While much of this site has primarily concerned itself with the nexus of film and screenwriting, I expect that this will change more and more in the near future. I’ve had a religious conversion of sorts back to the written word. A repentance brought on by night visions and fever dreams. For anyone interested in the story leading up to this, feel free take a look at my sports blog article here. I battled with frequent bouts of illness in the earlier part of the year which for some reason led me to a fascination with the foundational texts of English poetry, which grew into an obsession with various expressions of old literature.
Category: Long Articles
“I thought it was dystopian!”
“I thought it was modern?”
“I thought it was the past…”
The Millennials are confused, and understandably so. The Barbican Centre’s production of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, directed by Lyndsey Turner and filmed before a live audience, presents a unique and refreshing perspective on the 400-year-old play. It is not the medieval Danish world of Shakespeare’s setting, and nor does it sit well within any of the centuries that have occurred since then. The buildings are Victorian, the uniforms modern, the clothing contemporary, but the weapons historic. Hamlet has traded in his doublet for a David Bowie shirt, but keeps a dagger by his side and listens to Nat King Cole albums on an old record player. And just wait until you see Horatio.
The world in P.D. James’ novel The Children of Men differs vastly from the onscreen realm that we see in the 2006 film adaptation. The basic premise remains the same: widespread infertility has halted the birth of human babies for nearly twenty-five years and Oxford professor Theo Faron, along with the rest of humanity, calmly and apathetically awaits the end of the world. With some minor changes in characterization, the screenplay and subsequent film build from the same starting point but enact one striking change. In the film, futuristic England is transformed from the wistful and nostalgic hills of peaceful Oxford to the chaotic and explosive streets of a xenophobic London.
In the beginning, God created Adam. Then, because Adam was lonely, God made Eve. When Eve fell, she led Adam to fall with her and God expelled them both from the garden of Eden. In the 17th Century, English poet John Milton provided his own take on the story of Adam and Eve in his epic poem Paradise Lost. Milton’s version contains moments of sympathy for God, for Eve, and even for Satan, but most poignantly for Adam.
Milton, in his own problematic, misogynist view of Original Sin, presents the idea that Adam chooses a life of companionship over a life of bliss. In other words, the idea of a lonely existence in paradise is worse than whatever could await outside the garden walls, and his decision has haunted us ever since.
The shame in Steve McQueen’s 2011 film is never clearly stated, but nonetheless finds plenty of opportunities to present itself. Perhaps we see it in the film’s opening scenes, when a married woman feels a flush of guilt upon considering an affair with another man. Or maybe it comes later, when our hero finds himself caught in an embarrassing moment during an encounter with a woman, unable to carry on with a date that seemed promising. Or possibly it appears toward the end, when a young woman clings to a life threatened by self-inflicted wounds in a hospital as cold and sterile as the rest of the world feels. Whose shame do we experience and what is the source?
How do writers anticipate future technology? There is no clear cut rule, and like many visionaries we are wrong more often than we are right (hover boards by 2015). However, there are two guiding questions that tend to form the boundaries of creative space in which to develop fictional societies and depict imagined worlds — Where will technology go? But more importantly, where will technology refuse to go?