seeing this new movie, it will be entirely because Ed Westwick of Gossip Girl is in it as Tybalt. I XOXO that guy.

Bad Boys

I have this problem in which my favorite characters are all bad boys.

Every time I re-read Wuthering Heights, I’m rooting for Heathcliff. He’s not a good guy. It shouldn’t really matter how much he loves Cathy. Mr. Rochester, Hamlet—all my favorite books are filled with jerks whom I can’t help but love.

Maybe it’s that storybook (or TV or movie) love is interesting because of the conflict, and nobody causes more trouble than a bad boy. Buffy said it best (in one of my favorite episodes, season 4’s “Something Blue”)

 “I know it's nuts, but part of me believes that real love and passion have to go hand-in-hand with pain and fighting.”

 She then turns and stakes a vamp and wonders where she got that idea…But for the rest of us, who lead a vamp-dusting free existence, where does that idea come from? In my AP class we’ve been talking a lot about the ultimate bad guy: Milton’s Lucifer.

First of all, poor Milton. I feel bad for the guy. Yes, he achieved immortality with his work. But he was a Puritan who set out to justify the ways of God to man. The fact that the Romantics of the nineteenth century embraced his Satan as an (anti-)hero would likely have upset him. A lot. I would actually argue that we’re still a Romantic era—after centuries cycling through alternating eras of reason and romance, we're probably stuck now. Reason is no longer strictly necessary. Instead, we have Google. Instant gratification (usually emotional) is what we want now.

So if we’re making a choice of favorite characters with our feelings instead of our brains, it’s bad boys all the way. It’s just not that much fun to root for the good guy. If you watch The Vampire Diaries, like I do, you probably root for bad-brother Damon rather than grim, self-righteous Stefan (if you’re a fellow TVD fan, are you feeling my pain over this protracted Professor and The Cure bit? Ugh).

Bad boys are more compelling for lots of reasons. One: cross them and they’ll get revenge. Milton’s Lucifer’s first speech promises vengeance, “All is not lost; the unconquerable will/And study of revenge, immortal hate/And courage never to submit or yield”

If you think about it, a lot of our favorite bad boys have Miltonian DNA. They are often outcasts—usually by choice. They want their freedom and will do almost anything to get it. They’re smooth talkers. These characters show up and steal the show—it happens over and over. The narrator of Gossip Girl in the early days was good-guy Dan. Snore. Bad-boy Chuck Bass was the character we tuned back in to see.

Maybe it’s the possibility of redemption that brings us back for more of the bad boys. It’s more satisfying to watch Chuck struggle to become a better man than it is to wait for Dan’s inevitable misstep, to be followed by his also-inevitable self-recrimination-filled moping.

Romantic-era writer and bad girl Lady Caroline Lamb probably summed up the bad boy’s appeal best with her famous description of Lord Byron: mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Swoon!

Would I want to actually deal with one of these mad, bad, dangerous dudes in real life? That’d be a no. But when it comes time to escape into a book or a show, bring on the bad boys.