Shakespeare, The Movie II

Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, Video and DVD

Richard Burt, Lynda E. Boose

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134456994
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Following on from the phenomenally successful Shakespeare, The Movie, this volume brings together an invaluable new collection of essays on cinematic Shakespeares in the 1990s and beyond. Shakespeare, The Movie II:
*focuses for the first time on the impact of postcolonialism, globalization and digital film on recent adaptations of Shakespeare;
*takes in not only American and British films but also adaptations of Shakespeare in Europe and in the Asian diapora;
*explores a wide range of film, television, video and DVD adaptations from Almereyda's Hamlet to animated tales, via Baz Luhrmann, Kenneth Branagh, and 1990s' Macbeths, to name but a few;
*offers fresh insight into the issues surrounding Shakespeare on film, such as the interplay between originals and adaptations, the appropriations of popular culture, the question of spectatorship, and the impact of popularization on the canonical status of "the Bard."
Combining three key essays from the earlier collection with exciting new work from leading contributors, Shakespeare, The Movie II offers sixteen fascinating essays. It is quite simply a must-read for any student of Shakespeare, film, media or cultural studies.

1

Shakespeare, “Glo-Cali-Zation,” Race, and the Small Screens of Post-Popular Culture

Richard Burt

“I don’t like Shakespeare. I’d rather be in Malibu.”

Anthony Hopkins¹

Dislocation, Dislocation, Dislocation

In Orange County (dir. Jake Kasdan 2002), Mr. Burke (Mike White), a high-school English teacher, asks his students who comes to mind when they hear the names “Romeo” and ‘Juliet.” One student responds, “Claire Danes,” and another adds “Leonardo DiCaprio.” Overlooking the constantly raised hand of the film’s protagonist, Shaun Brumder (Colin Hanks), Mr. Burke says that another person was involved in “that movie” (Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet) who “in some ways is as famous as Leonardo DiCaprio,” and then holds up a Folger edition of Romeo and Juliet, and names “William Shakespeare.” The scene hardly ends up confirming Shakespeare’s status as a literary writer, however.² Mr. Burke proceeds not to value literature and print over film but the opposite, as the film’s satire of literature’s low value among adult as well youth culture is driven home. “And some great movies were based on [Shakespeare’s] plays,” Mr. Burke comments, and then ticks off the titles as Shaun looks increasingly puzzled: “Hamlet, West Side Story, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Waterworld, Gladiator, Chocolat.”³

Yet the film undercuts its satire of a present indifference to esthetic distinctions between literature and film as well as among films (which Hamlet is being referred to?) by consistently devaluing literature in the serious and non-serious moments of the film. Shaun wants to become a writer and go to Stanford University, and his story, first seen in the beginning, shares the same title as the film, “Orange County.” Shaun’s girlfriend, Ashley (Schuyler Fisk), ends her praise for his short story by saying “it could be a movie,” and when Shaun suggests that Toni Morrison be invited as the graduation speaker, the school Principal (Chevy Chase) opts instead for pop star Britney Spears. Similarly, a Stanford student who wants to become a writer lists novels, short stories, and screenplays as his interests, and says he has a television project going on vampires which, he explains, is really about “the reunification of Germany – but still funny.”

By the end of the film, Shaun decides that it is best both for him and for his writing to remain “on location” in Orange County. It turns out that the collapse of elite and pop culture evident in Shaun’s high-school English class also obtains at Stanford. Shaun meets a female student who is reading Faulkner and who invites him to a party. He takes her up on the invitation, but when Shaun asks her at the party if she likes Faulkner, she shrugs and says “it’s pretty boring” and that maybe she’ll “get the CliffsNotes.” When her friends walk up to them, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Butterfly” plays and the women excitedly move to the dance floor and do the very same dance routine the cheerleaders did earlier to the same song at Shaun’s high school. Moreover, the Stanford English professor Marcus Skinner, played by Kevin Kline, with whom Shaun wants to study, is equally disappointing. Unlike the serious teachers Kline played in In and Out (dir. Frank Oz, 1998), where he cited Shakespeare, and The Emperor’s Club (dir. Michael Hoffman, 2002) or Robin Williams played in Dead Poets Society (dir. Peter Weir, 1986), this English professor offers Shaun only empty praise (“it’s very good”) and empty criticism (“you need an ending”). Given the universal triumph of popular culture even in elite higher education, it makes no difference if Shaun goes to Stanford, the Harvard of the West Coast, or the fictional Orange County University, where Shaun’s girlfriend Ashley has been accepted.

Yet the very universality of popular culture also undercuts Shaun’s rationale for staying in Orange County so he can be a writer. By the end, when Shaun cites the examples of James Joyce and William Faulkner as writers who did not leave their regions or cities of origin, the idea that writing is tied to the writer’s location has become meaningless. Shaun immediately corrects himself in the case of Joyce, and he is simply wrong about Faulkner, who did leave the South and go to Hollywood to write screenplays. There is no locus classicus for writing in the film, then.

Orange County’s satire of the low value accorded literature in contemporary high-school pedagogy and in our culture moves beyond the earlier comic reversals of literature and film in Clueless (dir. Amy Heckerling, 1995), which actually did involve knowledge of a recognizable and canonical Shakespeare film, Franco Zeffirelli’s Hamlet (1992), and Last Action Hero (dir. John McTiernan 1992), which did show a clip from Olivier’s Hamlet. In Clueless, Mel Gibson was a mnemonic device for Cher (Alicia Silverstone) that allowed her to identify the character in Hamlet who delivers a cited line correctly and impress the guy she likes; and in Last Action Hero, Danny Madigan’s (Austin O’Brien) memory of the Jack Slater (Arnold Schwarzenegger) action film he has seen before class allows him to leave Olivier’s version behind as he fantasizes his own trailer-length Hamlet as action film. Yet in Orange County, nothing other than the lead movie stars is considered memorable about “that film,” William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, not even its name. Shakespeare’s foundational status as printed text and even as canonical film is emptied out, and star fan trivia games such as “six degrees of separation” count as knowledge.

In a failed and rather futile attempt to tie writing to location, Orange County shows how difficult it is to place and locate Shakespeare in the wake of the digitalization and multi-mediatization of film and what I call, if I may be permitted a neologism that also contains a pun, “glo-cali-zation.” By “glo-cali-zation,” I mean both the collapse of the local and the global into the “glocal” and the retention of “Cali” (or Hollywood) as the center of the film industry. Shakespeare film adaptations significantly blur if not fully deconstruct distinctions between local and global, original and copy, pure and hybrid, indigenous and foreign, high and low, authentic and inauthentic, hermeneutic and post- hermeneutic, English and other languages. Consider Figure 1.1, taken from the opening of The Street King, a modernized adaptation of Richard III (dir. James Gavin Bedford, 2002), set in contemporary Los Angeles. What begins as a spray painting of Shakespeare very similar to the Droeshout portrait ends up a modernized, bandannaed, beauty marked, and much hairier Shakespeare, wearing dark glasses and an earring as a cross, with two spray-painted Spanish words, “plata” (silver) and “plomo” (lead), gang slang for a strategy called “bullets or bribes.”⁴ The graffiti artist has signed off as well as “LCN.”

Figure 1.1 Shakespeare, homeboy.

The global city Los Angeles, the site of King of the Streets, is not exclusively American or Western. It has been called the Third World capital of the world (Rieff 1991) and the site of “forces that marginalize ever-shifting populations into internal third worlds” (Sawhney 2002). Moreover, Los Angeles is part of what Pico Iyer (2000) calls a post-imperial, post-global order, a world of jetlagged speed, flux, mediatized-inter-connection, and rhizomatic newness, and of what Marc Auge (1995), along similar lines, calls the “supermodern non-places” of the airport transit lounge, supermarket, and highway, that have outstripped our earlier notions of “place.” As glo-cali-zation collapses the local into the global, cultural centers and margins are no longer opposed as high to low culture, authentic to inauthentic, serious to parody, sacred to profane, and so Shakespeare cannot rightly be placed squarely on the side of hegemonic, dominant culture or counter-hegemonic, resistant subculture. Nevertheless, when it comes to cinema, glo-cali-zation keeps “Cali” (as in California) or, more specifically, Hollywood, as the central point of discursive reference, through a center hybridized by the white suburbs of Orange County and the gang warfare of south central Los Angeles.⁵ Shakespeare is still going Hollywood, even if Hollywood is only a discursive point of reference rather than the center of actual film and television production.

In the remainder of the present essay, I examine how Shakespeare’s glo-cali-zation has accompanied both his decanonization and decolonization via film, television, advertising, and other media, in the US and the UK. While adaptations of Shakespeare, as The Street King testifies, have become more multiracial and multicultural, the heterogeneity and multiplicity of Shakespeare’s decanonization and decolonization does not amount to a liberated “popularization” that one could oppose to institutional, elite Shakespeare, however. The present era of mass media is effectively one of post-popular culture, if indeed popular culture as such ever existed (see Burt 2002a). Liberals who want to redeem the popular as political (or protopolitical) and elitist neoconservatives and reactionaries who want to trash it cannot convincingly account for the ways mass media have transformed Shakespeare’s status and reproduction.⁶ In this essay, I want to focus on several related aspects of that transformation: Shakespeare’s televisualization and post-popular culture; a new phase in the postcolonial relation between the US and the UK; and race in relation to US and UK film and television advertising. Shakespeare on film is not only seen more frequently on the small screens of television sets and computer monitors than on the big screens of movie theaters, but has also more frequently been produced for television in the late 1990s than for film, and most Shakespeare films went straight to video and DVD. Shakespeare (or “Shakespeare”) is less a foundational origin that might authorize either a progressive or conservative agenda than he is a nodal point whose position and presence, when recognized, are relative to the media in which he appears.

Post-Popular Shakespeare

At an earlier historical moment when Shakespeare and high culture were regarded as sacred in the West, when Shakespeare was a token of Englishness used to legitimate Britain’s imperial power (Viswanathan 1989; Loomba 1997) or to legitimate a division between high and low cultures in the United Sates (Levine 1988), there was an investment among colonizers and the (post)colonized in distinguishing between the authentic and the inauthentic Shakespeare. Any critical potential of a parody was gutted by virtue of its not being “really Shakespeare.” Now the distinction between authentic and inauthentic Shakespeares is not even made consistently, much less policed. Few academic critics want to ask anymore how Shakespearean a given adaptation of a given play is because we all know there is no authentic Shakespeare, no “masterpiece” against which the adaptation might be evaluated and interpreted. To be sure, one can easily tell the difference between the Quarto or Folio King Lear and the made-for-television, Shakespeare-language free, US Western adaptation, King of Texas (dir. Uli Edel, 2002), directed by a German filmmaker and starring Patrick Stewart as John Lear, set in 1842 in the newly created Republic of Texas just after the Mexican-American wars and the Alamo. My point is that virtually no one cares to make it.

Even in contemporary Britain, productions of Shakespeare such as the made-for-television Othello (dir. Geoffrey Sax, 2001) drop the language of the play and modernize it, then, without explanation or apology, put it on PBS “Masterpiece Theater” in the US. Trevor Nunn’s PBS The Merchant of Venice (2001) was broadcast in the US a few months earlier in the same PBS “Masterpiece Theater” series, using the language of the play. Yet the “Masterpiece Theater” introducers and the educational material for the two productions did not in any way differentiate them by their distance from the original play they were adapting.

A consequence of the present lack of interest in differentiating modern-language film and television Shakespeare adaptations from Shakespeare adaptations retaining the language is that earlier ideas about popularization no longer hold. Conservatives might think of popularization as equivalent to simplification, secondary to a more expensive and supposedly better, more authentic version. A liberal like Orson Welles might, by contrast, think of popularization through film and radio (or even comic books) as introductions to the real thing. In either case, the popular is seen as secondary to the original. Insofar as there’s a Shakespeare in many present adaptations at all, he seems to inhere in the plot. The implicit claim is that the Shakespearean language is not universal but the plots, narrative conflicts, and/or character issues are. Yet plot and character are what traditionally was taught as inessential, borrowed, not-Shakespeare. Popularization does not return us, then, to the fuller, original and essential Shakespeare; it is the essence of Shakespeare.

The present indifference to how Shakespearean a given film or television adaptation may be poses problems both for neoconservative and reactionary commentators such as Lynn Cheney and George Will, as well as for self-identified liberal academics. The problem for liberals is that there is no longer a Shakespeare icon, a token of Western imperial power, out there to subvert from the margins; the center is already decentered, the original is already hybrid, the authentic is already a simulacrum. The problem for the conservatives is that there is no Shakespeare at the center ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: Editors’ cut
• 1. Shakespeare, “Glo-cali-zation,” race, and the small screens of post-popular culture
• 2. “Remember me”: technologies of memory in Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet
• 3. James Dean meets the pirate’s daughter: passion and parody in William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet and Shakespeare in Love
• 4. Sure can sing and dance: minstrelsy, the star system, and the post-postcoloniality of Kenneth Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and Trevor Nunn’s Twelfth Night
• 5. Race-ing Othello, re-engendering white-out, II
• 6. Shakespeare in the age of post-mechanical reproduction: sexual and electronic magic in Prospero’s Books
• 7. A Shrew for the times, revisited
• 8. Mixing media and animating Shakespeare tales
• 9. Nostalgia and theatricality: the fate of the Shakespearean stage in the Midsummer Night’s Dreams of Hoffman, Noble, and Edzard
• 10. “Top of the world, ma”: Richard III and cinematic convention
• 11. Shakespeare and the street: Pacino’s Looking for Richard, Bedford’s Street King, and the common understanding
• 12. The family tree motel: subliming Shakespeare in My Own Private Idaho
• 13. War is mud: Branagh’s Dirty Harry V and the types of political ambiguity
• 14. Out damned Scot: dislocating Macbeth in transnational film and media culture
• 15. Dogme Shakespeare 95: European cinema, anti-Hollywood sentiment, and the Bard
• 16. Shakespeare and Asia in postdiasporic cinemas: spin-offs and citations of the plays from Bollywood to Hollywood
• References
• Filmography
• Index