Meme day 24: Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
[Best quote: Lee Adama's defense of Gaius Baltar from "Crossroads, Part II," season 3, episode 20 of Battlestar Galactica, Syfy SciFi Channel, 2007]
I'll have you know that as a long-time collector of quotes, I find this prompt to be grossly unfair. There are many directions I could take this in, but for now, let's go with the following astonishing monologue, given by Lee Adama at the conclusion of season 3 of Battlestar Galactica, during a trial to determine whether the much-hated Gaius Baltar is guilty of treason for collaborating with the Cylons during his presidency:
"Did the defendant make mistakes? Sure, he did. Serious mistakes. But did he actually commit any crimes? Did he commit treason? No. I mean, it was an impossible situation. When the Cylons arrived, what could he possibly do? What could anyone have done? I mean, ask yourself, what would you have done? What would you have done? If he had refused to surrender, the Cylons would've probably nuked the planet right then and there. So did he appear to cooperate with the Cylons? Sure. So did hundreds of others. What's the difference between him and them? The President issued a blanket pardon. They were all forgiven. No questions asked. Colonel Tigh. Colonel Tigh used suicide bombers, killed dozens of people. Forgiven. Lieutenant Agathon and Chief Tyrol. They murdered an officer on the Pegasus. Forgiven. The Admiral? The Admiral instituted a military coup d'etat against the President. Forgiven. And me? Well, where do I begin? I shot down a civilian passenger ship, the Olympic Carrier. Over a thousand people on board. Forgiven. I raised my weapon to a superior officer, committed an act of mutiny. Forgiven. And then on the very day when Baltar surrendered to those Cylons, I, as Commander of Pegasus, jumped away. I left everybody on that planet alone, undefended, for months! I even tried to persuade the Admiral never to return. To abandon you all there for good. If I'd had my way, nobody would've made it off that planet. I'm the coward. I'm the traitor. I'm forgiven. I'd say we're very forgiving of mistakes. We make our own laws now, our own justice. We've been pretty creative at finding ways to let people off the hook for everything from theft to murder. And we've had to be. Because... Because we're not a civilization anymore. We are a gang. And we're on the run. And we have to fight to survive. We have to break rules. We have to bend laws. We have to improvise. But not this time, no. Not this time. Not for Gaius Baltar. No. You, you have to die. You have to die, because... Well, because we don't like you very much. Because you're arrogant. Because you're weak. Because you're a coward. And we the mob, we want to throw you out the airlock because you didn't stand up to the Cylons, and get yourself killed in the process. That's justice now. You should've been killed back on New Caprica, but since you had the temerity to live, we're gonna execute you now. That's justice! This case...This case is built on emotion. On anger, bitterness, vengeance. But most of all, it is built on shame. It's about the shame of what we did to ourselves back on that planet. And it's about the guilt of those of us who ran away. Who ran away. And we are trying to dump all that guilt and all that shame onto one man, and then flush him out the airlock and hope that that just gets rid of it all. So that we can live with ourselves. But that won't work. That won't work. That's not justice. Not to me. Not to me."
I can never decide why I love this quote more: Because it's so remarkably and movingly spoken by a character who I'd honestly never had that much interest in before, or because it thoroughly and canonically embodies the interpretation of the events of Battlestar Galactica to which I am most committed. It makes me irrationally and profoundly angry to run into BSG fans who want to squash all the moral ambiguity out of everything that their favorite characters do and proclaim that there are clear and obvious heroes on the show who always make the best decisions and cannot do any wrong - or, conversely, that there are clear evil villains who we should always be against. In my opinion, that's so far from the point of the show that I wonder if we watched the same thing. By the end of BSG's season 3, as Lee points out, everyone has done questionable or flat-out immoral things in the interest of keeping the human race alive. In many ways, by that stage of the game no one is any better than anyone else, but this was the first time on the show that anyone really came out and said it. It's a scene that has stuck with me very vividly to this day.
[That one awesome movie idea that still hasn't been done yet: Chaucer's The Miller's Tale as a raunchy teen comedy]
I am so happy that this is a prompt. So incredibly happy. In fact, the existence of this prompt is probably a large part of the reason why I decided to do the movie meme in the first place. Some people will recall that my personal Awesome Million-Dollar Brilliant Idea For A Smash Hit Movie!!!!!1 has been on my mind ever since my freshman year of college, when the terrible movie A Knight's Tale was released. Apart from the fact that I thought it was terrible and that it made a fair amount of money, the only other important thing you really need to know about A Knight's Tale is that it was extremely loosely inspired by the Knight's Tale from Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and features Chaucer as a character. Given that I was an English major and studying Chaucer at the time, after unfortunately spending money on A Knight's Tale I was struck with an amazing idea: Why not take other stories from the Canterbury Tales and make them into contemporary movies? And because my sense of humor stopped evolving when I was twelve, the first one that came to mind was the Miller's Tale.
For those who have not had the singular pleasure of reading the Miller's Tale, it is basically a protracted dirty joke from the 14th century. It deals with a student named Nicholas who wants to have sex with his landlord's much younger wife, Alison, and accomplishes this by tricking the landlord into thinking that there is going to be a flood of Biblical proportions and that he can only avoid it by sleeping in a bathtub on the roof, which will allow Nicholas to sleep with Alison. The local parish clerk, Absolom, interferes, and there is literal butt-kissing and hot pokers and general hilarity. I promise you that it's really very funny. When I first read it, I felt that its story and its sense of humor very much ran parallel to the raunchy humor of sex comedies like American Pie, and that you could totally make a hilarious movie out of it by moving it to a contemporary setting, as was the fad at that time for adaptations of Shakespeare and the like. Sure, you would have to develop the characters and pad the story to make it movie-length, but that's what A Knight's Tale did too. Given that they're not really making movies like American Pie anymore, I suspect that I have missed the boat on this one, but I still think I could have at one point made a crapton of money writing a script for this. So Hollywood can just call me anytime about that.
This entry was originally posted at http://gamerchick.dreamwidth.org/565372.html. You can comment on either journal. Number of comments on Dreamwidth: