Dream, Reality, Hamlet, Sea Shanties, Hanks
Let's go to some unpleasant places with occasional breaks
If you’re directing a play or a movie, you don’t want to steer an actor toward a result in their acting, you want to help them find the reality of the scene and let whatever results from that come naturally and honestly.
For instance, don’t ask the actor to make it funnier. That’s a result. Help them find what’s happening in the script and how it intersects with their character. Then they’ll play something truthful and if it’s been set up to be funny by the material, it will be. Don’t ask the actor to cry, instead make something honest and then crying will happen or it won’t but it will be better art because the performer and the audience will understand the reality of what’s happening.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech is masterful. It should be honored and studied and treasured. But it’s always bugged me that only that one refrain, the title track as it were, the hit song from the end of the speech, is what’s brought up. We honor Dr. King this Monday in January but in a lot of places we act like he ever only made one very short speech, talked only about a nice dream, and left the stage. Not so. He stood for a lot. And the issue of race in America IS a lot.
So why is that one part of that one speech played the most? Because it’s a result. White America wants to get to the happy ending, the part where “my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” White America wants to skip the part where the brutal truth of the present moment is recognized, past all the work that needs to get done, and just think about that pleasant future.
If you blow off the full reality that Hamlet is in during the play, if you fail to understand the horror of your uncle killing your father and marrying your mother and your father’s ghost appearing, then “To be or not to be” is hollow. It’s a cliche. It’s not the complete but honest nightmare that the moment should be when Hamlet asks if we are all at the mercy of far greater forces and the only decision is whether to be swept away by those forces or die to avoid them. We need to understand the scene.
You can’t tell the actor playing Hamlet to just be sad or to cry. You have to ask the actor to fully grasp and feel the weight of what’s been happening.
As I said, “I Have a Dream” is masterful. And dreaming of a better time is certainly helpful and noble. But even in that one speech, King doesn’t mention a dream until he lays out the reality of the scene.
But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land.
Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. And there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.
We cannot be satisfied as long as the negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their self-hood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating: "For Whites Only."
The Dream in the speech is set up against the ugly reality of the present. The forms of racism have changed somewhat but the reality is still very much with America every single day. I can’t judge whether “it” has gotten “better” because I’m pretty sure those terms are too broad to be useful.
But anyone who wants to help direct the country into a future would be best served by looking at what’s happening in the story instead of pinning it all on a result.
Here are some Martin Luther King, Jr. speeches that you may not be nearly as familiar with as “I Have a Dream” (that one is in there too).
You may have seen something about sea shanties popping up in your social media here and there, which is notable because old Scottish whaling songs rarely burn up the charts. Not like before. Here is an explainer, packed with truly delightful music.
I got this link from kottke.org, a blog from Jason Kottke that I’ve been checking daily for oh so many years because it offers delight on the regular and I like delight. Jason asks, “How do we get rid of hate speech and plans for insurrection on social media but keep joyful stuff like this?” And that is a good question.
I’ve been thinking about the enormous shared trauma of covid and the instability in the White House that has shaken so many people the last four years. I think about it all the time. And so I tweeted
And that tweet really caught on, aided by some retweets and quote tweets by folks like Patton Oswalt, who said it made him think of the last scene in Captain Phillips. I’ve thought so too and wrote about it here.
Here’s the scene talked about. It’s pretty intense.
So really, Tom Hanks is playing all of us. That’s a way to think about it. And hey! Tom Hanks is playing us! You’re not so special now, MISTER ROGERS.
This is a good essay by Jake Tapper…
and it highlights one of the reasons why I think so many people are in such rough shape mentally. People inside the system are working to destroy the system. American democracy has historically existed as a truce between opponents. Ideally, it should function as a place where the best ideas emerge from two opposing but equal sides, where the most one-sided and marginal ideas are pushed out of the way.
But there are white supremacists acting at very high levels as part of a movement to knock it all down. And if you’re anyone, but especially if you have a turbulent mind, it’s a little FUCKING HARD TO RELAX in a situation like that.
Here’s something pleasant and silly.