Blog 3 01-25-10
Poetry and Pop Culture
In the machinimized version of Langston Hughes’s “Suicide’s Note,” clips from the video game Halo are used to portray the suicide scene supposedly depicted in the poem. It could be just a person washing their face in the river if one had not known about the title, but it would not be called “Suicide’s Note,” would it? The scenes of the player on the cliff’s edge, looking down, and perhaps contemplating whether he should live on or not, greatly enhances the tone of the poem. In addition to the scenes, the music adds to the meaning of “Suicide’s Note.” Gary Jules’s “Mad World” also depicts thoughts of suicide, which makes the tone even sadder. These enhanced effects from the machinimized version connect deeply with the words and makes it clear to what this poem means.
The scene that really connects the poem and the video is where the player is about to jump, while at the bottom, the text read “asked me for a…” Then as the player jumped, the poem finishes the line with, “kiss.” The maker of this video carefully placed these frames together to create a metaphor to which why a person would want to jump off to their death in a river. In the poem, the river “asked [him] for a kiss” represents the action of a suicide because one can infer that some person is coming in contact with the water and conclude that they drowned themselves from the kiss of death.
The scenes that depict “the calm, cool face of the river,” stay true to the picture, displaying a calm, serene river that the player jumps to his death in. However, the calmness of the river in the video kind of detracts the vision of the river that is supposed to be depicted in the poem. In fact, the whole brightness of the video should be turned down a bit to stay true to the tone. One would imagine the poem’s scene to be gloomy and tired, like this scene from PS3’s Flower:
http://blog.landofthegeeks.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/flower-playstation-3-ps3-069.jpg
The song “Mad World” sets down the mood. It sounds sad, and it describes how one gets tired of life and how one wants to “drown in [their] sorrow.” It is a nice match to the tone of the poem because it also depicts suicide. The lyric’s dark tone enhances how the video as a whole feels. Without it, the video by itself would have seemed humorous because it just shows a video game character falling down into a river for no reason.
A reference to poetry in pop culture occurs in The Whitest Kids You Know, where “Hamlet” is being acted out on stage (although it is not in iambic pentameter, and not even in its exact words). This skit is more about what really happened to Abe Lincoln. The president and the people of his time may have been watching “Hamlet” in its dramatic form, as plays were popular back then. Here is a clip of the skit:
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