Stage 5

Sorry to keep harping on Titus, but he just seems to keep popping up, so I'm going to give him the floor to kick off this week's discussion of The Sopranos:

A better head her glorious body fits
Than his that shakes for age and feebleness.
(T.A., 1.1.190-191)

Mafia dons, both the real ones and the much more interesting fictional ones, have long liked to link themselves with their Roman ancestors, none more so than History Channel fan Tony Soprano, who once used the reign of Augustus to attempt to tutor Uncle Junior on being a benevolent dictator. And as The Sopranos winds down, it appears that Tony and his colleagues are learning the lesson of their fictional ancestor Titus.

In declining to be named Emperor, Titus argues that he is an old man, soon to die, which would only lead to them having to find a new emperor sooner rather than later. He is man that has achieved success through brute force and physical strength. He has survived 40 years on the battle field seeing many younger men, including his 21 sons, fall, and that has added up to . . .what? His physical strength is rapidly dissipating, his body is betraying him, he is too old to be emperor. What is waiting for him at the end of the road? If the play has a redeeming quality, it is this affecting portrayal of a man out of time, who only knows one thing and can't do it anymore, who is a stranger in the land in the fought to protect, in many ways more of an foreigner than his Goth prisoners.

It is a drama modern sports fans are intimately familiar with. Like the ancient epics and mythologies handed down over generations of oral storytelling, sports deals in similar master narratives retold for every generation with new actors in the lead roles. One of our favorites is the star past his prime who refuses to hang it up. It is superb tragicomic tale. Elite pro athletes are made up of two things: a natural athletic ability combined with an unhealthy competitive streak. From puberty (at the latest), their entire existence revolves around perfecting a very specific skills and using it to destroy their competitors. Then, in their late-30s, just as their peers in almost every other profession are just starting to hit their professional stride, that natural athletic ability starts to disappear, though the competitive streak is still there. So they hang around until they have been embarrassed by younger versions of themselves enough times that they finally are forced to give up the only thing they have ever know how to do. And they are only 40, with close to half their life left to live. Like Titus, their fortune is made by their bodies, which then betray them.

Which brings us to Tony and his pals. Let's take a look at the last three episodes, going back to last season's finale:

"Kaisha": Phil Leotardo, acting boss of the New York family and Tony's chief rival, suffers a heart attack and has quadruple bypass surgery.

"Soprano Home Movies": Tony, boss of the New Jersey family, celebrates his 47th birthday and gets his ass kicked by his creampuff, model-railroading brother-in-law Bobby, and spends the rest of the episode lamenting his lost manhood and worrying that Carmella will no longer be attracted to him.

"Stage 5": Johnny Sack, currently-incarcerated boss of the New York family, is diagnosed with terminal cancer and dead by episode's end. At the beginning of the episode, he is told that it is Stage 4 lung cancer, and fills in the blank himself "And there's no stage 5, is there?" Later, Phil, still recovering from his heart surgery, tells Tony he does not want to be boss: "Being a boss is young man's game."

Tony, Phil and Johnny Sack, the three most powerful men on the show in terms of mob hierarchy, are all being betrayed by their bodies. A mob boss's power is not embued by sovereignty or rule of law, but physical strength. However, having spent possibly all of that strength getting to the top, they no longer have the strength to hold on to it.

All of this takes us back to show's first season. Forty-something acting boss Jackie Aprile dies of cancer, creating an opening at the top. Mob bosses, like Roman emperors, always have trouble with succession because it is neither strictly heritary or strictly meritocratic. In this case, the captains want Tony, but Uncle Junior thinks the title is rightfully his. Tony creates a compromise by giving Junior the title, but running things behind his back. Junior, like Titus, has fought his way to the top, only to be too old to rule once he got there. Tony is now facing the same problem.


A quick off-topic note: Radio Open Source, a public radio show from Boston, excerpted my "Batshit Crazy" post on their website in conjunction with an episode entitled "Entertaining Violence", dedicated to a Boston of production of Titus. It is a great listen, and very relevant in light of the Virginia Tech incident on Monday.

Speaking of Virginia Tech, I feel like I should say something in light of Monday's comments on Grindhouse and Paglia's Mozart/Jack the Ripper comparison, and I will eventually, but I just don't think I can right now.

Severed Limbs

This post is going to be all over the place, but I promise you that it makes sense in my head, if nowhere else. Do you ever have one of those stretches when everything you come into contact with—movies, TV, books read for pleasure, books read for class, class discussion, casual conversation with friends—seems to have some underlying connection? Over the past few days, the same ideas have kept popping up and I am going to try to draw them together here.

Let’s start with Titus Andronicus, the subject of my last post and of an ever-growing obsession with me. I first became aware of the play when the film came out but have only recently become intrigued with it. I don’t think people truly appreciate the magnitude of its importance. Shakespeare, the revered bard, the secular saint, really wrote something this messed up. It’s truly mind-boggling.

I had Titus on my mind when I went to see Grindhouse this weekend and I couldn’t have found a better movie to feed my obsession with. The Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino double-feature inhabits the same grey category between art and trash, exploitation and satire, that Titus does, and features even more severed limbs. Severed limbs are a recurring motif in Grindhouse, much as they are in Titus. In Planet Terror, Rodriguez’s film, we have, most famously, lead actress Rose McGowan’s severed leg, which is outfitted with a machine gun in the film’s climax and plays a decisive role and saving the heroes. But there is also Marley Shelton as another heroine, a doctor whose hands are anesthetized by her deranged husband and spends a good portion of the film groping, Lavinia-like, without them.

Both McGowan and Shelton are postmodern, postfeminist takes on the Lavinia motif of the mutilated woman. Both overcome their mutilation to kick zombie ass and, in McGowan’s case, turn it into an asset. Shelton’s character, pointedly, regains use of her hands just in time to help save McGowan from a rapist.

But we can’t read too much into Planet Terror. Not surprisingly, Rodriguez’s film never rises above the B-movie gimmickry of the Grindhouse idea. His much more intelligent and talented friend, however, uses the guise of this gimmick to make what is perhaps his most personal film yet. Death Proof, Tarantino’s half of the double-feature is, on its surface, a B-movie homage just like Planet Terror. While Rodriguez covered the sci-fi/zombie movie, Tarantino took two other grindhouse staples: the slasher film and the car chase film. But Death Proof, the story of Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell), a deranged former stuntman who kills women with his reinforced, “death proof” stunt car is both much more and much less.

While Rodriguez fulfills your expectations with his film (that is meant both positively and negatively), Tarantino confounds them. He uses the Grindhouse label to make an art film disguised as a genre film, in the mode of past B-movie auteurs such as Sam Fuller. The film is, with one notable exception, surprisingly gore-free and spends most of its time focusing on the nine women Stuntman Mike is stalking. Tarantino says his favorite slasher films were the ones that let you get to know and care about the victims before the violence began, and we get that here, with long scenes of typically Tarantino-esque dialogue as the characters shoot the shit in cars and diners. The difference is that this time the characters spitting the dialogue are women, and Tarantino obviously exhibits a fascination with how women talk when men aren’t around. He is also mesmerized by their bodies and uses the guise of the exploitation film to let his camera linger longer than it should on their curves, but they are shot in such in loving way, just as women in his films always are, that it never even reaches exploitation. All of the women in the film, especially Sydney Tamilia Poitier, Vanessa Furlito and real-life stuntwoman Zoe Bell, join Uma Thurman, Pam Grier and Lucy Liu in the Tarantino Goddess pantheon.

Which brings us to Stuntman Mike, who shares with Tarantino a voyeuristic fascination with these women and a nostalgia for old-fashioned, non-CGI stuntwork. The difference is that, while Quentin channels these notions into a film, Mike releases them by crashing his car into the women and killing them. It’s an almost perfect illustration of Camille Paglia’s famous and controversial formulation that there is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.

I have much more to say on this, including a discussion of last week’s episode of The Sopranos which ties into all of this, but I have to wake up in five hours so that will have to be put on hold.

Batshit Crazy

There is a great article over at Inside Higher Ed by Scott McLemee about Titus Andronicus and the current production at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington. He gives perhaps the greatest critical judgment of the play ever, describing it at "Shakespeare's batshit crazy play". I have been really interested in Titus recently. My Shakespeare playreading group recently read the play as a part of a series on his controversial plays along with Taming of the Shrew and Merchant of Venice. I have also been reading Camille Paglia's "Sexual Personae", in which she described Titus as a satire on Spenser's pageant of rape and torture in the Fairie Queene and suggests that it should be performed by drag queens. Like many of Paglia's opinions, it is out there, but frankly, do you have anything better? In the family that is the Shakespearean canon, Titus is the meth-addicted, thrice incarcerated cousin that no one likes to talk about and you watch your wallet and your kids around when you see them at Christmas. But, just like that cousin, it can't simply be ignored and forgotten about, it has to be dealt with. It potentially blows a hole in the entire business of bardolatry, which all people in the Shakespeare industry, whether they admit it or not, take part in.

Titus' profile has risen greatly in the last several years, and has picked up since Julie Taymor's film version, and I think it is only going to increase. It both speaks to modern tastes (look at last week's big movie release, Grindhouse) and is reminds us that Shakespeare, for all of his genius, was an extremely weird guy. We can gloss over the weirdness of the other plays because of their brilliance but Titus doesn't let us escape from it. When thinking of Titus, I am always reminded of the poster for famed B-movie house Troma Pictures' infamous parody "Tromeo and Juliet". The tagline reads "Body Piercing, Kinky Sex, Dismemberment. All the Things that Made Shakespeare Great." Replace body piercing with cannibalism and kinky sex with gang rape and you have an accurate description of Titus. In other words, even the creators of the Toxic Avenger and Sgt. Kabukiman didn't go as far into dark as Shakespeare did.

McLemee stumbled on to something interesting when he compared Titus' moral universe to that of professional wrestling. Pro wrestling good guys, like Titus the play's ostensible hero, are violent oafs who lack any sense of introspection or self-awareness. The only thing that separates them from the bad guys is the code of honor they live by. This has especially been true over the past 10 years, as pro wrestling has taken a darker turn and good guys have become just as likely as bad guys to torture opponents with foreign objects or abuse women.

Which leads us into the big question about Titus: is it simply A) morally repugnant violence for the sake of entertainment on the scale of pro wrestling or pseudo-snuff films like "Saw", or is it B) a more knowing comment on the culture of violence, and violence as entertainment, such as the work of Tarantino or "The Sopranos"? The bardolater in us all wants to say option B, and that may very well be so, but, unlike any of Shakespeare's other violent works, we have to at least entertain option A as a possibility. Its a disconcerting thought, but I think ultimately an enlightening one, especially in today's world when violence permeates our art and entertainment and the line between option A and option B becomes ever more blurred.