The King's Speech and Vonnegut

I have to admit I have no motivation this semester. I feel sorta like a monkey with a wrench banging himself in the head over and over again. Sometimes it stinks majoring in both English lit and Finance. My mind is spread over two disparate worlds, and sometimes I wish I could bring them together better. At any rate, Shakespeare still reverberates today as much as ever, and I know I should find it easy to reconcile the two. But I don't. I am still lost in a world of hard to comprehend sentences. I feel like my blogs this year have been half-assed, and really they have been. At any rate, I wish I knew how to continue after this. I don't though. ...

Last night I watched "The King's Speech" directed by Tom Hooper and starring Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush (of Captain Barbossa fame). Geoffrey Rush's character, Lionel, is a failed Shakespearean actor, but he teaches King George VI how to conquer his speech impediment. I think both actors did a fabulous job in a slightly underwhelming movie. It's good, but not academy award best movie of the year good. The film does deal explicitly with words and acting, and any English major should appreciate that.

My deduction is that all speech is acting. We are all performing a role--some a king (who really has no right to be) and some a failed-actor-turned-speech-therapist with out his doctorate. It doesn't matter if we deserve this spot in the play, it's really how well we perform it, and how well we are perceived to be performing it. That's why David Seidler, the writer, made Lionel's dream of being in a Shakespeare play a central part of his character. He wanted to bring light to perceptions and the true role of thespians. King George V, near the beginning of the movie, even comes right out and says, "actors, truly the most vile of creatures". But that's who we all are. We are all here doing things on a stage, dancing and wagging our fingers, and hopefully, it won't end up too badly. Dr. Sexson mentioned Kurt Vonnegut in class. Over winter break I read a book of his, Mother Night. In the book we discover that it doesn't matter who we think we are, it only matters who others think we are. Another of Vonnegut's short stories, Who Am I This Time?, also deals with that. It's about an actor who is a loser in real life, but when he gets on stage, he's a revelation. A woman falls in love with the man he acts to be, but discovers he is not that man. I feel like I am going somewhere with this, but I am falling off a cliff.