#This has turned into a rant about Laurence Olivier

[assortedantics]

I love Shakespeare, but I feel like that’s either extremely obvious because it’s Shakespeare it extremely pretentious because it’s Shakespeare.

[fedonciadale]

I didn’t explain my problem with that jondellion post clearly. It wasn’t the name they gave the ship. It was the fact that the sole purpose of the post was to mock the other ship for a post THEY made. It was embarrassing. And I have to address this: “I can’t fathom why you would think that Jon being the third treason for love as a theory has not some merit” - to me the “evidence” is non existent. I’m sorry, but all of the “parallels” etc are straws, and I’m not interested in grasping at them.

Dear nonny,

I think I understood you quite well. I just thought that you were also complaining about the ship name. What I wrote in my first post to you still holds though: In your case that means if you see Jondelion in a post there is absolutely nobody who forces you to read that post.

Of course you can hold to the opinion that the post you saw gave you second-hand embarassment, but you didn’t write that post. If people want to rant, just let them rant. Again, neither do you need to read that post nor do they need to adjust their posts to your opinion. You are not responsible for the Jonsa fandom as a whole, nor is the OP with that post (which I didn’t see by the way, I have no idea what was in that post) a representative of anything else but their own opinion. If it was cross-tagged you could address the OP to be a decent human being and leave out the tag of the other ship. Crosstagging means to shove one’s own opinion down other people’s throats and this is not what freedom of speach is about and you would be right to complain about that. You are not right about complaining that there are people in the fandom who dislike Da€nerys or Jon€rys. And my ask box is the wrong place for that anyway. Jon€rys has been my NOTP since 1998.

Speaking about shoving one’s own opinion down other people’s throat the second half of your ask certainly brushes the boundaries. While you asked for my opinion in your first ask and I gave it, you now insist of telling me again what your opinion is and you - at least how it looks to me as a non native-speaker - now come very close to be insulting. You say, my evidence for ‘political Jon’ is  ‘non-existent’, while the ‘parallels’ - I assume you mean the parallel arcs of Jon and Sansa - are just straws, and you are not grasping at them, implying that I do. That’s not very far from calling me ‘delusional’ and you should work on your wording, at least in circumstances where the very situation gives me the opportunity to have the last word. So, you lecture me, and now I’m going to lecture in turn.

It is in the nature of literal analysis, that the evidence can be conflicting, and that the interpretations can differ. Usually there are some ‘main-stream interpretations’ how this or that book should be interpreted. Sometimes another interpretation comes up and the new interpretation either leads to a reassessment of the work or it produces some hype and vanishes again. Let me quote an example: When Laurence Olivier - a long dead famous British actor - played Hamlet, his interpretation became very famous when he added an Oedipus-complex twist to the relationship of Hamlet and his mother Gertrude. Ever since Olivier did this, this twist and the allusions haven’t been absent from any Hamlet production. Olivier - or maybe the producer of this Hamlet production - changed the interpretation of Shakespeare’s play in a very significant way. And this is a play that has been known for centuries and which is finished….

As for GRRM his work is not finished and as long as it is not finished, we simply cannot tell exactly how it will go and anybody who thinks he can predict the exact ending is in fact really delusional. This means that in a way every theory has its merits and although I personally might not be convinced by the evidence for “Varys is a merman”, I would argue that you can’t say it is non-existent. In the end, it comes down to what people think is convincing.

I have read the books when they first came out and I have read all the theories “Three-headed dragon”, “Jon, Da€nerys and Tyrion” will save the world, “Jon as Azor Ahai”, “Jon and Da€nerys will end up together” etc. etc. None of these theories ever convinced me thoroughly. I could see the evidence and yet to me it was as if a piece of the puzzle was lacking. It was only with season 6 and me getting alerted to Jonsa as a possibility that the series as a whole suddenly made sense in a much more satisfying way - which is admittedly a question of my personal opinion. What to you looks like ‘straws’ was a lifeline for me - I never wanted Jon€erys, I never wanted Jon, Da€nerys and Tyrion as dragonriders and some of the other theories. Now, I can’t convince you that Jonsa will happen or that ‘political  Jon’ is true and I don’t want to try, since you seem to be very disinterested. I just want to argue, that you cannot tell which interpretation will turn out to be true and neither can I. I think that it is very inconsiderate of you to tell me that I’m grasping at straws - which you did by implication - when I’m perfectly happy with my interpretation.

You know, as I see it, - and I repeat what I wrote in another post -

I see two possible outcomes:

1. Our tinfoils are right, Jon is not in love with Da€nerys, but with Sansa and Jonsa is endgame. Then we will have been right. Great, imho.

2. Our tinfoils are bullshit, Jon€rys is the greatest love story ever told and when the credits of season 8 run, we will have been delusional all the time. Not so great, but on the other hand, we have a loooooong hiatus before the next season, let alone the next book and meanwhile we will have the greatest fun in one of the greatest fandoms ever. And would we really care if the show goes for a bland Jon€rys story of ‘hero boy’ and ‘hero girl’? No, our headcanons will always be better.

Your option seems to me to be ‘rational’, ‘not grasping at straws’, ‘feeling second-hand embarassment for other shippers’ (either because they rant about Jon€erys and/or the stupidity of some posts on Jon€rys or because they believe in Politcal Jon and DarkDany).

So, guess who’ll be having more fun during the long hiatus? I know, I’ll have fun with a great fandom for over a year. On the other side of the scale might be six weeks of misery once season 8 airs and the season turns out to be a 12hour Jon€nerys love feast. You on the other hand make yourself miserable for over a year just by reading posts you don’t want to read and on the other side of the scale is even more misery if Jonsa is endgame, because you can look back and tell yourself that you could have been a part of this very clever part of the fandom that worked it all out. We can lean back and tell all the others: “We told you so, but you wouldn’t listen.”

Look, I’m all for staying in my own lane and I don’t torture myself by going into the Jon€erys tag. If I think something is stupid I tend to bitch about it in private, but you should just accept that for a part of the fandom the logic of the story points towards DarkDany, Political Jon and Jonsa. And as long as GRRM has not finished his books, this will be one interpretation amongst many, and not the silliest by far.

So, if Political Jon is not true and neither DarkDany nor Jonsa ever happens - and to me DarkDany and Political Jon is even more important than Jonsa - you can come into my ask box and tell me, “I was right” to which I’ll answer : “That was always a possibility, but guess what? I had fun! Did you?”

[disappointingyet]

The Entertainer

Director Tony Richardson Stars Laurence Olivier, Joan Plowright, Roger Livesey, Brenda de Banzie UK 1960 Language English 1hr 36mins Black & white

Heavyweight ham joins the new wave

Supposedly, Laurence Olivier was one of Britain’s greatest-ever stage actors. That may well be true. His film work, however, I’ve mostly found tiresomely mannered, and that weird, almost German accent – where the hell did it come from? – distracting. It probably doesn’t help that I’m not kindly disposed to him having – for some inexplicable reason – read his autobiography, which left me feeling that he was a thoroughly dislikable man.

In The Entertainer, though, this great ham was cast as a great ham, and that helps. It’s 1956 in the English seaside town of Morecambe, and Archie Rice (Olivier) is a fifth-rate (at best) music-hall turn trying somehow to hang on in showbiz. But the halls are dying, and he was never any good anyway. He’s living with his long-suffering second wife Phoebe (Brenda de Banzie) and old dad Billy (Roger Livesey), who really once was a star. One son (Alan Bates) works for him in the theatre, but idealistic daughter Jean (Joan Plowright) is off in London teaching difficult kids and his other son – Mick (Albert Finney) – is in the army and being dispatched to the Suez crisis. 

Jean’s visit to her family coincides with escalating crises on the home front and in the Middle East – Archie makes one final desperate bid for showbiz survival at the same time as Britain is making a doomed attempt to reassert itself on the world stage. From my memory of a radio version, John Osborne’s play has much more in the way of explicit politics, with Archie getting in some epic rants about a nation going to the dogs. In the film, that stuff is more of backdrop. 

The Entertainer (as a play, then the film) was Olivier throwing himself in with the new breed – Osborne had grabbed headlines with his play Look Back In Anger, directed by Tony Richardson. It had caused a huge sensation in 1956, although I’ve never really been able to see what all the fuss was about. Richardson and Osborne had set up a film company – Woodfall – and were about to have a terrific run of films about young working-class people in the Midlands and the North: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Taste Of Honey and The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner. The Entertainer features early big-screen appearances from some of the new faces we’d see a lot more of the years to come: Finney, Bates, Shirley Anne Field, even Charles Gray.

And, of course, Joan Plowright, who is good as the sensible, earnest but forgiving Jean. It’s a bit unsettling, though, watching her play father-daughter scenes with dear, dear Larry knowing that she would marry the old creep just a year or so later. 

I would say the film works about 70% of the time – a little too much is stated unnecessarily, and there are a number of moments that maybe work in the theatre but look crude and heavy-handed on screen. There are some rather random wonky camera angles early on, as if Richardson was saying, ‘Look, this really is a movie!’ Location filming in Morecambe, with a good sense of tatty seaside England, tells us that much more effectively. Graham Massey is pretty hopeless as Jean’s well-meaning but square (to use a word that crops in the film a number of times) fiancé. And one of the key bits of the story gets slightly lost in a belated rush to move the plot along. 

But working 70% of the time means that there is definitely more good than bad here, not least what I suspect is one of Olivier’s better film performance, maybe the best, as an untrustworthy, self-serving bastard – and one of those incredibly camp womanisers you get in old films. Who knows if he really was that great on stage, but once in a while, he was good on film.