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remindmeofthe) wrote2009-02-26 04:52 pm
remindmeofthe) wrote2009-02-26 04:52 pm
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Occasionally, as an English major, one gets the chance to write something incredibly ridiculous. On Tuesday, I got to write and pass in a paper comparing Hamlet and The Fix. (This was my justification for paying actual money for that bootleg: "It's okay, it's for SCHOOL!")
I think my flist contains a few people as geeky as I am who might be interested in reading this paper, so I figured I'd throw it up here. It's not as thorough as I'd like - it came out to six and a half pages for a five-page assignment, and that was after skipping the comparison of Tina and Ophelia - but I think it's a decent overview. And it does contain a brief summary of The Fix (an incomplete one, but it has what you need to know for the paper), so if you're not familiar with it, it's okay.
Hamlet is a work so famous that it has been spoofed, satirized, imitated, or simply ripped off countless times in its long existence. This seems appropriate, since Shakespeare himself borrowed this and other stories frequently from varying sources. Some Hamlet-inspired works are more obvious than others, and some require closer examination. The 1997 stage musical, The Fix, seems at first to be only loosely based on Hamlet, containing at first glance only the more obvious elements of the original play. The main character's contentious relationship with his uncle, both political and personal, and the scene where he hallucinates his deceased father, are so clearly inspired by Hamlet that it seems easy enough not to look further, and there are so many differences in the story and other satirical references that The Fix often seems to be drawn primarily from a different creative well. However, a closer examination, and strong familiarity with both plays, makes it clear that The Fix is in actuality an aggressively cynical retelling of Hamlet.
The Fix, in brief, tells the story of Cal Chandler, whose mother, Violet, and Uncle Grahame propel him to political prominence after the death of his father, Senator and Presidential candidate Reed Chandler. Cal himself has no political ambitions, and goes along with his family's machinations for the sake of the family name, as the Chandlers are the rough fictional equivalent of the Kennedys in terms of social and political prominence. Cal is photographed in an affair with a singer, Tina McCoy, from a local nightclub; to save his career, Grahame revives the Chandler family's connections to the local mob. Cal becomes despondent in his powerlessness, developing an addiction to heroin after Tina introduces him to the drug, and it is only after circumstances force him to reevaluate his life that he cleans himself up, publicly reveals his association with mob boss Tony Gliardi, and uses his position as Governor to disrupt Gliardi's successful drug market. The play closes with Cal's murder at Gliardi's hands after Gliardi uses Tina, who has returned to work for him after Grahame banished her from Cal's life without his knowledge, to lure him to a private, unguarded location.
The Fix is a work of satire, rife with over-the-top plot developments and character choices. This helps to further bury connections with Hamlet to the casual viewer; after all, associating a political satire musical that is described by its own creators as "trashy" (Horowitz, “Interview”) with a seminal work of English literature is hardly an intuitive conclusion to reach. However, its satirical nature is precisely what allows for its deeper connections to Hamlet. Satire permits more over-the-top and melodramatic plot developments than serious drama can convincingly portray, which in turn lets The Fix become, in many aspects, an exaggeration of Hamlet: Hamlet as soap opera.
Cal Chandler as the Hamlet figure is perhaps the most straightforward character adaptation. His characterization contains less exaggeration of Hamlet’s own personality and plot developments. The characters at a glance seem to be very different. Cal’s lack of ambition extends into all areas of his life: he claims at one point to be “studying for the bar” (John Dempsey, Dana Rowe, The Fix) when in reality he is smoking marijuana and playing air guitar, which contrasts with Hamlet’s desire to return to his schooling in Wittenberg. This lack of scholastic interest is because Cal is either not very smart or not interested in using the intelligence he has. Where Hamlet delights in playing with words and thinking circles around others, particularly those who irritate him, Cal is willing to let others do the heavy intellectual lifting for him, relying instead on his good looks and training in using his charisma.
This, however, is where the differences in the characters end; while their stories are, in many aspects, dissimilar, their responses to their circumstances are very much alike. Each is changed with a responsibility he does not wish to carry out: Hamlet with Claudius’s murder, and Cal with his political career, and playing the public face while his family, and later Gliardi, wield the real power. Both respond at first by alternately accepting and withdrawing from their burdens. Hamlet buries himself in constantly creating new plans, setting them into motion, and then finding a reason why he cannot carry his intentions through to their conclusions. He plays up the “antic disposition” by toying with Polonius and verbally attacking Ophelia, among other things, perhaps more than is necessary to convince people that he is unstable; he sets up the elaborate “Mouse Trap,” which hinges entirely on Claudius’s reaction, and requires a great deal of effort with an equally great potential for no payoff. In The Fix, after Cal loses in his clash with Grahame for power over his life and career, he responds to his loss of control by falling into drug addiction and public misbehavior. Both men find different ways to avoid what they are afraid to face. Interestingly, Hamlet also seems to share Cal’s lack of political ambition. While he resents losing his crown to Claudius (“Excellent, i' faith; of the chameleon's dish: I eat/the air, promise-crammed: you cannot feed capons so” [Shakespeare, Hamlet].), he evinces no interest in actually ascending to the throne and assuming the responsibilities of king.
In the end, both men face reality and accept their responsibilities, knowingly facing their deaths in order to disrupt the corrupt power in charge of their respective areas of governance, Claudius and Gliardi. When Horatio points out to Hamlet that, in accepting Laertes’s challenge, he has effectively agreed to go to his own death, Hamlet agrees and explains that he has made peace with this: “there's a special/providence in the fall of a sparrow. [. . .] the/readiness is all” (Shakespeare). When Grahame observes that Cal’s turning against Gliardi is suicide and pleads with him to changes his mind, Cal is impassive. While Cal’s success is more ambiguous than Hamlet’s - Gliardi survives where Claudius does not - his death is no less a sacrifice than Hamlet’s.
Violet Chandler, by contrast, is far more of an exaggeration of Gertrude than an analog. There is a curious lack of back story in Hamlet regarding Gertrude, and what little is given is from Hamlet’s perspective, and thus not terribly reliable. Gertrude herself is a rather flatly written character, as well. These two shortcomings of the text result in a need for speculation if one wishes to better understand the character and where she is coming from as the play unfolds. Violet is, essentially, what would result if one imagined Gertrude to be power-hungry and ambitious. Violet marries Reed because it places her in a position to have power by proxy; Reed is being groomed to go into politics, with the long-term goal of becoming President. Interestingly, Violet first dates Grahame, who, despite being the older brother, is The Fix’s Claudius analog; however, because Grahame is disabled as a result of childhood polio, he is unable to assume the political life that Reed ends up taking on in his place. Despite this situation, The Fix chooses not to go the obvious route with a love triangle, making Grahame homosexual and his behind-the-scenes alliance with Violet entirely platonic. Thus, when Reed dies, the pair do not marry; instead, they put their collective savvy behind Cal’s career. This all serves to make their relationship, and Violet’s role in her son’s life, more blatantly about getting and keeping power. It is not out of the question to view Gertrude’s marriage to Claudius in a similar light. Shakespeare offers no insight into her motives, and assigning her the cynicism that defines Violet is a reasonable extrapolation, though not the one generally adhered to. Likewise, there is no reason to assume Gertrude carried on an affair with Claudius prior to her husband’s death, and also no reason to assume she did not. Gertrude and Hamlet, Senior are presented as a loving couple, but this presentation is offered by Hamlet in the midst of his idealizing his father, so even that much cannot be taken with any degree of certainty.
There is also, with Violet and Cal, a complete lack of Oedipal tension. While the Oedipal content in Hamlet is subtextual and a matter of much debate, it is impossible to avoid addressing it in any modern take on Hamlet. However, once again, The Fix declines to go the predictable, easy route with this aspect of Hamlet, making a much more controversial storytelling choice: the incestuous sexual tension manifests instead between Cal and Grahame.
Grahame Chandler is arguably the most complexly written character in The Fix, much of which derives from the same exaggerated extrapolation to be found with Violet. Claudius is a simpler character, more clearly defined than Gertrude but similarly lacking in back story. Grahame’s relationship with his brother is lacking in affection, as demonstrated by a flashback sequence to the Chandler brothers’ days attending Harvard, in which Reed repeatedly derides Grahame for his disability and the stutter he is also afflicted with. Hamlet provides no information on Claudius’s relationship with his own brother, but from the small glimpses shown of the former king’s forbidding personality, and of course the fact that Claudius murders him, one might assume that this relationship is less than harmonious. Reed does not die by Grahame’s hand, because Grahame, like Violet, needs Reed to achieve power.
Both characters have complicated, contentious relationships with their nephews, as well. Claudius is soundly rejected by Hamlet when he attempts to offer himself as a father figure; ultimately, he is forced to admit that Hamlet is dangerous to both Claudius’s life and his possession of his crown, and he arranges to have Hamlet killed. It is possible that his professed fondness for Hamlet is sincere, and neither a political show or one put on for Gertrude’s sake; at any rate, he is willing enough to let others be directly responsible for Hamlet’s death, instead of committing the murder himself as he did with his brother. Grahame’s relationship with Cal is primarily personal; at the time of Reed’s death, Grahame has garnered enough professional power that he believes he can attain the judgeship he aspires to, but Violet manipulates his attraction to Cal (which is apparently an open secret within the confines of the Chandler family) to get him to agree to manage Cal’s career.
Initially, unlike with Claudius and Hamlet, this relationship is antagonistic on both sides, with Grahame going so far as to tell Cal, “I don’t like you. As a matter of fact, I despise you” (Dempsey, Rowe). Grahame continues to play the reverse of Claudius as The Fix progresses; where Claudius’s feelings toward Hamlet harden, it becomes increasingly evident that Grahame is, if not precisely in love with Cal, then certainly possessive of and attached to him. He takes a good amount of pleasure in the opportunity to eject Tina from Cal’s life, and in the end, when he realizes that he cannot stop Cal from martyring himself, he weeps. Like Claudius, Grahame becomes responsible for his nephew’s death. He does not directly engineer it, but it is his bringing Gliardi into Cal’s career that ultimately causes Cal’s death. Grahame is defined in large part by his powerlessness. Grahame, in devoting his life first to Reed’s career, and then Cal’s, and ending with nothing to show for it, is a portrait of what Claudius might look like if he failed from the very beginning to take any kind of power. Like Violet, Grahame survives, but he has been so broken by events that he may as well have shared in Claudius’s fate.
If one takes the Freudian approach to the play, the sexual aspect of Grahame and Cal’s relationship - Grahame’s desire is one-sided, but Cal manipulates it as circumstances require; Grahame’s anger over this may be in part what makes him go to Gliardi - is not completely out of left field. There is the scene in Hamlet after Polonius’s death where Hamlet calls Claudius his mother: “My mother: father and mother is man and wife; man/and wife is one flesh; and so, my mother” (Shakespeare). If one presumes that Hamlet is acting in part out of sexual interest in his mother, then it is not unreasonable to take this as at least a show of similar interest in Claudius - more than one production shows Hamlet kissing Claudius at this point. It is a tenuous connection to make to Grahame and Cal, but in a comparison of the two works, it cannot be overlooked.
The Fix, as a work on its own merit, hardly measures up to a work like Hamlet. However, when the plays are compared in terms of content rather than quality, each highlights aspects of the other that only serve to improve enjoyment and understanding. A solid background in familiarity with Hamlet can lend weight to the occasionally awkward and narratively clumsy satire of The Fix, and an exploration of The Fix as a cynical retelling of Hamlet can offer a different view of an old familiar story.
My two favorite things about writing this paper:
* Srs Scholastic Discussion of fictitious gay incest
* The fact that my Works Cited contains a website entitled "Zombie Prom (A New Musical)." Guys, when you are writing about a work as obscure as The Fix, you take your outside sources where you can find 'em.
My two least favorite things about writing this paper:
* As you may have gathered, my professor has a Thing about the Oedipal complex theory; we read Hamlet for his class after reading Oedipus Rex, and also he teaches a class on Freud. I HATE the Oedipal complex theory as applied to Hamlet SO GODDAMN MUCH, but it happens to work in favor of my argument, so I went with it.
* This is my third paper on Hamlet in two semesters. (It should be my fourth, but I never did get my shit together on that assignment last semester.) Good thing I love Hamlet, right? Now can I please have at least another year before I end up studying the fucking thing again?
I think my flist contains a few people as geeky as I am who might be interested in reading this paper, so I figured I'd throw it up here. It's not as thorough as I'd like - it came out to six and a half pages for a five-page assignment, and that was after skipping the comparison of Tina and Ophelia - but I think it's a decent overview. And it does contain a brief summary of The Fix (an incomplete one, but it has what you need to know for the paper), so if you're not familiar with it, it's okay.
Hamlet is a work so famous that it has been spoofed, satirized, imitated, or simply ripped off countless times in its long existence. This seems appropriate, since Shakespeare himself borrowed this and other stories frequently from varying sources. Some Hamlet-inspired works are more obvious than others, and some require closer examination. The 1997 stage musical, The Fix, seems at first to be only loosely based on Hamlet, containing at first glance only the more obvious elements of the original play. The main character's contentious relationship with his uncle, both political and personal, and the scene where he hallucinates his deceased father, are so clearly inspired by Hamlet that it seems easy enough not to look further, and there are so many differences in the story and other satirical references that The Fix often seems to be drawn primarily from a different creative well. However, a closer examination, and strong familiarity with both plays, makes it clear that The Fix is in actuality an aggressively cynical retelling of Hamlet.
The Fix, in brief, tells the story of Cal Chandler, whose mother, Violet, and Uncle Grahame propel him to political prominence after the death of his father, Senator and Presidential candidate Reed Chandler. Cal himself has no political ambitions, and goes along with his family's machinations for the sake of the family name, as the Chandlers are the rough fictional equivalent of the Kennedys in terms of social and political prominence. Cal is photographed in an affair with a singer, Tina McCoy, from a local nightclub; to save his career, Grahame revives the Chandler family's connections to the local mob. Cal becomes despondent in his powerlessness, developing an addiction to heroin after Tina introduces him to the drug, and it is only after circumstances force him to reevaluate his life that he cleans himself up, publicly reveals his association with mob boss Tony Gliardi, and uses his position as Governor to disrupt Gliardi's successful drug market. The play closes with Cal's murder at Gliardi's hands after Gliardi uses Tina, who has returned to work for him after Grahame banished her from Cal's life without his knowledge, to lure him to a private, unguarded location.
The Fix is a work of satire, rife with over-the-top plot developments and character choices. This helps to further bury connections with Hamlet to the casual viewer; after all, associating a political satire musical that is described by its own creators as "trashy" (Horowitz, “Interview”) with a seminal work of English literature is hardly an intuitive conclusion to reach. However, its satirical nature is precisely what allows for its deeper connections to Hamlet. Satire permits more over-the-top and melodramatic plot developments than serious drama can convincingly portray, which in turn lets The Fix become, in many aspects, an exaggeration of Hamlet: Hamlet as soap opera.
Cal Chandler as the Hamlet figure is perhaps the most straightforward character adaptation. His characterization contains less exaggeration of Hamlet’s own personality and plot developments. The characters at a glance seem to be very different. Cal’s lack of ambition extends into all areas of his life: he claims at one point to be “studying for the bar” (John Dempsey, Dana Rowe, The Fix) when in reality he is smoking marijuana and playing air guitar, which contrasts with Hamlet’s desire to return to his schooling in Wittenberg. This lack of scholastic interest is because Cal is either not very smart or not interested in using the intelligence he has. Where Hamlet delights in playing with words and thinking circles around others, particularly those who irritate him, Cal is willing to let others do the heavy intellectual lifting for him, relying instead on his good looks and training in using his charisma.
This, however, is where the differences in the characters end; while their stories are, in many aspects, dissimilar, their responses to their circumstances are very much alike. Each is changed with a responsibility he does not wish to carry out: Hamlet with Claudius’s murder, and Cal with his political career, and playing the public face while his family, and later Gliardi, wield the real power. Both respond at first by alternately accepting and withdrawing from their burdens. Hamlet buries himself in constantly creating new plans, setting them into motion, and then finding a reason why he cannot carry his intentions through to their conclusions. He plays up the “antic disposition” by toying with Polonius and verbally attacking Ophelia, among other things, perhaps more than is necessary to convince people that he is unstable; he sets up the elaborate “Mouse Trap,” which hinges entirely on Claudius’s reaction, and requires a great deal of effort with an equally great potential for no payoff. In The Fix, after Cal loses in his clash with Grahame for power over his life and career, he responds to his loss of control by falling into drug addiction and public misbehavior. Both men find different ways to avoid what they are afraid to face. Interestingly, Hamlet also seems to share Cal’s lack of political ambition. While he resents losing his crown to Claudius (“Excellent, i' faith; of the chameleon's dish: I eat/the air, promise-crammed: you cannot feed capons so” [Shakespeare, Hamlet].), he evinces no interest in actually ascending to the throne and assuming the responsibilities of king.
In the end, both men face reality and accept their responsibilities, knowingly facing their deaths in order to disrupt the corrupt power in charge of their respective areas of governance, Claudius and Gliardi. When Horatio points out to Hamlet that, in accepting Laertes’s challenge, he has effectively agreed to go to his own death, Hamlet agrees and explains that he has made peace with this: “there's a special/providence in the fall of a sparrow. [. . .] the/readiness is all” (Shakespeare). When Grahame observes that Cal’s turning against Gliardi is suicide and pleads with him to changes his mind, Cal is impassive. While Cal’s success is more ambiguous than Hamlet’s - Gliardi survives where Claudius does not - his death is no less a sacrifice than Hamlet’s.
Violet Chandler, by contrast, is far more of an exaggeration of Gertrude than an analog. There is a curious lack of back story in Hamlet regarding Gertrude, and what little is given is from Hamlet’s perspective, and thus not terribly reliable. Gertrude herself is a rather flatly written character, as well. These two shortcomings of the text result in a need for speculation if one wishes to better understand the character and where she is coming from as the play unfolds. Violet is, essentially, what would result if one imagined Gertrude to be power-hungry and ambitious. Violet marries Reed because it places her in a position to have power by proxy; Reed is being groomed to go into politics, with the long-term goal of becoming President. Interestingly, Violet first dates Grahame, who, despite being the older brother, is The Fix’s Claudius analog; however, because Grahame is disabled as a result of childhood polio, he is unable to assume the political life that Reed ends up taking on in his place. Despite this situation, The Fix chooses not to go the obvious route with a love triangle, making Grahame homosexual and his behind-the-scenes alliance with Violet entirely platonic. Thus, when Reed dies, the pair do not marry; instead, they put their collective savvy behind Cal’s career. This all serves to make their relationship, and Violet’s role in her son’s life, more blatantly about getting and keeping power. It is not out of the question to view Gertrude’s marriage to Claudius in a similar light. Shakespeare offers no insight into her motives, and assigning her the cynicism that defines Violet is a reasonable extrapolation, though not the one generally adhered to. Likewise, there is no reason to assume Gertrude carried on an affair with Claudius prior to her husband’s death, and also no reason to assume she did not. Gertrude and Hamlet, Senior are presented as a loving couple, but this presentation is offered by Hamlet in the midst of his idealizing his father, so even that much cannot be taken with any degree of certainty.
There is also, with Violet and Cal, a complete lack of Oedipal tension. While the Oedipal content in Hamlet is subtextual and a matter of much debate, it is impossible to avoid addressing it in any modern take on Hamlet. However, once again, The Fix declines to go the predictable, easy route with this aspect of Hamlet, making a much more controversial storytelling choice: the incestuous sexual tension manifests instead between Cal and Grahame.
Grahame Chandler is arguably the most complexly written character in The Fix, much of which derives from the same exaggerated extrapolation to be found with Violet. Claudius is a simpler character, more clearly defined than Gertrude but similarly lacking in back story. Grahame’s relationship with his brother is lacking in affection, as demonstrated by a flashback sequence to the Chandler brothers’ days attending Harvard, in which Reed repeatedly derides Grahame for his disability and the stutter he is also afflicted with. Hamlet provides no information on Claudius’s relationship with his own brother, but from the small glimpses shown of the former king’s forbidding personality, and of course the fact that Claudius murders him, one might assume that this relationship is less than harmonious. Reed does not die by Grahame’s hand, because Grahame, like Violet, needs Reed to achieve power.
Both characters have complicated, contentious relationships with their nephews, as well. Claudius is soundly rejected by Hamlet when he attempts to offer himself as a father figure; ultimately, he is forced to admit that Hamlet is dangerous to both Claudius’s life and his possession of his crown, and he arranges to have Hamlet killed. It is possible that his professed fondness for Hamlet is sincere, and neither a political show or one put on for Gertrude’s sake; at any rate, he is willing enough to let others be directly responsible for Hamlet’s death, instead of committing the murder himself as he did with his brother. Grahame’s relationship with Cal is primarily personal; at the time of Reed’s death, Grahame has garnered enough professional power that he believes he can attain the judgeship he aspires to, but Violet manipulates his attraction to Cal (which is apparently an open secret within the confines of the Chandler family) to get him to agree to manage Cal’s career.
Initially, unlike with Claudius and Hamlet, this relationship is antagonistic on both sides, with Grahame going so far as to tell Cal, “I don’t like you. As a matter of fact, I despise you” (Dempsey, Rowe). Grahame continues to play the reverse of Claudius as The Fix progresses; where Claudius’s feelings toward Hamlet harden, it becomes increasingly evident that Grahame is, if not precisely in love with Cal, then certainly possessive of and attached to him. He takes a good amount of pleasure in the opportunity to eject Tina from Cal’s life, and in the end, when he realizes that he cannot stop Cal from martyring himself, he weeps. Like Claudius, Grahame becomes responsible for his nephew’s death. He does not directly engineer it, but it is his bringing Gliardi into Cal’s career that ultimately causes Cal’s death. Grahame is defined in large part by his powerlessness. Grahame, in devoting his life first to Reed’s career, and then Cal’s, and ending with nothing to show for it, is a portrait of what Claudius might look like if he failed from the very beginning to take any kind of power. Like Violet, Grahame survives, but he has been so broken by events that he may as well have shared in Claudius’s fate.
If one takes the Freudian approach to the play, the sexual aspect of Grahame and Cal’s relationship - Grahame’s desire is one-sided, but Cal manipulates it as circumstances require; Grahame’s anger over this may be in part what makes him go to Gliardi - is not completely out of left field. There is the scene in Hamlet after Polonius’s death where Hamlet calls Claudius his mother: “My mother: father and mother is man and wife; man/and wife is one flesh; and so, my mother” (Shakespeare). If one presumes that Hamlet is acting in part out of sexual interest in his mother, then it is not unreasonable to take this as at least a show of similar interest in Claudius - more than one production shows Hamlet kissing Claudius at this point. It is a tenuous connection to make to Grahame and Cal, but in a comparison of the two works, it cannot be overlooked.
The Fix, as a work on its own merit, hardly measures up to a work like Hamlet. However, when the plays are compared in terms of content rather than quality, each highlights aspects of the other that only serve to improve enjoyment and understanding. A solid background in familiarity with Hamlet can lend weight to the occasionally awkward and narratively clumsy satire of The Fix, and an exploration of The Fix as a cynical retelling of Hamlet can offer a different view of an old familiar story.
My two favorite things about writing this paper:
* Srs Scholastic Discussion of fictitious gay incest
* The fact that my Works Cited contains a website entitled "Zombie Prom (A New Musical)." Guys, when you are writing about a work as obscure as The Fix, you take your outside sources where you can find 'em.
My two least favorite things about writing this paper:
* As you may have gathered, my professor has a Thing about the Oedipal complex theory; we read Hamlet for his class after reading Oedipus Rex, and also he teaches a class on Freud. I HATE the Oedipal complex theory as applied to Hamlet SO GODDAMN MUCH, but it happens to work in favor of my argument, so I went with it.
* This is my third paper on Hamlet in two semesters. (It should be my fourth, but I never did get my shit together on that assignment last semester.) Good thing I love Hamlet, right? Now can I please have at least another year before I end up studying the fucking thing again?