The title of this entry comes from Oscar Wilde’s Salome. It is a line spoken by Herodias directed at Iokanaan, or John the Baptist. It is an important line, for it captures the hysteric, maddening quality of utterance in the play, not just Iokanaan’s but all characters. Salome is a play in which language has become unmoored from reality. I’m currently knee deep in the play working on the final chapter of my dissertation, so a few reports of Al Pacino’s new “experimental documentary” on the subject caught my eye. Here is the trailer for Wilde Salome:
 

It looks like the kind of documentary exploration Pacino did with Looking for Richard, though Salome is much harder material than Richard III for a number of reasons. For one thing Salome is decadent art: in Shakespeare the language opens up the subject matter allowing us an intimate look into the characters’ psychologies, in Salome as in much decadent literature, the purpose of the work is an examination of language itself. Still, the play has a fascinating history and Pacino claims to be obsessed with it. I’m very interested to see what this ends up looking like when it gets a wide release or is out on DVD.