I have just watched “The Libertine”,
featuring Johnny Depp as the Earl of Rochester, John Wilmot, and was, as the
Earle would say, moved. Depp played the
role of a man who desperately wanted to feel and have meaningful connections in
life but whose experiences were largely limited to the superficial. The audience watches as the Earl of
Rochester drinks away his talent and his life in the desire to experience
something other than his melancholic emptiness that exists in spite of his
title, position, possessions and beautiful, loving wife. Depp perfectly captures the essence of a man
who sees pettiness and worthlessness in the highest endeavors of society, and
artistic beauty in the decadence and overindulgence of the classic tortured
soul.
The Earl says, “I wish to be
moved. I cannot feel in life. I must have others do it for me here in the
theatre” and continues to say, “ the theatre is my drug, and my illness is so
far advanced that my physic must be of the highest quality”. Theatre indeed offers one of the best mirrors
to reality in the satires of comedies and the necessary catharsis of the
tragedy. Aristotle saw the importance of
the theatre and its ability to disassociate the audience from their lives and
societies and reveal the idiocy and/ or horrors that they willingly participate
in. The issue with the Earl of Rochester
is that he did not realize that, in his illness, he had become his drug, had
become theatre and allowed art to permeate his every action and word. In life the Earl sought an experience that
could give him a cathartic release; drink only temporarily numbs the sting of
the emptiness, sexual release is fleeting and finally he falls into the abyss
of self loathing and hates himself even more when he realizes that two things
will happen; the people who care for him will either continue to love him
despite his repulsiveness or they will feel apathy towards him, not because of
what he has allowed himself to become, but because it was he who chose the path
to digression.
Over the course of the film, the
Earl referred to himself as a natural being; he says to an actor in a tone of condescension,
“I am Nature, you are art. Let us see how we compare”. While the actor plays a
character and speaks the lines given to him, the Earl is free to create himself
in his own image, not directed or cued into one action or another; however, the
Earl is so concerned with his personal rebellion and need to feel anything that
he cannot realize that his life is theatre.
The Earl cannot be art and simultaneously be an objective viewer of
himself. Though the Earl recognizes the
anti-societal message of his life’s play, he cannot appreciate his life, a commentary
on the banality of humanity and quest for catharsis, as a reflection of the
world around him.
When the Earl approaches Lizzie, he
says to her, “I think I can make you an actress of truth, not a creature of
artifice”, but no matter how truthful an actress is in her acting, her role is
not to create, but only to modify another’s creation—she can allow herself to
feel what she assumes a character would feel, but she is separated from that
character because she is real and it is a reflection of the playwright’s
interpretation of reality. An actress can
imitate a role and, for all intended purposes can become a character, but there
is a separation between a person and the art of another, ergo an actress is not
a character (except the character that is herself). The Earl, a piece of art in and of himself,
can only see truth in art and interpretation and perceives that what is reality
is true artifice.
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