O and Othello

When Shakespeare composed the play Othello, televisions were not around. Life around the late 1500s also had many different qualities than it does today. The time period of Othello did not have wars on drugs or high school shootings. Peer pressure back then was not an issue. Othello’s audiences in the 1500s did not face the situations that I, once an American high school student, faced. These significant differences make it hard to relate modern day tragedies to those of the 1500s. The common themes and characters from Othello were, I thought decently represented in the movie, O. The movie represents jealousy as a dominating factor over how people live their lives.

As I began thinking about the movie, 0, in comparison to Shakespeare’s Othello, I realized that I would not care much for the movie without having read the play beforehand. The drama, jealousy, and love are all very intriguing and relevant, but a few things caught my eye that I do not believe accurately represent the play. I feel that we never really understand why Hugo involves an unreliable, unpopular, rich kid, Roger, in his scheme. Also, I do not get why his own girlfriend and Desi's roommate, Emily, so easily go along with the deception Hugo presents them, including the scarf. Emily knew very well Desi and O were fighting and the scarf had something to do with it. A great deal of time is spent developing the honest and pure love story between Desi and O, so I find it hard to swallow the fact that O would throw away his obvious potential over a rumor concerning Desi’s impurity he heard from only one person. Though full of confrontations, I sense a missing scene one in which O demands the truth from both Desi and Michael face to face. Racial issues are dealt with in different ways-lightheartedly between Desi and O, obviously. O deals with it directly and Hugo, along with the adults, with understatement. I do, however, find it interesting that O is the only black student possibly in the entire school.