Thoughts on morality, Measure for measure and how people are strange.

There is a really sweet Ryan Gosling film that he made before he was Drive famous called Lars and the Real Girl. In it he plays Lars, a man in his early thirties with few friends who lives on his brothers garage. He is also in a relationship with a sex doll he ordered online called Bianca, the titular Real Girl. Gosling is still in skinny, pale indie phase at this point and he plays Lars with a thin blonde 'scandiporn' moustache, a greasy combover and a 'jumper'. These things together with the sex doll thing could make the character seem grossly unappealing but you know, he is Ryan Gosling so he is still pretty attractive. Also, I said this was a sweet film, and what might seem like some kind of sexual perversion is treated gently by his family and community. Instead of ridicule and slander, they allow his fantasies to play out, revealing his deep feelings of loss and betrayal after his mothers death and when after meeting a real 'Real girl' he decides to let Bianca go by rushing her to hospital after finding her 'unresponsive', they continue to play along with a funeral and comforting him through his grief. They accepted his strangeness because all people are strange.



I mention this film after just seeing Measure for Measure at the Young Vic for two reasons. One, sex dolls are a big part of this production and two, the complexity of all the characters reminded me most of people's inherent strangeness. We are so used to carbon cut out characters, where people are good and bad. Where the only alternative to a women playing a one dimensional weak character is to play a one dimensional 'strong' character. Yet we all know it is a lie. People are strange, they do one thing and say another, the most pious people we know turn out to be selfish assholes and that guy you nailed as a druggy dropout turns out to be the sweetest most generous guy you know. There were a host of characters in Measure for Measure who are like this. There is the religious Angelo, hooked to his bible like a smartphone, who calls for all sexual acts to result in death but then follows this by blackmailing a virgin into have sex with him. There is Isabelle who has devoted her body to the Lord and her life to piety and prayer but refuses to relinquish this goodness in order to save her brother from death. Most confusingly of all there is the Duke, who leaves Angelo behind to do the dirty work he can't do, bringing the flagrant Vienna back to moral order but then goes under cover in order to 'save' them all. This desire to reveal human dysfunctions is displayed most effectively in the last image of the production in which the Duke clunky tries to create a tableau of happily ever after, forcing together unlikely pairings, including his own with the distraught Isabella, who has now contorted herself into Munch's The Scream.

The productions shows that this dysfunctional behaviour is not just true of individuals, it also reflects the conflicts within the structure of our society. We are appalled at the idea of the government reading our emails, but equally vitriolic when we feel we are not being protected from terrorists. We point fingers at the depravity of underage drinking and prolific paedophilia alongside printing pictures of upskirt shots of drunk underage it-girls getting into cabs which we tut at whilst hooked to ever more scandalous clickbait. Morality is fucking strange. We may look to philosophers to answer the question 'How should I live?' but what we find in Shakespeare is 'How I do live.' and it is clear from this production that we live strangely.