Hic Sunt Coriolani
Jun. 18th, 2020 09:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakThe Donmar Coriolanus with Tom Hiddleston in the title role was put up on Youtube. I liked it, with the caveat that I preferred Ralph Fiennes' interpretation - both in the title role and as a production, though the later is a bit unfair since it's a movie, not a stage production, and thus of course can do more in terms of cinematography. Where I think Fiennes as the advantage: Fiennes' Coriolanus really does come across as one of those military types unable to function in civilian society, and thus unable to even go through the motions of campaigning. Hiddleston, despite declaiming all the lines about pride with conviction, still comes across as too sociable for me to believe he couldn't pretend even for five minutes. Also, the Fiennes Coriolanus had Coriolanus and Aufidius mutually obsessed with each other not just in words but by acting, and thus was way slashier, imo as always, while the Dommar Coriolanus had me believe the Aufidius was hung up on good old Gaius Martius, but not vice versa, at least not to the same degree.
What I liked about the Domnar in particular: our scheming duo of Tribunes, who were instantly recognizable politicians, and good for you, production, of making one female. The gratitious shower scene, providing us with the chance to see how hard Tom Hiddleston trained to be cast as an action hero. And, to be fair, the facial acting in the big Volumnia and Coriolanus confrontation where you see just when he makes his decision, knowing it will kill him.
Both productions - both Coriolani? - tried to get around the fact that Virgilia, Coriolanus' wife, has hardly any lines and is completely overshadowed by Volumnia his mother by providing her with a lot of silent reactions to what's going on and with silent interactions with her husband emphasizing physical tenderness between them. (I do suspect this is also done to banish Freudian interpretations of Coriolanus and his mother.) This is most effective in the early scene where Volumnia upon hearing the reports of her son's battle bravery wishes he had even more wounds to distinguish himself, and Virgilia, who is played by Katrine from Borgen, is silently horrified. Now Volumnia, otoh, is a fantastic female Shakespearean role. Not sympathetic, but, like Queen Margaret in the York tetralogy, a gift for an actress. In the Domnar production, I felt they tried to soften her in her big scene, where you don't get the impression she realises that by saving her city, she's also dooming her son, and that her accusations earlier came out of desperation and love. Otoh Vanessa Redgrave in the Fiennes movie played a Volumnia who does realise but does it anyway, and also means every word, and she has that inner hardness. Both make for very affecting scenes, just in different ways.
On to the other Coriolanus, i.e. Snow. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is the Hunger Games prequel published this month, featuring seventeen to eighteen years old Coriolanus Snow, the tenth Hunger Games and a lot of song lyrics: Portrait of the Dictator as a young Sociopath, essentially. Even more than an origin story for Snow, it's an origin story of the Hunger Games as they show up in the trilogy, and that to me was the most interesting part, along with the fact that the novel - which does remain in young Coriolanus' pov, but not in first person, as with the Katniss novels, but in third person - fleshes out the Capitol. Collins is good with the post war society feel; just barely papered over ruins, everyone still very much affected by the war. (Including our villain protagonist, and not just because his family went from rich to genteel poverty - poverty by Capitol standards, which is still laughably privileged when compared with the Districts - but because he grew up with bombings as part of his every day life.) The Games themselves aren't yet the successful high tech media spectacle they'll become, but a post war revenge act that's starting to become routine and which (some) of the Capitol kids are still capable to be appalled by. The arena is truly an old sports arena (with bomb damage), in which the tributes are locked with some weapons in order to kill themselves with. There are no rewards for the "victor". There are few cameras and mikes, but they don't cover the entire arena, and are static. The tributes themselves aren't fetishized and fed before hand but literally locked into cages of the zoo. The interviews, costumes, sponsors and betting system, the mixture of privilege and gilded slavery the victors later life in, in short, the way the Games become a gigantic commercial sports event allowing the audience to "participate" and feel great about themselves by simultanously rooting for "their" tribute of choice and being entirely unbothered by the fact this is a bunch of children forced to slaughter themselves - all this will be invented and added during the course of the story, and I'll give you three guesses as to who does most of the inventing. (As with the original books, there's also some neat media satire and history going on; when it's possible for the first time to bet on a tribute, it's still possible to place your bet in the post office as well as via phone calls, for example.)
In terms of young Coriolanus, I'm not so sure the story works if its aim is to answer as to where human evil comes from, but then I'm not sure that it is. Early on, he's self-centered, a great many of the actions the characters around him interpret as good or compassionate are really caused by him working for his own advantage, but otoh he's not an evil clockwork; he has nightmares, shakes, can be horrified when witnessing sadism on display and believes himself to be attached to several people. By the end of the story, he's set on the course of becoming President Snow with no regrets whatsoever and not a flicker of empathy in sight, and he got there through his own choices. However, even if you didn't already known he'll be the main antagonist of the Hunger Games, I don't think the narrative ever gave me the sense that this particular character would make other choices, so if this is supposed to be a question of nature versus nurture, it's definitely settling on the nature side. I'm just not sure that this was one narrative goal.
We get several characters who are in the same or extremely similar situations Coriolanus is in, and who make different choices. Unlike the Capitol kids Haymitch observes decades later in the movie version, here some of the Capitol teenagers are able to see not just the wrongness in the fate of one particular tribute but of the entire system, and act on it. Incidentally, that we see Capitol society - and later the Peacekeepers in training - not as homogenous but as individuals with differing opinions and ethics is definitely one of the advantages of choosing a a third person Snow pov, as opposed to making this novel's main tribute character the pov.
Trivia: Collins really does like her songs. The novel provides us with the origin for both Katniss' Meadow song and The Hanging Tree, adding a thick layer of irony to the way it'll be later used in Mockingbird, and there are other songs, including a national anthem for Panem. Collins also seems to subscribe to the believe that loving music by itself signals something about human sensitivity and capacity for empathy - young Coriolanus goes from neutral and very occasionally respective on music to actively resenting it through the course of the story, which is one of the marker as to his degree from neutral (neither good nor bad) to evil in his development. Between Hitler's passion for not just Wagner but Franz Lehar and Stalin's love for Mozart (and other composers, and live recordings; see also, the Death of Stalin opening sequence which uses a event), Louis XIV liking ballet so much he performed in it and good old Frederick the Great playing and composing flute music, I really really REALLY doubt that being a despot and loving music is in any way incompatible. But in The Hunger Games verse music and singing has strict positive connections, so that fits within this world.
What I liked about the Domnar in particular: our scheming duo of Tribunes, who were instantly recognizable politicians, and good for you, production, of making one female. The gratitious shower scene, providing us with the chance to see how hard Tom Hiddleston trained to be cast as an action hero. And, to be fair, the facial acting in the big Volumnia and Coriolanus confrontation where you see just when he makes his decision, knowing it will kill him.
Both productions - both Coriolani? - tried to get around the fact that Virgilia, Coriolanus' wife, has hardly any lines and is completely overshadowed by Volumnia his mother by providing her with a lot of silent reactions to what's going on and with silent interactions with her husband emphasizing physical tenderness between them. (I do suspect this is also done to banish Freudian interpretations of Coriolanus and his mother.) This is most effective in the early scene where Volumnia upon hearing the reports of her son's battle bravery wishes he had even more wounds to distinguish himself, and Virgilia, who is played by Katrine from Borgen, is silently horrified. Now Volumnia, otoh, is a fantastic female Shakespearean role. Not sympathetic, but, like Queen Margaret in the York tetralogy, a gift for an actress. In the Domnar production, I felt they tried to soften her in her big scene, where you don't get the impression she realises that by saving her city, she's also dooming her son, and that her accusations earlier came out of desperation and love. Otoh Vanessa Redgrave in the Fiennes movie played a Volumnia who does realise but does it anyway, and also means every word, and she has that inner hardness. Both make for very affecting scenes, just in different ways.
On to the other Coriolanus, i.e. Snow. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is the Hunger Games prequel published this month, featuring seventeen to eighteen years old Coriolanus Snow, the tenth Hunger Games and a lot of song lyrics: Portrait of the Dictator as a young Sociopath, essentially. Even more than an origin story for Snow, it's an origin story of the Hunger Games as they show up in the trilogy, and that to me was the most interesting part, along with the fact that the novel - which does remain in young Coriolanus' pov, but not in first person, as with the Katniss novels, but in third person - fleshes out the Capitol. Collins is good with the post war society feel; just barely papered over ruins, everyone still very much affected by the war. (Including our villain protagonist, and not just because his family went from rich to genteel poverty - poverty by Capitol standards, which is still laughably privileged when compared with the Districts - but because he grew up with bombings as part of his every day life.) The Games themselves aren't yet the successful high tech media spectacle they'll become, but a post war revenge act that's starting to become routine and which (some) of the Capitol kids are still capable to be appalled by. The arena is truly an old sports arena (with bomb damage), in which the tributes are locked with some weapons in order to kill themselves with. There are no rewards for the "victor". There are few cameras and mikes, but they don't cover the entire arena, and are static. The tributes themselves aren't fetishized and fed before hand but literally locked into cages of the zoo. The interviews, costumes, sponsors and betting system, the mixture of privilege and gilded slavery the victors later life in, in short, the way the Games become a gigantic commercial sports event allowing the audience to "participate" and feel great about themselves by simultanously rooting for "their" tribute of choice and being entirely unbothered by the fact this is a bunch of children forced to slaughter themselves - all this will be invented and added during the course of the story, and I'll give you three guesses as to who does most of the inventing. (As with the original books, there's also some neat media satire and history going on; when it's possible for the first time to bet on a tribute, it's still possible to place your bet in the post office as well as via phone calls, for example.)
In terms of young Coriolanus, I'm not so sure the story works if its aim is to answer as to where human evil comes from, but then I'm not sure that it is. Early on, he's self-centered, a great many of the actions the characters around him interpret as good or compassionate are really caused by him working for his own advantage, but otoh he's not an evil clockwork; he has nightmares, shakes, can be horrified when witnessing sadism on display and believes himself to be attached to several people. By the end of the story, he's set on the course of becoming President Snow with no regrets whatsoever and not a flicker of empathy in sight, and he got there through his own choices. However, even if you didn't already known he'll be the main antagonist of the Hunger Games, I don't think the narrative ever gave me the sense that this particular character would make other choices, so if this is supposed to be a question of nature versus nurture, it's definitely settling on the nature side. I'm just not sure that this was one narrative goal.
We get several characters who are in the same or extremely similar situations Coriolanus is in, and who make different choices. Unlike the Capitol kids Haymitch observes decades later in the movie version, here some of the Capitol teenagers are able to see not just the wrongness in the fate of one particular tribute but of the entire system, and act on it. Incidentally, that we see Capitol society - and later the Peacekeepers in training - not as homogenous but as individuals with differing opinions and ethics is definitely one of the advantages of choosing a a third person Snow pov, as opposed to making this novel's main tribute character the pov.
Trivia: Collins really does like her songs. The novel provides us with the origin for both Katniss' Meadow song and The Hanging Tree, adding a thick layer of irony to the way it'll be later used in Mockingbird, and there are other songs, including a national anthem for Panem. Collins also seems to subscribe to the believe that loving music by itself signals something about human sensitivity and capacity for empathy - young Coriolanus goes from neutral and very occasionally respective on music to actively resenting it through the course of the story, which is one of the marker as to his degree from neutral (neither good nor bad) to evil in his development. Between Hitler's passion for not just Wagner but Franz Lehar and Stalin's love for Mozart (and other composers, and live recordings; see also, the Death of Stalin opening sequence which uses a event), Louis XIV liking ballet so much he performed in it and good old Frederick the Great playing and composing flute music, I really really REALLY doubt that being a despot and loving music is in any way incompatible. But in The Hunger Games verse music and singing has strict positive connections, so that fits within this world.
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