M to the A to the S to the K

Friends, Romans, countrymen--lend me your ear! (so I can eat it)

Creatures, the wilderness is calling us. In this edition, more of my slow-burn Plautus obsession, and notes on the first two seasons of “Yellowjackets.” Plus a small ad.

Roman Laughter Is Creepy… Because Roman Everything Is Creepy

I got into Plautus because of this phenomenal book by Amy Richlin, on the startling ways Plautus gives voice to enslaved people. In Plautus’ time, actors were themselves usually slaves, and some slaves would also be able to see their plays during public festivals. I’ve never been able to see Plautus performed; the closest most of us will come is A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which is an adaptation of “Pseudolus.”

I re-read a couple plays (“Captivi,” probably still my favorite so far, and “Pseudolus”) and read “Casina” and “Amphitryon” for the first time, in David Christensen’s translation. And yes, the violence of slavery and the hope of freedom permeate every single one of these plays, you can’t miss it (unless you want to). Things like this suddenly punctuate the comedy:

A free captive is like a wild bird: give it

Just the slightest chance to fly and it flees,

And you’ll never be able to catch it again.

And the comedy itself is often built on an unexpected twist in status and identity—a slaveholder proclaiming himself the property of his slave, or pretending to be a slave and taking lessons from a “real” slave. There are bits in Plautus that read like the “flagon with the dragon” scene from The Court Jester, except that the pellet with the poison is complete loss of civil rights and name and parents. (Parents, another theme here. The absolute power of the paterfamilias, contrasted with the slaves who are constantly talking about their renowned lineage even though they are parentless by law. Comedy tonight!)

So all that stuff is hilarious, obviously—no, there are some very satisfying overturnings here, and restorations. And this time around, I noticed how often Plautus tosses a line of wisdom in there—something shaped like a statement about how one should live. I didn’t take notes on this, so I may be exaggerating, but I seem to recall that the characters who talk a lot about how you need to meet challenges with a positive attitude (the Americans let’s say) are the citizens, and the characters who talk a lot about how we know little, our actions have mostly unintended consequences, we are not even always able to identify our desires, are the slaves.

This time around I also spent more time with the deeply pleasing metatheater. These characters parody tragic language. They constantly comment on whether their actions and personalities do or don’t fit the conventions of comedy, and it’s often really funny; I guess breaking the fourth wall literally never gets old. All of life is a choice of genre, although you’re probably not the one choosing:

This same play, if you want, I’ll now make from a tragedy

into a comedy, with all the very same verses.

… [I]ndeed, for me to make it a comedy all the way through

where kings and gods come—I don’t judge that a match.

What then? Since a slave also plays a part here

I’ll make it be, just like I said, a tragicomedy.

—“Amphitryon,” tr. Richlin

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Gods of the Lost

My partner and I just finished watching the second season of “Yellowjackets.” In the mid-’90s, a suburban high-school girls’ soccer team is headed to Nationals when their plane crashes in trackless woods. They are not found for eighteen months. (Wait, you say. Can’t they just trace the black box? Whoooo boy.) In the wilderness, the girls change. Or maybe the wilderness is like the Overlook Hotel, and it draws out something that had waited inside them all along. At some point during their ordeal, the girls don animal skins and masks, and they hunt one of their own to the death. And then eat her.

The show switches back and forth between the past and the present day, the team’s 25^th reunion year, when a mysterious reporter (or is she!!!) starts digging into their secrets. Subplots and chains of consequence unfurl, but I don’t care about the specifics of these events; what’s compelling to me in “Yellowjackets” are images and performances. Juliette Lewis as adult Natalie, fresh outta rehab, slurring her walk and drawling her insults. Melanie Lynskey, soft and fluffy and good with a cleaver. Courtney Eaton as teenage Lottie lacing her fingers together behind her back before one of the show’s most disturbing scenes. The camera panning over the woods and into the girls’ snowbound hellscape cabin while Nirvana’s “Something in the Way” plays—a pure crystalline representation of misery. The teen/adult mirroring is eerie, like you’re seeing not the teen trapped inside the adult, but the damaged adult already waiting behind the face of the desperate teen. The spiral into madness is slow, patient, an erosion—with outbreaks of absolute maenad horror like the season one homecoming dance, for girls who may never make it home.

My partner thinks the god of the wilderness is psychological, and she likes the story better that way: “I don’t really believe in gods of the woods, so that isn’t scary to me.” There’s nothing in the story so far that would force you to read it as supernatural, and the idea that a situation can break you—can take you outside of consensus reality with no way back—is pretty terrifying. But I like the story better if there’s something out there. I like The Secret History in part because they go into the woods to meet Dionysos and (imho) they do. I guess I like the idea that we can be awed by something that doesn’t love us, not only by Someone Who does. I have navigated my life mostly by sublimity vs. banality and maybe that’s why I love stories where that is a really, really bad idea.

Apparently that line from The Waste Land, “Who is the third who walks always beside you?”, is an allusion both to Jesus on the road to Emmaus, and the thing that happens to people in survival situations, where they hallucinate (hallucinate?) a companion. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon plays with this idea too, and I’ll always like it: the moment when you realize you are not alone.

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icymi

I review “Lee,” the new biopic of war correspondent and Surrealist visionary Lee Miller. Miller has been a personal lodestar for a long time.

Male comic theater mask from the second century AD (they were still creepy then) photographed by Mary Harrsch at the National Museum of Rome and used under a Creative Commons license.