Mislike me not

Only weeks after everyone else I stumbled into the hornet's nest of Bright Sheng, the University of Michigan and a 56-year-old film of Othello.   After reading wildly varying accounts of the outrage from the Daily Mail, the World Socialist Website and several in between, one question remains unanswered:  Why is a professor of musical composition screening Othello for a class?  I assume he requested Verdi's Otello and the library sent the wrong DVD.  He turned it on, stepped out for a smoke, and returned to find a large puddle where all the snowflakes used to be.  It's just an assumption.

Tom Bartlett writes in The Chronicle of Higher Education, "Bright Sheng's first couple of apologies didn't go over well," as though the need to apologize were self-evident.  But apologize he did, for the atrocity of forcing music students to watch a white actor play a black man while wearing makeup.  He apologized for "the graveness of my action" and assured the dear students that he understood how it feels to be the object of racism.  In the end he lost his class anyway.  Sheng was around thirteen when the Cultural Revolution rolled through his native Shanghai and probably experiences PTSD.  Maybe he thought that if he didn't grovel someone would cut off his head and use it for soccer practice.  We're getting close on some campuses, and a lot of other places in this country.  I like to think I would have said, "Oops, wrong film" and moved on.

The only reason to apologize for this movie is Laurence Olivier's hammy performance in the title role, featuring some accent never heard on this planet.  (He does the same thing in The Merchant of Venice but let's not even go there.)  Even great actors give lousy performances.  It would make even less sense without the makeup, since Othello's color is referenced about once a page.  Otello, now, that's a different matter, because in opera there is one overriding concern:  can you sing?  If you can and you're built like a linebacker, you can still play a tubercular courtesan or a teenage geisha.  That's why we've averted our eyes all these years and just listened to Ramon Vinay, Mario Del Monaco, Jon Vickers and Placido Domingo instead of leaving Verdi's masterpiece on the shelf for 150 years while waiting for Russell Thomas to be born.

 There is enough real racism in this country -- in this world -- without searching for it in a half-century-old film of a four-hundred-year-old play.  Derek Chauvin did not psych himself up by binge-watching Shakespeare before he murdered George Floyd.  Yutes of today, keep your eye on the ball or you'll wake up one day to find that you can't vote, you can't have an abortion, you can't even protest because that's been criminalized, too.  If you don't believe me, look at the legislature of any state controlled by Republiclowns.  If this movie, or The Jazz Singer, offends you so much, better plan on staying in school forever.  Reality is going to offend the living fuck out of you.