And This Cushion My Crown

One class-based argument against Shakespeare’s authorship of his plays is sometimes presented (and, interestingly, is often from those who are not from upper-class backgrounds themselves). It offers that Shakespeare wrote like a patrician, elevating the importance of court life, and that he ignored or demeaned the proletariat. Certainly he often wrote about royal rulers, but that seems no stranger than Hollywood making movies and miniseries about legendary heroes, famous politicians, or movie stars – it sells tickets because of the name recognition and public interest in the topic. Shakespeare did write about political intrigue at court in ways that made the characters three-dimensional, but it is odd to deduce from this the necessity of first-hand observation in an actual royal court, especially since so many of the plays about royals were set in the past, when Elizabethan palace customs mattered less. It seems like what was most needed to write about the rulers and the intrigues in the halls of power would simply be historical research, imagination, and an understanding of human nature. 

Julius Caesar and Coriolanus do seem to indicate a profound distaste for ‘mob rule,’ and his history plays frequently have rebels mounting attacks on lawful rulers and causing chaos, and eventually being punished. However, this general slant hardly makes Shakespeare’s provenance from a middle class background disqualify him as a writer who might express such themes. Elizabethan England was not a democracy, and letting the people decide on a course of action would have seemed like anathema – but particularly to the theater’s underwriters, who were either royalty or nobility. In fact, universal human equality would actually have been an alien idea to everyone, no matter what their class. Their whole belief system during the Renaissance rested on an overarching concept of hierarchy, the Great Chain of Being -- with God at the top and the various races and animals arranged at specific, assigned levels on a kind of permanent staircase below.

But at the same time, it is not even universally true of his plays that rebellion was naughty: in Hamlet, though Leontes foolishly tries to overthrow Claudius, when Fortinbras marches on Elsinore at the end of the play, he is returning a troubled castle to peace and stability. Moreover, this comes after the protagonist has murdered a king -- something that in the world of this particular play comes across as a noble act. In Macbeth, the rebels are technically the good guys, recruited by the stalwart Macduff into overthrowing the bloodthirsty eponymous tyrant. When they march on the usurper on the throne (Macbeth) they do so to end his murder spree, so clearly this rebellion is positive.

Personal rebellion and disobedience are also seen in positive lights in other plays of Shakespeare’s. Imogen and Hermia disobey their stern fathers’ matrimonial commands in Cymbeline and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and we are on their side. Juliet does the same; the play certainly does not rebuke her willfulness, but instead, ends with the bereaved Capulets and Montagues both learning lessons about parenting. In Measure for Measure, it is the sanctimonious and regimental deputy overseeing the city with an iron fist who is the villain -- the libertines and lawbreakers are shown as very likeable, with understandable flaws. Antony and Cleopatra are the objects of gossip throughout the ancient world over their licentious affair, but at the end of the tragedy, the play sides with them, the independent-minded risk-takers, not with the upright bore Octavius who wages war against them. Moreover, the comedies Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Tempest all devote considerable stage time to mischief and pranks perpetrated by characters who encapsulate the idea of high-spirited anarchy. 

Then we should consider Henry IV, Parts I and II. Though these plays are ostensibly about an English king, he barely appears in it. The riotous, hedonistic, unrepentant anti-hero Falstaff actually seems like the centre of both plays. Prince Hal is the character who changes most over the course of the two plays -- he is the protagonist, strictly speaking, and ultimately he has to disavow the values of the rascal knight Falstaff after his coronation. The play itself does not disavow them, however. When Hal rejects Falstaff, it is Hal who disappears from the stage; Falstaff stays on so we can feel his pain. Moreover, in Henry V, we learn that Falstaff has died of a broken heart because of Hal’s rejection; Shakespeare’s humane ethic has a lot of warmth toward Falstaff, over three plays.

The strongest argument against the theory that Shakespeare must have been a nobleman is Act 2, Scene IV in Henry IV, Part 1. This very long scene takes place at The Boar's-Head Tavern in Eastcheap and shows the deep friendship that Prince Hal and Falstaff have with each other – it also, through their constant playful banter and competition, proves how well-matched they are, though one of them will inherit the kingdom and the other is already disgraced. The teasing and back-and-forth culminates in a role-playing game in which Falstaff turns an ordinary tavern chair into a throne, a dagger into a scepter, a pillow into a crown, and himself into the king, Henry IV. 

Disrespectful? Disloyal? It certainly could have been perceived that way by the gossips and spies from the court. Falstaff apes a monarch, rather like the Lord of Misrule tradition in the Feast of Fools though Queen Elizabeth had banned such festivities. Falstaff presumes, during his play-acting, to put words in the king’s mouth – and to benefit himself. He treats the ceremonial trappings of royalty as a joke, all while playing around with a prince who is next in line for the throne. Falstaff is a commoner, and this mockery is being done in public, before a crowd of both men and women, at a disreputable, low-class tavern. Does Shakespeare show the prince being offended by it, though? No, instead Hal is tickled, and he does exactly the same thing himself – he switches roles with Falstaff and likewise dishonors the king, his own father, by mocking the monarch’s serious commands. When the king’s officers arrive and disrupt the proceedings, the harshness of their interruption is a subtle reminder of the dangers this irreverent display might actually bring in an autocratic state. Yet we are not on their side.

It seems impossible to imagine a nobleman writing this scene. Aristocrats in the Renaissance may have received better education than middle-class Englishmen, but they also were educated to think a certain way: it is much more likely that an aristocrat would have been shocked by that scene, viewed it as undignified and scandalous. That’s not all, though. The play as a whole, both parts of Henry IV in fact, place much greater value on the Eastcheap gang’s irreverent and mischievous scenes than on the formal, serious dialogues at court. The scenes which come alive and seem the most naturalistic -- the most closely observed, if anything in Shakespeare should legitimately be said to feel observed -- are not the courtly pontifications, but the scenes surrounding Falstaff and his milieu. The Oxfordians would have us believe that their Shakespeare was a nobleman who kept himself hidden away on a remote estate, writing in secret – while the actor Shakespeare frequented taverns and apparently had an active London social life. Yet the plays themselves do not sound like they were written by someone in a garret or in an approved, important, careful position at court – they sound precisely like they’re written by someone who enjoyed goofing around with other actors and hanging out at taverns. They sound as if they are written by someone who did not view the pedigreed as the only legitimate subjects of drama, but by someone who admired the full variety of human types and frailties.

 

Small Latin and Less Greek

A number of doubters argue that Shakespeare’s provenance from the backwater of Stratford could not possibly have allowed him to accrue the expertise in legal customs, the enlightenment of travel, and the observations of life at the royal court which appear in his plays – they believe that a writer would need the education and opportunity of a nobleman like the Earl of Oxford to achieve the level of detail in these areas that Shakespeare did over the course of the canon. This is one of the most bizarre aspects of authorship theory, because it rests on the assumption that somehow Shakespeare’s mind must have stayed permanently fixed at the level achieved by a middle-class grammar school education, that he could not have learned enough of substance beyond what his instructors taught him to create these plays as an adult.

It assumes that, though his schoolteachers obviously taught him reading, history, rhetoric, and the rudiments of classical languages, he could not possibly have used these skills for his own independent research later. This conclusion seems particularly obtuse, since scholars have long been able to identify the exact sources Shakespeare did use for his plays; he took his plots from Greek and Roman texts, other plays, history chronicles, and  so forth, thus it is quite well-established that whoever the person who wrote as William Shakespeare was, that person was doing a lot of reading. Why that person could not be a glover’s son just as well as a nobleman is the sticking point.

The detractors against Shakespeare’s authorship seem to have a categorical prejudice against the possibility of anyone with ordinary parentage or a mediocre education ever developing genius. However, a number of figures including Mozart, William Blake, Charles Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, Charlie Chaplin, and modern figures like Martin Scorsese all blossomed into phenomenal talents and geniuses despite lowly upbringings or informal educations. Helen Keller even did it without the benefit of sight, hearing, or speech – and outside of the established schools for the blind. The ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus, public speaker Sojourner Truth, and political leader Frederick Douglass began their lives as slaves, but rose to prominence thanks to their inner gifts. Moreover, another famous figure who disproves the class-bound argument for the presence of genius is Leonardo da Vinci. To say that he taught himself Latin, math, anatomy, aerodynamics, and a host of other sciences is obviously an understatement. (It was really only art in which he had a mentor -- one he outgrew.) At the time, the printing press was a brand new invention, yet da Vinci somehow acquired this treasure trove of knowledge on his own. By Shakespeare’s epoch, the printing press had been around for over a century; why could he not have benefited from its invention, and of the presence of book-sellers in London?

The authorship questioners also consider the lack of any documentation that the real Shakespeare ever went to Italy as a serious blot on his credibility, since so many of his plays are set there. They point out that aristocratic young men traveled to Italy in those days as a common facet of their education and coming-of-age. They therefore view specific nobles who were known to have visited Italy, especially the Earl of Oxford, as much more likely candidates for the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays than the man from Stratford could be.

Yet they stumble over several critical thinking glitches with this line of reasoning. First of all, the lack of documentation that Shakespeare of Stratford ever went to Italy is hardly conclusive. What would they be looking for? A ticket stub to prove he booked passage on a ship? A ship’s register from over four centuries ago with his name on it? It is ridiculous to expect such things to have been preserved, and there would be no reason for such a trip to be notated in a formal document preserved by civil servants in the town -- which is just about the only solid paper trail actually left by Shakespeare.

Secondly, it is unclear why Shakespeare would have felt he had to travel to Italy in order to write about it. He was not trying to document current life there, or even to be historically accurate, but was in a way always writing fantasies, whether in comedic or tragic form. It would have been very strange to either him or his contemporary playwrights to think of making a real life study of a place when it was fine to merely make it all up -- just as much as when writing about fairies in a forest, or a magician on a deserted island. Besides that, Shakespeare was perfectly content to color all of the exotic locales he wrote about with the same lens: the perspective of Elizabethan England. 

Theatre practice in his time did not even strive for historically or ethnically accurate costumes; the actors wore their own Elizabethan clothes when they played ancient Romans, for instance, merely adding a cape or a breastplate. The English were very insular and chauvinistic during Elizabeth’s reign, despite the influence of trade on their culture, and the theatre-going public generally would have seen foreigners as suspect, or as laughable ethnic stereotypes (as they often can be in Shakespeare’s plays – the Welsh and the Irish even being among those they considered foreigners). Finally, most of Shakespeare’s audience would not have gone to Italy themselves, so inaccuracy would not have been a concern.

However, there is also reasoning the Oxfordians use which proceeds in the other direction: starting from the fact that Shakespeare’s plays do frequently have Italian settings, the deduction goes that therefore the person who was Shakespeare must have gone to Italy, and been influenced to set plays there because of his experience with it. Yet this assumption seems to forget that the Renaissance fascination with antiquity would naturally bleed over into a romantic attraction to contemporary Italy, and moreover, that Shakespeare was using the Italianate comedies and the Italian commedia dell’ arte theater troupes as models. The theory also overlooks how popular Italy was in the Renaissance imagination generally – and perhaps even overlooks the fact that Italy is where the Renaissance started. In retrospect, it actually seems as logical for Shakespeare to use Italian settings as it does nowadays for Hollywood to set so many of its disaster or superhero movies in New York City. It is traditional and part of the cultural zeitgeist – not a personal reflection of the artists’ own experiences.

 

Shakespeare By Any Other Name

The speculations that Shakespeare was not the Shakespeare we think persist, more than four centuries after his death. Musings that Shakespeare’s plays were written by someone other than William Shakespeare, the London actor and “glover’s son” from the small town of Stratford, have percolated for a couple of hundred years, and have fascinated a variety of luminaries – including Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Mark Twain, Henry James, Helen Keller, and Freud – but in recent years the authorship debate seems to have picked up momentum. Brunel University of London offers an M.A. in Authorship Studies, and the University of London offers free courses about Shakespeare Authorship online. A few notable figures like Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and John Paul Stevens (bizarrely for figures who aren’t supposed to take stands), as well as some respected British actors of Shakespeare like Sir Derek Jacobi, Sir Mark Rylance (former artistic director of the Globe Theatre), Jeremy Irons, and Michael York OBE have all signed a Declaration of Reasonable Doubt. This petition expresses the sentiment that there is significant evidence to question the centuries-long common assumption that Shakespeare wrote the plays that every pupil studies under his name.

One of the doubters’ initial arguments is that no manuscripts of any work in the Shakespeare canon exist in his hand. This strikes numerous people as damning. However, they happily overlook the follow-up question required by logic: do manuscripts of other plays of the period exist written in the hands of their authors? The answer to that is also No, according to English Literature professor and Stratfordian (one who supports Shakespeare’s authorship) James Shapiro in his book Contested Will, a historical overview of how Shakespeare has been perceived through the centuries. Shapiro explains that the plays were considered by their authors as entirely expendable creations of the moment. So many plays were being written and performed, they were more like episodes of TV series, just without the ongoing royalties for reruns. A theater company would only pay the writer for the delivery of the play, and then it became the company’s property. There was no notion of an author having a copyright – which is one reason there were so many collaborations between writers, something again similar to TV series with multiple credited writers over a season, and with regular writing staffs in “writers’ rooms”. 

Fewer people might doubt that Shakespeare was Shakespeare if they really grasped how very different things were then: none of the playwrights expected their playscripts to be published, sold, or preserved, Shapiro tells us. No-one conceived of plays being published at all until after Shakespeare’s death. The authorship doubters contrast the lack of manuscripts with the odd mundanity of the few records we do have of Shakespeare’s life, mere legal and business documents. But preserving and accounting personal transactions would have been exactly the kind of papers that would have been seen as valuable and would have been preserved by Shakespeare or his family --  that is what people did. Not for posterity, but for the short-term, in case someone got into a dispute, haggled over bills, or had to go court. No-one at the time would have thought that Shakespeare’s books, notes, or drafts would hold any interest. Certainly, in that era people did not set up museums or university archives for great cultural figures.

The very vitality and scope of Shakespeare’s works also make the authorship doubters suspicious. The plays exhibit a far-ranging imagination, while historians know that Shakespeare emanated from and later withdrew to a quiet existence in Stratford, where it doesn’t seem like he ranged very far at all. Therefore, various other personages of the time who lived much more glamorous lives sound like more appropriate candidates to have written the plays. A primary candidate, the one favored by the “Oxfordians,” is aristocrat Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. He was a poet and a patron of the arts who jousted, traveled in Continental Europe, joined military escapades, sat on trial commissions, and was welcomed at the royal court. The claim is often made that de Vere’s own life bears such notable resemblances to plots in several of Shakespeare’s plays that they must surely be clues about the writer’s identity.

However, according to Shapiro, playwrights did not write autobiographically in those days. They did not think to base their writing on their own lives the way we do now. Their subjects were places and periods far removed from their own experience. It is clear that Shakespeare became so admired after his death that the public demanded to know more about his life; they wanted to be able to understand his genius and see into his mind. This kind of curiosity did not exist in his own time, however. A writer could be private in his daily life, and it would not have occurred to him to write his commissioned plays as if they were channels for soul-baring. In fact, Shapiro would argue, when we dissect the sonnets as clues to Shakespeare’s own love life, or when we talk about Prospero’s final gesture at the end of The Tempest as an emblem of Shakespeare’s retirement, we are pursuing an inappropriate and useless track.

Another key argument by the doubters is that the only real biographical records we have to accompany such a staggering genius seem banal, and portray a rather miserly and superficial character. We do not expect someone with such fame and acclaim during his own lifetime to have lived such a prosaic personal life: retiring to the seclusion of his provincial hometown of Stratford after his prominence in the bubbling cauldron of London theater, selling grain for a profit, suing a neighbor over a debt of a mere £6, and leaving his wife his “second-best” bed. However, several of these biographical items are misunderstood, according to Shapiro. 

First of all, Shakespeare did not give up writing when he left London. Scholars no longer view The Tempest as his final work but now believe that after the four romances, he went on to write Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and even a third, the late discovery, Cardenio. Secondly, Shapiro states that Shakespeare was probably not himself much involved as a grain merchant; his wife would probably have overseen that business as part of running the household. Thirdly, the lawsuit Shakespeare embarked on against a local tradesman was not uncommon for the time; it was how people went about collecting debts as there were no other means of enforcement. Moreover, £6 was of course worth much more at the time (it would be over $1350 today). And as for the ‘shade’ thrown by Shakespeare’s will, that is the subject of significant debate. Shapiro points out that the Bard also left the equivalent of about £350,000 to each of his daughters, and that the reason the only inheritance he mentioned for his wife was the bed is that every widow was automatically entitled to a third of her husband’s estate anyway, as well as to the continued use of their home as domicile. The reason it was noted as “the second-best bed” is that it would have been the bed they had both slept in together; the best bed was customarily placed in the guest room. Also, Shakespeare didn’t just abandon London, he still went up to the city often, collaborated on plays, and continued to hold a financial interest in the enterprise of theater. 

Moreover, Shakespeare’s three last plays, those which follow The Tempest, are incredibly inconvenient to those who argue that Shakespeare was not Shakespeare. All three of them happen to be collaborations with John Fletcher. Thus, realistically, Fletcher would have had to be in on the conspiracy to keep Shakespeare’s true identity a secret -- since if he worked with him, he would have easily discovered that he was a phony. Yet, if he knew that the Stratford actor Shakespeare was an impostor, he would not have wanted to waste his time working with him, because it would be like collaborating with an amateur (or perhaps even a non-writer). Besides all of that, if there was political repression and danger motivating use of the name Shakespeare as a front -- which is what seems to appeal to a lot of those who favor the idea of a cover-up -- then it could conceivably even have put Fletcher at risk to work with him. Therefore, Fletcher’s collaboration with the Bard is a logical conundrum if Shakespeare was faking being the writer of those plays.

On the topic of collaboration, however, there have also been some even more interesting suppositions in recent years. In 2016, the Oxford Press announced that they would be adding Christopher Marlowe’s name as a co-writer to Shakespeare’s three-part Henry VI history plays. These plays were at the beginning of Shakespeare’s career -- and I personally can’t remember a thing about them even though I watched all of them from the BBC-TV adaptations. Scholars have wondered about them for a long time. (No high-schoolers should start out by reading them first if they want to get a real feel of what Shakespeare could do, even if they might come at the front of a collection arranged chronologically.) Oxford Press based its decision on computer analysis of the texts and consideration by 23 academics. Furthermore, Thomas Middleton is also getting co-authorship credit on All’s Well That Ends Well. Scholars now see a possibility that 17 of Shakespeare’s plays may have writing in them from the quills of other playwrights.

Though it is entirely possible that computers can be wrong in trying to interpret words as if they were data points, I think this new direction, as unsettling as it may be, solves some of the core issues. The need to elevate William Shakespeare as a superhuman genius who must have written every single word of every one of his plays is a sort of psychic need, much like the desire to tear Shakespeare off that pedestal may be – but the insistence on one or the other extreme position may be part of the cause of the debate. Finding a middle ground where Shakespeare may have gotten some help seems like it could put to rest some of the doubts, or at least the arguments for them. 

If we can look at it practically and reasonably, it makes perfect sense that Shakespeare may have collaborated with others. With the sheer volume of output all of these theaters were producing in that golden age when everyone went to the theater, it certainly does come across rather like Hollywood in the studio era, where of course writers often did collaborate, or at least work on scripts serially. This does not take away from Shakespeare of Stratford his achievements as Shakespeare the dramatist. It merely suggests that sometimes, some of these writers -- in that very small world of London theaters all clustered together -- may have intersected. Collaboration seems like a sane way to meet deadlines during such a prolific period. It also makes sense that the versions of Shakespeare’s plays that have been handed down to us could have bits and pieces from other writers. Those who ascribed Thomas Middleton to All’s Well That Ends Well detected that Shakespeare seemed to have been the first writer, and then Middleton added some contributions later, perhaps even after Will died. Again, rewrites and touch-ups are well-known in Hollywood, so this does not seem far-fetched, although the Writers’ Guild of America is probably relieved that these scripts are not among those they have to arbitrate for writing credits.

However, the explanations that Shakespeare may have helped out other writers with their work, and other writers may have contributed to his, does not sound at all dramatic, nor does it appear to have political motives. It’s hard to make a conspiracy and cover-up theory out of the rather mundane idea that during this fertile period, playwrights may have been collaborated with each other from time to time. These new title pages in the Oxford Shakespeare editions, therefore, are unlikely to put the authorship debate to bed.

The Non-Conformist is Beautiful: Two Italian Films

Though looking at just two films is hardly enough to discern a pattern, it is still interesting to see that a theme running through two very different Italian films made almost three decades apart is in both cases an elevation of non-conformism in a sick society. Both award-winners, the 1970 film The Conformist and the 1997 film Life is Beautiful both chronicle World War II-era fascism in Italy and examine the moral responsibilities of the individual in the midst of an immoral and anti-individualistic system. 

Both films spend a significant amount of narrative emphasis on the rise of fascism in Italy. The Conformist, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci and based on the novel by Alberto Moravia, shows the career of its anti-hero Marcello beginning in 1938 in Rome; Life is Beautiful, written and directed by Roberto Benigni, shows the career of its hero Guido beginning in 1939 in Arezzo, Tuscany. Though Marcello marries a woman he does not truly love, Guido marries a woman he adores – for the tone of these two movies are in striking contrast, as too are their levels of realism. The main characters are also at opposite poles: the latter is brave, the former cowardly, or perhaps more precisely the latter is generous, the former selfish. And so the cautionary tale The Conformist is a melancholic and damning drama about selling your soul, while the comedy-drama Life is Beautiful aims to be a kind of fable about the power of the little guy and of faith.

The Conformist and Life is Beautiful both have the same central, compelling, dramatic premise: will the protagonist save the lives of the people he cares about? In The Conformist, he is smitten with Anna Quadri, and he also has respect and affection for her husband, his old philosophy professor. Yet he knows (since he works for the secret police) that they are targets for assassination for their subversive activities. Thus, the main thrust of the film is suspense over whether he will allow them to be killed. In Life is Beautiful, Guido devotes himself in the second half of the movie to trying to keep his wife and son alive despite the whole family’s internment in a Nazi camp. Despite Guido’s tactic of pretending to his young son Joshua that it is all a game, the film has tremendous suspense, because of course the audience knows what the true horror of the situation is and how fraught with peril at every moment.

Propaganda is accepted in the Italian cities in both movies, for instance: near the start of The Conformist, the protagonist’s friend Italo records a speech on radio about how wonderful it is that Italy and Germany are uniting forces, and one of the ways Guido courts Dora early on in Life is Beautiful is to impersonate an inspector who otherwise would have given the schoolchildren a straight lecture about their inherent racial superiority. We also see how the fascist bureaucracy controls the economic success of the citizenry in both films. Marcello and Guido each enter the huge, impersonal, cavernous offices of their city governments to assure their livelihoods. 

Marcello has some arrogance and cruelty that makes him a good fit with the intolerant and bullying side of fascism – he despises what he calls his mother’s “decadence”, for instance, and has her Japanese chauffeur beaten up and sent away;  he torments his father when he visits him in an asylum. But he tends to resist the fascist bent of his country in only small gestures: he leans away from his fascist friend Italo, he tries to wave away Agent Manganiello who pursues him about the mission. 

By contrast, Guido is cleanly opposed to fascism, and his whole personality is the antithesis of it. He is fundamentally egalitarian in spirit – from a lower class than Marcello, he is also without disdain or pomposity. We initially meet him driving through the countryside in a run-down car with failing brakes alongside a working-class friend. When they arrive in Arezzo, they share a bed for the savings. From the start of his family, Guido paints a kind of fairy tale atmosphere. He dotes on both his wife and son and upholds togetherness. Whereas Marcello was always dissatisfied, Guido makes his own happiness even in the face of nightmarish oppression.

In The Conformist, Marcello does seem to have a conscience, but he lacks actual principles. He knows an assassination of someone who doesn’t deserve it is pending, and he spends a lot of the movie moping about it. At one he tries to give the gun back to the Agent -- but his attempts to refuse to participate are half-hearted.

In Life is Beautiful, Guido is the exact opposite: he’s all principles and self-sacrifice in the second half of the movie, which is full of daring actions he undertakes at the death camp just to keep his son and wife Dora’s spirits up. In the more comedic first half, he does break rules – and eggs – but he does not do it out of spitefulness. Sometimes it is just accidental, Chaplinesque slapstick – taking someone else’s hat, for instance – but the butts of the jokes are, like in Chaplin’s films, members of a mean-spirited and snobbish over-class. And the clowing is gracefully executed by Roberto Benigni, a highly-skilled physical comedian.

The screenplay for The Conformist is shrewd because in it Marcello’s obsession with conformity precedes his political compromises. He talks about normality quite often, from his conversation with his friend about impending marriage (and how he wants it to make him normal) to his reluctant confession in church, when he tells the priest that he intends to “construct” his “normality” by paying a debt to society. Because the fascists now rule Italy, he thinks he can hide what he feels is his abnormality by making a firm commitment to the dominant ideology in joining OVRA, the Organization for Vigilance and Repression of Anti-Fascism. For almost two decades, he has felt intense guilt and shame around the accidental murder of a chauffeur when he was 13 (which he has kept secret), and he believes that “blood atones for blood,” as if two wrongs can somehow magically make a right. 

In opposition, Guido fully embraces being abnormal in Life is Beautiful. He is a kind of innocent Pierrot who sees everything from a fresh and imaginative perspective -- which may be why he is able to commit to viewing even the darkest and most dysfunctional environment through the eyes of a hopeful child. He does not spend time worrying about where he fits into society -- when he is a poor waiter trying to romance Dora, a schoolteacher whose current fiancé has much more money, it does not discourage him. He still does what he can. When, as fascism starts growing in his town, he starts observing the vile graffiti all over that vilifies his people, he takes an uncle’s white horse that has been painted bile-green and covered in anti-Semitic graffiti, and rides that horse into a hotel ballroom gala and chivalrously spirits the willing Dora away.

The helpless, sulking Marcello, a passive protagonist, has already lost himself well before the harrowing climax of The Conformist. (At dinner, two women discuss whether he ever smiles and decide he doesn’t, but that is “his nature.” Petulantly, Marcello disagrees: “That’s not my nature!” This suggests that he feels at odds with what he projects, that he would like, perhaps, to be less tormented.) By contrast, in Life is Beautiful, the very active protagonist Guido seems to be exactly who he wants to be, and stays true to his independence and inner resilience despite ordeals much worse than Marcello’s.

Marcello is so passive that he does not even drive himself to the assassination ambush, Agent Manganiello drives him and he sits in the back, where he dozes off. Awaking, he shares a dream that he was blind and that Manganiello drove him to Switzerland for an operation by Professor Quadri, who restored him to sight. This is evidently inspired by the conversation Marcello had at the professor’s about Plato’s allegory of the cave, in which the professor links the takeover of Italy by fascist ideology to the inability of the prisoners in the cave to see reality or even to recognize unreality. Marcello has internalized the idea that the anti-fascist professor could help him to see again, and this shows that Marcello doesn’t really believe in fascism. (Switzerland is also important in the dream because it was ostensibly neutral in both world wars.) At the end of the dream, Marcello found true love -- a soothing wish fulfillment for him. But he never does anything to make it happen in real life. In fact, he merely allows the antithesis to come true.

Ultimately, the only active things Marcello does are all soul-denying gestures to “construct” his “normality”, and when in the end of the film politics have done an about-face, he turns former friends over to the mob and denounces them as fascists – only because suddenly the safest thing to be anti-fascist. He is still imprisoned in himself and unsure of his identity; and we can see that in the closing image as he turns to look at us through a gate’s iron bars. He is still a conformist.

There is also some philosophy in Life is Beautiful, and it goes right to the core of the difference between being passive and active. While trying to get some sleep one night, Guido’s pal explains to him that he uses willpower to fall asleep, and cites the philosopher Schopenhaeur’s ideas as the inspiration. Thereafter, Guido consciously uses willpower to try to make things happen in the external world that he desires, starting with a visit to the opera where he wills Dora to turn from her expensive box seat (where she is on a date) to look at him below in the cheap seats. This all lays the groundwork for the bold coup that Guido pulls off over the course of the family’s internment in the camp. He uses willpower to convince his son Joshua to stay hidden by day in the barracks every day at the camp, and to prevent Joshua from despairing. Guido’s very active approach is a tremendous gift of love.

Though they take vastly different approaches, The Conformist and Life is Beautiful both show the value of resistance against depraved authority. They uphold the individual as the seat of morality, and portray the importance to an individual of seeing clearly and of having the will to follow one’s conscience. Ultimately, each of these movies revolves around the rejection of conformity for its own sake, and the elevation of non-conformity as a muscle to train and prepare. Both movies illustrate that the non-conformist is beautiful.

"Carrie" vs. "Carrie"

This article was originally published on Political Film Blog on Jan. 12, 2014.

 by Jennifer Epps

•  Carrie (2013) is out on DVD this week. 

When I heard that Kimberly Peirce was directing a new film version of the bullying horror flick Carrie, I thought it a safe bet that the bullying would go cyber (though Carrie herself would be out of the loop), that the gym teacher would have to eschew physical disciplining of the students, and that the high school might have more diversity. I predicted correctly, though none of these updates warranted remaking the movie. Peirce’s feminism, however, did suggest that she would steer Stephen King’s Cinderella story away from some of the most misogynistic excesses of Brian De Palma’s 1976 take on it, — and that was what seemed like a worthwhile endeavor.

The plight of misfit Carrie White and her coming-of-age has archetypal fairy tale resonance in De Palma’s prom-night movie, albeit complicated by De Palma’s typically icky ambivalence about women. (He would exhibit particularly nasty iconography against females in Body Double). The ‘wicked stepmother’ in this Cinderella tale is Carrie’s biological mother, but she feels just as threatened by the ingenue’s budding sexuality as the traditional matrons of these tales. Female peers (stepsisters in the Cinderella case, classmates in Carrie’s) also feel competitive with the heroine, and they do their best to undermine her; she feels she has no female network of support. Happily, a dashing and much-admired Prince Charming, normally out of range for this lowly, unsophisticated girl, discerns her merit; he sees past the cinders be-griming her features to her shining essence, as it were. These sorts of tropes, embraced for so long in fairy tales, began to be questioned and deplored by feminist critics in the 1970s – the same era that the novel and the movie emerged. In addition to transcending De Palma’s male-centric blinders, Peirce’s remake held the promise of re-examining the Cinderella archetypes behind it all with more psycho-social savvy.

Indeed, Peirce does emphasize girl-power, go easier on Mom, and show that despite competition the possibility of female friendship still exists. And she tries pretty hard to eschew the ‘male gaze’ that colored De Palma’s version. Gone is the prurient opening credit sequence in the locker-room, during which De Palma’s camera watched beautiful young women dress themselves (or not dress at all) in slow motion. The lyrical music and the way the actresses playfully thwacked each other with towels rather than cover up with them was jokey, of course, but it was like De Palma trying to make a Benny Hill skit seem intellectual. In a couple of other scenes, De Palma went in for close-ups of be-gowned Carrie and naughty-girl Chris’ nipples under their clothes (braless thanks to the seventies) but Peirce makes adolescent sexuality a central factor in her film without being voyeuristic about it.



Also gone: the prudish old-maid secretary glaring at Carrie disdainfully in the principal’s waiting room, Chris giving a parking-lot blow-job to her guy in order to get a favor in return, classmate Sue’s mental breakdown, and Sue’s mother drinking and watching soaps in the afternoons. Moreover, Sue is now a more central character, representing a kind of well-adjusted alternative to both Carrie’s fearful withdrawal and Chris’ defiant acting-out. (Peirce has stated that her aim was to adhere much more closely to King’s novel. Though Lawrence D. Cohen, who adapted King’s book for the original film, is also credited here for part of the screenplay, a new screenwriter, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, has been added to the mix.)

Peirce doesn’t laugh off the conflict between Chris and her boyfriend Billy like De Palma did. While in 1976 Nancy Allen and John Travolta played these scenes with great comic flair – revealing how petty and superficial their relationship was behind-the-scenes – De Palma also thought it was funny for Billy to slap Chris in the face, hard, on several occasions. Peirce, who took brutality against women very seriously indeed in her 1999 breakout debut Boys Don’t Cry, naturally sees it differently. So she presents Billy as egging Chris on, daring her — a dark character instead of a buffoon – and she implies that Billy is very capable of violence against Chris.

As a whole, the young men in the 2013 Carrie have more of an edge than the cut-ups in De Palma’s flick. This is a level not just in Billy (Alex Russell) but also in the star athlete and dream date Tommy (Ansel Elgort). His dialogue would make him seem to be upstanding and devoted, but he apparently doesn’t use protection with his girlfriend Sue (Gabriella Wilde), and he certainly doesn’t care much about romancing her first. There’s also a change in a minor character: the male English teacher is no longer an effeminate elf in a bow-tie, but a handsome hetero who makes eyes at a teenage girl in his class. Moreover, all Carrie’s female peers are now regularly, thoughtlessly, sexually active as a staple of high school culture. So though Carrie’s 1976 mom seemed to be spinning phantasmagorias of sexual danger out of thin air, it’s not that unrealistic for the 2013 parent to worry that Carrie might get impregnated in the back of someone’s car her first time out of the house. (The craziness lies in thinking that therefore Carrie must never have any kind of life whatsoever.)


The biggest difference between the two movies revolves around how Carrie’s lunatic mother Margaret White is understood. The role Piper Laurie had to play in 1976 – and in which she gave an admirable, theatrical performance – was devout with a capital D, and a woman-hater. She held fast to every scriptural anti-female reference she could find, and she apparently didn’t even believe in sex after marriage. Her twisted, fundamentalist Christian ideology (as extreme as if she had been reared in a private cult in a remote cabin) seemed to have scarred her from a very early age, and to have driven Carrie’s father away.
This was interesting in that it oppressed Carrie terribly, and when she rebelled against her mom she was also defying patriarchy. But De Palma’s film also suggested that it was only when Margaret is skewered with kitchen utensils that she can be sexual – pinioned by weapons from the knife rack, she panted and moaned as if in ecstasy. Visually, her pose echoed a spooky Saint Sebastian statue in Carrie’s prayer closet: the famous martyr shot with arrows, able to commune better with God because of it. Granted, the iconography of the bound, almost-nude Sebastian – much like that of the crucified Christ — does speak to a thread of psychosexual fascination with agony and ecstasy that lurks under historic Christianity. But in the real world, there are a lot more women who have to worry about other people confusing those two poles in their treatment of them than there are men who do. De Palma isn’t exactly serving society by putting that kind of imagery out there, however masterfully photographed and edited. (And it is masterfully photographed and edited, with a powerful score as well. Like Sam Peckinpah before him, De Palma’s very talent is a frustrating part of the problem; it makes the misogyny all the more compelling.)

By contrast, though Julianne Moore does play Margaret in the 2013 remake as a mentally ill person steeped in bizarre, oppressive dogma, she also loves her daughter in her own way. She is a little more functional too: she drives, she comes to school when called in. Though still a seamstress, she works at a dry cleaner’s rather than in her living-room, and she doesn’t dress in such a puritanical serge uniform and cape. (Moore looks conservative and prim in the movie, but not like a Salem witch-hunter, as Laurie did.) The production design even makes Margaret’s home decorating skills seem normal this time around – it’s kind of inexplicable, but Peirce doesn’t seem to want the Whites’ house to look like it’s in a horror movie. So unlike the house De Palma made into an eerie character of its own, this house is attractive and roomy; its yard and street are verdant and well-kept; the plain, freshly-painted walls are light-colored; the furniture is pleasantly arranged and ready for company; and judgmental male religious icons don’t surround the female inhabitants and glare down at them as they did in De Palma’s version.



The extent to which Margaret hates herself is now more pitiful – and less funny-scary, the frequent quality of De Palma’s films (as Pauline Kael perceptively pointed out). Peirce’s movie digs deeper into Margaret’s self-hatred, and makes it quite serious. Whereas Margaret’s self-punishment was a passing idea in the 1976 film – and even seemed a little like she was putting it on for show in front of Carrie — here the miserable single mom is constantly engaged in self-harm. Any time Margaret is on-screen in this remake seems to invoke her secret addiction to self-mutilation and scarification.
In Aguirre-Sacasa’s screenplay update, it is much clearer that Margaret’s rigid hatred of sex was caused by a past rape, and Margaret is less of a monster and more a victim of traumas. Peirce’s film begins with a gripping prelude: blood-curdling screams and a slowly creeping camera find Margaret in the midst of labor, utterly alone, and at the same time completely unaware of how babies are made. She thinks she’s dying, not giving birth. This indelible image ensures that Margaret’s pathology will arouse some sympathy, and that we will keep that feeling for a good while.

On paper, such feminist angles seem like workable ideas. But a movie is not made of paper. There may have been problems with the story De Palma was telling, but he sure told it well; he has been a superb craftsman throughout his career. His Carrie is a prime example of how he can drive you crazy with suspense, contrast moods from scene to scene to scene, and take total charge of your emotions. Somehow, Peirce does a poor job at all of these essential things here — though she did them very well in Boys Don’t Cry. In cheesier territory than she was in for that debut drama or for her sophomore film Stop-Loss, she doesn’t seem to know how to handle tone. De Palma was adept at the balancing act; he could make a joke just in the way he moved the camera, never let you forget that you were watching a movie, and still scare you. In her own Carrie, Peirce doesn’t seem to know when she should be realistic and when she should be ridiculous, or which one she’s being at any one time.




Sadly, the well-intentioned attempts to humanize Margaret with an opening backstory screw up the shape and tempo of the film. The prelude feels like grand opera, and it offers up blood in the very first scene so as to satisfy horror movie fans who can’t stand waiting till Act 3. But all that screaming and high drama come just two scenes before the flash-forward to Carrie, now-almost grown, has a pivotal scene when she gets her period in the high school shower – having no idea what’s happening, she assumes she’s mortally ill.

For Chloë Grace Moretz’s Carrie to momentarily worry that she’s internally bleeding is small potatoes compared to the terror and ignorance her mother went through. Carrie’s coming-of-age thus becomes less prominent a point in the story structure, her menstrual blood less potent as a symbol. Julianne Moore steals poor Chloë Grace Moretz’s thunder. And these imbalances soon take on a domino effect.

Moretz’s Carrie starts out fearful of her mother, and does get abused in an early scene, but it is not long before the girl appears quite able to distinguish current truth from the older generation’s delusions, and to stand up for herself — the emotional effects of living with her mother fade pretty easily. Sissy Spacek’s Carrie had a similar arc, but it seemed much more high stakes for her.
Furthermore, Moretz really does not play Carrie as much outside of it all as Spacek did. The new Carrie does figure out how to go online at school to look things up; she has much greater access to learning about the world. And she looks well-groomed from the very first scene — she doesn’t hide behind her hair as Spacek did, it even looks like she might be styling it before school. When Carrie’s getting ready for prom night, it hardly calls for much of a transformation – she already knows ‘how to clean up good’. One of the domino effects here is that because wallflower Carrie already looks pretty, and fairly comfortable (her eyes dart around fearfully but her overall body language is not that of a misfit), her peers have to be ten times more chic and model-perfect in order to leave her behind. Perhaps this is why Peirce seems to have cast the girls in the school from the same acting pool as Entourage.

In the age of ‘adorkable’, it’s harder to make us believe an asocial misfit really has nowhere to belong – nowadays we have to wonder if she couldn’t just go to Comic-Con and find her tribe. Or she could hang with the art students who always dress in black. Kids don’t seem limited to just two disparate camps anymore — complacently popular and hopelessly outcast – since Napoleon Dynamite, The Big Bang Theory, and even The Breakfast Club have intervened between the original Carrie and this update.

But instead of working harder to marginalize Carrie so we would believe she’s really at risk, Peirce seems to have wanted to normalize her so we would identify. Peirce doesn’t even seem to believe that telekinesis has a potential down side – this, in a movie about telekinetic mass murder. In the 1976 film, each telekinetic incident was accompanied by eerie Bernard Herrmann-like stabbing chords. This foreshadowed, however briefly each time, that Carrie might use the power for something ill. Peirce, however, treats Carrie’s discovery of her abilities like she’s Tobey Maguire learning how to shoot spider-webs from his palms. Carrie practices, mundane objects move courtesy of special effects, and Moretz reacts to it all with an astonished, open-mouthed stare. Try this at home, folks!



De Palma’s gliding camera moves and extended wordless montages stressed a kind of ironic hand of fate, making us actually feel some sadness over how noble intentions can still go astray. Even with his impish sense of humor, De Palma managed to make the climax of Carrie feel tragic. The remake doesn’t have that effect, even though the dialogue spells out repeatedly how much it wants our empathy.

In the original film, we couldn’t be sure what Sue intended in persuading her boyfriend Tommy to invite Carrie to the prom. For one thing, Amy Irving’s Sue had led the attack on Carrie in the shower –Wilde’s Sue in the new version doesn’t, and she comes down against the way Carrie is mistreated right away. The 1976 Sue seemed to be good friends with mean-girl Chris, their feuding was only hinted at – in 2013, it’s all laid bare. And in the original film, we never heard Sue’s conversations with Tommy play out; there was just enough to mislead us. Moreover, De Palma deliberately spliced Chris’ scheming scenes with Irving’s prom preparations – this cleverly made the two plans seemed linked.

Peirce, however, goes with King’s decision to sacrifice the ambiguity; there’s no doubt that Sue genuinely wants to help Carrie. And Peirce lets this part of the story go very slowly, with lots of dialogue between Sue and Tommy making plain their benevolence. (Yes, it’s disastrous to the pace as well as the credibility.) De Palma kept you constantly guessing about Sue and Tommy, and kept you so concerned for Carrie that you didn’t have time to really think about the plot contrivance. In fact, he kept Sue’s real feelings about Carrie muddy until the actual seconds before Carrie is doused in pig’s blood – and placing the revelation that Sue had meant well so late in the movie gave it a great impact.
Once you stop and think about what Sue is doing, however, it’s obviously ludicrous. If Sue wanted to help Carrie, she could just talk to her, not go behind her back and convince a football champion to escort her to the prom. She could share fashion magazines with Carrie, compliment her appearance, ask her about herself.  Etc. If she wanted Carrie to feel more normal, surely the best way would be to include her, without any mystery, and thereby openly show her own peers that they should do the same. Peirce gives you way too much time to think about how silly the cornerstone of King’s plot actually is.

Consequently, Tommy and Carrie’s scenes in the remake are also remarkably banal. In the original movie, there were enough contradictions to be compelling: William Katt, 24 or so at the time he played the teenaged Tommy, had the maturity to highlight Tommy’s immaturity. Katt’s Tommy basks in the spotlight of being a golden boy. He is a plagiarist, not very interested in homework, and a giggler. He knows it’s cool to resent authority and if possible to outwit it, but he’s also a little afraid of his teachers’ power. Mostly, he wants to be ordinary, to conform. Because he liked being liked, Carrie’s suspicion of what he’s up to (she still doubts him even when they go to slow-dance) makes sense. We’re not sure he has the courage to befriend the pariah.

But in Peirce’s film, Tommy’s dialogue is on-the-nose, and Elgort portrays him as if teenagers have no immature thought processes. There isn’t, therefore, much space for him to grow, and the romanticism between Elgort’s Tommy and Moretz’s Carrie has no sparkle. (By contrast, when Katt danced with Spacek, De Palma filmed it in one single virtuoso 2-minute take from a tight low angle, with both the actors and the camera spinning around more and more vertiginously. It was romantic and alarming simultaneously – since the more Tommy seemed to fall for Carrie, the faster they rushed toward to their doom.) This time Elgort is just doing Moretz a nice favor, however, and Carrie’s fragility is barely an issue. The scenes between them at the prom are treated as if Sue’s scheme made perfect sense.

Having reserved his aces for the cinematically flamboyant sequences leading up to the prank pulled on Carrie, as well as the suspenseful stillness before her mother turns on her, De Palma was apparently the least interested of all in Carrie’s actual burst of revenge. He got it over with quickly, in a split-screen montage. He didn’t even clarify just what was going on, much of the time. (People die, vaguely, because of water hoses, electricity, and fire.) But Peirce is very interested in this section. She seems to have been rubbing her hands together, gleefully, anticipating it. She is vividly detailed about the ghoulish punishments Moretz inflicts on the students and staff at the prom, and takes her time making sure we understand exactly how each individual died. Peirce also has little sympathy for the victims, showing the whole room laughing at Carrie’s humiliating coronation — whereas De Palma suggested that only two or three people in the assembly were really laughing, and the rest were in Spacek’s head, planted there by her mother.

Though Spacek’s Carrie was in a daze, Moretz’s Carrie is lucid throughout her revenge, targeting individuals ruthlessly and sadistically. She also looks extremely commanding as she wreaks her havoc: no longer shy, this Carrie uses dramatic arm gestures as if casting spells, and she exudes a calm confidence for once. Carrie has become ‘cool.’ Also, have I mentioned she can now fly? Harry Potter, eat your heart out.



When Moretz’s Carrie leaves the site of the massacre, which she has just set ablaze, she hunts down the lead pranksters Chris and Billy and tries to kill them in their fleeing car by causing a miniature earthquake – it’s a remake, so I guess topping the spectacle factor of the original is a point of pride. However, it’s worth noting that in 1976, the order of events was the other way round: they tried to run her down, and she flipped their car over only in self-defense, thereby helping us retain a scrap of sympathy for Carrie. But Peirce doesn’t even end Carrie’s revenge with the car-flip. No, she drags this particular bit of gore out for a while, as Carrie dramatically tortures them before they die. Poor Carrie has no internet or TV, but apparently she’s up on horror trends.

This is not what one would have hoped for from Peirce. She created one of the most significant and searing films about bullying/non-conformity/intolerance one could ever hope to see in Boys Don’t Cry, the true story of hate-violence victim Brandon Teena. But with this film, it’s Carrie who becomes the bully. And apparently that’s supposed to be just fine – fun, in fact. Peirce has gotten stuck on trying to be one of the cool kids herself.

She might have really updated the movie by trying to bring a consciousness of Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora, Newtown, or the like into it. Instead, she made the kind of film that someone who feels like the underdog – someone like the loners who go out and perpetrate those kinds of massacres — can actually seize on and watch over and over again. Teenagers are already sorely tempted to see just about any slight they suffer as the gravest injustice, and to take their sense of being underappreciated deeply to heart. The film’s target audience is in fact the very same demographic which tends to go through a phase of self-importance; the same age cohort whose brains, science says, are still very much in the process of learning how to make objective judgments. So it’s fortunate that the protagonist of this movie is a girl, and that rampaging shooters tend to be male. But the fact that this new Carrie just won the People’s Choice Award for Favorite Horror Movie is still disquieting.