Shakespeare, The Movie

Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV and Video

Lynda E. Boose, Richard Burt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134707522
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Cultura popular en el arte

Shakespeare, The Movie brings together an impressive line-up of contributors to consider how Shakespeare has been adapted on film, TV, and video, and explores the impact of this popularization on the canonical status of Shakespeare.
Taking a fresh look at the Bard an his place in the movies, Shakespeare, The Movie includes a selection of what is presently available in filmic format to the Shakespeare student or scholar, ranging across BBC television productions, filmed theatre productions, and full screen adaptations by Kenneth Branagh and Franco Zeffirelli. Films discussed include:
* Amy Heckerling's Clueless
* Gus van Sant's My Own Private Idaho
* Branagh's Henry V
* Baz Luhrman's William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet
* John McTiernan's Last Action Hero
* Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books
* Zeffirelli's Hamlet.

1
TOTALLY CLUELESS?
Shakespeare goes Hollywood in the 1990s

Lynda E.Boose and Richard Burt

A short sequence in the 1995 summer film comedy Clueless (dir. Amy Heckerling) offers what might be considered a mini-allegory of Shakespeare’s circulation within the popular culture of the 1990s. Based on Jane Austen’s Emma, the film narrates the coming of age of “Cher,” a Beverly Hills high school ingenue and media-savvy teen queen who reformulates the pleasures of discourse into side-by-side telephone conversations conducted on mobile telephones. In the manipulation of cultural capital as a means for asserting status, Cher (Alicia Silverstone) clinches her superiority inside of a contest that defines itself through Shakespeare. When her stepbrother’s excessively Harvard girlfriend misattributes “to thine own self be true” to Hamlet and Cher corrects her, the girlfriend then rejects Cher’s substitution of “that Polonius guy” and slams home her apparent victory with the smugly dismissive line, “I think I remember Hamlet accurately.” But Cher beats her, point, set, and match, with the rejoinder that while she, by comparison, may not know her Hamlet, she most certainly does know her Mel Gibson!

We begin with Clueless because it complicates present moves in cultural studies about Shakespeare. With its Los Angeles location and youth market for Shakespeare, Clueless offers an opportunity for certain kinds of questions. For openers, just who is its Shakespeare joke on—the girlfriend, Cher, or just whom? Just what is the high-status cultural currency here, and how does “Shakespeare” function as a sign? Does the fact that Cher knows Hamlet not via the presupposed Shakespearean original but only via Mel Gibson’s role in Zeffirelli’s movie signify her cultural illiteracy—or her literacy? Or does this exchange perhaps point us away from any presumptive original, be it Jane Austen’s or Shakespeare’s, and direct us instead toward a focus on just its mediating package, what might be called the Hollywoodization of Shakespeare in the 1990s? In a postmodern way that effectively mocks all the presumed distinctions between high and low culture, Clueless does not merely relocate high culture to a low site (Los Angeles): after all, this is Beverly Hills, not the Valley, and no one is more vigilant than Cher and her friends about maintaining standards and eschewing tastelessness. Instead, Clueless elaborates on films like L.A. Story (dir. Steve Martin, 1991) in which Steve Martin begins by reciting a speech in praise of L.A. that parodies John of Gaunt’s deathbed speech to Richard II, substituting “this Los Angeles” for the concluding words, “this England”; and on Jean-Luc Godard’s Lear (1987), in which William Shakespeare Junior the Fifth goes to Hollywood to produce his ancestor’s plays, which end up being edited by Woody Allen. Like these two films, Clueless’s repeated reference to technologies such as movies, televisions, mobile phones, head sets, car radios, CDs, computerized wardrobes, intercoms, and other devices that record, transmit, amplify, and likewise reshape meaning formulate the mediating power of Los Angeles as the contemporary site where high/low distinctions are engaged in endlessly resignifying themselves.

Cher’s receding of Hamlet could be located in a wider range of 1990s Hamlet (s). The Hamlet created by the 1990s wasn’t big just among the literati—he was so big that he was making guest appearances in all sorts of unexpected places, with different implications of its gendered reception. In 1991, Oliver Stone cast the Kennedy assassination through the lens of Hamlet in JFK. In 1994, Danny DeVito and the US Army found Hamlet to be the perfect force for transforming wimps and misfit soldiers into the STRAK army company that concludes Renaissance Man (dir. Penny Marshall) reaffirming the male bond in “Sound Off” lyrics that inventively substitute “Hamlet’s mother, she’s the Queen” for the usual female object of cadenced derision. Similarly, Disney’s 1994 The Lion King (dir. Roger Allers and Ron Minkoff), reworked Hamlet for a younger generation. In 1995, Kenneth Branagh released his A Midwinter’s Tale, a film about a provincial English production of Hamlet, and then in 1996 and 1997 his own full-length and abridged versions of Hamlet.

Ultimately, however, it was Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1992 film, The Last Action Hero (dir. John McTiernan), that most clearly allegorized the transformation of Hamlet from melancholy man into an image that could be valued by the young male consumers to whom the newly technologized violence of the 1990s was being played. In a displacement explicitly fictionalized as the direct product of a young male viewer’s contemporary fantasies of masculinity, on screen the image of Olivier hesitating to kill the praying Claudius literally dissolves into a Schwarzenegger Hamlet who is actively engaged in “taking out the trash” of the something-rotten Denmark into which he is thrust. And in a clever bit of metatheatricality, the substitution of Schwarzenegger, America’s highest paid actor of the early 1990s, is situated as the ultimate insurance that movie houses will stay open and movies will keep on playing. Kids like the film’s ardent young filmviewer will keep right on getting sucked into the action-packed worlds of heroically imagined male violence that is both promulgated by American film and simultaneously guarantees the industry its seemingly unassailable hegemony. Though ironic, it is nonetheless true that the Hamlet(s) of the 1990s construct a world even more obsessively masculine than did the Hamlet(s) that preexisted any articulated feminist critique of popular culture. Mel Gibson as Hamlet means Hamlet as Lethal Weapon Four. But Mel also means Hamlet as Hollywood Hunk, an object of desire who, like Glenn Close’s Gertrude, projects an image implicitly accessible to female and male viewers alike.¹ Zeffirelli’s film may well be Lethal Weapon Four, but Hamlet-as-Mel suggests Shakespeare’s prince as a 1990s model of unrestrictedly appropriatable desire, and it was through an appropriation of Mel-as-Hamlet that Cher triumphs over her truly clueless adversary, eventually winning a college guy (read: Harvard Law) boyfriend at the film’s close.

Rather than assessing the various new Hamlet-sites in terms of possibilities for contradictory readings or as evidence anew of an American cultural imperialism, we are more interested in the critical developments that such a proliferation may signal. In the wake of the present displacements of book and literary culture by film and video culture and the age of mechanical reproduction by the age of electronic reproduction, the traditional literary field itself has already, to some extent, been displaced as an object of inquiry by cultural studies. And the Shakespeare moment in Clueless perhaps interests us for the very way it enacts this displacement, invoking the high status literary text only to dismiss it in favor of the actor’s performance. For Shakespeare studies, what the transition from a literary to an electronic culture logically presages is exactly what, in fact, seems to be happening: an increased interest in the strategies of performance accompanied by a decreased focus on the poetic and rhetorical, the arena where New Criticism once so powerfully staked its claim.² If Michael Berube (1995) is right in assessing that the move to cultural studies primarily involves taking a less serious relation to criticism and its subjects, then Shakespeare (and Renaissance) Studies appears to be following suit, its dialogue lightening up a bit. New ways of reading the transvestism of the Renaissance stage, for example, are being discovered by contextualizing the cross-dressed Shakespeare heroine alongside pop culture figures like Michael Jackson and Madonna (see Garber 1992, 1995) and films like The Crying Game (dir. Jordan, 1992; see Crewe 1995).

It could be said that this shift to a cultural studies approach opens new possibilities for a kind of Shakespeare criticism with wider appeal to a nonacademic public (which presumes, of course, that the Shakespearean academic necessarily wants such a popular audience.) It must also be said, however, that the shift raises a number of new questions, many of which relate to the new influence that Hollywood, Los Angeles, and American capitalism are already exerting on the popularization of Shakespeare. The media in 1990s America— film, video, television, and advertising—seemed suddenly prepared to embrace the Bard with all the enthusiasm (and potentially crushing effect) that such whole-hearted American embraces have come to harbinger for much of the world. Thus the question of potential diminishment that has always been raised about putting Shakespeare on film reappears, reinvigorated by the very technologies that make Shakespeare more accessible. We have yet to imagine how Shakespeare will be staged on the Internet, but for many of those who, unlike Cher, do know their Shakespeare, the transfer from “live” theater to the absent presence of the technologically produced filmic (or digitized) image invites a distinct ambivalence much like that which betrays the voice of New York Times writer Frank Rich, here writing in 1996 about Fredericke Warde, the star of the recently rediscovered silent 1912 Richard III. Noting that Warde blamed what he perceived as a “fall off” of Shakespeare theatrical productions on schools and literary societies for turning acting texts into objects of intellectual veneration, Rich, for whom the discovery of this venerable old Shakespeare film seems to have acted as catalyst for his own lament for a lost golden age, characterizes Warde as a thoroughly clueless innocent, someone who “didn’t have a clue that movies were harbingers of a complete cultural transformation that would gradually lead to the desensitized pop media environment of today.”³

In the larger sense, however, Shakespeare’s disappearance, his status as ghostwriter, precedes the 1990s. In some ways, the present historical moment only clarifies the way Shakespeare has always already disappeared when transferred onto film. Taken on their own terms, films like Greenaway’s Prosperous Books, Derek Jarman’s Tempest, and Godard’s Lear involve not merely the deconstruction of Shakespeare as author but his radical displacement by the film director; and the interest in any of these films could legitimately be said to lie less in its relation to Shakespeare’s play than in its relation to the director’s own previous oeuvre. Even films which adapt the Shakespeare script as faithfully as does Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing speak within a metacinematic discourse of self-reference in which, through film quotation, they situate themselves in reference as much to other films as to a Shakespeare tradition.⁴

Yet judging from the commentary and the advertising matrix surrounding the release of the most recent Shakespeare adaptations, the fact that Shakespeare is the author seems to be becoming not only increasingly beside the point but even a marketing liability—an inference that Los Angeles Times movie critic David Gritten quite clearly picks up from the voices of both the director and producer of Ian McKellen’s 1995 Richard III:

Here on the set of Richard III, a film adaptation of one of the world’s best known plays starring a bunch of distinguished classical actors, it comes as a surprise that everyone is trying to play down the S-word. The S-word? That stands for “Shakespeare.” He’s the guy who wrote Richard III some four hundred years ago, in case you weren’t quite sure. In truth, the people behind this Richard III…are hoping to attract those very people who aren’t quite sure of the film’s provenance. “I’m encouraging everyone working on this film not to think of it as Shakespeare,” says director Richard Loncraine. “It’s a terrific story, and who wrote it is irrelevant. “We’re trying to make the most accessible Shakespeare film ever made,” says producer Lisa Katselas Pare.

(Gritten 1995:39, 41)

The similar trend that Don Hedrick points out in an essay in this collection— that any mention of Shakespeare is exactly what was under avoidance in the marketing of Branagh’s Henry V—is a truism equally applicable to Zeffirelli’s Hamlet. Likewise, Gus Van Sant (1993:xxxviii) notes about the making of My Own Private Idaho that while the foreign producers wanted to put in as much Shakespeare as possible the American producers wanted to cut out as much as possible.⁵ Yet just when we might assume that the Bard’s name was truly a marketing liability or that veneration of Shakespeare had come to be regarded in popular contexts as uncool,⁶ the notably cool film director Baz Luhrmann put out a new Romeo and Juliet that is unquestionably situated in the pop culture, made-for-teens film market and is called William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.⁷

The popularization of Shakespeare on film, video, and television—which began inside the stalwartly liberal tradition of noblesse oblige attempting to bring culture to the masses—now finds itself, in America at least, in a strictly market-responsive milieu in which literary knowledge is in general a decidedly low capital, frequently mockable commodity, caught within the peculiarly American ambivalence about intellectualism, and therefore to be eschewed at all costs. When Gus Van Sant imports the various Hal and Falstaff scenes from the Henry IV and Henry V plays and sticks them into My Own Private Idaho’s world of contemporary Portland gay hustlers and street dwellers, neither the film nor the characters speaking the lines register any acknowledgment that they are drawing upon Shakespeare. If this film is a Shakespeare spin-off, no one has to admit knowing it. But as a market screening device, the omission must have worked, since only those people who had read the Henriad or read commentary on the film in specifically “intellectual” magazine and review venues seemed conscious of any Shakespeare connection. The same might be said of L.A. Story. While many members of the audience may have have picked up the allusions to Hamlet and other Shakespeare plays, only a Shakespearean would have read the movie as a rewriting of the play. Likewise, the connection between Clueless and Jane Austen’s Emma got intentionally excluded from the film’s promotional packet and was left to become known via strategically leaked news items designed to be circulated by word of mouth to intrigue the elite without turning off the intended teen market.

But while pride in anti-intellectualism has long roots as an American tradition and is a force which the 1980s and 1990s have seen assume a renewed political ascendancy, quite the opposite has historically been true o...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PLATES
• CONTRIBUTORS
• INTRODUCTION: SHAKESPEARE, THE MOVIE
• 1. TOTALLY CLUELESS?: SHAKESPEARE GOES HOLLYWOOD IN THE 1990s
• 2. RACE-ING OTHELLO, RE-ENGENDERING WHITE-OUT
• 3. WAR IS MUD: BRANAGH’S DIRTY HARRY V AND THE TYPES OF POLITICAL AMBIGUITY
• 4. “TOP OF THE WORLD, MA”: RICHARD III AND CINEMATIC CONVENTION
• 5. POPULARIZING SHAKESPEARE: THE ARTISTRY OF FRANCO ZEFFIRELLI
• 6. SHAKESPEARE WALLAH AND COLONIAL SPECULARITY
• 7. POETRY IN MOTION: ANIMATING SHAKESPEARE
• 8. WHEN PETER MET ORSON: THE 1953 CBS KING LEAR
• 9. IN SEARCH OF NOTHING: MAPPING KING LEAR
• 10. A SHREW FOR THE TIMES
• 11. SHAKESPEARE IN THE AGE OF POST-MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION: SEXUAL AND ELECTRONIC MAGIC IN PROSPERO’S BOOKS
• 12. GROSSLY GAPING VIEWERS AND JONATHAN MILLER’S OTHELLO
• 13. AGE CANNOT WITHER HIM: WARREN BEATTY’S BUGSY AS HOLLYWOOD CLEOPATRA
• 14. ASTA NIELSEN AND THE MYSTERY OF HAMLET
• 15. THE FAMILY TREE MOTEL: SUBLIMING SHAKESPEARE IN MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO
• 16. THE LOVE THAT DARE NOT SPEAK SHAKESPEARE’S NAME: NEW SHAKESQUEER CINEMA