The Gulling of Malvolio скачать в хорошем качестве

The Gulling of Malvolio

I’ve chosen Act 4 Scene 2 of “Twelfth Night” mostly because I think it embodies the play’s biggest themes in an interesting and hilarious setting. In short these themes are about identity and sense of self. In particular Twelfth Night seems to be about trivializing these concepts. For example, we see at the end of the play almost every member of the romantic pairings disregarding the identity of their respective lovers. Duke Orsino quickly forgets his infatuation with Olivia and marries a woman who moments before was disguised as his male servant Cesario, while Olivia happily embraces Sebastian despite conflating him with Cesario, the person she thought she knew. Neither Malvolio nor Feste were central characters but their interactions here still depict this common theme. In the beginning of the scene Feste sets the mood by rhetorically musing “what is is, but is?” while disguising himself for this prank on Malvolio. He goes on to mock Malvolio, his Puritan identity, and his determination that he is truly sane, all in the name of a prank that exploits his unrequited love for Olivia. His gaslighting of Malvolio, and Malvolio’s despair and confusion, furthers the idea that our sense of self is ultimately pretty shallow and based entirely on mutual recognition. Without interactions from others, we have no basis from which to define ourselves, and without their validation we have no ballast with which to maintain ourselves. My creative interpretation for this scene is more or less a music video performed with Davis Curry, my friend outside the class who happens to know the bass line for Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb,” a song said to be written about their band mate who regressed into his schizophrenic symptoms and lost his sense of self. We ended up adapting the song entirely with vocals and guitar by my brother Blayze and a number of other instruments and effects on garage band, managed by Davis. My sister Carly helped me with editing and videography. Although not a perfect match, the lyrics and the ominous sounds of the song seem to loosely and humorously parallel the context of the scene. We are pantomiming the scene, with our faces concealed for obvious thematic purposes, while accompanied by subtitles and music audio. Through artistic flourishes via editing, a staple of any music video, we hope to emphasize this nihilistic view of the self in a music video that is, like the original scene, both morbid and funny. If present circumstances do not limit us too much we hope to create a final product that illustrates the Shakespearean dark humor in a very modern medium.