Shakespeare, Cinema, Counter-Culture

Appropriation and Inversion

Ailsa Ferguson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781135041847
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

Addressing for the first time Shakespeare's place in counter-cultural cinema, this book examines and theorizes counter-hegemonic, postmodern, and post-punk Shakespeare in late 20th and early 21st century film. Drawing on a diverse range of case studies, Grant Ferguson presents an interdisciplinary approach that offers new theories on the nature and application of Shakespearean appropriations in the light of postmodern modes of representation. The book considers the nature of the Shakespearean inter-text in subcultural political contexts concerning the politicized aesthetics of a Shakespearean 'body in pieces, ' the carnivalesque, and notions of Shakespeare as counter-hegemonic weapon or source of empowerment. Representative films use Shakespeare (and his accompanying cultural capital) to challenge notions of capitalist globalization, dominant socio-cultural ideologies, and hegemonic modes of expression. In response to a post-modern culture saturated with logos and semiotic abbreviations, many such films play with the emblematic imagery and references of Shakespeare's texts. These curious appropriations have much to reveal about the elusive nature of intertextuality in late postmodern culture and the battle for cultural ownership of Shakespeare. As there has yet to be a study that isolates and theorizes modes of Shakespearean production that specifically demonstrate resistance to the social, political, ideological, aesthetic, and cinematic norms of the Western world, this book expands the dialogue around such texts and interprets their patterns of appropriation, adaptation, and representation of Shakespeare.

1 (Post)Punk Shakespeare, Carnival and Rebellion

The Filth and the Fury and Richard III

“If any author has become a mortal god, it must be Shakespeare.”¹
“I am an antichrist!”²

Reminiscent of the soundbites from Kenneth Branagh and others telling bad school memories of ‘boring’ Shakespeare in Looking for Richard (1996, UK, dir. Al Pacino), The Filth and the Fury, (2000, UK, dir. Julien Temple), a documentary representing the short career of the Sex Pistols, introduces its connection with Shakespeare via this same route but with a very different effect:

I question everything; I always have done. We were doing Shakespeare [at school]. A teacher would give me a hard time: he wouldn’t tell me what I wanted to know. I’d ask outright questions and you weren’t supposed to do that. You’re just supposed to accept that it’s Shakespeare, it’s great, you’re not. And that’s not good enough for me.

Lydon’s voiceover accompanies footage of Olivier as Richard III, seated on his throne, suddenly striking a subordinate with vicious violence. The strike hits home – and the subordinate falls – the instant Lydon says, “you’re not.” So Olivier’s Richard III personifies Shakespeare’s looming “great[ness]”, Lydon’s unpleasant teacher archetype and the weight of hegemonic, oppressive structures of authority all at once. Yet at another moment, “Don’t accept the old order,” says a young Johnny Rotten, “get rid of it!” and Richard, for Johnny, brutally smothers his enemy.

In this first case study, the hypothesis that the counter-cultural appropriation of Shakespeare can be read as carnivalesque inversion, play and parody is applied to this book’s only documentary, The Filth and the Fury, which appropriates Shakespeare’s Richard III, via Olivier’s (1955, UK) film and the band’s lead singer John Lydon’s recollections of his inspiration from Shakespeare’s notorious villain-king. This parallel-protagonist gambit, a common feature in documentary film, is subverted to challenge the false neatness of documentaries’ imposed parallels, such that, when Richard III’s narrative is transposed onto Filth, the audience’s expectations of the familiar play are exploited to enable a carnivalesque set of transgressions and redirections to confuse, entertain and challenge their approach not only to Filth and its subjects, but to the whole notion of portraying a ‘history’ as a neatly formalised narrative. From camp and seductive to dangerous, perverse and deformed, Olivier’s portrayal of Shakespeare’s hero-villain has become culturally definitive (despite its own merciless cutting and splicing of the play text within itself as well as the incorporation of parts of Henry VI). It would, therefore, be inaccurate to examine the relationship between Filth and Shakespeare without noting the bridge formed between the two by the 1955 film. A detailed analysis of Olivier’s portrayal, however, does not belong here. Rather, an awareness of the contribution made by the earlier film to Lydon’s and, subsequently, Filth’s appropriation of Shakespeare’s play must inevitably be maintained.

In a film that asserts, throughout, its punk authenticity (despite its belatedness), appropriating Shakespeare might at first seem puzzling. However, Filth in facts represents one of a few punk and post-punk film ‘Shakespeares,’ all of which play with the anachronism inherent in transposing Shakespearean text into postmodern contexts. In the punk moment itself, the late 1970s and early ’80s in the UK, Derek Jarman’s Jubilee (UK, 1978) and The Tempest (UK, 1979) firmly posited Shakespeare and early modernity itself as conducive within the punk aesthetic and philosophy. However, later in the century, a new, post-punk nostalgia brought a return to Shakespunk. Now largely forgotten teen Shakespeare The Punk (UK, 1993, released as The Punk and the Princess in the US, dir. Michael Sarne) was a very loose Romeo and Juliet, while in 1996, the same year Romeo + Juliet launched a wave of teen Shakespeare movies in Hollywood, low budget exploitation parody specialists Troma Studios released the now cult Tromeo and Juliet, (1996, USA, dir. Lloyd Kaufman) featuring a lesbian punk inversion of Romeo and Juliet’s comic nurse into the film’s key tragic character and repeated tropes of tattooed and pierced bodies. These later films display nostalgia for the brief heyday of punk; the anarchic carnival of grotesquery, oppositionalism, sedition and parodic hilarity inherent in the movement’s definitive music and fashion saturates these films, not least The Filth and the Fury.

Filth begins by setting the scene for the birth of the band: the winter of 1976. The dustbin men were on strike; unemployment was at a record high; racial hatred was causing rioting in the streets. “England was in a state of social upheaval … total social chaos,” says a reflective John Lydon³ (lead singer) in voiceover. Archive footage pans the cold streets of London, littered with uncollected rubbish bags ironically covered with picturesque snow. Steve Jones (lead guitar) describes the setting with brutal negativity: “it was cold and miserable … if you weren’t born into money, you may as well kiss your fucking life goodbye.” Suddenly, this barren, postmodern landscape is interrupted by a regal Shakespearean figure in the form of Olivier’s hunched, mischievous Richard III: “Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun of York” (I.i.1–2). We are then thrust back to the 1970s, as a child surveys his bleak view from a run-down housing block balcony. Fragments of Richard III are reformed into a new whole and recoded into The Filth and the Fury, a postmodern, counter-History play. This chapter on Filth’s appropriation of Richard III focuses on notions of antithesis, anachronism, monstrosity and the carnivalesque in the counter-cultural use of Shakespeare.

Filth’s appropriation of Shakespeare is neither isolated nor without precedent, both in film⁴ and in cultural criticism. While Shakespeare was not prevalent in punk lyrics, Vivienne Westwood, the most influential figure in ‘designing’ punk style, showed heavy influence from early modern imagery in her punk-era creations, some of which survives in definitive Westwood pieces such as the ‘Memento Mori’ ring, ‘Skeleton Collection’ jewellery (described on the Westwood online shop as a “traditional memento mori”⁵) and the ‘de la mode – de la morte’ t shirt, which substitutes fashion for love by appropriating the morte et amore conjunction of early modern emblematics. Gina Marchetti summarises punk as “a way of using cultural objects … in new and startling ways.”⁶ From the safety pin to the dustbin bag, the Sex Pistols composited a cornucopia of rebelliously disparate and impudent appropriations. For John Lydon, and subsequently Filth, one of those cultural objects is the trinity of Shakespeare, Richard III and Laurence Olivier. Lydon claims openly in the film and his autobiography that the defining features of his youthfully anarchic alter ego, Johnny Rotten, were in large part a result of his experience of having seen Olivier’s Richard III,⁷ which he consciously fashioned into part of a bricolagic performative self. Dick Hebdige identifies bricolage as central to the style and expression of subcultures; he writes:

The subcultural bricoleur … typically ‘juxtaposes two apparently incompatible realities […] on an apparently unsuitable scale … and … it is there that the explosive junction occurs’ (Ernst, 1948). Punk exemplifies most clearly the Subcultural uses of these anarchic modes. It too attempted through ‘perturbation and deformation’ to disrupt and reorganize meaning.⁸

Filth’s appropriation of Shakespeare may appear obscure, but appropriation of ‘everyday items’ defined punk and, notwithstanding endless debates still taking place on the texts’ ‘high art’ or ‘popular’ position, Shakespeare is still ‘everyday’ in terms of fame and is subject to constant popular appropriation. The act of taking conventional artefacts and resituating them in contexts which contradict and disturb defined punk style: the innocent safety pin, for instance, instead of pinning a nappy or bandage (birth and healing), presents a gruesome health risk as an amateur body and face piercing implement. Shakespeare, a ‘safe,’ uniting common hero, becomes embodied into the dangerous and deadly Richard III, the textual body in fragments becoming, as we shall find in Chapter 2, an emblem both of the disconnectedness of marginality and, paradoxically, the connectedness of shared cultural history.

Taking pieces of Shakespeare and daring to compare oneself to them, to cut his texts apart for one’s own purpose and to reclaim him, could be seen as a textual ‘uncrowning.’ However, the specific choice of play, Richard III, must also be closely investigated. Some of Shakespeare’s History plays incorporate a subcultural subplot, yet Richard III has no such characters and so might appear to be an odd choice to parallel the countercultural Sex Pistols. However, Richard himself contemplates, resents and exploits his own marginal status and bitterly describes himself as “deformed, unfinished” (I.i.20). Without being led into an unhelpful debate over high/low art status, it is essential to note the general ‘greatness’ and the cultural capital, of Shakespeare used in Filth as a stylistic throwback to the bricolage and appropriation that defined punk style in late 1970s Britain. This ‘greatness’ brought down, or carnivalistically reversed into marginality, in Filth (and, indeed, across counter-cultural appropriations encountered in the rest of this book) creates a performance of what Bakhtin describes as “the mock crowning and subsequent uncrowning of the carnival king” that forms “the primary carnivalistic act.”⁹

There are a few tangible links between Shakespeare, and Richard III in particular, and punk. In the early 1980s, there was a French punk band called Richard III but punk has, since Filth, been critically and performatively linked with Richard III on more than one occasion. In early 2010, for example, the Hole in the Wall Theater Company in Connecticut’s production of Richard III was styled in a punk milieu. In the same year, Less Than Rent’s New York adaptation Richard 3 again set Richard III into a punk – or arguably post-punk – context; “fitting Shakespeare’s play to a punk world, in general, works really well,” writes one reviewer, “the lines, characters, and violent actions are well-suited to sneers and anarchy.”¹⁰ Placing Filth’s use of Shakespeare’s/Olivier’s Richard III as part of a broader use of Shakespeare in punk music, Adam Hansen sees Filth’s appropriation of Shakespeare’s play as an offshoot of Lydon’s self-fashioned persona, which he confesses is influenced by Richard’s persona in both his autobiography¹¹ and his voiceovers in Filth. Yet to see Filth’s use of Shakespeare as tied purely to the Rotten persona is reductive. Hansen remarks on the temporal disjunction of the Richard III clips within Filth:

Shakespeare is sufficiently disconnected and discrete from the decrepit period Rotten finds himself in to offer an opposition to that period. In other ways Shakespeare is close enough for Rotten to make productive connections with his work. To Rotten, Shakespeare’s characters show a merciless but energizing disregard for moral niceties, and so reflect an earlier period where it was obvious those niceties were not universally maintained. This contrasts with the hypocritical, repressive and restrained state Rotten resists.¹²

This approach sees the use of a particular Shakespearean figure in Filth as representing a whole host of meanings in Shakespeare’s entire body of work. Indeed, the only other Shakespearean figure to appear in the film is a brief clip of Olivier (again) as Hamlet. Hansen’s notion that the film uses Richard III simply as a marker for Shakespeare’s characters as representing an anarchistic Arcadia where one can flout “moral niceties” is not entirely convincing. The play’s relationship to the film is structural rather than personal, and the relationship of the historical periods presented is not just a matter of Shakespeare’s England and Lydon’s England, rather it is complicated by the visual presence of Olivier’s 1950s medieval fantasy.

Critically, the link between punk and Richard III has also occasionally surfaced. For example, Douglas Lanier specifies this conjunction somewhat cryptically:

For the most part … Shakespeare appears in pop music in the form of Shakespearean characters who are treated as contemporary a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 (Post)Punk Shakespeare, Carnival and Rebellion: The Filth and the Fury and Richard III
• 2 Shakespeare and Inversion: My Own Private Idaho and Henry IV Parts 1 & 2
• 3 The Dance of Death: Dogme#4: The King Is Alive and King Lear
• 4 Three Hamlets: Festivity and Sedition
• Bibliography
• Index