Has anyone seen the new Guitar Hero version with the Beatles? My dad and I were discussing it, and marvelling at how realistic the band members appeared in the game. They look almost exactly like the real musicians. But in this game, who are the "real" Beatles?
I allude to the current classroom text, Six Characters. One argument made by on of the characters (the father, I believe) is that the characters are more real than the actors who play them because while human beings change from day to day, the characters in a play are always the same. They are static, never changing, and for this reason their personalities have fixed definitions.
So using Pirandello's reasoning, we could say that the Beatles in the Guitar Hero video game are more real than their human counterparts. Lennon and Harrison are dead, but the video-game versions are alive in the mind of the gamer-guitarist. And Paul McCartney and Ringo are portrayed as their much younger selves on the screen, while the physical men age by the day. The Beatles are only human, yet are immortally preserved within the game.
-emily donahue
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My book, The Stuff of Thought, used a similar example to illustrate an even more similar idea. For my fellow Beatle geeks, you are probably already aware of the "Paul is dead" hoax. For those of you who aren't, there was once a conspiracy that Paul McCartney had been killed in a car accident in 1966 and was replaced by a look-alike so the Beatles could play on (http://www.paulisdeadhoax.com/).
ReplyDeleteSteven Pinker asks the question, "How does one define Paul McCartney?" Most would probably answer that he was the Beatle known for his love songs and gift for melody, and is remembered for his best work on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Operating under this definition, would the Paul replacement, a supposed William Campbell, not be Paul McCartney? He wrote and sang on Sgt. Pepper and every subsequent Beatles album. If Paul is actually dead, then the Beatles work associated with him is much more applicable his replacement, not Paul McCartney himself.
IT'S CRAZY!!! - Colin
Back to the Beatles Rock Band topic, it is even stranger because there are a few different animations of the different Beatles, a young Paul with the famous mushroom hair cut, a Paul with a beard, and a Paul with longer hair. If all the animated characters were alive like in the play, who would be the "real" Paul McCartney character? Each one of them represents a different moment in his life. I can just imagine them arguing over who is the "real" one. That would be an interesting story to read.
ReplyDelete-Alexa
I completely disagree with Pirandello's notion that to remain the same is to be "real". To me, that is exactly what is not real. It is the ability to change, or more so, the impossibility of not changing that makes something real. It's like that essay we wrote, about everything changing all the time. That's life, thats what makes something alive, makes it real. To remain constantly static is to lose that and thus to be less real.
ReplyDeleteFor this reason, the characters in the play, or the Beatles in the game, are less real. They can't live out lifes, they can't change. The characters are forever trapped in the same story, over and over and over. There is no chance to live, to change, to become real.
~Becca