Sleepwalkers

On Saturday I went to see La Sonnambula (The Sleepwalker) by Bellini at the Metropolitan Opera. The Sicilian musician composed it in 1831 but he was inspired by a French panthomime.
That was absolutely the best thing I have ever seen in my whole life. Imagine I am coming back home after the opera and you ask me what I have seen. I would tell you that it was good but the story was a little bit strange. There is a duke. But because the setting was in our times he was dressed like a business man. One day they find a woman in his bed but she was there because she was sleepwalking. You would tell me: “What? Are you dumb or what? This is the most absurd story I have ever heard. Obviously that was an excuse invented by the guy. He fooled everyone and you too! You are such a fool!” And I would say: “But I swear I saw the girl sleepwalking on stage….Ah. Now I understand. This is why at the end all the singers were dressed like the simple people from the Swiss village that was the original setting of the opera and they were kind of playing fool and laughing at us…The duke made a fool of everyone. I understand that the simple people of a Swiss village would believe this story. But…I was fooled by the duke too!”
There are a lot of plays and novels written in France at the time that followed the revolution which were dealing with rethoric and discourse. That was because during the revolution there would be people speaking at every corner of the street, and people believing in what they were told and acting consequently. When democracy appears in a society then rhetoric follows. And artists and intellectuals of that time dealt with this issue and warned people about the dangers of rhetoric.
How many times can you see that on TV nowadays that we are submerged by discourse thanks to the media? Have you ever seen an ad that at the end tells you: “You fool, that was a joke. Obviously our products are not natural but full of preservatives. You should not believe in all of what you hear or see. Keep it in mind.”
Only once it happened on the American radio. In 1938 Orson Wells was broadcasting The War of the Worlds, a novel about an alien invasion. When people listening to the NBC program changed frequency because of an intermission they could hear the story of an alien invasion reported in the style of a news broadcast, and they panicked thinking that a real invasion was in progress. Many people think he did it on purpose, to show us how powerful media are and how foolish we are. I decided to go and hire one of his best known movies, Citizen Kane, next week because it was among the movies shown at Ramapo one month ago and I missed it. I was very curious to watch it because I have heard people comparing Berlusconi to Citizen Kane, which was a magnate of the media industry. And now I am even more interested in watching it.