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.
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Notes
John Lewis, The Road to Romance and Ruin: Teen Films and Youth Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 3.
Michael Barson and Steven Heller, Teenage Confidential: An Illustrated History of the American Teen (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1998), pp. 88–9.
See Steven Conner, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 73–81.
See Jay Carr, Boston Globe; Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times; and Janet Maslin, New York Times: all 1 November 1996.
See Susan Hayward, ‘Postmodernism’, in Key Concepts in Cinema Studies (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 259–72.
In the introduction to the published screenplay, Luhrmann performs the common directorial strategy of enlisting Shakespeare to justify his approach: ‘Shakespeare’s plays touched everyone, from the street sweeper to the Queen of England. He was a rambunctious, sexy, violent, entertaining storyteller. We’re trying to make this movie rambunctious, sexy, violent, and entertaining the way Shakespeare might have if he had been a filmmaker.’ Baz Luhrmann, ‘A Note from Baz Luhrmann’, in William Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo & Juliet’: The Contemporary Film, the Classic Play (New York: Bantam Doubleday, 1996), p. i.
Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, 1865. The film uses a recording by Leontyne Price.
Quoted in Lynda E. Boose and Richard Burt, ‘Totally Clueless?: Shakespeare Goes Hollywood in the 1990s’, in Lynda E. Boose and Richard Burt (eds), Shakespeare, the Movie: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, and Video (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 18.
Peter Newman, ‘Luhrmann’s Young Lovers as Seen by Their Peers’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 15:3 (1997), pp. 36–7. The four comments quoted came respectively from L. A. and C. L., both aged 15, and M.S., aged 14.
Frederic Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, in E. Ann Kaplan (ed.), Postmodernism and Its Discontents (London: Verso, 1988), pp. 18–20 and Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 19–20.
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Loehlin, J.N. (2000). ‘These Violent Delights Have Violent Ends’: Baz Luhrmann’s Millennial Shakespeare. In: Burnett, M.T., Wray, R. (eds) Shakespeare, Film, Fin de Siècle. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230286795_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230286795_9
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