Fortune cookies taste like icecream cones
Nov. 7th, 2008 12:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethSophocles Electra is good.
Also there's three female characters that talk to each other.
Dear screenplay writers of today: Ur doin it wrong if some dude a few thousand years ago kicks your arse.
There's C who killed Agamenon (Clytemnestra? There's a whole vowel thing going on in there.)
Electra, her daughter
and another C who is C's daughter.
... this is why I need to learn to spell the names.
There's one dutiful loyal daughter who says to obey authority because, basically, it can squish you.
There's one daughter ruled by grief and devotion to her brother.
This is very Antigone and hence potentially useful for exam answers.
But Electra isn't much like Antigone. She does have a few moments of "I'll starve on the doorstep to piss them off!" but she gets over it and decides to go stab her mum herself instead of waiting for her baby brother to get home because, by then, she thinks he's dead.
... Greek Tragedy: Like soap with more stabbing.
So then Orestes turns up and Electra doesn't do stabbing.
She does stand outside and cheerlead it.
... yeah, that annoys me still.
This Electra tells the same bit of story I, er, skimmed over in the Oresteia, because there the story is all Orestes going 'I'll kill her I'll kill her' and really I didn't see anything getting in his way, so I got bored.
Here Electra is constrained by her relative powerlessness and her gender and is waiting for Orestes to get home. But it don't quite make sense to be moping about being treated like a slave. Hmm, she complains she's treated like a slave, but another thing in this one is a difference in seen vs heard, and there's a lot of deceit and trickery involved. We know what Electra says about her treatment. Also that she hasn't been married. And we see her getting in an argument with her mother. Her mother says again that the killing of Agamemnon was about him killing his daughter. E responds with saying it was all ambition, and anyway A did it for the gods, so getting annoyed about it is impious. That's the big argument.
The source of the curse on the house in Agamemnon is all about killing children. And, also, eating them.
The source of the curse in Electra is about cheating in a race, a kind of cheating that leads to deaths.
So one of them uses myth backgrounds to emphasise the killing children and sort of side with C, who wins in that one.
The other uses myth background to emphasise power and cheating, and C loses and dies.
But everyone uses deceit in Electra. Actually, we know C was tricksy in the past, but we see Orestes get all sneaky in the present. Using a lie about how he died that basically calls back to the house-curse-racing thing. Ties him in to it on the victim side.
Lots of interesting going on. Different approaches to the central argument.
Electra kind of pisses me off, as a character. So easy to be :eyeroll: at her. But she saved her baby brother when her mother wanted him dead, she lived without deceit and with open mourning for years and years, she never wavered, and she was certain that Justice was on her side. So that's a bunch of Hero tendencies. She's also very much attached to her brother. Having no husband she has no competing loyalties. That's like Antigone too.
Plays is interesting.
It's half past midnight and I have slept once tonight but it wore off. I should try again.
Also there's three female characters that talk to each other.
Dear screenplay writers of today: Ur doin it wrong if some dude a few thousand years ago kicks your arse.
There's C who killed Agamenon (Clytemnestra? There's a whole vowel thing going on in there.)
Electra, her daughter
and another C who is C's daughter.
... this is why I need to learn to spell the names.
There's one dutiful loyal daughter who says to obey authority because, basically, it can squish you.
There's one daughter ruled by grief and devotion to her brother.
This is very Antigone and hence potentially useful for exam answers.
But Electra isn't much like Antigone. She does have a few moments of "I'll starve on the doorstep to piss them off!" but she gets over it and decides to go stab her mum herself instead of waiting for her baby brother to get home because, by then, she thinks he's dead.
... Greek Tragedy: Like soap with more stabbing.
So then Orestes turns up and Electra doesn't do stabbing.
She does stand outside and cheerlead it.
... yeah, that annoys me still.
This Electra tells the same bit of story I, er, skimmed over in the Oresteia, because there the story is all Orestes going 'I'll kill her I'll kill her' and really I didn't see anything getting in his way, so I got bored.
Here Electra is constrained by her relative powerlessness and her gender and is waiting for Orestes to get home. But it don't quite make sense to be moping about being treated like a slave. Hmm, she complains she's treated like a slave, but another thing in this one is a difference in seen vs heard, and there's a lot of deceit and trickery involved. We know what Electra says about her treatment. Also that she hasn't been married. And we see her getting in an argument with her mother. Her mother says again that the killing of Agamemnon was about him killing his daughter. E responds with saying it was all ambition, and anyway A did it for the gods, so getting annoyed about it is impious. That's the big argument.
The source of the curse on the house in Agamemnon is all about killing children. And, also, eating them.
The source of the curse in Electra is about cheating in a race, a kind of cheating that leads to deaths.
So one of them uses myth backgrounds to emphasise the killing children and sort of side with C, who wins in that one.
The other uses myth background to emphasise power and cheating, and C loses and dies.
But everyone uses deceit in Electra. Actually, we know C was tricksy in the past, but we see Orestes get all sneaky in the present. Using a lie about how he died that basically calls back to the house-curse-racing thing. Ties him in to it on the victim side.
Lots of interesting going on. Different approaches to the central argument.
Electra kind of pisses me off, as a character. So easy to be :eyeroll: at her. But she saved her baby brother when her mother wanted him dead, she lived without deceit and with open mourning for years and years, she never wavered, and she was certain that Justice was on her side. So that's a bunch of Hero tendencies. She's also very much attached to her brother. Having no husband she has no competing loyalties. That's like Antigone too.
Plays is interesting.
It's half past midnight and I have slept once tonight but it wore off. I should try again.