I was just in the uni cafe when Taylor Swift's 'Love Sotry' came on and gave me something to write about. For many years now I am constantly reminded of how people seem to misinterpret the Shakespearean play Romeo and Juliet. Taylor Swift is a prime example of someone with an, at best, loose understanding of the play and decided that she would focus all her artistic energy into appropriating the "love" aspect of this story.
What am I on about here? Allow me to elaborate. To briefly run over the general plot as most people seem to see it. Romeo and Juliet fall in love despite they're familie's violent rivalry and tragically die trying to run away together. It is forbidden love that is trampled by the pettiness of honour and blah blah blah. All very tear jerky and tragic right? WRONG!
Now here's the way I see it. Romeo and Juliet are a pair of sexually frustrated teens who have never set eyes on a member of the opposite sex before who isn't poor and dirty or related to them. So their hormones kick in and they think they're in love because they can't stop staring at each other from across the room and lusting after the attractive young specimen who apparently can't stop staring either.
Now just as an aside, let my cinicism squash any belief you have in "love at first sight" right here. It doesn't exist. How can it? Seeing a person who makes your heart skip a beat is lust, plain and simple. Love implies a deep understanding and respect between the couple (amoung other things). It's hard to pinpoint exactly what love is but I can tell you right now that it is far too complex for you to be feeling it after a mere 2 seconds of carnal thoughts. Now stop! Don't bother flooding me with your little stories about how you know some old couple who've been happily married for 60 years and love each other just as much as they did the day they met and blah blah blah. Let me suggest this to you. Man and woman meet and are mutually attracted. This mutual attraction tricks their brain into rushing in and buying into the love thing before having a chance to really think about it. Now more often than not this temporal love will not last. This belief in love at first sight is probably the second greatest contributing factor in the whole shotgun wedding scene right after alcohol. Now on a very rare occasion this initial love trick will manage to withstand the scrutiny of your brain well beyond the time of the initial lust. But enough about that and back to the story.
So Romeo and Juliet is a story more about the frivolous nature of youth and the way in which they fail to act rationally because they're too busy trying to fall in love with everything in a desperate attempt to inject some meaning into their cold, hollow and temporal existance. Here's a story of a guy and a girl who have the hots for each other and decide to betray their parents and get married within 24 hours of fist talking to each other. Then they die because they are just a bunch of stupid kids who come up with the flimsiest, success-proof plan that their sex addelled brains could come up with. They enlist the help of the local preacher whom is only to happy to marry off a bunch of kids before they just have sex anyway without gods approval and then they die because they are a pair of dramatic twits who fail to ever communicate properly. How is this a love story? If anything it's sceptical of the merits to the whole buisiness in terms of how it makes people behave like morons. So let me just say that if you plan on writing a love story that parallels this story you should do some throough reading and reflecting beforehand so that you know what you're getting yourself into.
No comments:
Post a Comment