Adaptation Adapted and The Importance of Art in Society

The brilliance of authors is proven sometimes by the amount of times in which they are adapted. Stories are adapted and used again because the message of a specific human emotion is so important that it needs to be revisited. I compared "Volpone" to "Wall Street" last week and a fellow classmate compared it to "Goodfellas". This displays the brilliance of Jonson as an author. However, no author will ever achieve the flattery level of adaptation as well as Shakespeare. It is true that the movie affected me on an emotional level. The portrayal of Sammie as a caring, intelligent, and grief-ridden human being who then gets denied parole was undoubtedly a tear-jerking moment. Nonetheless, the film actually hit me greater on an artistic level. It did not make me feel more artistic, but instead showed me the great need and importance for art at a societal level.

The need and relevance for art in society is understood as important but I sense that many feel skeptical about the subject. The inmates are proof of its importance because they are able to learn how to fix themselves through the story of "The Tempest". Proof of this is seen when "Big G" attempts to discover "Caliban", the character he is playing in their production. He first portrays the character as a pure monster, who awkwardly lumbers around with no emotion or care. He then gets stopped by the director and his fellow actors because they understood something about the art. They understood that even though the world viewed Caliban as a monster, he had feelings and emotions just like anyone else. I would argue that this is the thesis of "Shakespeare Behind Bars". Big G and the other inmates realized that every person, no matter what they do, has real emotions. They could now use this information created by art, to make themselves truly better people.

More proof of how the adaptation of great art helped the inmates is with Red's realizations through the character Miranda. Red is able to deal with is bisexuality through Miranda as well as dealing with parental issues that plagued his life. This is proof that the archetypes already established by great authors should not be ignored due to a lack of creativity, but instead developed further to create a new kind of message.

A movie that attempts to find the archetypes of contemporary writing is the movie "Adaptation". Attempting to summarize the movie would be a true nightmare, but the video that I posted below does a pretty good job of showing the struggle of an author attempting to be fresh and creative. The story is about a screenwriter attempting to adapt a book into a movie, which is what the screenwriter of the actual movie did. If you understand that, than the movie is right for you. The youtube video below is comically titled "Adaptation Adapted". Enjoy!