Assessment time

We had a take-home exercise to complete by tomorrow to round off this semester's unit on Literature and Cinema.  The questions were released on Friday.  I didn't particularly like any of them but I chose the following (Question 4, on irony).

“Irony was a fundamental feature of ancient tragedy and the view of life it inspired, yet it may be argued that some modern literary or cinematic genres – such as the mystery or the thriller – are similarly motivated by an ironic sense.”  Discuss in terms of one cinematic and one literary text.

Oedipus the King - Sun.Ergos Company, Alberta

I chose Oedipus the King and Brazil.  I finished the essay this afternoon around five o'clock.  It came in at 1,640 odd words, less than 10% over the limit so I shouldn't be marked down for that.  I think it's a decent essay.  Here's how it ends.

Gilliam’s ending to Brazil may be read as an ironic commentary on, or rejection of, the didactic certainties of Aristotelian tragedy in general and Oedipus the King in particular.  When Sam’s escape fantasy is revealed as such, Helpmann remarks “He’s got away from us Jack” to which the torturer replies “I’m afraid you’re right ... He’s gone.”  In that moment, Sam, the hero of the melodrama that is Brazil, attains the psychological oblivion, release or escape denied to the tragic hero Oedipus.




In his valedictory address to the Chorus blind Oedipus asserts that:

… had I known a way to choke the springs
Of hearing, I had never shrunk to make
A dungeon of this miserable frame,
Cut off from sight and hearing; for 'tis bliss
to bide in regions sorrow cannot reach.

Brazil - Sam Lowry escapes

Sam Lowry’s escape into the imagined paradise of his personal Brazil reaches that blissful region free from sorrow Oedipus craves.  Both texts depend on irony to lead the audience to their different conclusions.  The tragedy by Sophocles offers catharsis and the possibility of moral improvement or learning.  Gilliam resists didactic certainties and by means of ironic questioning of the ways in which genres raise expectations he de-stabilises generic conventions to reach an ambiguous, unsettling conclusion that invites us to re-read and re-appraise both the text and ourselves.

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