Context Is Key

I've written this opinionated piece as I was inspired by a quote - one of the writing prompts I received in a daily email from @shadowspub. The quote, from Keira Knightley is, “You have to learn the rules to be able to know how to break them.”

Thanks in advance for reading!

Context Is Key

I experienced just a bit of difficulty finding the context of this Keira Knightley quote, “You have to learn the rules to be able to know how to break them,” and when I finally found it, I wanted to face-palm.

A woman floats downward, holding onto an umbrella.

Sometimes, things appear out of context, like the woman and the umbrella picture. Sometimes they’re taken out of context or just printed without context, such as quotes, especially celebrity quotes, and many times the quotes seem to be in-line with the views or acts of a degenerate or criminal.

My theory is that this particular quote continues to make its rounds on the internet with scant context existing specifically because of its potential impact.

“You have to learn the rules to be able to know how to break them,” just naturally sounds like something an extortionist or scam artist might reflect on as being their guiding light, while writing their memoirs.

When this quote is attributed, with scant context availability, to a celebrity like Keira Knightley, it makes her seem like she’s done something underhanded at some point, and it paid off for her and her career, and someone else may have had to have been sacrificed just so she could rise.

Is this what you think Keira was up to when she said this? If you knew she’d actually said this back in 2005 when her career was still very young, would you suspect it was possible she was this sinister in nature? Without context, what can one think? I’d bet that a fair amount of people, especially those on social media, would jump to the conclusion think she was rotten.

Bad boy and bad girl social media types would probably think it’s cool that she’s ruthless and will do absolutely anything to advance herself in Hollywood, so they’d remain her fans, right?

If we could hang this quote on anyone of our choosing, minus the context of course, how would it play out?

What if, say the Pope was revealed to have said this? It would probably cause a backlash, because if you’re someone like the Pope, then you shouldn’t be considering the ways in which you can break the rules, which seems to be the major “wisdom” one would acquire as the benefit of abiding by the tenets of this quote.

What if we could bring Al Capone back from the grave, who once held the record for pleading the 5th amendment during his trial? Yes, I believe that someone else has broken that record since, but what if Al had been quoted saying, “You have to learn the rules to be able to know how to break them?” I’m pretty sure that most of us would say, “Well, that just figures – he’s like the worst criminal ever.”

So we’ve looked at a supposedly “good” person, the Pope, and a supposedly “bad” person, Al Capone, and that quote, still taken out of context and coming out of both of these guys’ mouths, didn’t draw a positive reaction from either in my made-up scenario.

It’s looking more and more like, “You have to learn the rules to be able to know how to break them,” has nothing but sinister aims as its “wisdom” factor is dispensed… when there is no context provided.

Let’s consider another celebrity or two for trying on this quote.

How about someone like Dr. Oz, with a reputation for identifying and calling out fraud in OTC medicines, odd medical treatments and implements, drugs, etc. - what if he said it? Some of his detractors might think he’s really, secretly owned by one big pharma corporation, and gets paid by them to focus on competitors they want him to negatively criticize on his show.

This kind of scam’s been done before, I believe.

A lot of us would probably be shocked if someone like Carrie Underwood was responsible for this quote, maybe even more than we’re shocked at this point that Keira Knightley said it.

In actuality, Keira Knightley was asked a question in an interview about playing her role in Pirates of the Carribean. It went like this:

Keira Knightley: I read the book a lot. I've been obsessed by the book since I was about seven, I had all the Austen series on book tape. I was obsessed with the BBC version when I was about ten or eleven. I read the book finally when I was about fourteen and got obsessed again. When I was offered the role, I was terrified of doing it, because I'd been really obsessed with the BBC one, I thought I'm just going to do an absolute copy of Jennifer Ehle's performance and that would be awful. I was so terrified before I started, that I learned the entire script, my part and everybody else's by heart. We had historians come and give us lectures, and we had etiquette lessons. You have to learn the rules to be able to know how to break them. Source

See? She isn’t talking about underhandedness at all. She’s talking about her role in the movie, and her preparations for her role in the movie. She describes her obsession with Pirates of the Carribean, listening to the audio book as a young child, and then actually reading it in print at fourteen.

She wasn’t sure of herself playing the part, because she’d focused on one version, the BBC one, with which she identified for the part she’d play, and which to her thinking, wasn’t good. So she went all-out. It all had to do with her movie role and those lectures and the etiquette lessons.

I personally think it’s a shame that this quote is on so many sites with just the quote and the attribution to Keira Knightley and no context for it is given on most of them that I viewed. My search sample returned only this one site that explains the context of the quote, but once found it, I did not continue searching, since this interview appears to be the original source of the quote.

_{Context Is Key © free-reign 2020}

Sources for images used in this post:

_{Keira Knightley in Passenger Movie: Image by Kurt Deiner from Pixabay
Context-less Umbrella Woman: Image by Pexels from Pixabay
BOOM!: Image by Raphaël Jeanneret from Pixabay
Piranha: Image by Reimund Bertrams from Pixabay
Good or Bad?: Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay
Etiquette Book: Image by MorningbirdPhoto from Pixabay}