Assignment 6: Create Your Own Adventure--Amir Abou-Jaoude

1. Evaluate the morality of cheating. Is cheating acceptable in any case, and why?

2. Can a work of art change our interpretation of history? Why or why not?

3. Analyze the last film you saw. Explain what you liked or disliked about it, and describe some choices the director of the film made to achieve his purpose.

I choose prompt two.

There is a common saying that "history is written by the victors," but I would propose that "history is written by the artist." Long after historical events have faded in the annals of time, art lives on with us, blurring what is fact and what is fiction.

Without question, William Shakespeare is one of the greatest English authors ever to work. His plays are read, studied, and performed around the Globe. One of Shakespeare's most famous plays is Macbeth, set in medieval Scotland. At the opening of the play, the king of Scotland is elderly Duncan. The king's forces have triumphed in battle. On the decimated battlefield, three witches appear to Duncan's lieutenant Macbeth and his friend, Banquo. They say that Macbeth will soon become king of Scotland. He tells this to his wife, Lady Macbeth, and soon, husband and wife are plotting the murder of the king. Duncan comes to the Macbeth residence and is murdered. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth become king and queen, but it is not long before the consequences of their deed catch up with them. Macbeth, haunted by guilt, is defeated by Duncan's son, Malcolm, as the curtain falls.

There was an actual Scottish king named Macbeth, and he ruled the country from 1040 to 1057. The king before him was Duncan, as in the play, except the historical Duncan was extremely young and was not an old man. In fact, the historical Macbeth was probably forty years older than Duncan. In addition, Macbeth did not murder Duncan--instead, he slew him in battle. Lady Macbeth played a minimal role in the plot to become king. While Shakespeare portrays Macbeth's reign to be short and tumultuous, Isaac Asimov notes in his Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare that the historical Macbeth ruled for seventeen uneventful years before he was dethroned in a rather ordinary coup.

The historical Macbeth brought peace to Scotland for seventeen years without an unnecessary amount of bloodshed, and because he was able to do this, we might consider him to be "good." However, Shakespeare makes him one of the great tragic heroes--an "evil" villain, tormented by his misdeeds. In reality, Lady Macbeth supported his husband, but Shakespeare made her into one of the most manipulative and powerful women in history. It should be noted that Shakespeare twisted the historical record more than once. His Richard III portrays Richard as one of the most evil monarchs of all time. In reality, Richard tried to end the War of the Roses and create peace in "the winter of our discontent."

Shakespeare is not the only artist to alter the historical record. Jacques Louis-David was a neoclassical painter whose popularity reached its height during the French Revolution. In 1793, a crisis occurred, as one of the revolution's brightest minds, Jean-Paul Marat, was stabbed to death by the disgruntled Charlotte Corday. David was given the task of immortalizing Marat, and he succeeded spectacularly. In reality, Marat was bitter and brutal, ordering the deaths of thousands by the guillotine. He was not particularly attractive either, his skin discolored due to disease. However, none of Marat's faults show in David's magnum opus, his 1793 Death of Marat. In this work, Marat appears to be a Greek god, a martyr dying for the cause of liberty. His pen, the source of his power, remains in his hand, as if he was in the middle of composing a brilliant thought. This is the Marat we remember--not the power-hungry revolutionary.

Even film, arguably the newest of all art forms, has been used to twist the truth. In 1925, the Russian director Sergei Eisenstein directed a communist propaganda film called The Battleship Potemkin. While it was propaganda, it is the most influential film of all time, and every movie that came after it--from Citizen Kane to Seven Samurai to Bonnie and Clyde to Apocalypse Now is indebted to it. In the film, Eisenstein used a new way of editing, called montage, to enhance the power of his images, and this revolutionary style is on display during the famous Odessa Steps sequence. The tsar's troops murder innocent civilians on the Odessa Steps in the film, and Eisenstein's camera is there to capture the horrific event. There was no massacre on the Odessa Steps, and yet Eisenstein edited and shot the sequence so well that stills from the film have been reprinted in textbooks as actual photographs.

What is the effect of all these artistic distortions on the historical record? Should we try to rehabilitate Macbeth's legacy, expose the moral failings of Marat, and dispel the idea of a massacre on the Odessa Steps? Perhaps, but these artistic works are too embedded in our culture to try and do this successfully. Rather, I believe we should accept these artworks as a mixed blessing. True, they distort the historical record, but would anyone have remembered Macbeth, Marat, or the Odessa Steps had the works not been created? Furthermore, they should stand on their own artistic merit. True, we do have a distorted idea of all three subjects due to these pieces, but we also have the moving pathos of Shakespeare's Macbeth, the neoclassical splendor of David's Marat, and the revolutionary techniques of Eisenstein's staged massacre. These are artistic treasures that cannot be taken for granted, as they shaped our conception of art as much as they have distorted history.