Film Adaptation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex Essay -- blind by ignorance,

â€Å"You are your own enemy† (Guthrie, Oedipus Rex, 22:43). In the film adaptation of Sophocles’ â€Å"Oedipus Rex† (1957), Sir Tyrone Guthrie portrays the characters as truth seekers that are ignorant when trying to find King Laius’ murderer. On the other hand, Sigmund Freud’s hypothesis of Sophocles’ work introduces us to â€Å"The Oedipus Complex† (1899) which states that as we’re young we grow infatuated with our opposite sex parent and feel resentment towards our same-sex parent. These two pieces have adapted mirror like meanings of Sophocles’ tragic play. Sir Tyrone Guthrie and Sigmund Freud explore this through the use of ethos, irony, social distance, and the visualization of state of mind in order to show the manifestation Oedipus undergoes living with his â€Å"mix of killing and unimagined shame† (Guthrie, Oedipus Rex, 21:19). Though the answer is in front of Oedipus, he wears a mask that protects him from the answers he does not want to believe is true. To begin with, Oedipus is his own tragedy since his actions and decisions are the reasons why he was not able to thoroughly see his mistakes. Sir Tyrone Guthrie places Oedipus in the middle of the town to begin the interrogation of finding the murderer of King Laius so the city can be unwind of its plague. Sir Tyrone Guthrie does this on purpose so the audience and the servants around him can see the foolish mistakes their great King achieves. Tiresias, the blind prophet who can see the past, present, and future, speaks to Oedipus, since Tiresias has the ability to only see the truth. Even though the audience can see that Oedipus is not taking any consideration of the prophet’s words when Tiresias directly yells to him that Oedipus is the â€Å"murderer [he] [seeks],† the ignorant side of Oe... ...now where he was â€Å"†¦in calamity,† seeking the truth to stop the plague was in his good intentions but his unconscious mask would not let him see the answers (Sophocles, Oedipus the King, 425). It is the reason why â€Å"most young people outgrow the compulsion† for their parent â€Å"and thereafter repress it† which is why Oedipus was unknowingly his own disaster (Jacobus 476). Works Cited Freud, Sigmund. "The Oedipus Complex." A World of Ideas: Essential Readings for College Writers. By Lee A. Jacobus. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2010. 475-85. Print. Oedipus Rex. Dir. Tyrone Guthrie. By Sophocles and William B. Yeats. Perf. Douglas Campbell and Eleanor Stuart. YouTube. YouTube, 01 Feb. 2013. Web. 07 Feb. 2014. . Sophocles. Oedipus the King. Trans. David Grene. 1st ed. Chicago & London: University of Chicago, 2010. Print.