It's been nearly a year since my last post. Thank god no one's actually reading this, or there'd be some disappointment going around. I promised stories from suicide row in my last post, and I'll get to that later on, along with the various comings and goings of life in general, and what's been happening these last eleven months. Big news: kid number two on the way! But that's also for another post.
What I want to talk about today is the problem of being cool. I was never cool in the sense that I was popular, or sought after, or a trend-setter. But I have, for a long time, tried to cultivate coolness. Ironic detachment. The ability to remain unruffled, and unmoved. And I'm realizing how much I missed in the process. How much we all miss, because our culture pushes cool to the point that I believe its hobbling the whole society.
I'll tell you what brings this up. In the last couple of months I've become a fan of Roger Ebert's website, especially his Great Movie essays, which are a biweekly feature. You can get the complete list here . Anyway, tonight I read his essay on Franco Zeferelli's Romeo & Juliet and thought "I bet Netflix has that available for streaming". Sure enough, they do.
If you studied the play in high school, this is probably the film version they showed you. If you are studied in the art of cool, as any High Schooler is, it is ridiculous. The actors cry a lot, the fights go on too long, the camera movements are dated. I chuckled at the nude scene (which has itself inspired ridiculous discussions), and moved on. I hadn't watched it since then, until tonight.
I'm not going to lie: I cried tonight, which surprised me. It's not like the ending came as a shock, and I'm familiar enough with the language to be appreciative, but not moved. No, it was those two teenagers up there, Olivia Hussey and Leonard whiting, 16 and 17 years old, respectively. They were up there feeling, not acting, not reciting, and decidedly not being cool. Now you can say that coolness didn't exist when Shakespeare wrote the dialogue; I say look hard at Mercutio, and tell me he isn't a cool guy.
Romeo & Juliet is taught in High School because people think that teenagers can relate to the characters, but I realized tonight that it shouldn't be. Romeo & Juliet is about teenagers, but it isn't for teenagers. Most teenagers are so bound up in their own narcissism that there's no way they could ever see themselves in those two weirdos going around moaning about their love lives. The play is for us, who have lived through that time and learned to regard our past selves with some objectivity. We can watch those two, and miss the time when we could devote ourselves to wondrous, heedless, deliriously physical love, before all the sparkle was removed by reality. That's why it's so important that they die in the end. If they lived, it would allow for cynical reflections on what lay ahead - the inevitable conflicts of marriage, boredom, financial worries, concerns about the children, and so forth and so on. By ending it there in the tomb, Shakespeare denies us that wry, ironic way out, and turns a pretty story into a monument of its age.
This post is longer than I intended it to be, so let me get to my point. I'm worried that push to be cool has become to powerful. We should feel what we feel and express it when we can. We start our kids early, with snarky bits of postmodernism like Shrek, or God help us, Gnomeo and Juliet. What does it mean when our first experience of a work of great power is a parody of that work? I worry that it shuts us off to that power, that it raises that shield of cool that prevents us from feeling the world or being affected by it. It starts so early, and many never grow out of it, and miss so much, because you don't learn anything from being cool.
What I want to talk about today is the problem of being cool. I was never cool in the sense that I was popular, or sought after, or a trend-setter. But I have, for a long time, tried to cultivate coolness. Ironic detachment. The ability to remain unruffled, and unmoved. And I'm realizing how much I missed in the process. How much we all miss, because our culture pushes cool to the point that I believe its hobbling the whole society.
I'll tell you what brings this up. In the last couple of months I've become a fan of Roger Ebert's website, especially his Great Movie essays, which are a biweekly feature. You can get the complete list here . Anyway, tonight I read his essay on Franco Zeferelli's Romeo & Juliet and thought "I bet Netflix has that available for streaming". Sure enough, they do.
If you studied the play in high school, this is probably the film version they showed you. If you are studied in the art of cool, as any High Schooler is, it is ridiculous. The actors cry a lot, the fights go on too long, the camera movements are dated. I chuckled at the nude scene (which has itself inspired ridiculous discussions), and moved on. I hadn't watched it since then, until tonight.
I'm not going to lie: I cried tonight, which surprised me. It's not like the ending came as a shock, and I'm familiar enough with the language to be appreciative, but not moved. No, it was those two teenagers up there, Olivia Hussey and Leonard whiting, 16 and 17 years old, respectively. They were up there feeling, not acting, not reciting, and decidedly not being cool. Now you can say that coolness didn't exist when Shakespeare wrote the dialogue; I say look hard at Mercutio, and tell me he isn't a cool guy.
Romeo & Juliet is taught in High School because people think that teenagers can relate to the characters, but I realized tonight that it shouldn't be. Romeo & Juliet is about teenagers, but it isn't for teenagers. Most teenagers are so bound up in their own narcissism that there's no way they could ever see themselves in those two weirdos going around moaning about their love lives. The play is for us, who have lived through that time and learned to regard our past selves with some objectivity. We can watch those two, and miss the time when we could devote ourselves to wondrous, heedless, deliriously physical love, before all the sparkle was removed by reality. That's why it's so important that they die in the end. If they lived, it would allow for cynical reflections on what lay ahead - the inevitable conflicts of marriage, boredom, financial worries, concerns about the children, and so forth and so on. By ending it there in the tomb, Shakespeare denies us that wry, ironic way out, and turns a pretty story into a monument of its age.
This post is longer than I intended it to be, so let me get to my point. I'm worried that push to be cool has become to powerful. We should feel what we feel and express it when we can. We start our kids early, with snarky bits of postmodernism like Shrek, or God help us, Gnomeo and Juliet. What does it mean when our first experience of a work of great power is a parody of that work? I worry that it shuts us off to that power, that it raises that shield of cool that prevents us from feeling the world or being affected by it. It starts so early, and many never grow out of it, and miss so much, because you don't learn anything from being cool.
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