Emotions have no age. One of the few aspects of life that survives generations, that everyone has in common, is emotion, feeling. The human experience is built upon it. “Decode” is a song by Paramore. Written for the Twilight soundtrack, the song is dark and questions whether a relationship is legitimate and worth fighting for. Macbeth, a tragedy by William Shakespeare, is set in mid-eleventh century Scotland. It is about a man who fights to hold power as the King of Scotland, despite the many deterrents of doing so. Despite the vastly contrasting settings, the pop-rock song and the Elizabethan play have many overlapping themes, the result of similar emotions felt by the characters. “Decode” and Macbeth are bound together by human feelings through the common elements of desperation, which leads to women’s expectations of men, and regret.
Desperation in both “Decode” and Macbeth result in the questioning of what it means to be a man. In the lyrics, “But you think that I can't see / What kind of man that you are / If you're a man at all,” Paramore questions manhood in an aggressive and accusatory way. “If you’re a man at all” is a stab at the person that the band is referring to’s pride, and the band makes it seem as though that person would be worth less if he wasn’t a man. In this case, being a bad man is better than being no man at all. This is a common theme throughout Macbeth. In Act I Scene VII, when Macbeth confronts his wife and tries to back out on their plot to murder Duncan, Lady Macbeth replies, ”When you durst do it, then you were a man” (49). Lady Macbeth defines being a man as being tough and strong enough to do hard deeds, and she holds this definition against her husband, calling him weak. Although this degradation of men is not an emotion in itself, it is fueled by emotions. In both, it’s the result of desperation. The narrator in “Decode” sees all of the flaws in her relationship, and is scared that it is not going to work out. She degrades the other half of the relationship because she is desperate to have a man, and the strength and stability that comes with that. She cannot, or does not want to, be by herself. Lady Macbeth also feels this hopelessness. She can’t rise to power alone, because her womanly qualities-- her stronger emotions-- hold her back from murdering Duncan. In both cases, women’s emotions cause them to degrade men by the questioning of their manlihood.
Towards the end of the song and the play, both express feelings of deep remorse and regret. In “Decoded,” this occurs during the bridge, where the tempo slows, the sound becomes quieter, and the lyrics are, “Do you see what we've done / We've gone and made such fools / Of ourselves.” The musical and lyrical aspects of this section of the song embody not only embarrassment, as the singer refers to themselves as “fools,” but regret and sadness as well. This remorseful regret is also displayed in Macbeth’s “Tomorrow” soliloquy, stated immediately after Macbeth is alerted of his wife’s suicide. “And all our yesterdays have lighted fools / the way to dusty death” (5.5.22-23), Macbeth states to himself. “All our yesterdays” refers to his and Lady Macbeth’s past, their decisions to murder Duncan, Banquo, and countless others in order to hold power. It is these decisions, Macbeth believes, that led to his wife’s death-- and soon his own. The shared word, “fools,” in “Decoded” and Macbeth holds significance. The songwriters and Macbeth are not just sad or regretful. They are mad. “Fools” is spit out like an insult, which reflects their pessimism and negativity about their respective situations.
At face value, “Decoded” and Macbeth could not be more different. Yet, the shared human emotions and feelings are able to bind the two works together, through the desperation that results in women’s expectations of men and the common theme of regret. This is important. If human emotions can bind together a song about Twilight and a Shakespearean tragedy, why can’t they bind today’s population together? Every person has emotions, feelings, which make them act and make the decisions that they* do. If one just tunes into the other’s emotions, is empathetic and tries to use their shared human experience to their advantage, the human race would reach the high level of unification that is and has always been possible.
*They: he, she, they
No comments:
Post a Comment