Notes on 'Othello'
Some thoughts on Shakespeare's play after seeing the faithful 1995 movie, the recent Broadway production, and the 2001 modern reimagining.
I watched quite a bit of Shakespeare’s Othello in the past month. My wife and I were able to score relatively affordable tickets for the recent Broadway production starring Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal, so we decided to revisit the 1995 movie starring Laurence Fishburne and Kenneth Branagh and Tim Blake Nelson’s modern reimagining of O starring Mekhi Phifer and Josh Hartnett.
The material still feels incredibly relevant as entitled white men sneer at people of color and whine about “DEI hires.” Of course, an adaptation suitable to our current moment would need to make Iago much dumber.
Iago: im gonna to lie to Roderigo to make him think he has a chance with Desdemona, get Cassio drunk to lose his job, convince him to go begging to Desdemona to get it back, make it look like the two of them are hooking up behind Othello’s back, and then make Othello so jealous he kills Desdemona loooooool
Roderigo: you sent this to the group chat
Cassio: what the hell man
Desdemona: 😳
Othello: wtf, dude
Jeffrey Goldberg, Editor-in-Chief of The Atlantic: …
If you want to get a good baseline on the material (outside of seeing a staged production), the 1995 film is a great place to start. It’s a traditional setting, but it looks incredible with Branagh giving my favorite performance of his career as Iago. It was a smart move by writer-director Oliver Parker to use the characters’ asides as fourth-wall breaks, which makes the viewer feel more complicit in Iago’s duplicity. We become his co-conspirators, caught up in both disgust at his actions and the thrill of seeing his machinations come together.
Having never seen Othello on stage, I was already amped to see a live performance, but of course, seeing a legend like Washington take on the title role was an experience we couldn’t miss. Now having seen it, my mini review is that it’s still worth seeing for Washington as Othello, but there are issues with the surrounding production. The rest of the cast is solid, and I like Gyllenhaal’s take on Iago as more scorned friend than vengeful colleague, but only Washington seemed to have true mastery of Shakespeare’s language. For everyone else on stage, they seemed to rush to keep up with the lines, never quite fully bringing them to life. But for Washington, Shakespeare’s words flowed through him, and he controlled the current. Bending the Bard’s dialogue to your will isn’t a skill that all actors possess, but Washington made it look effortless.
I also had a bit of an issue with director Kenny Leon’s approach. I didn’t necessarily mind the contemporary military setting, but as my wife pointed out, clothing everyone in desert military fatigues constantly flattened out the look of the production, although I did like both the production design as well as the lighting that pushed the duplicitous nature and inner conflict of the characters.
Where I was taken slightly aback was the audience’s reaction. I do wonder if modern audiences understand how to sit with tragic stories in public, and if the frequent titters of laughter came from their discomfort. Still, the full title of the play is “The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice,” and yet even when the play reached its violent and sad conclusion, there were still laughs from the audience. It was weird, and I’m not sure there’s any real cure for it. The laughs didn’t ruin the experience, but it did leave me wondering what play these viewers thought they were watching.
After returning home, we decided to pop on O, which neither of us had watched since our college days, and was now streaming on The Criterion Channel as part of a lineup recognizing Nelson’s directorial work. I would easily place it alongside the best film adaptations of Shakespeare’s work, and I feel like its relative anonymity is because Miramax bungled the release. It was originally set for release in 1999, but was shelved because of the shooting at Columbine, and while I understand the need to be sensitive, the fact that it was eventually distributed by Lionsgate signals that this was more about Miramax’s frequent clumsiness with material that didn’t fit its Oscar aspirations.
It’s a film that’s very much worth your time. Brad Kaaya's script is a sharp, insightful resetting of the story into a white boarding school that celebrates its lone Black athlete. It touches on how white appreciation for Black excellence comes through not only a transactional lens (you’re our hero as long as you play basketball well), but also where the white characters feel entitled to a savior role regardless of the Black character’s fuller humanity. The film also adds a nice wrinkle by rooting the Iago character’s jealousy in his longing for his father’s approval.
Othello will continue to resonate, especially in America, because of what it says about Black people in white spaces. Shakespeare understood the inherent resentment of a dominant racial class that cannot brook those it deems as “outsiders” reaching a higher station. Not simply a plea for tolerance, Othello examines how Iago can bring out the worst in everyone, playing on their prejudices and fears as a manifestation of his own resentment. As Iago says, “I'll pour this pestilence into his ear.” For us, that pestilence is now a steady stream, and we’d be wise to recognize the desires of those who pour it.
What I’m Watching
My wife and I tore through The Four Seasons, Netflix’s miniseries remake of Alan Alda’s 1981 movie. Tina Fey co-created the show with Lang Fisher and Tracey Wigfield, and while it’s funny, it’s a different kind of comedy for Fey that still bears her wit and comic bite. The show takes place across four seasons as a friend group of three couples deals with not only the fallout of one couple splitting up, but the stresses and fractures in their own marriages. The whole cast is terrific, with Fey having amazing comic chemistry with Colman Domingo, and Kerri Kenney-Silver, who I mostly know from The State and Reno 911!, delivering a great dramatic turn.
The second season of Nathan Fielder’s HBO comedy series The Rehearsal is somehow even more unhinged than the first, and I’m loving it. The arc this season is ostensibly about helping communication between pilots and co-pilots to prevent plane crashes, but the way it spirals out from there is constantly surprising and hilarious. Between this and The Curse, there’s a growing Lynchian vibe that’s coming into Fielder’s work while also remaining satirically pointed about contemporary hypocrisies. I know it’s not everyone’s speed, but I feel like HBO should give Fielder anything he wants to keep making this show.
I’ll have much more to say about Andor once the series wraps, but even three-quarters of the way through this second season, I’m confident saying this is easily one of the best things that’s ever come out of Star Wars. As I said about the first season, it’s not just great for a Star Wars series—it’s great television, period. There’s a level of maturity here that feels both surprising yet completely organic to the story Tony Gilroy is telling. The way the show maps out compelling arcs for main characters down to those who only pass through a few episodes is stunning, and it’s rare for a prequel to be so riveting when we know the fate of the eponymous hero.
What I’m Reading
I’m on a bit of a pulp crime kick at the moment, and quite enjoying myself. I liked Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, although Philip Marlowe’s personality is like a stiff drink—bracing and potent, but you wouldn’t want to down his stories one after another. Then I moved on to James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice since I love the 1946 John Garfield/Lana Turner movie. The book is a short, sweet read, and I love how Cain leans into how these two people can’t escape their dark fates. I’m now on to Dashiell Hammett’s The Dain Curse. It’s been a minute since I’ve read any of Hammett’s stuff. I love The Maltese Falcon and Red Harvest, but ran a little lukewarm on The Glass Key and The Thin Man, so I’m curious to see how this one shakes out.
In other reads:
The Evolution of the Alpha Male Aesthetic by Derek Guy [Bloomberg] - A great little history of male fashion and how we’ve arrived at our current moment of insecure men who spend half the day in the gym, mainline HGH, and wear a shirt so tight it appears to be a child’s polo. Of course, the larger question surrounding all of this is, “Why?” How did we come to revere the muscle man, and how does their current look tie into what they’re communicating to the world?
Meet the Alpha Male Bros Influencing Your Sales Team by Sam Blum [Inc] - Picking up from that, Blum’s article examines the attitudes of these so-called alphas and the archaic values they espouse as a means of success. Looking at these two articles, I feel like we’ve reached a level of caricature in modern masculinity where those men clinging to outdated ideas (never show any emotion other than anger, assert dominance at all times, etc.) have now ballooned those concepts for a social media age where they’re outsized to be immediately apparent.
What I’m Hearing
I finished listening to the new season of You Must Remember This, “The Old Man Is Still Alive,” and it was a fascinating approach by Karina Longworth to examine the work of the Studio System’s auteur directors by looking at not only their work in their later years, but work that was made after the studio system collapsed. This led to movies that were weird and perhaps unappreciated. Moreover, it shined a light on films that deserve another look, like William Wyler’s The Liberation of L.B. Jones or Billy Wilder’s Fedora. Plus, I got to hear Longworth’s impressions of John Huston and Alfred Hitchcock. You don’t get that on other movie podcasts.
What I’m Playing
I’ll have a longer, spoilery piece on Blue Prince for my paid subscribers on Friday, but I beat the main quest this past weekend, and I have to admit the game lived up to the hype. While it has clear influences from puzzle games past like Myst and first-person story games like Gone Home, it also feels like an evolution where the way it weaves in other genres like deck-builders and roguelikes gives it a distinct personality. I’ve played games where I felt like I got better because of muscle memory or I hit upon the right strategies, but Blue Prince made me feel like I was getting smarter even if I couldn’t nail every underlying puzzle without a bit of help from online guides (dartboard math puzzle: you are the bane of my existence).