Joss Whedon’s "Much Ado About Nothing"

Joss Whedon of The Avengers and Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame has directed a film version of Much Ado About Nothing that's received critical plaudits, and rightfully so. Though the setting is entirely modern with one of the supernumeraries cast as an in house photographer, Shakespeare’s classic figures, the headstrong and the well defended Beatrice (Amy Acker) who loves with “an enraged affection,” and Benedick who declares “’till all graces be in one woman, one woman shall not come in my grace,” are still as Shakespeare had them, charmingly combative and two sides of he same coin. This is not a Shakespeare for our times, but for all time and the contemporaneity exists to facilitate the reading of the text, in such a way that at times you forget you are seeing Shakespeare. The words are there, but any hint of archness is gone and you begin to relate to Shakespearean dialogue the way you would to everyday speech. Whedon’s Much Ado is not the kind of Shakespeare in modern dress that we’ve seen where the plays are interpreted so that we recognize them as allegories of modern angst, as was the case with Peter’s Brook’s l962 production of King Lear, influenced by Jan Kott’s famous essay “King Lear or Endgame.” In this regard the Whedon’s Much Ado achieves the kind of intimacy with a classic text that Andre Gregory, Louis Malle and Wally Shawn did in the film of  Vanya on 42nd Street and Gregory and Shawn are doing in their long awaited production of The Master Builder (some scenes of which were previewed in the recent Andre: Gregory Before and After Dinner). Whedon’s Much Ado makes you laugh and cry and is a reminder that it’s still possible to lose yourself in a Shakespearean text.

Hit & Miss

The Times’ Mike Hale gave a lukewarm review to Hit &Miss, the English made television series “about a hit woman who’s a preoperative transsexual” calling it an “unsuccessful attempt to graft ‘The Crying Game’ onto ‘Party of Five.’" (“She’s Living A Double Life In More Ways Than One,” NYT, 7/10/12). In terms of shock value the scene Hale describes “of the impressively trim body of Chloe Sevigny, and a plainly displayed penis” may rank with Sevigny’s famous fellatio scene with Vincent Gallo in The Brown Bunny. Hale takes the series creator Paul Abbott to task for self-consciously trying to combine “two projects—one about a hit man and one a about a transsexual mother.” Actually this new television series reads like an essay on surrealism. At the very least it has three of the central tenets of the surrealist project: aggression, humor and sexuality. In dreams such elements can meld seamlessly. The incongruity of the two sources of inspiration, family life and assassination, only strengthens the strategy. Back in the sixties the British created an immensely popular television series, The Avengers, a spy series that was basically a surrealist dream. Hopefully Hit & Miss, whose very title exudes  Lautreamont’s famous definition of beauty (that the surrealists glommed onto) as the  “chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table,” will live up to its British predecessor.

The Avengers

The Times quoted Paul McMullan former deputy features editor of Rupert Murdoch’s now defunct News  of the World as telling “a judicial inquiry” that “Phone hacking is a perfectly acceptable tool, given the sacrifices we make, if all we’re trying to do is to get to the truth.” The Times (“British Inquiry Is Told Hacking Is Worthy Tool," NYT, 11/29/11)  quoted McMullan going on to ask if “we really want  to live in a world where the only people who can do the hacking are MI5 and MI6.” And McMullan put the icing on the cake when he commented, “For a brief period of about 30 years, we have actually lived in a free society where we can hack back.” If what the Times described as McMullan’s "jaw-droppingly brazen remarks" seemed beyond the pale, they make sense if you consider him as a character in a forthcoming Thames Television series modeled on The Avengers. You remember that Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg starred in that highly popular sci fi and fantasy show back in the 60’s. Well, we can’t be sure until we have hacked into Rupert Murdoch’s private phone, but who knows? Perhaps all the wild antics McMullan describes which included spending “two weeks locked in a hotel room with Princess Diana’s gym instructor” were inspired by The Avengers. Speaking of  Princess Diana, car chases were all the rage until tragedy struck. “I absolutely loved giving chase to celebrities,” McMullan said. “How many jobs can you have car chases in? Before Diana died, it was such good fun.” McMullen could easily take over the role played by Macnee and how about his comely former superior Rebekah Brooks as Emma Peel? And what will these twenty-first century Avengers  avenge? Of course the fact that only enforcement officials get to spy. As we all know, fantasy sells.

In Depth

Will “boundary violation” ever be restored to its pristine meaning of a border dispute between countries, rather than the current psychological jargonese referring to an intrusion into someone's personal space? It makes you wonder about how language gets hijacked to describe inner states. What is anxiety? What depression? What the depraved indifference to human life of the sociopath? 

   

To be human is to be neurotic, so why refer to something according to Merriam Webster if it only constitutes a slightly lesser form of distortion than psychosis itself? Why does narcissism get such a bad rap? Narcissus was no different than a lot of other people who fall in love with themselves. Those whose interests fall consistently within the self are described as “self involved,” but how do these egotistical individuals differ from so called “normal,” perceiving selves, filled with appetites and desires that are reflective of bodily needs? Is the need to defecate or urinate a sign of self-involvement? Is sexual discharge selfish?

   

An epistemological cop is needed to police the systems of knowledge gathering and categorization. Pop psychology lacks depth, while depth psychology merely describes the epidermis, but lacks guts.

   

Sea Hunt, the popular ‘50s radio program and TV series, was more than an adventure series. It was one of the first televised attempts to represent unconscious thought processes, succeeded by The Avengers with Diana Rigg and Patrick Macnee. Is it more profitable to visit the Museum of Broadcasting than to undertake therapy? It’s certainly less expensive, especially if your disposable income is invested in tax-free municipals.

   

This or that pronunciamento is regarded as a profound meditation on man’s place in the universe. But what can be deeper than the sound of the bubbles an aqualung makes as it accompanies divers under water? What’s more fearful than the clash of metal as a submarine torpedo makes contact with a destroyer? Speaking of depth psychology, Jacqueline Bisset’s opening wet tee shirt seen in The Deep (l977) should be added to the syllabus.