Entertainment
Shakespeare's 'The Tempest' illuminates an existential truth revealed by the Los Angeles fires
The sprawling geography of Los Angeles is hard to envision for those who live outside the region. Friends and family members in New York, gripped by apocalyptic images of the fires in 24/7 news reports, have had difficulty accepting that I live far enough away from the hills and the coast to be relatively safe.
“Still OK?” is the text I’ve been answering daily. “Yes, I’m still safe,” I reply, which is truer than I’m still OK, for how can anyone be OK knowing that just a few miles away, people are grieving the loss of their homes, belongings and communities?
The Beverly Hills Flats has become my default home, and it’s here where I’ve been getting reports on the devastating fires. The smoke has been insidious yet manageable with a mask. Facebook posts from acquaintances and former colleagues who have been evacuated or lost homes have brought the situation nearer to me, but it’s hard to imagine the scale of such suffering when you haven’t experienced the destruction firsthand.
Shakespeare helps me envisage the unimaginable, and a speech from “The Tempest” has been running through my mind since images of charred sections of Pacific Palisades and Altadena started circulating. In Act 4, Prospero, the former Duke of Milan who has been exiled to a desert island with daughter Miranda, and his magic book, interrupts his revenge scheme to conjure a supernatural theatrical pageant in honor of the engagement of Miranda and Ferdinand, the son of the king of Naples.
The masque, performed by gentle spirits, enchants the betrothed. But Prospero is jolted into an awareness that Caliban and his confederates are plotting “a foul conspiracy” against his life, and he abruptly ends the show.
“Our revels now are ended,” he tells a dismayed-looking Ferdinand. “These our actors/(As I foretold you) were all spirits, and/Are melted into air, into thin air.”
The lines that Prospero speaks next have been echoing in me with the persistence of an earworm as I have tried to mentally put myself in the place of fellow Angelenos whose homes and neighborhoods have suddenly been erased.
“And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-cappped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”
Shakespeare was accustomed to making the stage a metaphor for life. “All the world’s a stage,/ and all the men and women merely players,” Jaques declares in “As You Like It,” and his melancholy set piece reflects a standard Elizabethan trope that Shakespeare as a man of the theater couldn’t resist.
But in “The Tempest,” Shakespeare takes this proposition a step further, directly equating the ephemeral conjurations of the theater with the transient reality of the audience. Metaphor become actual. The world offstage is no different from the world onstage, no matter the differences in duration. Impermanence is the common denominator.
Those gorgeous palaces and solemn temples, along with the planet itself and all who inhabit it, shall one day disappear and leave not a rack (or “wisp of cloud,” as “The Riverside Shakespeare” defines the word) behind. Prospero’s mind is understandably vexed, but the losses he’s already endured have sharpened his vision.
“We are such stuff as dreams are made on” is a Shakespearean maxim emblazoned on T-shirts and trotted out in high school yearbooks, but the greeting card sentiment can stand only if the line isn’t quoted in full. The notion of our little lives surrounded by sleep is too death-haunted for Hallmark. But those whose lives have been upended by the fires can attest to the truth of what Shakespeare is describing.
A home is first and foremost a shelter designed to protect from the vicissitudes of nature. We are reminded of this basic function when there’s been a failure during a natural disaster. But the spiritual and symbolic aspects of where we live are as vital as the practical protections these lodgings afford.
A home is, after all, a private stage set, imbued with meaning by those who live there. And a neighborhood is made up of a collection of homes, businesses and civic trusts that extend the private imaginings of individuals to the broader community.
These dwellings and districts are indeed compounded of dreams, and all of us know how destabilizing it can be when we move and box up these hopes and fantasies. I moved five times in my first nine years in L.A., and each move brought intimations of mortality that were more unsettling than the physical work of setting up a new home.
As a renter, I don’t perhaps have the same sense of rootedness that those who have invested a portion of their life savings into home ownership. But a recent dispatch on the Los Angeles fires by the Irish writer Colm Tóibín in the London Review of Books helped me understand more personally how the fires jeopardize not only real estate but also identities.
Writing from Highland Park, Tóibín concludes his report with a sad anecdote on the library of iconoclastic writer Gary Indiana that arrived in Los Angeles from New York on Jan. 7. The books were ultimately headed to an artist residence in Altadena.
If the collection “— the signed editions, the rare art books, the weird books, the books Gary treasured — had come a day later, there would have been no address to deliver them to, so they would have been saved. But on that Tuesday, unfortunately, there was still an address.”
Last year, I inherited a library of books from theater critic Gordon Rogoff, a colleague of Indiana’s at the Village Voice. The welcome addition of my mentor’s library compelled me to add more shelves to my already book-crammed apartment.
If I lost my furniture, clothes and apartment, I’d obviously be thrown into a state of emergency. But if I lost my books, I wouldn’t know who I was. It’s how I’ve defined myself as an adult making my way in the world.
The grief of those bearing witness to the fires is more than sympathy. We’ve all been given a shocking lesson in the “baseless fabric of this vision” we call reality but which Prospero recognizes is no more solid than a dream.
Shakespeare, however, doesn’t leave his audience in despair. The play ends with an epilogue in which the protagonist addresses the audience directly, a not uncommon practice in Shakespearean comedy. But in this late romance, as Shakespeare critic Anne Barton has pointed out, Prospero remains in character, courteously asking the audience for release from the island so that he can return to his dukedom.
By the grace of the audience, the play can continue offstage. The material world may be vulnerable to disaster. But our lives are the product of imagination, and that is a zone no inferno can touch.
Movie Reviews
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Entertainment
Universal Music invests $80 million in Bollywood production company
Universal Music Group is investing $80 million for a stake in one of India’s biggest Bollywood production companies, Excel Entertainment Pvt.
Universal Music India, a division of Universal Music Group, will acquire a 30% equity interest in the Mumbai-based movie studio. In the deal, announced Monday, the companies will work together on forthcoming films, series, music and emerging formats.
While getting involved in India’s local film industry, Universal Music will also now receive global distribution rights for all future original soundtracks attached to projects produced or owned by Excel. There are also future plans for the companies to launch an Excel-linked music label that will allow UMG and Universal Music India artists to appear in various Excel titles.
The investment underscores the rapid growth in the Indian entertainment industry.
India is the 15th-largest recorded-music market globally.
Founded by producers Ritesh Sidhwani and Farhan Akhtar in 1999, Excel is responsible for making over 40 different films and scripted shows. Its most popular titles include “Dil Chahta Hai,” “Don” and “Talaash.” The company is currently valued at approximately $290 million.
“India’s entertainment landscape continues to grow from strength to strength, and this is the perfect moment to build meaningful global collaborations,” said Sidhwani and Akhtar in a joint statement. “Together, we aim to take culturally rooted stories to the world.”
Universal Music Group, with its corporate headquarters in the Netherlands and another office in Santa Monica, was founded in 1996. The music giant behind artists like Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish is valued at roughly $48 billion on the U.S. stock market, with shares selling around $25.80.
Movie Reviews
UNTIL DAWN Review
UNTIL DAWN is nicely shot and paced well, with believable performances. However, the movie has a strong humanist worldview featuring gruesome violence, lots of strong foul language, and excessive gore. The violence includes psychopathic killers, people spontaneously exploding, stabbings, kidnapping, demonic possession, and more. The frequent dying over and over in the plot of UNTIL DAWN puts the sanctity of life into question. It forces the characters to conduct abhorrent and unacceptable immoral actions for survival.
Dominant Worldview and Other Worldview Content/Elements:
Strong humanist worldview that twists the concept of modern psychology into a supernatural hellscape with unexplained time loops and reoccurring nightmarish horror filled with excessive violence and gore, but with unexplained pagan supernatural elements (such as a storm circling a house, the appearance of more buildings, the time loop itself, and many more), the time loop perverts the laws of mortality and implies that the consequences of violence, murder, suicide, etc., don’t apply, the psychologist controlling the time loop discusses the situation with modern psychology in vague circles meant to confuse and disorient the nature of the reality in which the victims are trapped, religion or God is not explicitly discussed, but there’s an unexplained cross in front of a house that isn’t explained and a character references the belief that a possessed person cannot become possessed through contact but rather weakness of faith, and some occult content where one woman is a self-described psychic and is into “woo-woo” stuff as another character describes it, she tries to amplify her psychic abilities with help from the others by holding hands and meditation, and she often has strong feelings and seems to have a sense the others do not have, but no worship or symbols are shown, plus a girl dating a guy is said to have previously dated a girl as well as other men;
Foul Language:
At least 101 obscenities (including 62 “f” words), two strong profanities mentioning the name of Jesus, and four light profanities;
Violence:
Very severe violence and gratuitous blood and gore throughout including but not limited to dead bodies, monsters, scarred masked psychopath, stabbing, beating, and people spontaneously exploding;
Sex:
No sex shown, but a person puts on a VHS tape and a pornographic movie is heard playing briefly but not shown, and a woman is said to date a lot of people and one time dated another woman;
Nudity:
No nudity;
Alcohol Use:
No alcohol use;
Smoking and/or Drug Use and Abuse:
No smoking or drugs; and,
Miscellaneous Immorality:
A psychologist is a callous antagonist whose motives are relatively unknown beyond having a morbid curiosity that led to awful experiments and playing games with other people, he purposely keeps people trapped for no known reason other than his sick and twisted observations that end in gruesome murder and unnecessary torture.
One year after her sister Melanie vanished without a trace, Clover and her friends look to find more information about her disappearance. Clues lead them to an abandoned mining town. This place of unimaginable horrors traps them all in a horrifying time loop where they will be murdered again and again.
UNTIL DAWN is nicely shot and paced well, with believable performances, but it has a strong humanist worldview overall with some occult elements is filled with gruesome violence, gore, lots of strong foul language, and a time loop that leads to an increasing amount of horrific murder and unacceptable immoral actions for survival.
The movie begins with a woman named Melanie clawing her way through the dirt with an unknown monster chasing after her. Digging her way out, she looks up to a masked psychopath standing over her with a scythe. She begs him, “No! Please not again. I can’t!” He fatally stabs her without a thought. It cuts to the main title, and an hourglass is shown with a ticking clock sound and unsettling music.
Cut to a group pf people in a red car driving up a winding mountain, an obvious nod to THE SHINING. It’s been one year after Clover’s sister Melanie vanished without a trace. The group consists of Max, Nina, Megan, Abe, and Clover. Shortly after their mother died, Melanie had decided to start a new life in New York. Clover decided to stay, which created tension between the sisters before Melanie left.
Clover and her friends are looking for more information about her disappearance. Their last stop is the last place she was seen in a video message taken in front of a middle-of-nowhere gas station. Megan, a proclaimed psychic, wants to join hands outside and see if they can feel any mystical energy regarding Melanie. Their attempt is cut short when an RV blares its horn and almost hits them, scaring them all.
Clover goes inside the gas station for a cup of coffee while the others talk outside. Clover asks the man behind the register if he worked here last year. After confirming he’s been working there for years, she shows him a picture of Melanie from the video. He asks if she was missing and clarifies saying that Clover is not the first to come asking. When she asks if many people around here go missing, he says people “get in trouble” in Glore Valley. As their only lead, the group decides to go there and stick together.
Nervously driving to the valley in an increasingly dangerous storm, the group begins to question what they are doing. Suddenly the storm stops but is still raging behind them. They park in front of a house with a “Welcome Center” sign, with the storm circling around the area but leaving the house dry. Confused, they get out of the car and look around. Nina decides to see if there’s anyone inside so they can come up with a plan. Everyone goes in except Clover, who walks up to the strange rain wall.
Inside the house, they find a dated and dusty interior. The power and water don’t work, and they conclude that they are the first people to come there in years. There is a strange hourglass with a skull on the wall. Checking the guest book, Nina finds Melanie’s name signed multiple times, with increasingly shaky handwriting. In another room, Abe finds many missing posters with faces on a bulletin board and finds poster with Melanie’s face.
Outside, Clover thinks she sees a person in the rain. She also hears Melanie’s voice and runs after it. Concerned, Max calls after her and he pulls her back in. As Nina signs the guestbook, the sun suddenly sets and the clock starts ticking.
Inside the house now with the hourglass turned over, they try to understand what’s happening. The car is out in the rain now with someone revving the engine threateningly. Some of them go to the dark basement, where the lights don’t work. There is an eerie sense of dread as Abe goes to check out a noise, and Nina finds a scarred and masked psychopath standing in a room as the top half of Abe’s body falls to the ground.
Hearing the commotion upstairs, the others go to see what happened and Max spots the killer. They run to hide, and the apparently invincible psychopath horrifically stabs each of them as they try to fight back. The sand in the hourglass runs back, as each character returns to where they were when Nina originally signed the book (she now signs it a second time). They remember what had just taken place, and how they were all murdered. Clearly stuck in this time loop escape room situation, they will now have to figure out how to escape this terrifying hellscape as the situations get worse with every loop.
UNTIL DAWN is nicely shot and paced well, with believable performances. However, the movie has a strong humanist worldview featuring gruesome violence, lots of strong foul language, and excessive gore. The violence includes psychopathic killers, people spontaneously exploding, stabbings, kidnapping, demonic possession, and more. The frequent dying over and over in the plot puts the sanctity of life into question. It forces the characters to conduct abhorrent and unacceptable immoral actions for survival.
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