Hello everyone, welcome back to my blog it has been some time since I last wrote a post. So getting back into the swing of things is a little difficult
This year we have only done two projects so far. Our most resent was focused on the play Macbeth and how its themes connect to our world today, spoiler alert more then you would think. We have our films and tv today that we watch. New movies release every month but what we don’t realize is the underlining themes within our modern cinema. We may not realize it but the themes that Shakespeare put within his plays the morals within his stories are heavily used till this day. Pixar and Disney movies tend to have more simplistic versions of the common morals that Macbeth has so young children can pick up on them. But movies such as Fight Club and Night Crawler which are darker and more mature have similar morals that are just more complex. One subliminal moral I can compare is “carful who you trust”. Fight club staring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton contains a lot of subliminal imagery to strengthen this theme. Disclaimer, If you haven’t watched either of those movies I mentioned I highly recommend you do before continuing as they are both incredible and there will be spoilers coming up.
Fight club is a movie about breaking the routine going against societies rules and the big plot twist in the end is that Tyler Durban the man that changed Edward Nortons (who is called the Narrator) characters life. Tyler Durban is a figment of his mind the man he had been following was his own projection of himself. But the part that matters is how he gets into the mess of the whole movie and that is were the theme I mentioned earlier comes into play. Not on trust Tyler a stranger he meets on a plane. Which is what gets him into the whole mess. Tyler Durban was him all along and was a second person with a completely different personality he persuaded Norton because Norton trusted him.
Night crawler has a similar plot how ever this one follows the whole trust people theme much more. There is a poor man who “partners” with the main character Louis Bloom and ends up getting killed because Louis Bloom sacrificed his partners life for the perfect news story. He trusted Bloom and Bloom saw him as a dispensable equipment.
In Macbeth we meet a crusader named Macbeth a true hero on the battle field. He ends up Plotting to kill the king of Scotland after witches predict him to become king. He gets away with it for a little while but however trusting the witches was the worst choice he could have made. As it ends with his death after trusting the witches prediction that “no man born of a women shall harm Macbeth”. A man born of a sea section is the one to finish Macbeth off.
As you can see Shakespeares theme of carful who you trust which was in many of his plays. Has carried over to our modern Film and media. These example I picked from above are just some of the movies that have theses themes.
There is also this timeless theme within our society and human behaviour what Shakespeare was inspired by and were he got them from was his fellow humans. We all have these themes within our behaviour. We feel guilt, distrust, hate, happiness these are emotions that have been transformed into themes. Macbeth feels tons of guilt after killing the king, but feels he has gone to far to turn back he was in so much pain he felt he could never return to being a normal man again he dug deeper down the dark path that the witches sent him on. He trusted the wrong person.
Through all of these example and if you have watched the movies I mentioned before you will start to understand what I mean. Shakespeare timeless themes are timeless because many of them are emotions and issue humans have. We trust, we feel pain, we feel guilt. Humans feel emotion, we experience tragedy, we feel hurt. To go further I would say these themes are built into ourselves. People at least experience at least one thing in life that makes them feel pain and fear. The more of them you experience the more tolerance you gain. The people who read or watch these plays resonate with the emotion Macbeth and Lady Macbeth experience and fee through out the plays
Competencies:
Analyzing:
This project is the most analyzing I have ever had to do so far academically. Luckily there were some part along the way that made it easier. Translating Shakespearean english is kind of difficult it definitely takes time to do.
Questioning:
One thing I did in this project which I haven’t had before was the questioning of my place in humanity and how I feel and how relate to the character of Macbeth. I have felt pain and guilt so I can begin to relate to Macbeths experiences.
Connections:
The main point of themes is to connect and reach. To have as many people understand and relate to it. That is one thing that Shakespeare plays do amazingly well. I honestly think he wrote them with more then just money and entertainment in mind. His understanding of human emotion, how he writes to invoke emotion is something beyond his time. There is not a play he has wrote that hasn’t related to a human emotion he has written a network of entertainment that plants seed with out minds about how the world around us works. His plays aren’t all happy they aren’t all sad. There is part that any nobody would understand.
Conclusion:
In conclusion we humans absorb a lot of entertainment from cinema, books, people, theatre and media we intake billions of information in the daily. So the way we behave will always be apart of our creation put emotion in almost every creation or idea we come up with. That is the true timelessness of our world. The real reason media is timeless is because the themes that are inside the media will always be able to be related to as-long as humans still feel emotion.