‘These Violent Delights Have Violent Ends’: Baz Luhrmann’s Millennial Shakespeare

Abstract

Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film, William Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo + Juliet’, is necessarily a central text for any consideration of Shakespearean filmmaking at the millennium.¹ Of all the Shakespeare film releases of the 1990s, it is the one most obviously oriented toward the twenty-first century. Along with its effective plundering of youth culture and its aggressive marketing toward a teenage audience, it employs postmodern aesthetic strategies that set it off from the substantial body of teen-star-crossed-lovers films from which it derives. Luhrmann’s flashy, eclectic visual style and ultra-hip ironies earmark William Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo + Juliet’ as fin-de-siècle spectacle; yet the gesture to bardic authority in the film’s title, and the watery cocoon in which Luhrmann shelters his young lovers, evince a romantic nostalgia that is a surprising and poignant response to the frenetic excess of late twentieth-century culture.