**TRIGGER WARNING** Because I know that some of my readers may be sensitive to such things, this is a warning to sensitive individuals that the following post contains images of extreme violence, and some discussion of the same.
When we see powerful contenders meet, Titus and Tamora in Titus Andronicus, for example, or Coriolanus and Aufidius in Coriolanus, we can often feel the struggle beneath the skin. If scenes are written well, directed well, played well, the character tension becomes almost palpable.
Here’s a scene with Coriolanus, recently banished from Rome, meeting his enemy, Aufidius (who is general of the Volscians against whom Coriolanus has fought many times):
When taken a bit out of context of the production like this, Aufidius’ almost giddy enthusiasm when receiving his old enemy feels uncomfortable. It may very well be meant to do so, as there is much in this play to make the audience uncomfortable. Relationships stand on the same kind of shifting sand as allegiances, reputations, and popular opinions.
Yet, one of the interesting choices about this scene is the kiss. Not just that it seems sudden and perhaps almost intrusively familiar, but it also reflects, as Shakespeare is often wont to do, the parallels between war or human struggle and intimacy. The kiss between Coriolanus and Aufidius may also bring to mind another kiss:
Granted, these are both productions with deliberate choices, but the kiss remains striking in both, reflecting the enormous vulnerability inherent in intimate interaction. Of course, in the Bible, Judas does betray Christ with a kiss, “Judas, are you betraying the Son of Humanity with a kiss?” (Luke 22:48). Not that the intimacy must be a kiss per se. When Delilah discovers that Samson’s long hair is the source of his strength, she coaxes him to fall asleep in her lap, and then urges the servants to cut his hair as he sleeps.
In Othello, Iago infiltrates Othello’s mind so that his poisonous influence becomes promiscuous with Othello’s psyche. In this clip from Orson Welles’ classic film, Welles cinematically illustrates Iago’s increasing intrusion into and growing presence within Othello’s mind. This clip includes some of the film’s proliferation of spider web imagery and the moment where Othello’s mind becomes (literally) an unsteady reflection of the poison that Iago speaks:
http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/video/1090589/Othello-Movie-Clip-It-Is-The-Green-Eyed-Monster.html
(Orson Welles as Othello and Micheàl MacLiammóir as Iago–which I hope readers can access, because TCM is persnickety about letting me imbed their clip here.)*
Playwrights and filmmakers readily grasp how intimate persuasion can be–and effective productions seldom miss the opportunity to underscore the parallels between sexual intercourse and penetrating another person’s mind, as we see in Justin Kurzel’s painterly Macbeth from 2015:
The heightened intimacy of the scene is a production choice here, of course. When staged, the scene too often takes on more of a lecture quality, which arguably might be a less viscerally immediate choice.
Of course, people tend to engage with each other in so many acts that either are, or border on, the physically and the psychologically intimate. Here’s a clip with a trigger warning. If you are squeamish about murder and blood (a lot of blood), I advise you to avoid watching the following clip from Sweeney Todd. But it does highlight the intimacy of a shave:
The death scenes from recent versions of Coriolanus, also depict this intimacy:
Although the Sweeney Todd sequence may be paralleled in this bloody Coriolanus death scene, again with Hiddleston and Fraser:
So frequently in narrative does the human struggle between good and evil lie in intimate contact with others, that it becomes a kind of super trope, whether that contact be physical, emotional, psychological, or magical force. The struggles of intimacy mark the collective human struggles with ourselves for the future of the world:
Intimate moments present a kind of sword of Damocles, perching on a ridge of human emotional and psychological topography that runs between vulnerability and power (or even abusive domination, as the case may be in many of these clips). The truth of our humanity lies in how we conduct ourselves in our moments of intimacy, how we exercise any accompanying power we may perceive, or how we may decline to abuse the vulnerability that others may offer to us. In the best cases, of course, intimacy strengthens us. Human connection lends us strength and support that may allow us to further our place and the place of others in the world. Yet, as the stories repeatedly remind us, intimacy also places us at the mercy of others, and those moments sit upon a knife’s edge, offering a strange and sometimes final evaluation of our past crimes and of our very existence.
*Orson Welles’ film version of Othello, restored in HD, may be watched here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yx6l3mPmOMY
(In light of the illustrative moments above, one can envision Trump singing a dark duet with Putin, Kim Jong Un, perhaps with Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn, and various figures from the United States Congressional right and left as a kind of deranged chorus, with the climate changing world dissolving around us all. Will someone please write this?)