Category: Internet

Creativity, Danger, and Internet Culture

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I keep finding myself surprised by the appearance of things in Shakespeare’s plays that have a ton of relevance to contemporary culture. For example, in All’s Well that Ends Well there is a scene where they prank a soldier. Prank culture has a big place on the Internet, too. Nelk Boys, the Logan Bros, Chad and JT: these are the children of Jackass, the offspring of Punk’d, but they have a four hundred- and twenty-year-old ancestor in Shakespeare’s play.

One of the great things about studying Shakespeare is the mental effort it takes to figure out what is happening as you are led through multiple plots that interweave and are only known through dialogue. We must decipher the stories and their relevance through what characters say to each other. In the case of All’s Well, we hear the soldiers plot out the prank ahead of time. They want to test their friend’s loyalty, so they plan to have him ambushed and held hostage so that he thinks he has been captured by the enemy, but it will be his fellow soldiers in disguise. 

Helena also pulls a kind of trick on Bertram. She switches places with the woman he is trying to have sex with, and she gets him to impregnate her. This is a prank with much more serious consequences, and it is the moral question of the play. Through this dynamic, Shakespeare creates an opportunity to ask a lot of interesting questions. There are debates to be had about the morality of the character’s actions.

One of the problems in our culture today is the changing line between culture and life. Shakespeare wrote plays that were performed in a theater. Nobody gets pregnant or is held hostage. One of the great things about self-made celebrities on the Internet is that they have a ton of creative freedom, because they did it their way. The downside to that freedom is a lack of support or connection to a sustainable business model. Once a movement starts making a lot of money and the players involved depend upon that income it becomes hard to make certain changes. There is a momentum to success that is hard to control.

There is also an escalation of the stakes. People study what performs well on YouTube, for example, and then you get someone like Mr. Beast who constantly feeds the algorithm exactly the kind of stuff it wants. Mr. Beast is performing stunts, not pranks, and this is a more sustainable model. Mr. Beast has an interesting combination of fantasy and reality at work in his videos and he does outlandish and absurdly expensive things, but they also take a lot of discipline and endurance.

Partly, this desire for reality that is shown in pranks and stunts is due to the ungrounded aspect of Internet culture. Because it is a potentially global stage, the internet attracts evermore extreme types of content where the stakes are real. We see people hanging with one hand from the edge of skyscrapers, walking a slack line across an impossibly huge canyon, snowboarding down basically vertical mountains of snow, and so many other death-defying acts.  The fear of death is universally compelling. 

So is sex appeal. If sex sells, it’s because people demand it. The attention economy is flooded with prurient content. The sexual trick in All’s Well works because Bertram is so damned horny. Helena knows it will work, too. She instructs the woman he is trying to screw how to get him to give her his ring, and he does it the dummy. 

Helena manipulates Bertram into marrying her and getting her pregnant through political power and sexual deception. Bertram is a character who represents something you see a lot of today. He is a guy who desires freedom because his life is ironically very unfree. Bertram’s retreat into bro culture shows just how defeated he is. 

It is super interesting to witness and participate in the cultural revolution we are experiencing. I believe that this is an early renaissance of internet culture and some of the characters we are watching are going to innovate and produce work that will be worth of studying far into the future.

My hope is that we will course correct away from higher and higher stakes and veer away from the potential for devastating consequences and instead we will raise the bar by focusing on developing talent and style. Instead of being impressed by someone who is so willing to risk their life, we could be celebrating things that are extremely hard to do, but that are good for life. Mr. Beast learned by studying the YouTube algorithm and now younger YouTubers are learning by watching him, so who oversees this thing? Creative control is the scary thing. Going to the edge of a building is obvious, compelling, and ultimately stupid. Going beyond the known and accepted ideas is scarier and has more potential to break new ground.

We have so many insanely terrifying and challenging problems we could work on tackling. Mr. Beast has a philanthropic component to his content that has the greatest hope to lead this pack of wild creators towards something more sustainable. By using the media to do philanthropic things in the world, he sets a precedent for achieving success by helping other people. The easy and obvious thing is to prove our courage by showing we are not afraid to risk our lives, but the harder and ultimately more rewarding thing is to prove our courage by showing we are not afraid to commit to challenging ourselves creatively instead of with danger.

All’s Well that Sends Well

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If you are looking for stories from Literature with strong women characters, Shakespeare’s Comedies are driven by them. The heroine of All’s Well That Ends Well is named Helena and she is the opposite of Helen of Troy, the face that sent a thousand ships sailing. Helena does not get kidnapped; she isn’t a passive character at all. To the contrary, she is the one who sends the plot into motion and drives it to the outcome.

In today’s context, Helena would be considered a #bossbitch, a common way to refer to alpha females. I would say she’s a strong woman, a strong character, generally. The comedian who immediately comes to mind is Kerryn Feehan. She could bring this role to life and there’s no question that Luis J. Gomez could destroy the part of Bertram. I’m trying not to force the casting of any of these plays. I know that when I study them all enough, the right people will click into place in my mind. People think that they know Shakespeare, but I’m not so sure they do. I keep learning wild new things every play I study. This one has some out-there ideas.

The thing about Shakespeare is that most people read a few plays at most. They are always selected from the same list of greatest hits. A lot of the more obscure plays, like All’s Well, are full of interesting details. For example, the heroine in this play uses sexual deceit to rape her husband to get pregnant by him. If that sounds weird, it is. Her hubby, Bertram, is an infamous fuck-boi who abandons his newly married wife to go to war in Italy so he can sleep around with other women. She infiltrates his plan, uses a woman to seduce him into a sexual encounter and then switches places with her to be impregnated. Now, this is an aggressive strategy, but it works.

She also trapped him into marriage in the first place, which is why he is so eager to leave. How? She cured the king of his hemorrhoids. He had an anal fissure and she pushed that prolapse back in place. She probably pegged the king if we’re being honest. The result? She gets to marry whomever she wants, and she chooses Bertram.

Luis J. Gomez would be so funny as Bertram because he embodies the “real ass dude” side of comedy. Gomez understands implicitly how this kind of comedy works. His instinct for absurd self-assertion would energize the role with the kind of tension necessary to empathize with the character. That’s Gomez’s great gift: getting you to like him despite his tendency to offend because he’s unafraid to be vulnerable. He’s a punk rock entrepreneur and comic, a free speech advocate, and someone who finds humor in the least acceptable places.

That’s the trick of playing Bertram. You must get the audience to like him despite the shady things he does. Why is Helena willing to go to such extreme lengths to have him for herself? There must be something magnetizing about the actor who plays Bertram and Luis’s attitude would translate well. I don’t know Luis J. Gomez, but I’m a fan of his comedy and I think that his matter-of-fact straightforward I-am-who-I-am energy would absolutely send this role into the ether.

Kerryn Feehan started an Only Fans account and named her podcast Only Feehans. Not only is that funny, but it’s also smart and that’s why she would make such a good Helena. Instead of worrying about what people might think, she chose a path to self-empowerment and that is exactly what Helena does in the play. She uses sex and manipulates men to get what she wants, and we love her for it. 

This play has been the hardest to listen to, by far, mainly because the plot is so confusing, and it is hard to keep track of the language. I know that by the end of the week after listening to it at least seven times I will know it well. Studying Shakespeare enriches how you see the world around you because the plays are such fun and artful illustrations of how social dynamics work. They remind you that you are part of this bigger picture, and if you can learn how the chess board works, then you can make moves to your advantage. They can teach you how to send well. 

As You Neg It: Shakespeare and the Psychology of Attraction

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In Shakespeare’s play, As You Like It, we see a pattern of interaction that illustrates something common in our culture, today. The practice of disingenuously criticizing someone to achieve a psychological effect, or negging, is shown through Rosalind’s interactions with Orlando and with Phoebe. She uses false criticism to create a power dynamic with both characters.

With Orlando, she is costumed as a man, and she guides the conversation and uses it to test him. She questions him, negating his declarations of love as nonsense. Orlando, in turn, asks her if she is from the forest, and she says yes. When he suggests that her pattern of speech is too educated to belong to these parts, she explains that she was educated by an uncle who also happened to be an expert in courtly love. Her lies become part of the game. She positions herself as an expert, even though she is pretending to be foreign to the court and questions his authenticity, turning the conversation back to interrogating him. 

Through her questioning his integrity, she manipulates him into working to prove himself. He responds by giving her more of what she wants: evidence of his feelings for Rosalind. A master of manipulation, Rosalind leads Orlando around like a lion on a leash lashing him with her tongue. It is an erotic exchange, as well. Rosalind’s negging includes assuring him that she would likely sleep with 20 or so men like him if they were married. She tortures him with the idea of her infidelity to test his true feelings.

The layers of deception and identity in Rosalind demonstrate how gender in Shakespeare is a performance of power. He uses cultural norms and customs to present an image of gender that the public reads and believes to be true within the context of the play. Many characters in Shakespeare’s comedies use costume to change genders and, in this case, Rosalind is disguised as a rural dude named Ganymede who is then pretending to be Rosalind to Orlando for him to practice expressing his love. She is pretending to be a man who is pretending to be her, a kind of double negative.

Ironically, this gives her the opportunity to be herself without any exposure. She is a spy watching her future husband react to her ideas. By negging him, by questioning his character and his devotion to love, she also eggs him on. She puts fuel on the fire. She gets to see what he is made of and how he feels about her.

Rosalind, while in disguise as Ganymede, also has a strange encounter with a young woman in the forest. Phoebe is actively rejecting the courtship of a suitor named Sylvius. With not much else to do in the woods, Rosalind is there for the sport of it. She is there to be entertained by their unhappy love connection and to play a trickster kind of role in their affairs. She interrupts their conversation and starts to criticize Phoebe suggesting that she should take the offer Sylvius is making because she is not beautiful enough to do better.

Phoebe’s response is to fall in love with Ganymede. Rosalind explains the psychology behind this reversal. Sylvius was being overly complimentary. He was making Phoebe think that she was better than she is. He was falsely flattering her, and it had the effect of making her think too highly of herself and that she was better than him. Because Sylvius has been worshipping her, she sees him as subordinate.  When Rosalind as Ganymede dresses her down, she feels more attracted to “him,” because his judgmental speech suggests that he is better than her. She is attracted to being negged because it makes her think she is with someone superior. 

We see this kind of cynical darkly humorous stance often on Twitter or generally online. We are pretending to laugh so we aren’t seen crying. We perform wokeness so nobody questions our complicity. We neg our crush so they will give us some attention. We know it works, but does it work to our advantage? What is that pattern keeping us from doing or knowing? 

Romantic love is a drug and a form of madness in Shakespeare. We see characters behaving in uncharacteristic fashion, lying, and deceiving people around them to pursue the feeling of being in love. This is much different than the effect of negging. Rosalind loves Orlando both for how she feels around him and for how she feels about him. She judges him to be worthy of her love and negging him is simply testing him and having fun with him until she can reveal herself to him and claim her place as his love.

Poor Phoebe is repelled by Sylvius who is in love with her, but she becomes attracted to Ganymede for negatively criticizing her. Shakespeare gives us a comparative study of different kinds of attraction to think about the differences between love, attraction, negation and power.

The Will to Love in As You Like It: Desire, Wrestling, and Brendan Schaub

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Rosalind is another great example of a dynamic female character in Shakespeare’s comedies. She is banished from the court, but she manages to become the puppet master of the world she inhabits. She moves to the country and sets up shop as a boss bitch. Even though she is a victim of circumstances, Rosalind manages to turn every situation to her advantage.

We never really know why Celia’s old man hates Rosalind so much, except for who her father was. She’s paying a heavy price for her lineage. The play is a portrait of power in flux. As You Like It portrays two situations where a patriarch has died, and the power structure is adjusting to that vacuum. In the case of Orlando and Oliver, the death of their father has resulted in conflict. Orlando feels like he has been denied his due rights to his inheritance.

Rosalind’s father has also recently died, and her uncle is attempting to consolidate power. Banishing Rosalind is an attempt to erase history, to preemptively silence dissent. In Shakespeare’s comedies the force of love is stronger than the desire to control and that first is apparent in this play when Celia abandons her father and her life at court to join her cousin Rosalind in exile. Her love for her cousin drives her actions.

For the other plot, we have a case of brothers feuding. It seems to have all the ingredients of a tragic scenario. Orlando, however, finds an appropriate outlet for his aggression. He is not a narcissist. The struggle of wills between brothers creates a context for conflict. Orlando is a badass and naturally refuses to accept the limitations imposed upon him by his older brother Oliver. Given no other recourse, he challenges the court wrestler to a match to assert his authority. He is willing to fight for his right to party. 

It just so happens that Rosalind and Celia are in the right place at the right time to witness this battle. From the context of 2021, the wrestling scene resonates with the world of cage fighting and UFC. The character of Orlando is an archetypal model of someone like Brendan Schaub who used fighting to assert himself, to gain access to an audience, and to act forcefully with the knowledge that “all the world is a stage.”

In the play, Orlando’s performance wins over Rosalind. She is instantly attracted to him and stays to talk to him after the fight. This is another moment when Shakespeare is still funny. Here we have Orlando, who has just beaten a professional fighter, and we gain insight to his mind suddenly overcome with anxiety and insecurities as Rosalind attempts to talk to him. He is unable to speak.

This unexpected transformation, when love conquers the wrestler, leads to another very funny scene featuring Orlando. When Rosalind and Celia explore their new territory in the woods, they find horrible poetry dedicated to Rosalind written by Orlando everywhere. He has caught the incurable madness of unrequited romantic love and it is causing him to produce prolific attempts at art. Schaub fancies himself an artist, too. I’m not going to belabor the comparisons, but let’s just say that Schaub would absolutely nail this role because it is so close to his experience. Not that Schaub lacks artistic merit; he doesn’t. He is a skilled and dedicated comedian and podcaster who inspires countless numbers of people with his work. 

The humor of the situation charms an audience because Schaub is a heavyweight UFC ex-fighter who wants to be slimmer and more artistic looking. Like the wrestler writing poetry in the woods, Schaub is a walking contradiction but an honest one and therefore likeable. Orlando is writing poems and messages to Rosalind almost involuntarily. He can’t help it. He is compelled to express his love and this compulsion is the epitome of authenticity. Not only is he not faking it, but he also can’t stop it.

The same is true with Schaub. His love of fashion, food, and women oozes out of him moment by moment and the audience has little doubt that he is being true to himself, partly because it is so unexpected. We don’t often put fighting and loving color ways together, but Shakespeare did it with Orlando, by showing him waxing poetic in the forest after smashing the ferocious wrestler Charles and being struck dumb by meeting Rosalind. 

Great characters push against the grain. They are tested and they find ways to persevere. Their process of overcoming obstacles becomes a protein to our beliefs. They embolden our sense that the will to love can be stronger than the will to control or to amass power. The uncontrollable force of romantic desire inspires a will to love that is stronger even than the will to live. In Shakespeare’s As You Like It, romantic love is a drug. It is a supernatural force, transformative and wild.