Irony in His Blood We first get a sense for who Rene is when he reveals his love for the opera Madama Butterfly. The first line he speaks in the first scene of the play is "Butterfly, Butterfly..." He's serving time for treason in a prison on the outskirts of Paris. He once lived the international life of a French Diplomat; now he's confined to live out his life in a tiny dark prison cell. He has nothing to live for. Everything he has ever had has been taken away from.
The only thing that keeps him going is this fantasy he has for Madama Butterfly. It dampers his reality. The story gives him hope. He shares it with his fellow prisoners: "My name is Rene Gallimard - also known as Madame Butterfly." Rene became hooked on the romance of the opera Madame Butterfly. It's about a young Japanese geisha girl who devotes her life to an American sailor. She just about lives for him. In fact, even when he disappears for three years without a word, she continues to love him. When Cho-Cho-san - that's the girl's name - finds out that her American sailor has married a white woman, she can't control herself. She kills herself with her uncle's knife. Rene thinks the opera story is so beautiful. From witnessing Cho-Cho-san's passion, Rene becomes obssessed with the Asian woman. He wants to experience the same feeling of having a woman submit to him the way Cho-Cho-san submitted to her American Sailor. That's the "irony in his blood": At the end of the play, we learn that Rene has lost his woman. She was a man. Now he's dressed in make-up and a wig - like a woman. After he tells his audience his real name, Rene Gaillamard, but now he reveals he is "Madama Butterfly." This is right before he drives a knife into his body. Clearly, Rene longed for the life he saw in Madama Butterfly, but I bet it just wasn't this one.
The Black Geishas This summer we read M. Butterfly with Mr. Lewenstein. Maria Callas captured our attention. Her name isn't mentioned in the play, nor does she appear in the movie. It's her voice that makes us want to write. She's one of the most famous opera singers of all time. For Maria, nothing short of the best was acceptable. She was a perfectionist. She was a "diva."
A diva
is a woman who demands all or nothing.
It’s
either her way, or no way at all. It’s
not that she is selfish or mean spirited; it means she is talented and knows
exactly what she wants. She may be a
perfectionist that strives for the impossible.
That may be good for her, but it can be absolute hell on earth for
everyone she works with. Divas are most often associated with opera singers,
but today the term often is used for top-of-the-line performers. (D)emanding.
(I)ntense. (V)ivacious. (A)ttitude.
Think J-Lo. Beyonce. They fought their way to the top. And now they are looking down at the rest of
us.
In the
movie “Callas Forever,” Maria Callas is so committed to excellence that she is
ready to kill for it. She’s fierce. She’s determined, but she has no voice. Once known as the best opera singer this
world has ever known, she has been asked to lip-synch scenes in a movie to
her own voice. The sound is already perfect. It’s her voice that had been recorded nearly
twenty years before. Here is the
problem: she lives in a world of the
past, and she has no way to cope with the world of the present. She abuses all of her friends. She terrorizes all of her co-workers. She will never understand why they will never
be able to match her passion or talent.
In the end, she destroys the project.
In
“Callas Forever,” everyone loves Maria, but that’s not good enough for a
diva. Nothing ever will be.
In Mr Lewenstein's class, we developed film history research papers. I chose to write mine about the famous Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. Below is an excerpt from my paper. I compared what I saw in Salma Hayek's movie with what I found in my research:
Frida
will always be known as a fierce individual who wasn’t afraid to express her
sexuality. When Frida married Diego, she had no idea what world she was
entering into. She must have felt like Alice dropping down the rabbit
hole. For Frida, Diego’s bohemian art world was this strange, weird place
she probably considered like some freethinking Wonderland, filled with crazy
people and peculiar creatures. It’s probably right here where Frida
discovered the full extent of her sexuality. While her husband openly
cheated on her, she began to be seen cavorting with more and more women.
According to her close friend, Frida loved to go out and have a good time
with the women. They liked to drink and dance with each other at popular
Mexico City cantinas. On these nights, Frida was known
to drink “like a mariachi.” This means, I suppose, anything
goes. Frida hid her bisexuality from no one.
The cantina scene captures Frida’s
free-wheeling, free-stepping nature. Here Frida dances the sensual tango with a
visiting female Italian photographer right in front of her husband. The
two women are all over the dance floor. Their hands are all over each
other. The song is called “La Alcoba Azul – The Blue Bedroom.” As
Frida and her partner are dancing, you hear a singer in the background belt out
these lyrics: “Vuelve a mí Ámame sin luz En nuestra alcoba azul Donde no
hubo sol para nosotros.” Come
back to me. Love me in the dark… At
the end of the dance, the women embrace to share a French kiss to the applause
of the crowd. Even Diego looks on with love and admiration.
The astute eye may see elements of her
bisexuality in her self-portraits. For Frida, her self-portraits
helped her explore her own identity. “I paint myself because I am so
often alone,” she once said, “and because I am the subject I know
best.” She was probably all alone when she painted Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair. In fact, it’s known that she was separated from Diego during this
time. Her creation of this work follows her heart-crushing discovery that
her husband was sleeping with her sister. During this period, she had
left the couple’s home in Coyacan and moved into her own apartment in the
center of Mexico City. In Self-Portrait
with Cropped Hair, Frida appears
in an over-sized, darkly-colored man’s suit. She has cut off all her
hair. We can see it strewn all over the floor. The scissors are
still in her hand. Across the top of the painting, she writes the
lyrics to a popular Mexican song of the Forties: “Mira que si te quise,
fue por el pelo…” In English, the words come out “See, if I loved
you, it was for your hair; now that you’re bald, I don’t love you
anymore.” Here Frida seems to be putting aside her feminine attributes.
Al that is left are her earrings.
Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair shows up in the film. There’s the portrait right in her
room, and there is Frida cutting her hair off in front of the mirror.
She’s been drinking all night. She’s alone. It’s like life
imitating art. Her worlds are fusing together. Playing in the
background is “La Paloma Negra” sung by a famous Mexican lesbian.
The lyrics tell Frida she should be out enjoying herself. At times, Frida
probably didn’t know which way to turn.
After reading The Tortilla Curtain, Mr. Lewenstein asked us select a song to represent our reading. He calls it our Tortilla Soundtrack. We all looked into our musical archives. I found this one - "Coyote" - by Joni Mitchell. Below I matched up lyrics with passages from the novel.
Joni Mitchell was once known as the Queen of the Canyon. She developed and refined much of her songwriting genius in L.A.’s Laurel Canyon in the Sixties. Who knows? That might not be too far away from The Tortilla Curtain’s Blanco Arroyo. Midway through the novel, I can hear Joni singing the perfect song in the background where America finds herself alone in the woods. In the shadows, America goes face to face with a wild coyote and doesn't budge. “There’s no comprehending…Just how close to the bone and the skin and the eyes…And the lips you can get..” sings Joni. “And feel so alone.” Joni knows something about surviving harsh realities. So does America. So I love the scene where America is sitting there all by herself in the shadows of the woods. It must be both frustrating and frightening . She’s tired and hungry and hurt, and she hears something but she doesn’t know what. It’s kind of like a dream, but it’s real – she’s staring face to face with a coyote. And instead of screaming or panicking, “she looked at that coyote so long and so hard that she began to hallucinate, to imagine herself inside those eyes looking out…”
In English 1A, Mr. Lewenstein asked us to vote for our Tortilla MVP. This means we get to choose the most valuable part. We write about the part of the book we connected with most. For me it was the mention of the Eagles song "Hotel California." A beautiful song about broken dreams. It's perfect. You can almost hear it in the background of the entire novel.
Eagles Guitarist Don Felder has said he came up with the idea for
the song “Hotel California” on late
night drive along an L.A. freeway: “You
can just see this glow on the horizon of lights and the images that start
running through your head of Hollywood and all the dreams that you
have." Most of my classmates will know this song. So will their
parents. Most immigrants come to America
in search of opportunity or freedom represented in the lyrics. The Hotel California becomes a symbol of an
escape and/or a better life… but things are not always as they seem. The
student narratives I read often refer to the constant struggle of immigrant
life: the toil in the fields, the financial
woes, the family separations. Many newcomers find life in California to be
an illusion.
In our reading of T.C. Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain, I mean, you can almost hear it in the background. Soon-to-be first-time father Candido crosses
the border with his teen-age wife in pursuit of the American Dream. He’s promised her a better life. Not a rich one, but a comfortable one where
some day they will have a house with chickens in the yard.
I bring up the part of the novel when Candido’s wife America was in the rich
white guy’s car listening to “Hotel California”. Right here, this song is so
significant because it was written to reflect the excess of luxury in this
country. Something for everybody, right: Any
time of the year..You can find it here.. Everybody, I suppose,
unless you are a Mexican immigrant. In this scene, America gets sucked into the
dream of Hotel California. She’s sitting up front in a Cadillac sedan and can’t
believe her good fortune. On the first day she looks for work, she was going to
be earning more money than she has ever before. This is the passage that stands out: “If someone had told her when she was a
girl at school she wouldn’t have believed them – it would have been a fairy
tale like the one about the chambermaid and the glass slipper” (Boyle 97). I think her mindset here might explain a lot about the novel. We as
Americans often have no idea of the thoughts immigrants may have. It’s so easy
to complain about them when we see them waiting on a street corner, but it’s
difficult to imagine their dreams and desperation.
I mean, America is basically
working for minimum wage, and she feels that she has hit the lottery on her
first day of work. Sadly, she got something more than she bargained for out of
the deal. Yes, she got paid, but she also felt a strange man’s hand on her
thigh. Here she learns a hard lesson about the American Dream. It’s not for
everybody.
