“Writing can get away from a writer, as love can get away from a lover,” explains Bradley Epps, the speaker for this past Monday’s comparative literature luncheon. A professor of romance languages, as well as gender and sexuality studies, at Harvard University, Epps’ talk centered around a somewhat pornographic, yet extremely stylistic film titled
Law of Desire (la ley del Deseo), directed by Pedro Almodovar (a famous Spanish director). Epps showed the opening of the film, and then proceeded to discuss it, as related to issues of authorial discretion and indiscretion within film-making and literary production.
Epps first explained that the two very opposite words “discreet” and “indiscreet” share the same origin, a Latin base meaning “not separate." Because of this, the two words are forever linked in their nature as opposites that can never be separated from each other: similarly to “hide” and “seek”, or “silence” and “spoken.” For Epps, this is the main issue within Law of Desire: the relationship between what has been hidden and how there is always a possibility for those hidden things to be revealed – through words, written documents, cameras, and other means of literary and artistic production. Throughout the film there is a constant re-articulation of desire, “that which is hidden”, by way of scenes that use discreet techniques to reveal far too much, indiscreetly. Epps calls this “the fragility of authorial discretion as haunted by indiscretion” – that no matter how hard a writer or director tries to be discreet, they are constantly bound by indiscretion, as it is the nature of writing, and film (scripts, scenes, etc), to serve as tools for revealing the hidden nature of all things – especially desire.
The opening scene of Law of Desire is, for Epps, a perfect example of this interchange between discretion and indiscretion. The opening begins with the names of the actors, director, producers, etc. on crumpled pieces of parchment with a single shaft of light illuminating them – already a discreet way of revealing something completely indiscreet: how the film was made. It is obvious what kind of work must go into creating a film, there has to be actors, actresses, a director, a producer, and a screenplay, but the opening credits of Law of Desire seem like an intrusion, with the single shaft of light and crumpled pages. It is as if we are not supposed to be looking at these pages, at these names – that we took them out of a trashcan and opened them back up by a window…an extremely secretive and discreet way of revealing obvious information about the film’s creation, which indiscreetly reveals the sort of film this is going to be even before the first characters walk on screen. This film is already, from the opening credits, about the relationship between the discreet and the indiscreet. As the opening continues, with the young man masturbating for pay, the audience is once again shown something extremely discreet – how the young man’s masturbation is shot with shadows and angles, pornographic yet not pornographic, for we see little of his private self or his sex organs – only to realize again how very indiscreet it is: as the scene ends, we are shown two elderly men reading a script, dubbing over the entire scene while the young man finishes masturbating! This jolting realization that the old men are dubbing this scene reveals something about the film that would surely have been hidden otherwise: this film is about the creation of cinema, and the simulation of cinema, as a way to speak about desire. The opening credits and this opening masturbation scene are, as Epps puts it, “acts of discretion that actually work as a violation of discretion at the same time.” I find this to be quite fascinating, and applicable to literature as well, though Epps did not go into literature as much as film. As a writer myself, I find that it is indeed true that writing can get away from a writer, and as we write ideas are brought forth and characters are shaped in ways that are both discreet and yet so very indiscreet. Much is revealed about an author through writing, and though we have discussed many reasons why an author’s intentions/background should not be considered when analyzing his or her work, the fact that an author’s hidden desires or feelings on certain subjects such as politics, love, sexuality, and ethics often come to light through their use of language is no accident, nor is it always intentional – more often than not it just happens that way. Language, it seems, has always had, and always will have, the power to be both discreet and indiscreet all at once: how we use it, and what we reveal by using it.
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Shakespeare Performance in Asia (SPiA) is the first phase of the Global Shakespeare digital video archive. SPiA, co-edited by Peter Donaldson and Alexander Huang, contains an extensive collection of videos of Asian Shakespeare performances for scholars, students, and any one interested in Shakespeare or Asian cultures. There are interactive maps and timelines, interviews, biographies of directors and actors, for understanding (1) intercultural performance in Asia and (2) Shakespeare's place in the modern world. 
