PARANOIA AGENT: OTHELLO HEADCANON

#OthElokuu

Elsewhere on this blog, I have been remarking left and right on how Iago may represent a dark force within us...
I happen to have noticed something the motif has with the downfall of the characters deceived by Iago in Othello: it's all about lowering one's guard. And about entitlement, the feeling that one deserves something, that what one wishes for is one's by right. These conditions are oh, so human. The archetypal pattern of descent. To fall asleep to one’s actual life. To lower one's guard; to think that what one desires is one's by right, that it is not only desired but also deserved.

You may never understand

how the stranger is inspired,

but he isn't always evil

and he isn't always wrong...

Though you drown in good intentions,

you will never quench the fire:

You'll give in to your desire

when the stranger comes along.

Iago is the Stranger. The catalyst, the disruptor. Satan, Loki, Eris, the Lord of Misrule. Every paradise has at least one discontented enfant terrible within. Not evil, but unable to care for what is right or wrong, knowing the distinction between left and right yet not paying heed to it.
The Stranger also lives within us. It's the little voice that whispers into our left ear or throbs within our hearts whenever we are inclined to lower our guard.

Arrigo Boito sums up the many faces of Iago in his characterisation notes for the Verdian opera:

He must be handsome and appear genial and open and falsely bonhomous; everyone believes him to be honest except his wife who knows him well. If he did not possess great charm and an appearance of honesty he could not be the consummate deceiver that he is.

One of his talents is the faculty he possessses of changing his personality according to the person to whom he happens to be speaking, so as to deceive them or to bend them to his will.

Easy and genial with Cassio; ironic with Roderigo; apparently good-humoured, respectful and humbly devoted towards Othello; brutal and threatening with Emilia; obsequious to Desdemona. Such are the basic qualities, the appearance and the various facets of this man.

Just stop and consider how everyone's Sein comes to light, their masks shatter, and their hearts are displayed in the light of day, throbbing, bloody, when their respective ribcages are metaphorically torn up!

Well, we all fall in love,
but we disregard the danger:
Though we share so many secrets,
there are some we never tell...
Why were you so surprised
that you never saw the stranger?
Did you ever let your lover see
the stranger in yourself?

The friendzoned and brokenhearted suitor who just won't give up is lured to pay his fortune, in so-called uragane or Judas money, in exchange for what he believes is self-confidence, staying equally awkward and equally desperate at heart, which makes him doubt the schemer at the end of the day.
The dashing, charming lieutenant gets persuaded to drink on duty and starts a brawl under the influence, which causes his fall from grace. He therefore doubts he can be reinstated if he tries on his own at the startover of his career. And, in involving his lady friend, it all snowballs into the end of his career and those he loves... said friend and his commanding officer role model, in spite of the fact that said CO has finally forgiven his initial offense. All of this for a drink more before the changing of the guard!
The happily married kind-hearted young lady tries to bridge the gap between her husband and her friend, only to realise that she is accused by the former of having an affair with the latter, suffering marital abuse and ultimately dying young and violently at the hands of her own spouse, while honestly defending the truth and her own purity and sincerity.
The lieutenant's fiancée, whom he basically friendzones out of fear of commitment, snaps out of the suspicion that he's found his equal in a girl of his own standing. Fortunately, she doesn't take it as far as the general does, being used to his ways and her heart staying intact.
The young lady's husband, a confident general of fortune madly in love with her and with another raison d'être than warfare since he met her, snaps even more dreadfully out of the suspicion that she's found her equal in a man of her own standing. It leads his wartime trauma to resurface when his heart breaks, turning him into an insane Untermensch or beast that relishes abuse and even kills his former beloved "for love" and for her to break no more hearts... and who subsequently commits ritual suicide upon realising the truth and coming to grips with the shock of reality.
The schemer's own wife is used to putting up a brave face, to dissociate her own omote and ura, due to her spouse's mistreatment... but her lady's suffering, mirroring her own in a younger and more innocent victim that is far more fragile, makes her convictions waver. It takes losing Desdemona for good to make her turn the corner, that "kaku" mentioned above, on the schemer by tearing out a few squares of Iago's Cube, as I once did as a preteen kid to my own Rubik just because I was curious and in the dissecting phase of my life: whether live large bugs and frogs, and lizards... speaking dolls, stuffed animals, or simple devices like a Rubik's Cube, I was always curious to see what it was like inside. And, to be earnest, the core of the Cube looked and still looks pretty anti-aesthetic to me.

But what if... Iago was never a flesh-and-blood person?
Isn't his motto "I am not what I am?"

You may never understand

how the stranger is inspired,

but he isn't always evil

and he isn't always wrong...

Though you drown in good intentions,

you will never quench the fire:

You'll give in to your desire 
when the stranger comes along.

"... but is this actually for no reason, Iago's character being unreason (the unreason of wish-making, of intoxication, of insecurity, of paranoia, of passion...) incarnate itself?"

There is an anime called Paranoia Agent, in which the leitmotif is the character of a tween boy armed with a baseball bat. The Batboy (Shounen Bat) is a serial assailant whose victims are all suffering from identity crises. A tabloid newshound hell-bent on getting the most sensational scoop; a popular teen prodigy who has lost his popularity in high school; a female university lecturer by daylight, moonlighting as a prostitute, whose two starkly different personalities clash for control of her; a LARPer with delusions that he is the righteous hero he plays... in real life, making him a po-mo Don Quixote; a young girl on the run from home after discovering harsh truths about her corrupt incestuous father; a weak-willed and inept assistant producer who always claims that his performance is impeccable and the others are the ones screwing things up... either seek the Batboy or he crosses their paths by chance. In this ensemble piece, which employs various POV of the victims, the line between reverie and reality is blurred to the point that some people think the Batboy is not real, but "a supernatural force driven to rescue the desperate from their tragedies through violence." In the end (spoiler alert!), the Batboy turns out to be an incarnate figment of the insecurities of a character designer, her imaginary friend brought to life when Tsukiko desperately needed to escape her responsibilities. He is later shown not to be human, but is instead a mysterious entity who grows stronger with the power of rumour and speculation. It is revealed at the end to be the creation of Tsukiko, who imagined him to avoid blame. The boy with the bat does not disappear until his maker confesses the truth about her anxieties, her pessimism, and the pressure she faces... Like Emilia in Othello, Tsukiko finally finds the nerve to confront and vanquish the inner demon that had weakened everyone vulnerable.
Maybe Iago, another Paranoia Agent, isn't real flesh-and-blood either, but an incarnation of the various characters' impulses, frustrations, angst... driving them over the edge, just like Shounen Bat. Right?

At length, Paranoia Agent is a social critique ensemble piece, each and every character being approached by their inner "Batboy," who functions as a nexus tying up the stories of all the victims, just like Iago himself.
Consider how, like the mirror in The Snow Queen, he displays a different face to cajole and tempt each and every other character. Consider how, like Mr. Gaunt in Needful Things (another paranoia agent unreal in the flesh and blood?) he brings out the worst in practically everyone.
Maybe Shakespeare already anticipated the premise of Paranoia Agent back in 1604.
The victims are themselves worthy of an early modern retelling of Paranoia Agent: the insecure, brokenhearted lordling who has not yet given up on getting the girl, even if it means that he should sacrifice far more relevant things; the dashing young lieutenant putting on a brave face against pressure, desperate to prove his worth yet feeling that he's under pressure; the foreign general, renowned throughout the realm as a war hero, but still bleeding within and thus a tad too possessive of his lady wife; said lady wife, a young debutante who ran away from home into the dead of night to marry for love and escape from her reality; the wench in a relationship with the lieutenant, also reaching (like the lordling) for someone who eludes her reach come hell or highwater; and of course the realistic, jaded older maidservant who is at first the one suffering the most, and the one closest to, the paranoia agent himself... and Iago, the paranoia agent, being more than a figment or a metaphor: in fact, unreason, insecurity, and entitlement incarnate. Thus why he has a different face and a different scheme for each and every person.

Long story short: Iago, just like Azathoth, may be entropy incarnate. The whole universe tends towards entropy, as life, being rather complex chemistry at the end of the day, has always struggled against entropy. From protozoa to people via plesiosaurs, we all tend towards decay and death and disorder, every day we breathe a victory in this conflict as old as day. Though we win each and every battle against entropy, we all (from protozoa to people via plesiosaurs) are doomed to lose the overarching war at the end of the day. The ending of Othello, with mostly everyone dead, the two survivors (Cassio and Bianca, analogous to the Livtrase/Livslust and Liv, respectively, at the end of Ragnarök) alive yet disabled and traumatised, and Iago vanishing like the Cheshire Cat... exemplifies the core of the story's themes: this Shakespearean tragedy, just like Les Misérables (in which the Thénardiers survive, but also Marius and Cosette) is, at the core, the story of the everlasting, futile yet always elusively hopeful, struggle between Life and Entropy.