As You Like It: The Original Mind Fuck Movie

The epilogue takes As You Like It to a whole other level as a representation of the original “mind fuck” movie. The work starts off with a complicated plot and heavy action. Like any good psychological thriller, the characters’ traits are revealed slowly and then complicated with different personalities layered on their originals. Of course, the gender flip flopping is complicated further with the dramatic irony that the actors are all boys to begin with! 

 

Because the identities of the characters constantly change, so do their relationships to each other. You end up with Phoebe/Ganymede, Orlando/Ganymede, Rosalind/Orlando, Celia/Rosalind, Celia/Oliver, Phoebe/Silvius etc. The schmorgasboard of heterosexual and homosexual lovers complicate the plot even further until the play’s “resolution” ties up all the pairs neatly with Rosalind and Celia’s reveal, and the subsequent quadruple wedding (Orlando and Rosalind, Oliver and Celia, Phoebe and Silvius, and Touchstone and Audrey). Like any good psychological thriller, you think the play sums itself up neatly here. Hannibal Lector is in his infamous straight jacket and headpiece routine in the airport as the senator’s mother begs for her daughter’s return. Leonardo DiCaprio is climbing the stairs to the lighthouse about to uncover the great conspiracy of Boston’s Shutter Island Ashecliffe Hospital. Leonard Shelby is tattooing one thing after the other, so close to finding his wife’s killer/rapist, you get the picture. BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE. A good psychological thriller builds up the false conclusion, some even play it out completely, but then slams down the true ending, often with little to no falling action or true conclusion. This forces the main character, and the audience as well, to reconcile what they thought they knew to be true for the past two hours with reality. Boom. Mind fuck.

Accurate representation of the average "mind fuck" movie viewer

WARNING SPOILERS TO SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, SHUTTER ISLAND AND MEMENTO

How does Shakespeare do this? He takes his neatly wrapped up ending and turns it upside down. First of all, Rosalind delivers the epilogue and says herself how unusual it is for a female character to do. She plays on all of the intermingling queer relationships throughout the play by dropping the “dramatic irony bomb:” Rosalind is being played by a man. Because the audience already knows this, the effect is comical rather than thrilling. Breaking the fourth wall by redefining a character completely with “were I a woman…” after the neatly resolved ending, while referencing queer love again and topping it all off with a curtsey and roaring applause seems almost ridiculous in the short epilogue, but it functions completely as the true, albeit comical, ending of a “mind fuck” movie. Hannibal sits up in the ambulance, Leo is a patient after all, Leonard Shelby IS Sammy Jankis and Rosalind is a man. Who knew. Way to go, Bill.