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Submitted by cusicusi on April 16, 2008
Category: Book Reports
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This basketball film translates Shakespeare's tragedy Othello into the high school teen genre and gets its identity and impact from the fact that its plot, themes, and the motivations and actions of its characters are contemporary equivalents of the seventeenthcentury play. (1) The director Tim Blake Nelson and the writer Brad Kaaya have created precise parallels, while at the same time adding elements which fit the modern context of high school violence. O is best appreciated as an interlinear exercise, which involves going back and forth between the movie and Shakespeare to determine the similarities and differences. As Coursen has stated, "this film ... pursues ... Othello so closely ... [through] the parallels between what is happening on the screen and what happens in the play" (52).
Nelson was initially reluctant to direct another "teening down" of Shakespeare, but he realized that he could use his version of Shakespeare's tragedy to investigate the nature and causes of the school shootings which have afflicted our society in the past decade. (2) Nelson wanted a serious work for a "younger audience with very adult sensibilities" in which the emotions of envy and revenge would fuel his characters just as they did in Othello. In order to, effect this transfer from Shakespeare's age to the contemporary context, Nelson created a series of translations, i.e., recastings of the original text to suit the teen genre. As Durgnat and Combs
have stated, "The finding of social parallels, the creation of parallel universes, has been the greatest factor in taking Shakespeare out of the ivory tower, deacademizing ... and defrosting him as a writer for our times" (58-59). The analysis of the numerous parallels between O and Othello constitutes the focus of this article.
The working title for the film was at one time the same as Shakespeare's play, but it was changed to the initial letter, which has resulted in a widening series of...
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joik;klj, April 19, 2008
Grader: jspeaoehgn, Grade: B
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