The Tactics of the Shrewd

A comparison of The Taming in the Shrew and Amélie

Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew proves that deception has long been a tactic people use to find a romantic partner. Lucentio is the son of a rich man who has traveled to Padua and is determined to gain the love of young, attractive Bianca. He disguises as a tutor, “Cambio,” in order to get closer to Bianca while his servant, Tranio, disguises as him.

In Jeunet’s Amélie (2001), Amélie is a very shy young woman who falls in love with Nino, a man who collects and reassembles discarded photos from a photo booth. However, she is too shy to meet him, so she plays a cat-and-mouse game with him, leading him to various places all across Paris and dropping hints about her identity.

There’s a similarity between their motivations, but a difference in their tactics. Though the genders are reversed, Lucentio and Amélie have the same goal: to gain the love of their respective sweethearts. But, Lucentio has to work around Bianca’s father Baptista, who has said that Bianca shall not court any men until her older sister has gotten married, whereas the only obstacle Amélie has to overcome is her own reticence. Amélie and The Taming of the Shrew both support the message that a little deception in a relationship can be a beneficial thing.

“LUCENTIO, as CAMBIO

 Now mistress, profit you in what you read?

BIANCA

 What, master, read you? First resolve me that.

LUCENTIO, as CAMBIO

 I read that I profess, The Art of Love.”

(Act IV, Scene ii, Page 153)

In this quote, Lucentio is disguised as Cambio, a tutor, and flirting with Bianca while it appears that he is teaching her from a book. His line, “I read that I profess, The Art of Love” is a not-so-subtle way of telling Bianca that he is in love with her. Lucentio’s use of a disguise to get Bianca is similar to Amélie’s use of clues in order to reveal pieces of her identity to Nino and eventually meet him: they’re both acts of deception. Their tactics are different though, Lucentio is disguised as another person while his servant is disguised as him, whereas Amélie never actually disguises as anyone but keeps her identity clandestine. This also means that Nino and Bianca, despite the gender differences, are similar in one aspect: they are the targets of the protagonist’s affection and deception.

Here’s an example of Amélie’s deception.

In this scene, Amélie (center) leads Nino (left) across a local park with arrows in order to arrive him at his scrapbook which he had lost when it fell off of his motorcycle, all without revealing herself. She avoids communicating with her partner until it is necessary, unlike Lucentio, who disguises as someone else and then reveals himself later.

“Love wrought these miracles. Bianca’s love

Made me exchange my state with Tranio,

While he did bear my countenance in the town,

And happily I have arrived at the last

Unto the wished haven of my bliss.”

(Act V, Scene i, Page 203)

When Lucentio delivers this quote, it is near the end of the play and he has married Bianca. When closely examining Lucentio’s strategy, it’s surprising it worked. There are many things that could have gone wrong during its operation: Bianca might not have immediately fallen in love with Lucentio like she did, or Lucentio could have been found out by Bianca’s father, or Petruchio could have failed to court Katherine which would’ve meant that Bianca couldn’t marry, and so on. So, even though the scenario where Lucentio and Bianca marry isn’t realistic, Shakespeare chose to write it that way.

Amélie has a similarly unrealistic plan. She creates an elaborate path that will eventually lead Nino to her, but there are also many possible complications: she could lose track of him or he could lose track of her, Nino could lose interest, and so on. However, it worked out regardless and they ended up together.

Of the billions of people on the planet, all of them have different experiences. Eventually, unfortunate things happen to them. Something as simple as a new, inconvenient class schedule at school, or something as serious as the death of a loved one. When these things happen, some sort of lifestyle change occurs. Maybe, as a result of the schedule change, a student has to wake up earlier. Or maybe, as a result of a spouse’s death, a man has to live without a wife. People can change, but change isn’t easy. All people have and need a coping mechanism in order to survive their changing world.

In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Jimmy Cross is a platoon leader in charge of O’Brien and a group of American soldiers in Vietnam during the war. Cross is still infatuated with a his teenage crush, Martha, from years ago. This quote on page 1 shows his obsession: “he [Cross] would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending. He would imagine romantic camping trips into the White Mountains in New Hampshire. He would sometimes taste the envelope flaps, knowing her tongue had been there.” Cross is still attached to Martha not just because he can’t help it, but because it’s his way of coping with being a soldier in Vietnam. Each day, their troop wakes up at dawn, walks practically the whole day, then sleeps for a few hours. Day in and day out. It’s understandable that Cross needs to remember Martha to remember what home was like and to remember that if all goes well, he can get back to her.

On page 239, O’Brien explains the importance of storytelling during wartime to the reader: “We kept the dead alive with stories. When Ted Lavender was shot in the head, the men talked about how they'd never seen him so mellow, how tranquil he was, how it wasn't the bullet but the tranquilizers that blew his mind. He wasn't dead, just laid-back.” By telling each other stores, O’Brien and his comrades can, for a little while, escape the war, socialize, and have fun. A good story engages the listener and takes him or her into a different world. Without them, it would be much harder for the soldiers to deal with the gruelling daily routine. Storytelling is another coping mechanism that O’Brien and company utilize to survive the ever-changing war.

On page 33, O’Brien describes the character of Ted Lavender, a fellow soldier: “Like when Ted Lavender went too heavy on the tranquilizers. ‘How's the war today?’ somebody would say, and Ted Lavender would give a soft, spacey smile and say, ‘Mellow, man. We got ourselves a nice mellow war today.’” The tranquilizers make him sleepy and happy but still able to walk, so they’re the perfect mechanism to make the world a little more tolerable. Soldiers in Vietnam, particularly O’Brien’s crew, had to walk miles and miles every day. Without a coping mechanism like tranquilizers, they wouldn’t be able to deal with the drudging routine of war.

Here’s a quote from O’Brien in an interview published in the New York Times: “Storytelling is the essential human activity. The harder the situation, the more essential it is. In Vietnam men were constantly telling one another stories about the war. Our unit lost a lot of guys around My Lai, but the stories they told stay around after them. I would be mad not to tell the stories I know.” Again, the soldiers tell stories to other soldiers so that they can briefly escape the war they’re in. “The harder the situation, the more essential it is,” implies that O’Brien has been in plenty of difficult situations and probably has experience where storytelling was necessary at varying degrees to tolerate and get through the situation. His account confirms that having a coping mechanism, such as storytelling, is necessary to survive a changing world.

Tranquilizers, stories, and even dreaming, are all coping mechanisms. When people go through tough times, such mechanisms are essential to carrying on with their lives. Coping is simply a part of human survival. Change arrives in some form, and something has to be done to adjust to that change. That’s what coping is, and it’s how change happens in a person.

Works Cited for Analytical Essay:

• Bruckner, D.J. "A Storyteller For the War That Won't End." New York Times Online. The New York Times. April 3, 1990. Web. October 20, 2009.

• O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. Print.

Narrative Essay:

One morning, two and a half years ago, my dad gave me an ultimatum. He told me that I had to take up some sort of physical activity. The options he recommended were sports and crossfit. I wasn’t a fan of the competitiveness of most sports and I had never heard of crossfit, so I asked him about crossfit. He explained that it was a fitness regimen for all ages designed to increase cardiovascular/respiratory endurance, stamina, speed and strength. I thought that sounded interesting, so I acquiesced.

At the time, I was really skinny for my age and height: 78 pounds. For some reason that I still don’t really understand, I wasn’t hungry often. Even when I was, I usually found whatever I was doing more interesting than food. Though I was told by parents that my weight was unhealthy, I had a bad tendency to ignore them. It didn’t seem unhealthy to me - I was never in pain, and except for occasional pangs of hunger, there weren’t any repercussions.

I started crossfit at the Sweat gym on Main Street, just a few blocks away from my house. I went two days a week to get personal training from Jim, who has been awesome throughout the whole session. I was an awkward kid and I remember saying very little for the first session we had because it was new and scary to me.

Over the next few weeks, I learned a lot of techniques and forms. Deadlifts, presses, front and back squats, cleans, jerks, snatches, and so on, became like second nature to me. Still today they’re embedded in my muscle memory. Knowing form sped up the training process - now I was really doing crossfit. Jim started assigning me actual crossfit workouts. They included a strength and a WOD (“workout of the day”) portion. The strength portion was dedicated to getting PRs (personal records) and the WOD portion was dedicated to completing an amount of exercises as fast as possible or completing as many exercises as possible in a given time.

After a month or so, I was gaining weight. Slowly, but surely - as a kid, I was always growing, but it was happening faster now. My dad had to tell me before I noticed, but when I did, that got me excited. I noticed that I was enjoying crossfit more than I used to. Two months after I started, I went to see the doctor for a checkup. I was now above the eighth percentile in body weight. This is about the time when my trainer opened up his own gym on Ridge Avenue, which is where I worked out from then on.

That’s my favorite part about crossfit, or any sort of exercise regimen. The more you do it, the more accustomed you are to doing it, and the better you get at it, and it’s uphill from there.

Soon, summer ended, and I went back to school - my first year at SLA. Things got complicated pretty quickly. When school ended, I had to take the train to the gym, which made my schedule hectic, given that I get out of school at very different times each weekday. I would walk up the hill on Ridge to the gym, then get driven home by parents. Fortunately, I settled into the not-so-routine routine well enough, and eventually, I went to the gym three times a week.

I did this for about a year and a half. I was gaining weight and increasing in body weight percentile, and the doctor told me during a checkup that my resting heart rate was lower than average (which is a good thing). When 2014 came, Jim bought a new gym. It was this huge, spacious building with a high ceiling just a few blocks away from the previous, and much smaller, location. It was also closer to the train station I got off at, so it was perfect. I went a solid three days a week for months.

Unfortunately, in the recent months in junior year, school caught up with me. I’m still doing crossfit, just at a slower pace - two days a week instead of three. But, crossfit has been immensely helpful in my weight gain process. Two and a half years ago, I was 78 pounds and around the eighth percentile for my weight. Now I’m 128 pounds and nearing the 40th percentile. Crossfit has been the perfect mechanism for me to change myself.

According to Investopedia, the definition of a regressive tax is “a tax that takes a larger percentage from low-income people than from high-income people.” Unfortunately when it comes to the lottery, that is the case in the U.S. State lotteries cause disproportionately high spending among low-income citizens, and are therefore a regressive tax.

State lotteries operate by printing large quantities of lottery tickets. Each ticket has an extremely small chance to reward their owner with a huge monetary prize. However, the insensible dreams of wild riches are mostly those of the impoverished. So, in an effort to escape their situation, they buy lottery tickets - but this only serves to send them further into poverty. Though the state is not deliberately asking for money from the low-income citizens, their lotteries have the same effect.

The Fiscal Policy Institute shows that lottery purchases are 4.0% of citizens with a median household income of $20,000, whereas they make up 0.25% of citizens with a median household income of $85,000. If it's the poor who are purchasing the majority of lottery tickets (money which goes to the government), then that meets the definition of a regressive tax.

The NCPA offers more evidence on the disparity between low- and high-income citizens’ expense on lottery tickets: “the dollar amount spent on the lottery by the lowest-income individuals (earning less than $10,000) is twice as much as the highest earners (earning more than $100,000 annually).” The impoverished buying twice as many lottery tickets than the wealthy, thus giving more money to the state government, is more proof that lotteries are a regressive tax.

In a memorandum to the governor of Massachusetts, Dong Kwang Ahn and Elizabeth Caldona did a study of 27 Massachusetts cities and found that “in 2009 the people living in Newton, one of the wealthiest cities in the Commonwealth with a $56,285 per capita income spent 0.4 % of their income on lotteries, while Springfield, one of the poorest cities in Massachusetts, with an $18,187 per capita income spent 3.6 % of its income on lotteries.” Here is yet more evidence that the poor are spending disproportionately high amounts on the lottery.

As the studies, research and statistics have shown, state lotteries in the U.S. have unintended consequences. Impoverished citizens feel that the only way out of their situation is to keep spending money on the one-in-a-billion chance of wild riches - but in doing so plunge further into poverty. By making the lottery available to everyone, the government is indirectly taking advantage of the poor.

Works Cited:

• "Regressive Tax Definition." Investopedia. N.p., n.d. Web. <http://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/regressivetax.asp>.

• Kramer, Brent. "The New York State Lottery: A Regressive Tax." Fiscal Policy Institute (special report) (2010): 961-66. www.fiscalpolicy.org. Fiscal Policy Institute, 29 Mar. 2010. Web. <http://www.fiscalpolicy.org/StateTaxNotes_LotteryRegressive.pdf>.

• Davis, Michael L., Ph.D., and Edwin L. Cox. "Taxing the Poor: A Report on Tobacco, Alcohol, Gambling, and Other Taxes and Fees That Disproportionately Burden Lower-Income Families." Ed. Matthew P. Moore. National Center for Policy Analysis 300 (2007): n. pag. www.ncpa.org. June 2007. Web. <http://www.ncpa.org/pdfs/st300.pdf>.

• Ahn, Dong K., and Elizabeth Cardona. "Interoffice Memorandum." Maxwell School (2010): n. pag. www.maxwell.syr.edu/Faculty/. 10 May 2010. Web. <http://faculty.maxwell.syr.edu/jyinger/classes/PAI735/studentpapers/2010/ahn_cardona.pdf>.

Why use insecurity in advertising?

The fundamental goal of advertising is to get you to buy or do something. That goal doesn’t need to achieved by creating a sense of insecurity. For example, in an advertisement from “Old Spice,” a mother follows around her son with his lady friend trying not to be seen. She sings a song about how he’s growing up so fast, how he’s being treated like a man and now thanks to Old Spice, he smells like a man. What this advertisement implies is that with Old Spice, women are not only attracted to you but also respect you.

Another example of an advertisement which does not attempt to make the viewer feel insecurity about his or her self is one by the U.S. Navy. In this commercial, they inform the viewer of how powerful the “call to serve” is and how it is a force of good in this world. It inspires one to join the Navy to become a better person. It does not use techniques such as the archetypal before-and-after comparison advertisements to badger the audience for not being good.

This method of before-and-after comparison is most common to insecurity-based advertisements. Why use insecurity in advertising? Well, the answer is that it’s very easy to instill self-doubt in the viewer.

It’s easier to destroy than to create.

Advertisements which deliberately attempt to make the viewer insecure are much more common than those which use different techniques (such as the aforementioned Old Spice and Navy commercials). This is because it is easier to make someone feel bad rather than good.

For example, in a short article by Mark VandeWettering, he explains how a beautiful  monument made of paper cranes dedicated to a girl who died of leukemia was easily burned down by some “yutz.” Making something is hard work, and destroying it is easy.

A survey conducted by the University of Central Florida revealed that 95% of male college students had some sort of dissatisfaction with their body, some claiming advertisements they saw a more ideal body image which made them consider their own stature.

Advertisements such as those by Axe are directed at males’ view of their sex appeal. In one of their commercials, two men and a woman are in an alley. One man looks very handsome on a motorcycle and is obviously the woman’s boyfriend, and the other man is homeless searching through a shopping cart. He sees the woman walking towards the first man and applies Axe deodorant. The woman smells, and approaches him, and sniffs him all over. She eventually returns to her boyfriend and winks at the homeless man. This advertisement is an example of those which cause people to be insecure about their body image.

A 2008 study conducted by Dove Self-Esteem Fund showed that 62% of girls aged eight to eighteen felt dissatisfied with themselves, and 71% of those girls felt that way because they believed that they were not as pretty as they should be.

However, probably the most notorious in the field of insecurity-inducing-advertisements is before-and-after cosmetics commercials. These types of ads show a female looking wrinkled, dirty, and unappealing in one frame labeled “before.” In the next, labeled “after,” is her looking attractive without any sort of blemish. This type of advertisement has caused females to feel insecurity about their own body image and purchase more in the hope of being pretty.

Defense against the “dark arts.”

Character lays sideways in bed, feet and head dangling over opposite sides, propping up his head with his arms, apparently staring up at the ceiling. He is smiling and chatting with his friend via his augmentation implant, a chip designed to grant the user abilities greater than that of a modern day computer.

“Haha, alright, I’ll talk to you later. Bye. Pause. End call.” Sits up, sighs.

My friend likes to ramble. I like to listen to him, so I think we make a pretty good team. Now, he was just rambling to me about family history, some funny events that lead him to meet his wife, the sort of thing he talks about sometimes. When he was getting to the end of his story, I asked him what his first date with his wife was like, just to humor him, to let him talk about what he likes to talk about. He responded evasively, I inquired, and he confessed to me that he didn’t really remember.

Character’s face turns serious. Now I know it’s not just me.

People don’t remember things anymore; they have technology and chips and stuff to memorize things for them. This whole generation has ADD. Social networks are accessible from anywhere, we can’t focus because we get notifications, calls, distractions that bring us back to the world of our friends, and it’s wired right to our heads. Literally. The era of smartphones is gone and chips have replaced them.

Stands, paces. Matter of fact, I was the last one to sign up for an augmentation chipping. My family and friends told me it was “the ultimate convenience” and my son uses it like a drug. He told me he was getting work done and that he didn’t need a computer or anything else. Now, I know he has also had issues with his work ethic. I’m trying to not let him slip into the zone of social isolation. The bubble of games, music, videos, digital communication. I just want my kid to be able to focus on school and not go all spacey on me when I talk to him.

I remember when he first got his chip. I was anxious as hell and I had learned everything there was to learn about augmentation, and why it was supposedly a good choice. Back then, I think it was expensive, but I’d been told about the calendar and digital organization and event planning and whatever. Know what? Right after we got it, he was texting his friends, going on the web, just staring at nothing in particular. As I recall, that was the first time I saw the glaze in his eyes as he looked to his upper left at the little display.

Before chips were becoming widespread, I didn’t really think much of the pace of technology. I mean, I knew it was fast, and new inventions were always happening, but… well, I can’t predict the future. My memory is fuzzy on occasion, but I think about 2005 was when me and my wife wanted a son. Now she wanted… um… well, she asked me if I was ready, and I told her… huh.

Addressing the audience: You ever have a memory almost clear in your mind and it just evades you? That’s what’s been happening to me recently. I mean, I’m only 48, but… do I need a doctor? Character’s speaking becomes excited and angry with realization, and gets a crazy edge to his voice. No. No, it’s this damned thing in my head! I swear it’s messing with me. I know that I’ve never had these issues before “augmentation” and that I haven’t always been like this. I think that - Pauses. You hear that…? I swear I heard a click, right in the back of my he - Pauses again. Character blinks and looks dazed and unfamiliar with his surroundings.

What just happened? Man, I don’t remember what I was just doing. Exit.

A loud hiss, the sound of pressurized air being released, made the din of the students temporarily inaudible. The large, yellow, gas-consuming transport behemoth in front of me settled and opened its doors. Not in any hurry, and wearing half my weight in winter gear, I let my schoolmates barge past me to escape the weather. I turned my head acutely to face my three close friends.

“Back of the bus,” I told them. They nodded, shivering. We boarded the steep steps into the bus and made our way through a multitude of loud children to the rear seats. Sheila followed suit, then Joy, then Taylor. Sheila was twelve, naturally a very pale girl, and a lover of dresses, accessories, and fashion (girl things), vampire novels, anime, and dolls. She was tall and thin, had purely dark hair which was neatly separated on tied into little buns on each side of her scalp. Her facial features slightly resembled that of a mouse, pointed and prominent. She wore an incarnadine dress with white buttons and a lace collar which I found adorable, with black buckled shoes and stockings striped black-and-white. These stockings she bore every other day, and they were collecting rips and tears (when I asked her about them, she told me that “threadbare” was her style). I wondered why she wasn’t freezing.

Joy was not tall, just the opposite was she. Stout, and proud were two adjectives that best fit her. She stood straight and as tall as she could, took school seriously, and wore plain clothing. Jeans, a t-shirt, and a thin jacket were all she ever needed. In warm weather, she would shed the jacket and that would be her outfit. She rarely talked about her hobbies, but I knew she played violin and piano. I couldn’t tell if she enjoyed it, perhaps her mother was the reason she played.

Taylor’s long, flowy, hair was dark as night. It went past her shoulders, and almost reached the small of her back. Each week she did new things with it, always growing it and caring for it. She had a feminine, kind face, with long eyelashes and a delicate nose. People were often assumed her soft appearance was matched by a soft personality, and they soon found out they were wrong as they got acquainted with her. She was seen by others as truculent, I saw her as righteous. She had a loud, infectious cackle of a laugh.

Despite our bizarre and differing interests, we had many common traits. We were reticent to those who didn’t know us and we took a long time to get acquainted.

At the moment, Joy, Sheila and I were conversing about boys, and Taylor and a few other kids a few seats ahead were yelling to each other. I heard snippets of their conversation, and at some point I Taylor say this:

“Yo, you are a bitch!” It was followed by clamorous laughter from Taylor and the other kids.

Whatever was funny, I didn’t get it. In my mind, the “b-word” was not something you called someone, and much less something you called a girl. Was it a joke? It sounded like one. I was a little bewildered.

I looked at Taylor. I started to say something, but I stammered, and just made an incoherent mumble.

“Huh?” Taylor queried, turning to see me.

“Um. Nothing,” I said awkwardly. Taylor was about to return to her conversation, when I continued:

“You can say that?” I blurted with sudden clarity.

“Say what? ‘Bitch?’”

“Yeah.”

“Of course!” She stated, almost too kindly, as if trying to not misunderstand what my issue was. “It’s just something girls call each other.”

“I thought it was especially bad when you said that to a girl.”

“Well, maybe if you’re a boy,” I was a boy. “But it ain’t that bad.”

Sheila and Taylor looked at me. I felt funny. Was is just me? I couldn’t call a girl the b-word yet other girls could address each other as such? Wasn’t it a bit unfair? The whole encounter left me confused. Was that double standard justified by gender? I never found the answer.