How can a character, such as Shakespeare’s’ Othello, be compared to characters in film. For instance, what similarities (physical, psychological, etc) does Othello have to characters that kill on film, such as the characters from the 1995 film, The Usual Suspects.
The focus here should be on what drives these people to kill. Explore economics, manipulation, and corruption. Obviously, these two works have easily identifiable differences, but the objective is to dig into the psychological to show how their different circumstances leads them down the same road. In other words, think of Othello as a character in The Usual Suspects (or vice versa, one of the characters from The Usual Suspects in Othello’s place).
I once listened to a podcast titled “New Evidence Calls into Question William Shakespeare’s Authorship of ‘The Usual Suspects’,” by The Onion. This topic reminds me a lot to that podcast, and how people can come up with crazy ideas disguised as serious matters. – T. Palomino2 years ago
An examination of how dark and morbid the worlds in Shakespeare’s plays are, as they’re depicted in small vignettes and windows through either historical explanation, or character aside and motivation. See Hamlet, for a world that is ravaged by war and suspicion and lies, and see Richard III for a world that is corrupted by the banality of evil and its persuasive charm.
Othello is also a good look at a world that has a very strong/power sense of "justice": the enemy ships are destroyed by a a storm, Othello must have used magic to trick Desdemona into marrying him, the trustworthiness of "close allies".
How does that cynicism reflect Shakespeare’s time and our own with making the plays and stories so long-lasting?
There is a pattern in Shakespeare's plays of characters in disguise or pretending to be other characters in order to advance their status...this could be relative to our own use of deception in our own lives and the way we portray ourselves online. – katrinafowler9 years ago
