Posted by Tenderdom2
on Mon 18 May 09, 5:56 PM to Tenderdom2's blog.
It's long, but it's not hard.
Somebody mentioned Wating for Godot to me a while ago. I tried reading it once when I was about 19 and got bored after the first three pages. Still, I think as an aspiring pseudo-intellectual I should at least know something about it other than that one of the blokes is called Vladimir and he smokes a pipe (which is all I remembered from when I last looked at it). So yesterday I did what everybody does now instead of getting an education, and looked it up on Wikipedia, where there's a very handy plot summary. Even then I only got through Act I. But that's more than enough to have an opinion on anything, obviously.
What was quite interesting though was the number of different interpretations people have put on it, like they're all trying to figure out what he meant, and also that what he meant just happened to be exactly what they've been saying all along. Bit like religion really innit? (Or is that the point?) Christians, Freudians, Jungists, Existentialists, people that believe the world is painted on the inside of an empty peanut butter jar and we'll never understand life because the ingredients are printed on the outside, etc etc.
Apparently somebody asked Beckett (blokey who wrote it) and he said it's something to do with symbiosis; at another time he said he couldn't understand why people made it so complicated when it was really quite simple. So there you have it. We've no idea what we're doing here so we fiddle with hats to pass the time, just in case something turns up. Oh, and love is just co-dependency; we need other people to take our mind off things, hence the symbiosis. As for the king bloke with the slave, well I've known a ton of people like that. No existentialist angst for them, they just get busy doing stuff. Alan Sugar, for instance. He's a clever guy and could think about things and even clown around if he wanted to, but can't see the point.
Beckett's reticence in the face of all those questions and interpretations makes me wonder, though, whether he knew what he meant either. After all, if he keeps his mouth shut then he can't look like an idiot. Or maybe he's gone a bit Dr Frankenstein - yikes, I've created a monster! But in a pleased kind of way.
Mostly the play is like a little crystal in a liquid which causes the rest of the liquid to make lots of new crystals attached to it. In a rubbish metaphor kind of way.
Anyway, I like to watch stuff and read stuff to pretend that life is exciting and maybe even has a point. I don't need to go and see a play to confirm that life is boring, pointless and halfway through your arse goes numb. I know that already.
Now if you want a really good piece of existentialist entertainment then, weird as it may sound, you should watch Top Gear. No, really. I used to hate it it too, or rather I hated Jeremy Clarkson and thought Top Gear was just for car bores, as indeed it used to be. But they re-jigged it a while ago to make it more interesting, and it's gradually got more and more surreal. One of the best episodes was when Clarkson decided that he liked everything about a Merc except the interior design, so he decided to re-vamp it.
His original objection to the innards was that "you'd never want any of that stuff in your house". You know, all buff leather and plastic fake wood. He got some up-her-own-bum arty French designer to help him, who wanted to make it really cutting-edge, avant-garde and, well, designer-y. So he totally ignored all that and re-built a Merc interior in the style of a country cottage. Lime plaster and stuck-on beams in the doors, a stone-flagged floor, wing-backed chairs and a wood-burning stove. Then got his two mates to test-drive it on the race-track.
Needless to say, the French woman completely failed to get the joke, which made it even better. It was like making a German think we really care who won the war. So much for the French tradition of existentialism.
| 18 May 09, 9:01 PM proccie UK(HP), 6 yrs   |
A classic case of The Emperors new clothes, nobody dares say that there is nothing there and that it is utter shite. Zen S&M: The sound of one hand smacking. | |
| 19 May 09, 1:38 AM Prunesquallor UK(RG), 7 yrs |
No, lots of people say that. In fact some people say it about all good art, from Mozart onwards. | |
| 19 May 09, 9:29 AM Tenderdom2 4 yrs |
Yep, I agree with that. I actually think it's a pretty good play. But it's been stripped down to such bare essentials that it's like a framework, allowing all and sundry to come and hang their own pet theories on. (Just as I have done, without even reading it properly...) Like I said, that's no bad thing; it acts as a catalyst for thought. Whatever it is, I'm against it! - Rufus T. Firefly |
