More W;t (Essay)

(I finished my editing, and then felt highly self conscious that my essay was shorter than everyone else's. Silly, I know. So I decided to take my remaining ten or so minutes and beef it up a bit, but at the same time, I'm afraid of over-talking and ruining my point. So.)

Viewing the play W;t as a film is an experience which allows the viewer to be exposed to a good deal of ideas and notions that may, in its stage format, be missed. W;t embodies a plethora of emotion and emotional tension that is best explored very close to the characters, Watching W't as a film urges a deeper comprehension of the story by exhibiting a visual representation of the characters' interactions, rather than forcing viewers to infer subtly (or miss entirely) through a viewing of the play from a distant stage.

Themes unravel and are understood when the viewer is close to a character or characters. In W;t, the viewer is presented with a woman--a professor of English by the name of Vivian Bearing, with an intense passion for the texts of John Donne. She, however, has cancer, and is confined to hospitals, where she is made to feel inferior and perhaps violated--she is not at all accustomed to losing her very elevated academic state. She, however, throughout her life, has practiced a proximity to texts, while simultaneously practicing a distance from people. Vivian's final understanding of what is important both in life and in learning is discovered due to her (albeit forced) close observation and dependence upon the humanity shown by others. In understanding this theme, proximity to the characters is as equally important to the viewer as it is to Vivian. Distance--such as that from a stage to an audience--chills and sets the audience apart from the characters, and in consequence does the same to the theme.

Humanity, in its most impactful form, as Vivian sees, most be shown minutely. As in real life, it is the small observations that create our opinions about other. Many times, a meaning most be noticed, not necessarily told about or guessed about. Every one of us has formed an opinion about a person based upon word of mouth, or what we have been told about them, and then discovered that our judgments were entirely false. And so, as stated earlier, proximity to the characters is the key to learning about them. Watching W;t as a film allows the audience to not only hear the characters speaking words, but also to see and feel them speaking words.  By immersing the viewer in, essentially, Vivian's exact point of view, the film version of W;t allows (perhaps even forces) the audience to understand what Vivian is feeling, and why she is feeling it. One must see through a character's eyes to know fully what they are seeing.

W;t is a story that requires a close observation to understand. Distance will ultimately kill a full understanding before it is born, and leave the viewer lacking greatly in what they were meant to understand from the story. While a stage may present a character, a camera can explore one, and W;t, the film, is an example of the importance of such a phenomena, and its theme depends entirely upon it.