From Amazons to Wives: The gendered difficulties of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and its Classical foundations
Though many have historically criticized Shakespeare’s early play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as shoddily written, re-examination of the text over the last several decades has leant new prestige to this entertaining ‘classic’. Most scholars agree that Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a light and frivolous accompaniment to the celebration of a wedding; and while the historical identity of the couple for whom it was written has escaped the knowledge of his students, there is ample textual evidence to support this claim. The main plot of A Midsummer Night’s Dream involves the complex machinations of two couples (Helena and Demetrius and Hermia and Lysander) whose romantic cross purposes are further complicated by their flight into the woods and into the realm of the faerie King and Queen (Oberon and Titania) who themselves are engaged in domestic battle. The play contains some of the usual ‘lighter’ themes common to Shakespearean literature such as love, dreams and the creative imagination. It is love however, that causes the most difficulties for Shakespeare’s hapless characters. This sentiment leads to confusion, escape, intrigue and a great many laughs for the audience. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the quintessential comedy using misunderstanding and circumstance to create a scene that becomes incrementally absurd as to produce nothing but laughter.
Crime in Cronenberg’s Videodrome: A perversion of the everyman’s subconscious
Rena King:
“Don’t you feel such shows [of soft-core pornography and hardcore violence] contribute to a social climate of violence and sexual malaise, and do you care?”
Max Renn:
“Certainly I care. I care enough to give my viewers a harmless outlet for their fantasies and their frustrations…”
Videodrome stars James Woods as Max Renn, president of an independent, Canadian (more specifically, a Torontonian) television station, Civic-TV. At a time when everyone seems TV-obsessed, addicted to the emissions of the all-powerful Cathode Ray Tube, Max’s station offers to viewers sensational programming – specializing in a unique mix of illicit sex (“smut”) and violence (“snuff”) – which earns it the dubious slogan of “the one you take to bed with you.” Fearing that his station – and indeed all of North America – is getting too “soft”, Max embarks on a quest to find “tougher” material for his audience. The plot thickens when he discovers pirate tapes of an experimental show called “Videodrome”, a raw, seedy program without plot or characters, only merciless acts of violence, torture and murder. Max quickly becomes infatuated with the scrambled images from the single-camera operation – in which a screaming victim is tortured, whipped, chained and beaten to death by two hooded figures – and develops an obsession with the “purity” (simplicity) of its message.
The ‘housewife’ and the ‘cityman’: A match made in suburbia?
Last night, for the first time, I ventured to Pointe Claire, Quebec. Pointe Claire is what one could call a typical suburb of Montreal – a small residential sprawl located far enough away from the city to function independently and retain a certain sense of community, yet close enough for its residents to commute to the city centre – for employment, health care, shopping or entertainment – in about thirty minutes.
Yet what struck me most about this ‘burb’ was exactly how little it resembles ‘suburbia’. Driving along what could be called the main street, one doesn’t notice any of the usual clichéd suburban symbols. Where are all the white picket fences, huge cookie-cutter houses, ‘big box’ stores? Instead, what one does notice in this suburb’s is a certain small-town appeal: unusual boutique-style shops and cafés, a large – and historic – Catholic parish and Church grounds, a community pool and park, and streets lined with modest, uniquely-designed houses with doors that all but open to the sidewalk. This place, this humble residential area, bears no similarity to Levittown (a famous “village in central Long Island in New York, noted for its ‘cookie-cutter’ houses” ) or Mississauga (the largest suburb in North America). Pointe Claire doesn’t even have a single noticeable mall, for goodness sake. This cannot be ‘suburbia’, can it?
Dita and The Darkness: Desperately Seeking Gaze
Theorist Laura Mulvey is notorious for her claims about the nature of cinematic enjoyment. In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", she concludes that a spectator experiences two main pleasures in viewing conventional Hollywood films: (1) a voyeuristic pleasure, constituted from considering a female figure in an objectified, sexual way, and (2) a narcissistic pleasure, arising from identification with a male protagonist and his ‘gaze’. (Mulvey 62) Central to her argument is Mulvey’s emphasis on the voyeuristic quality of the viewer’s ‘gaze’: it is an erotic look of power and of objectification, held from a distance, based on the fetishization of the female body. The view of the camera, and thus of the male protagonist and the spectator also, is that of the intended male ‘gaze’.
Reagan-inspired Dystopia and the Impediment of Human Freedom
From abortion to pornography, the "war on drugs" to the end of the Cold War, the 1980s played host to considerable controversy; amidst such political uneasiness, then, it seems that Reagan Era rejuvenated middle-America’s latent conservatism. This return to the traditional Puritan values of the "nuclear family" also sponsored heightened State intervention and policing of the private sphere, thereby buttressing cultural myths of the dangerous, unknown "Other".
As such a fear of the Other was socially perpetuated, it seemed the responsibility of liberal-minded skeptics to note such propaganda as an alarming preparation for totalitarianism.Many cultural texts from the period, such as James Cameron’s 1984 science-fiction film, "The Terminator", and Margaret Atwood’s 1986 feminist predictive-text, "The Handmaid’s Tale", used this opportunity to illustrate the drastic outcomes of a society founded on such mass ignorance. Following in the tradition of "dystopian", or anti-utopian, fiction, both texts use a depiction of a "perfect" future world in order to isolate, exaggerate and expose certain problematic social trends. While not intended as realistic or plausible predictions, these dystopian texts seek to expose extremist attitudes (such as radical conservatism, religiosity, or technological reliance) as fundamentally threatening to human nature and individualism. Dystopia, then, can be understood as a locale for the constant impediment of human freedom, maintained by a regime’s oppressive control of technology, gender and ideology.