Where have you been, Baby Blue?

Where have you been, Baby Blue?

A good story is something that transcends many levels of knowledge. They can be told orally, written down as books, or acted out as plays. But whether a story takes the shape of a novel, poem, song, or play, the story itself remains the same. This has been done for many ages in cases like Homer’s Iliad, and others. As time has passed, our modern culture has become comfortable with several common tropes. These ideas are very familiar to most of us, and are seen in plays, TV shows, movies, books, songs, poems, and anything else we use to communicate with. Basic stories of forbidden love, betrayal and irony, have been told and retold in different forms for ages.

For example, Homer’s Iliad entails the story of how a man surrendered to forbidden love, regardless of the horrendous consequences for him and his people. This story has been told in countless iterations. With each one, the basic plot of the story is seen in a different light. The story in Tucson, Arizona of how Charles Schmid murdered two young girls, inspired Joyce Oates to write “Where have you been?, Where are you going?” This story identifies with some other common tropes in our culture, such as “be careful what you wish for?, you just might get it” and the common story of breaking free of mundane life for something greater. This idea behind the story is seen in Bob Dylan’s song, and the movie Smooth Talk. Each one changes the story in a different way, while holding true to the foundation of the idea. From the story in Tucson, Joyce Oates changed some aspects to create her short story, and from that, the movie Smooth Talk was made, which mostly preserves Oates work. This is an example of how literature is fluid, and an idea or a story can traverse many different means of communication.