Luhrmann's Top 40 Shakespeare and the Crisis of Shakespearean Consumption

1. Consumption n. The act or process of consuming. In the autumn of 1996, mature theatre-goers flocked to movie theaters to feast upon Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet, a version ambitious enough to include not only every line of Shakespeare's text, but also a world-renowned cast and the director's ego. Press releases touted this film as a virtual banquet for the eye. Blenheim Palace was to serve as Elsinore and would feature an interior floor studded with 7,500 handmade, individually marbled, black and white tiles: the 70-mm format would allow viewers to indulge themselves in the grandeur of the State Hall, lined with 30 mirrors and fitted with a high gallery. Word about town was that this film was a noble endeavor, a marked enterprise, an achievement. The word over Jujubes and Twizzlers at intermission was that this movie was long. Branagh touted his version as a "full" Hamlet. Assuredly, 3 hours and 58 minutes after unfolding their sticky chairs, many viewers left stuffed. In adjacent theaters, however, in those same suburban minimalls, an audience was ingesting what one critic termed "Shakespearean snack food," another, a noisy "burp" (Alleva 19). Reviewers denounced the production and the audience in tandem, claiming that Shakespeare had been packaged "as a big, tempting box of candy for those who won't swallow their medicine any other way" (Matthews 54). Indeed, Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet cut in half the other film's running time: it similarly cut in half the age of the average viewer. Romeo and Juliet may remain the most frequently taught Shakespearean play in high schools; however, Luhrmann's means of offering the text for youth consumption raised disputes over matters of taste. Defining what Pierre Bourdieu calls "illegitimate extra-curricular culture," Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet angered critics because it delighted audiences (25). It was cultural capital effortlessly acquired outside of the institution. Ideally consumed according to the aesthete's detached "taste of reflection," Shakespeare's text was devoured in the movie house, according to nothing other than a barbarous "taste of sense." Luhrmann's film, with its contemporary iconography and hit soundtrack, provided an accessibility that frightened those who wanted the Bard bound in a gilded volume-or at least a four-hour, voluminous film. With reference to Roland Barthes, Luhrmann's porous text can be termed "writerly," offering "a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds" and encouraging "access to it by several entrances" (S/Z 4-5). Its permeability ensures that "the reader [is] no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text." Branagh's "complete Hamlet" could not be more literally "complete." This hermetic piece serves the "readerly" half of Barthes' paradigm. "Readerly" texts are "products (and not productions)." Denied "the magic of the signifier," the reader is rendered "intransitive" and "reactive," a victim of the "pitiless divorce" between producer and consumer, author and reader. This requisite "disinterestedness" of the Kantian aesthete, this concentration on form over function, stems from the film's pointedly textual focus. Branagh's cinematic excesses may border on conspicuous consumption; however, his exaggerated film size and length merely prevented the unwanted attendance of restless adults and pleasure-seeking teens. American movie theaters are defined by an inherent "interchangeable sameness," to use Adorno's term, and as Branagh's film emerges with an elitist tag-untarnished by the vulgar masses-it is a true testimony to the social filter of textual fidelity. Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet presents Shakespeare's drama without offering a line-by-line readerly regurgitation-though its respectability diminishes with each textual "cut." One tolerant critic aptly notes that Luhrmann "doesn't salaam to Shakespeare's language" and that Luhrmann's popcultural iconography constructs "a vernacular that can convey Shakespeare's story to a contemporary audience in a filmic way" (Arroyo 6). …