One element of Tim Blake Nelson's film, O, that we haven't discussed in depth is the decision to anchor the disconnect between Odin and the film's other characters in modern racial tensions. In other words, in Othello, the title character represents an appropriated "Other" (Othello rises to success as a Moor in Venetian society), yet nonetheless reminds audiences of Europe's anxieties over racial, religious, and geographic difference (though a Christian and a Venetian, Othello reminds Europeans of their North African Muslim neighbors to the South). Does something similar go on in the film? Is Odin both an appropriation and an anxiety? Are the worries about O as multidimensional in this American southern prep school as they are in 16th-century Venice? Or, is something else going on?
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
O, Othello, and the Question of Race
One element of Tim Blake Nelson's film, O, that we haven't discussed in depth is the decision to anchor the disconnect between Odin and the film's other characters in modern racial tensions. In other words, in Othello, the title character represents an appropriated "Other" (Othello rises to success as a Moor in Venetian society), yet nonetheless reminds audiences of Europe's anxieties over racial, religious, and geographic difference (though a Christian and a Venetian, Othello reminds Europeans of their North African Muslim neighbors to the South). Does something similar go on in the film? Is Odin both an appropriation and an anxiety? Are the worries about O as multidimensional in this American southern prep school as they are in 16th-century Venice? Or, is something else going on?
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