A Critical Companion to Julie Taymor (Critical Companions to Contemporary Directors) 1666936685, 9781666936681

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A Critical Companion to Julie Taymor

Critical Companions to Contemporary Directors Series Editors: Adam Barkman and Antonio Sanna Critical Companions to Contemporary Directors covers many directors who have not been studied previously in academic publications and whose works nonetheless are highly renowned nowadays. The intent of the series is to offer interesting and illuminating interpretations of the various directors’ films that will be accessible to both scholars of the academic community and critically-minded fans of the directors’ works. Each volume combines discussions of a director’s oeuvre from a broad range of disciplines and methodologies, thus offering the reader a variegated and compelling picture of the directors’ works. In this sense, the volumes will be of interest (and will be instructive) for students and scholars engaged in subjects as different as film studies, literature, philosophy, popular culture studies, religion and others. We welcome proposals for both monographs and edited collections that offer interdisciplinary analyses, focusing on the complete oeuvre of one contemporary director per volume.

Titles in the Series A Critical Companion to Julie Taymor Edited by Matthew Hodge, Adam Barkman, and Antonio Sanna A Critical Companion to Wes Craven Edited by Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns and John Darowski A Critical Companion to Robert Zemeckis Edited by Adam Barkman and Antonio Sanna A Critical Companion to Stanley Kubrick Edited by Elsa Colombani A Critical Companion to Terrence Malick Edited by Joshua Sikora A Critical Companion to Steven Spielberg Edited by Adam Barkman and Antonio Sanna A Critical Companion to Sofia Coppola Edited by Naaman K. Wood and Christopher Booth A Critical Companion to Terry Gilliam Edited by Sabine Planka, Philip van der Merwe, and Ian Bekker A Critical Companion to Christopher Nolan Edited by Claire Parkinson and Isabelle Labrouillère

A Critical Companion to Julie Taymor Edited by Matthew Hodge Adam Barkman Antonio Sanna

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE, United Kingdom Copyright © 2024 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-66693-668-1 (cloth) | ISBN 978-1-66693-669-8 (electronic) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Matthew: To my dad—gone too soon but always with me Adam: Dedicated to the true Royals, who have said with Tolkien, “Faithless is he who says farewell when the road darkens.” Antonio: To Barbara Baldino, Joy Sanna, Lalla Tola, and Giovanna Virdis—both our messages to each other and our time together are worth it all!

Contents

Introduction 1 Matthew Hodge, Adam Barkman, and Antonio Sanna PART I: CREATIVITY

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1 Julie Taymor’s Frida: A Two-Way Mirror on Female Creativity Anna Baccanti

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2 “We Can Work It Out”: Reassessing Musicality, Fidelity and Excess in Across the Universe Leanne Weston

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3 From Historical Relevance to Postmodern Revisionism: The Case of Julie Taymor’s Titus Andrew Grossman

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4 Across the Universe: How Political Mood Shapes Viewers’ Choices and Box Office Success Shawn Williams

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PART II: GENDER AND SEXUALITY

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5 Disruptive Desires and Creative Transgressions in Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe Sony Jalarajan Raj and Adith K. Suresh

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6 Framing a Feminist: Vehicles, Bodies, and Clothing as Biography in The Glorias Dominique Angela M. Juntado

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7 Frida: Creativity, Trauma, and the Woman Artist Gabrielle Stecher

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8 Why Feminism? An Examination of the Philosophy of Gender in The Glorias Samuel Vandeputte and Adam Barkman

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9 Wanton Boys: Queering Childhood and Youth in Julie Taymor’s Titus Jeff Turner

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PART III: ADAPTATION

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10 Fool’s Fire, Titus, The Tempest: Revenge in the Films of Julie Taymor Antonio Sanna

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11 From Titus to Tempest: Taymor’s Divergent Lenses on Shakespeare 195 Claire Kimball 12 Hybridity and Self-Reflexivity in Julie Taymor’s Film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream Elizabeth Klett

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13 Compulsive Symbolizations: Scenes of Power, Figuration, and Ob/Scenity in Titus Louis Breitsohl

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Index 257 About the Contributors

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Introduction Matthew Hodge, Adam Barkman, and Antonio Sanna

Julie Taymor is an American director known for her visually stunning works that combine multiple art forms to produce vibrant and moving storytelling on the screen and stage. Her prolific work among contemporary directors has rightfully earned her a reputation as a skilled artist who is drawn to emotionally driven storytelling that often fuses traditional heritages—such as folklore, mythology, and classic works—with intellectually deep themes to craft layered narratives that move and inspire audiences. Her portfolio as a prestigious film and theater director highlights her passion for crossinfluential approaches between screen and stage; from her films Fool’s Fire (1992), Titus (1999), Frida (2002), Across the Universe (2007), The Tempest (2010), and The Glorias (2020) to her notable Broadway and Off-Broadway theater productions, including The Green Bird (1996), Juan Darién: A Carnival Mass (1996), The Lion King (1997), Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark (2010), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2013), Grounded (2015), and M. Butterfly (2017), as well as her publicized stagings of the operas Oedipus Rex (1992), Salome (1995), The Flying Dutchman (1995), Grendel (2007), and The Magic Flute (2006–to the present). Taymor’s holistic approaches as a director are seemingly sculpted out of her multifaceted roles during creative and developmental processes, including experience as a producer, scenic designer, costume designer, puppet designer, choreographer, lyricist, and writer. Additionally, her strength in constructing worlds and narratives influenced by cultures around the globe is a direct result of her international travels and studies as a young emerging scholar and artist during her youth. Over the course of the director’s career, her impressive accolades and recognitions include her becoming the first female to win the coveted Best Direction of a Musical Tony Award along with her wins and 1

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nominations for Academy Awards, Tony Awards, Drama Desk Awards, Primetime Emmy Awards, Outer Critics Circle Awards, Drama League Awards, Moliere Awards, Olivier Awards, Obie Awards, and a Pulitzer (finalist), as well as her receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship and the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship (known colloquially as the “genius” grant).1 Taymor has become a prolific American director with a unique footprint as a pioneering filmmaker and a legacy as the groundbreaking visionary behind some of the most acclaimed and accomplished successes in entertainment history.2 The director’s career reflects her masterful skill of balancing art and entertainment. Taymor’s work celebrates a rejection of “ridiculous” stigmas that ‘art’ is for elite intellectuals and ‘commercial’ projects cannot be artistically crafted.3 Similarly, she protests against the unfair stereotype of an “artist” by striving to exemplify how a quality director should be able to “respect both” (a project’s artistic integrity and its commercial success).4 Her dedication to shattering these preconceived notions has resulted in a portfolio of projects that consistently blur boundaries of genres, styles, and influences through blending artistry/commercialism, theatrics/intimacy, classic/contemporary, high-tech/low-tech, and Western/non-Western cultures. This philosophy of elevated filmmaking is also shared by her personal life partner and frequent professional musical collaborator, Elliot Goldenthal. Goldenthal is an Academy Award-winning composer who frequently bridges contemporary classical music and cinematic scores for film, theater, opera, and ballet, and, like Taymor, has been labeled by critics as an experimental artist who creates profound music that is intellectually “avant-gardist” while still being “very accessible” to broad audiences on emotional levels.5 Besides Goldenthal being Taymor’s exclusive screen composer, having scored all six of the director’s films, he has implored his unique artistic approaches in writing elevated music for several high-profile commercial movies, including instalments of the Alien and Batman franchises, Heat (1995), A Time to Kill (1996), and multiple films from director Neil Jordan (including Interview with the Vampire [1994], Michael Collins [1996], and The Butcher Boy [1997]). Goldenthal’s musical achievements have earned him impressive accolades, including three Academy Award nominations and one win for the award for his original score in Taymor’s 2002 film Frida. Taymor’s films exemplify her philosophical approach to directing that she seemingly first honed within her theater work—a belief that abstract artistry can find a place within mainstream entertainment. As she expressed during a 1997 interview on the groundbreaking success of her experimental approach to directing the Broadway production of Disney’s The Lion King: “[A]n artist can be extremely true to their art and make a buck for their bosses or for themselves . . . you can aspire to the highest and you can make it happen and people will pay for it.”6 Taymor’s openness on her aspirations to bring experimental

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artistry to the masses carried over into her film career that launched from her theater successes. Part of her artistic process in approaching material is establishing what she believes is the “ideograph” of a story (meaning how a story can be reduced into a single image).7 Taymor believes establishing this image helps her extract a story’s essence, which can then lead her toward her desired imagery—which is often beautifully and stunningly surrealistic (such as branches replacing severed hands in Titus, paintings coming to life in Frida, psychedelic musical numbers in Across the Universe, a dissolving black sand castle in The Tempest, and a time-bending traveling bus in The Glorias). The director constructs visual journeys for audiences that match the emotional and narrative paths of her characters, believing that an artistic representation of something can often be more emotionally and spiritually moving for audiences than a literal, realistic representation.8 As Taymor frequently expresses in interviews celebrating her work, the art of storytelling is as important as the story itself.9 However, this in no way means the director prioritizes visuals over the actual story being told. As she expressed during a 2012 panel discussion, “Quite often, people think that if you’re a visual person, that you’re not interested in text or story, and that’s just not the truth at all . . . what excites me into the imagery is that the story has to be really good first.”10 Julie Taymor was born on December 15, 1952, in Newton, Massachusetts. While growing up in a Boston suburb, she spent her childhood immersed in a creative environment, which included performing at Boston’s Children Theatre and Theatre Workshop of Boston (where she learned experimental approaches to storytelling).11 When she was a teenager, she participated in a cultural exchange program that allowed her to visit India and Sri Lanka and become exposed to Asian theater. After high school, Taymor spent a year in Paris studying mime at L’Écôle de Mime Jacques LeCoq before returning to the United States for college. She attended Ohio’s Oberlin College, where she focused her studies on folklore and mythology while becoming involved with theater companies that specialized in experimental performance and ensemble work. After college, Taymor earned a traveling fellowship to study in Indonesia and Japan, an opportunity that led to her living in Indonesia for four years as a result of developing her own theater company alongside Indonesian and Western performers: a mask-dance troupe called Teatr Loh. After Taymor’s years working in Indonesia, she moved back to the United States, where she quickly built up a reputation in the New York City theater scenes as a visionary director and designer whose unique work reflected her roots in experimental theater and years of international studies immersed in performance traditions of various cultures around the world. Her years of cultural immersion within international performance traditions shaped her reverence for storytelling approaches that span Western and Eastern cultures. As

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the director expressed during an interview early on in her NYC-based career, “When you juxtapose naturalism with an exaggerated reality, the naturalism becomes magnified and, in its own way, larger than life.”12 Taymor spent the 1980s and 1990s staging a wide array of theater projects that spanned original works (including Liberty’s Taken and Juan Darién: A Carnival Mass), adaptations of classic plays (including productions of Carlo Gozzi’s The Green Bird and Shakespeare’s The Tempest, The Taming of the Shrew, and Titus Andronicus), and operas (including Oedipus Rex, The Magic Flute, Salome, and The Flying Dutchman). Taymor’s career as a theater director experienced a meteoric rise when Disney hired her to direct the Broadway production of The Lion King due to her proven strengths as an artistic storyteller who blends world cultures, emotionally moving designs, and mixtures of performance mediums (including live actors, shadows, masks, and puppets). The partnership initially seemed unexpected to critics, as the New York Times described it, “A surprising collaboration between an entertainment giant (Disney) and an avant-garde artist (Julie Taymor).”13 However, the partnership paid off, and Taymor’s staging of The Lion King became a massive critical and commercial success and earned the director impressive praise and accolades, including becoming the first female to win a Tony Award for directing a musical. The Lion King would go on to become the most successful entertainment (including theater, television, and films) in history and catapulted Taymor into a bright spotlight within the mainstream entertainment industry. Her theater career continued to grow with high-profile opportunities, including directing productions of The Magic Flute for the Metropolitan Opera, an original opera called Grendel at the LA Opera and the Lincoln Center Festival (composed by Goldenthal), the Broadway revival of M. Butterfly, and the original Broadway production of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. Taymor’s legacy as an artistic contributor to New York City is evident in the city’s recently opened Museum of Broadway, which boasts a plaque describing the director’s work as “brilliant,” “ingenious,” “groundbreaking,” and “awe-inspiring.”14 Taymor’s early experiences and successes in the theater world helped her transition into feature-length filmmaking. Before directing feature films, Taymor’s first project as a film director was Fool’s Fire (1992), a short film adapted from Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Hop-Frog.” The film focuses on a dwarf (Michael J. Anderson) enslaved by a cruel king (Tom Hewitt) who nicknames him “Hop-Frog” due to his walk. The king humiliates the protagonist by forcing him to be a jester at a masquerade. When the king abuses Trippetta (Mireille Mossé)—a young dwarf girl who is also enslaved—HopFrog executes a plan to enact violent revenge on the monarch and his cruel ministers by tricking them all into a situation where they are chained and burned alive. Taymor’s visual aesthetics as a director were supported by

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her incorporation of design skills she had successfully utilized in theater, including designing the puppets, costumes, and masks worn by the actors and actresses in the film (all characters except Hop-Frog and Trippetta are portrayed by performers in overscale masks in order to force the audience to identify with the dwarves while viewing the king and his ministers as the monsters). Fool’s Fire was a successful venture for Taymor as a first-time film director; the short film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, won the award for Best Drama at the Tokyo International Electronic Cinema Festival, and was broadcast on PBS as part of the television network’s “American Playhouse” series.15 Taymor’s debut feature film was Titus (which received a limited release at the end of 1999 and a wide release in 2000), an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s play Titus Andronicus. The filmmaker had previously directed the play for the stage, which gave her the confidence to transition into directing it for film, stating during a press interview for the movie, “All of my experience in the theatre has prepared me to do a film like this.”16 Titus follows the titular, successful Roman general (Anthony Hopkins), who returns to Rome after a decade of war against the Goths. Titus’s victory brings him great honor and acclaim, but it also sets off a chain of events that leads to tragedy. Titus forces his rival, Tamora (Jessica Lange), the Queen of the Goths, to watch him sacrifice her son. She seeks revenge on the general by conspiring with her lover Aaron (Harry Lennix) and her sons, Demetrius (Matthew Rhys) and Chiron (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), to manipulate Titus’s family and cause them harm. The plot includes multiple acts of violence and revenge, including the rape and mutilation of Titus’s daughter Lavinia (Laura Fraser), and the eventual deaths of many of the main characters. The movie explores themes of power, revenge, and the destructive nature of violence; it features stunning visuals and an all-star cast of award-winning actors, and received critical acclaim for its bold approach to Shakespeare’s notoriously gruesome play. Taymor’s next film was Frida (2002), a biographical drama that tells the life story of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (Salma Hayek). The movie depicts Kahlo’s life from her teenage years to her death at the age of 47 and portrays her relationship with her husband, the famous muralist Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina), including their turbulent marriage as a result of the latter’s affairs with other women. The movie also depicts Kahlo’s own affairs with both men and women, including her relationship with the artist and communist Leon Trotsky (Geoffrey Rush). Throughout the film, the female protagonist’s artistic journey is explored, which was influenced by the physical and emotional pain Kahlo suffered throughout her life, including her struggle with polio as a child and the severe injuries she sustained in a bus accident that left her permanently disabled. Taymor’s experimental instincts present themselves through the surrealistic approaches of art coming to life within the

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storytelling. The director experienced both commercial and critical success with Frida, which included the film winning two Academy Awards (Best Makeup and Best Original Score) among its six Oscar nominations. Five years later, Taymor released her third feature film, Across the Universe (2007). The musical film is set in the 1960s and follows the story of a young British man named Jude (Jim Sturgess) who travels to the United States to find his estranged father. While there, he befriends a group of artists and activists, including Max (Joe Anderson), Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood), Prudence (T.V. Carpio), Sadie (Dana Fuchs), and Jo-Jo (Martin Luther McCoy). Throughout the film, the characters experience various personal struggles that reflect the social and political upheaval of the era, such as Max’s battle with his draft notice for the Vietnam War and subsequent post-war trauma, Lucy’s growing investment in the anti-war movement, Prudence’s struggle with unrequited same-sex romantic feelings, Jo-Jo mourning the death of his younger brother as a result of police brutality, and Jude’s search for identity and purpose. The plot is driven by the music of the Beatles, as the characters sing their way through iconic songs and utilize the lyrics as powerful methods of dialogue that forward their stories. Taymor (along with Goldenthal as the film’s music producer) beautifully reimagines each song to musically represent the high emotions of the characters and their navigation of love, heartbreak, drugs, war, protests, violence, death, and identity. The director once again showcased her passion for nontraditional storytelling and abstract visuals through ongoing evocative musical numbers that evolve from realistic settings to psychedelic and surrealist presentations, all of which artistically play out the landscape of 1960s America shaped by the Vietnam War, antiwar protests, the civil rights movement, and counterculture. Across the Universe received nominations for prestigious awards (including an Academy Award nomination for Best Costume Design and a Golden Globe nomination for Best Motion Picture—Musical or Comedy) and has subsequently reached new levels of fandom by being perceived as a cult classic. Taymor’s next feature film was another adaptation of a play by Shakespeare, The Tempest (2010). The original theatrical text features the main character named Prospero (a male), while Taymor’s adaptation changes the character’s gender and name to Prospera (a female). The movie follows the story of Prospera (Helen Mirren), a sorceress who has been exiled to a remote island with her daughter Miranda (Felicity Jones) after being accused of witchcraft. Prospera uses her magical powers to conjure up a storm that causes a ship carrying her enemies to crash onto the island. With the help of a spirit named Ariel (Ben Whishaw), the sorceress manipulates and torments her enemies, including her brother Antonio (Chris Cooper), who has usurped her rightful place as ruler of Milan. Meanwhile, Miranda falls in love with one of the shipwrecked men, Ferdinand (Reeve Carney), while

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Caliban (Djimon Hounsou), a character who is half human and half island, plots against Prospera for enslaving him. As the story unfolds, the sorceress ultimately forgives her enemies and renounces her magical powers, allowing her to return to Milan and reclaim her throne. The film explores themes of betrayal, revenge, forgiveness, and the power of redemption. Taymor’s visually ambitious version of The Tempest earned praise and award nominations for its design and performances (including nominations for an Academy Award for Best Costume Design and a Satellite Award for Best Actress). Taymor primarily focused on staged works in subsequent years until her return to film directing with The Glorias (2020). The biographical film is based on the life of Gloria Steinem, an American feminist, journalist, and social and political activist. The movie is told through four different stages of her life, each played by a different actress (Ryan Kiera Armstrong, Lulu Wilson, Alicia Vikander, and Julianne Moore). The production navigates Steinem’s complicated adolescent years involving her parents, her early years as a journalist who starts to gain recognition for her work, including her investigative reporting on the conditions faced by women in America, and her subsequent years being more involved in the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s, working with other activists like Bella Abzug (Bette Midler) and Dorothy Pitman Hughes (Janelle Monáe). The film further explores Steinem’s achievements and criticisms as she becomes a leading national voice for women’s rights. Taymor’s injections of abstractness and surrealism within the biographical genre take the form of a Greyhound bus filled with all of the various incarnations of Gloria Steinem interacting with each other (artistically lifting the boundaries of linear narrative and timelines). The director earned critical praise for her artistic approach toward telling the story of a prolific real-life figure (in a similar vein as Frida). Full-length publications devoted to studies of Taymor are unfortunately rare. Book-length studies on the director include the third edition of Julie Taymor: Playing with Fire (Harry N. Abrams, 2007) by Eileen Blumenthal, Julie Taymor, and Antonio Monda—which unfortunately lacks discussion of any recent works—and Taymor’s publications that are solely focused on individual projects—The Lion King: Pride Rock on Broadway (Disney Editions, 2017), Titus: The Illustrated Screenplay (Newmarket Press, 2000), and Frida: Bringing Frida Kahlo’s Life and Art to Film (Newmarket Press, 2002). Broader edited collections consisting of only singular contributions to Taymor’s works include Michael D. Friedman’s essay entitled “‘This Fearful Slumber’: Some Unacknowledged Sources of Julie Taymor’s Titus” within Staging Shakespeare: Essays in Honor of Alan C. Dessen (University of Delaware Press, 2007) edited by Lena Cowen Orlin and Miranda Johnson-Haddad, George Rodosthenous’s chapter entitled “Relocating the

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Song: Julie Taymor’s Jukebox Musical Across the Universe (2007)” within Gestures of Music Theater: The Performativity of Song and Dance (Oxford University Press, 2014) edited by Dominic Symonds and Millie Taylor, and Clara Escoda Agustí’s journal article “Julie Taymor’s ‘Titus’ (1999): Framing Violence and Activating Responsibility” in Atlantis, vol. 28, no. 1 (2006). A Critical Companion to Julie Taymor, therefore, is the most updated and holistic volume on the director that is currently published. This scholarly collection consists of thirteen essays written by contributors across the globe spanning diverse fields of research and studies such as film, media, music, theater, literature, political science, sociology, anthropology, communications, journalism, philosophy, gender, queer identities, and popular culture. This book is divided into three parts. The first part, “Creativity,” discusses Taymor as an experimental visionary by exploring her artistic approaches in directing stories for screen and stage. In the first chapter, Anna Baccanti interprets Frida by proposing that Taymor’s emphasis on the pained, disabled body as the source of Frida Kahlo’s art puts a novel spin on the artist-asmartyr narrative and, in doing so, finds a way to lend an air of transcendence to the female artist. The second chapter, by Leanne Weston, explores the complex relationship between theatricality, musicality, fidelity and excess in the Anglo-American jukebox musical Across the Universe. The following chapter, by Andrew Grossman, situates Titus within the arc of Taymor’s expressionism, in which Western and non-Western traditions of masking (and masquing) take precedence over the humanism expected of modern performance. In the fourth chapter, Shawn Williams argues that the tepid reception of Across the Universe had as much to do with the timing of its release as the flaws of its construction, while also predicting how future generations may well rediscover the movie musical and herald its achievement. The second part of the volume, “Gender and Sexuality,” navigates Taymor’s framing of feminism and queerness through the perspectives of her directorial lens. In this part’s opening chapter, Sony Jalarajan and Adith Suresh explore how the notion of desire is depicted in the films of Taymor, which, they argue, fundamentally deal with the construction of desire as a signifying practice to define the complexities of human interactions, relationships, and identities. The following chapter, by Dominique Angela M. Juntado, examines The Glorias by bringing into focus Taymor’s approach to the motif of material culture in defining the life stages in Gloria Steinem’s search and development of identity as well as in her visible expressions contributing to her brand of activism. In the third chapter, Gabrielle Stecher considers the relationship between creativity and trauma as reflected in Frida and in its reception post #MeToo, as well as explores the film’s depiction of art and creativity as forces for healing and self-expression following moments of intense personal and physical trauma. The fourth chapter, by

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Samuel Vandeputte and Adam Barkman, navigates the journey through the wilderness of gender philosophy in order to inspire a renewed appreciation for Gloria Steinem’s impressive legacy and the complexities of the gender debate represented within Taymor’s The Glorias. In the concluding chapter of this part, Jeff Turner draws upon recent scholarship on queer childhood in representation by Kathryn Bond Stockton, Hannah Dyer, and Lee Edelman to explore how Taymor inadvertently deconstructs and queers the concept of childhood innocence so desired by adults depicted in Titus. In the third part of this book, “Adaptation,” the contributors discuss the filmmaker’s approaches to adapting and reimagining source materials and their themes. This part begins with Antonio Sanna’s examination of how, in Taymor’s films, revenge is portrayed as scheming, passionate, or villainous, how much pleasure and satisfaction it gives the characters after its enactment, and how justified it apparently is through an analysis of the various characters’ words, expressions, actions, as well as the films’ mise-en-scène. In the following chapter, Claire Kimball presents a close examination of Titus and The Tempest—as well as adapted screenplays, film commentaries, and personal reflections from interviews—to investigate a perceptible shift in Taymor’s treatment of Shakespeare’s works on film. The third chapter, by Elizabeth Klett, affirms that the 2014 film of Taymor’s stage production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, performed at Theatre for a New Audience in 2013, epitomizes the hybridity that characterizes the director’s work. The volume concludes with a chapter by Louis Breitsohl that argues that selected scenes of visibility within Titus have to be understood in a dialectical relation to something, that by definition cannot be represented directly: the obscene— which, according to etymology, refers to the off/scene. Taymor’s career as a visionary director spans all levels of perceived accomplishments and experiences in the areas of artistry, accolades, commercialism, and fandom. Her passions for both theatrical cinema and cinematic theater make her a groundbreaking director who consistently situates her work within the intersection of story and spectacle. Moreover, the funded study abroad experiences during her early years inspired her to recently establish the Taymor World Theatre Fellowship (which provides grants for emerging creative artists to work on year-long immersive projects in Africa, Asia, Central America, South America, and the Middle East).17 Her unique lens earns her a spotlight within the crucial academic conversations of significant contemporary directors. Thus, the diverse perspectives presented in this volume represent an array of necessary scholarly approaches that explore Julie Taymor as a globally influenced American director who exhibits and exemplifies the authentic artistry of ingenious storytelling.

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NOTES 1. MacArthur Foundation, https://www​.macfound​.org. 2. Taymor’s Broadway production of The Lion King is the most successful musical of all time. 3. Julie Taymor: Playing with Fire, dir. Koschka Hetzer. Documentary. MMK Media, 2002. 4. Karen Sanders, “Julie Taymor speaks with Michael Eisner at The Aspen Ideas,” YouTube, July 12, 2012. https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v=​-5FFTQTPP60. 5. Thomas S. Hischak, The Encyclopedia of Film Composers (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 270. 6. Manufacturing Intellect, “Julie Taymor interview (1997),” July 24, 2016. https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=sYBHX​_UBS4o. 7. TED, “Julie Taymor: Spider-Man, The Lion King and life on the creative edge,” YouTube, July 31, 2013. https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=SN7wO06Yz1E​ &t​=47s. 8. Ibid. 9. See, for example, TED, “Julie Taymor: Spider-Man, The Lion King, and life on the creative edge”; Kelly Apter, “Julie Taymor on bringing The Lion King to the stage,” The Scotsman, November 29, 2019. https://www​.scotsman​.com​/arts​-and​-culture​/theatre​-and​-stage​/julie​-taymor​-bringing​-lion​-king​-stage​-first​-big​-challenge​-was​ -wildebeest​-stampede​-1401065; and The View, “Julie Taymor on Bringing Disney’s “The Lion King” to Life on Broadway for 25 Years,” YouTube, November 16, 2022. https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=NjoSD1gzmoI​&t​=482s. 10. The Aspen Studio, “A Conversation with Julie Taymor,” YouTube, February 12, 2016. https://youtu​.be​/kc3sIWusSvU. 11. Eileen Blumenthal and Amy S. Osatinski, “Julie Taymor,” Jewish Women’s Archive, December 7, 2021. https://jwa​.org​/encyclopedia​/article​/taymor​-julie. 12. Hilary DeVries, “Julie Taymor: giving theatre a touch of cross-cultural whimsy,” The Christian Science Monitor, October 31, 1986. https://www​.csmonitor​ .com​/1986​/1031​/ltaymor​-f​.html. 13. Michael Paulson, “How ‘The Lion King’ Got to Broadway and Ruled for 25 Years (So Far),” The New York Times, November 16, 2022. https://www​.nytimes​.com​ /2022​/11​/16​/theater​/the​-lion​-king​-25th​-anniversary​.html. 14. Wall text, THE LION KING, The Museum of Broadway, New York. 15. G.W. Mercier, “Production designs for Fool’s Fire,” The New York Public Library Archives & Manuscripts. https://archives​.nypl​.org​/the​/21845. 16. Manufacturing Intellect, “Julie Taymor on “Titus” (2000),” YouTube, August 28, 2016. https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=sYhxFqyB00k. 17. Taymor World Theatre Fellowship, “About,” https://www​.tjtwtf​.com​/about.

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REFERENCES Blumenthal, Eileen, Julie Taymor and Antonio Monda. Julie Taymor: Playing with Fire, 3rd edn. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2007. DeVries, Hilary. “Julie Taymor: Giving Theatre a Touch of Cross-Cultural Whimsy.” The Christian Science Monitor, October 31, 1986. https://www​.csmonitor​.com​ /1986​/1031​/ltaymor​-f​.html. Hischak, Thomas S. The Encyclopedia of Film Composers. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. Julie Taymor: Playing with Fire. Directed by Koschka Hetzer. Documentary. MMK Media, 2002. MacArthur Foundation. n.d. https://www​.macfound​.org. Manufacturing Intellect. “Julie Taymor Interview (1997).” YouTube. July 24, 2016. https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=sYBHX​_UBS4o. ———. “Julie Taymor on “Titus” (2000).” YouTube. August 28, 2016. https://www​ .youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=sYhxFqyB00k. Paulson, Michael. “How ‘The Lion King’ Got to Broadway and Ruled for 25 Years (So Far).” The New York Times. November 16, 2022. https://www​.nytimes​.com​ /2022​/11​/16​/theater​/the​-lion​-king​-25th​-anniversary​.html. Sanders, Karen. “Julie Taymor Speaks with Michael Eisner at The Aspen Ideas.” YouTube, July 12, 2012. https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v=​-5FFTQTPP60. Taymor World Theatre Fellowship. “About.” n.d. https://www​.tjtwtf​.com​/about. TED. “Julie Taymor: Spider-Man, The Lion King and Life on the Creative Edge.” YouTube, July 31, 2013. https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=SN7wO06Yz1E​&t​ =47s. The Aspen Studio. “A Conversation with Julie Taymor.” YouTube, February 12, 2016. https://youtu​.be​/kc3sIWusSvU. The View. “Julie Taymor on Bringing Disney’s ‘The Lion King’ to Life on Broadway for 25 Years.” YouTube, November 16, 2022. https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​ =NjoSD1gzmoI​&t​=482s. Wall text. The Lion King. The Museum of Broadway. New York, n.d.

Part I

CREATIVITY

Chapter 1

Julie Taymor’s Frida A Two-Way Mirror on Female Creativity Anna Baccanti

Julie Taymor’s biopic Frida,1 released in 2002 and based on Hayden Herrera’s popular biography of Frida Kahlo,2 became Taymor’s most successful directorial project and earned Salma Hayek the Oscar nomination for best actress for the title role.3 The film achieved such cult status that some credit it with renewing critical interest in Kahlo’s work.4 In this production, Taymor navigates some issues of the artist’s biopic such as the representation of creativity but also of gender and authenticity. While, in many ways, Frida is a classic artist biopic, the director takes a visually original approach that often breaks with the conventions of the genre. In particular, in attempting to visualize the protagonist’s creative process, Taymor turns to nonrealistic representation and blurs the boundaries between Kahlo’s life and her art. With the success of Frida, Taymor also helped inaugurate a trend of biographical films about exceptionally talented women.5 These films grapple with the genre conventions of the biopic and their traditionally different treatment of men and women. In his study, Whose Lives Are They Anyway? (2010), David Bingham goes as far as defining men’s and women’s biopics as two different genres.6 While biopics about men have evolved from the classic, celebratory film exalting the triumphs of the “great (white) man” to more psychologically complex “warts-and-all” biopics and even to parodic forms, female-focused biopics have historically tended to reduce women’s lives to tales of dependency and downfall, “weighted down by myths of suffering, victimization, and failure perpetuated by a culture whose films reveal an acute fear of women in the public realm.”7 In Bingham’s analysis, the degrading “downward trajectory” of women’s biopics can be avoided only by consciously applying a feminist point of view.8 Taymor, like other contemporary directors, addresses this issue in part by seeking a uniquely female perspective and in part by appropriating the modes of representation 15

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of the classic celebratory (male) artist biopic to tell a story of artistic triumph in the face of personal difficulties. In this sense, Frida combines typical representations of male and female artists in Hollywood biopics and blurs the lines between male and female biopics that Bingham draws so sharply.9 The present chapter focuses on Taymor’s depiction of creativity in Frida as it relates to questions of genre and gender. It discusses the director’s interpretation and depiction of Kahlo’s work as narrowly autobiographical, the role that the (suffering) female body plays in the film’s representation of the creative process, Taymor’s attempts to visualize this “unfilmable” process through various cinematic devices and to convey the idea of a fragmented biographical subject. In the analysis, it becomes evident that while the filmmaker interprets Kahlo’s work as a direct consequence of biographical vicissitudes, she rejects the “downward trajectory” described by Bingham. Instead, she elevates Kahlo’s struggle with physical and psychological pain to an almost transcendental triumph, as pain becomes the source of her art.

LIFE AND ART BETWEEN FACT AND FICTION As fictional feature films whose appeal rests on the claim to biographical accuracy, biopics navigate an uneasy territory between fact and fiction and are routinely criticized for any departure from historical facts.10 However, the relationship between fact and fiction is especially complex in adaptations of Frida Kahlo’s life since Kahlo herself created an elaborate public persona that often blended fact and fiction. She played with ethnic and national identity, for example, by adopting indigenous costumes, changing her German name Frieda into a Spanish spelling, and changing her birthday to make it coincide with the date of the Mexican Revolution.11 Taymor is partially able to avoid questions about verisimilitude and historical truth by adopting a personal narrative perspective from the point of view of the protagonist and by choosing nonrealistic representation—a technique that recalls Kahlo’s own selfrepresentation. Frida is highly stylized and features several surreal sequences as well as animated scenes, collages of photos and drawings, tableaux vivants recreating Kahlo’s paintings, and self-referential cinematic quotes. Thus, Taymor not only takes artistic license and imitates her subject’s artistic style but also foregrounds the film’s fictional character. In doing so, she highlights the metafictional and self-reflexive aspect that is perhaps inherent to artist biopics: these films deal with the relation of cinema to other media and art forms, and the exploration of their protagonist’s creative process can often be seen as a “displaced” reflection on the process of filmmaking and the filmmakers’ artistic positions.

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Despite such self-referential moves, the explicitly personal point of view and the nonrealistic visual style, Frida classically rests on the idea of art as the authentic and unmediated expression of the artist’s personality and feelings. Like most biopics and, indeed, most treatments of artists’ lives, Frida posits a strong interconnection between life and art. The fact that Kahlo is the subject of many of her own paintings has always invited autobiographical readings of her art.12 Taymor depicts art as an authentic autobiographical expression, born directly out of the life experience of the artist as a “true” recording of her (perceived) reality. By choosing this approach, the filmmaker inserts Frida in the most classical tradition of the artist biopic as well as in the tradition of the artist’s vita that goes back to Giorgio Vasari and that “posits that an artist’s life and art explain each other, creating a feedback loop where the artwork can be explained only through biography, which simultaneously provides evidence for the veracity of that narrative.”13 But while Taymor interprets Kahlo’s work as autobiographical, at the same time, she recognizes that the biographical subject itself is not fixed but multiple and fragmented (as symbolized by the use of mirrors in the film, discussed below). Thus, the apparently straightforward connection between life and art is made unstable by the instability of the subject itself, always already staged as art. The tension between the conception of art as an “authentic” expression and the doubts concerning what constitutes “authentic” subjectivity remains unresolved in the film. Visually, the stylization of life as art is achieved by modeling the general look of the film, such as the bright color palette, on Kahlo’s own paintings. Taymor also integrates Kahlo’s art into the filmic image through trompel’oeil, tableaux vivants that recreate paintings through the arrangement of live actors and objects, as well as “mindscreens,” or subjective shots that show what a character is dreaming or imagining. These devices will be discussed more in depth below in the context of Taymor’s visualization of Kahlo’s artistic process. Kahlo’s life is presented, as the artist did herself during her life, as a form of Gesamtkunstwerk: her self-staging, including her outfits and the decoration of her houses, are depicted as authentic expressions of her creative spirit. Looking at the costumes, we can see how Taymor’s character turns to Mexican dress as a form of expression of her colorful personality. If the historical Kahlo appropriated traditional peasant outfits as a political statement connected to the post-revolutionary revival of Mexicanidad, the cinematic Kahlo represents “authentic” Mexican identity, but this identification is stripped of political significance.14 In the scene of Kahlo’s wedding to Diego Rivera (played by Alfred Molina), for instance, Kahlo swaps her white Europeanstyle white wedding dress, in which she evidently feels miserable, for a green Mexican dress and a bright red rebozo shawl, borrowed from her maid (like

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many elements in the film, this costume is modeled after a painting by Kahlo, in this case, Frieda and Diego Rivera, from 1931). She looks radiant in this outfit, and the implication is that it better fits her personality. Dress here is not presented as a political symbol or a strategy in the construction of a public persona but rather as the “natural” expression of the artist’s individuality. The aspects of presumed spontaneity and naturalness—central features of the idea of artistic genius—are highlighted by how the film never hints at the effort and time it took Kahlo to construct some of her more elaborate looks: the cinematic Frida just effortlessly transforms into a new persona.15 Taymor presents Kahlo’s artistic work as a direct consequence not only of her lived experience but, more specifically, of painful events. The next section explores this association of creativity and pain, focusing on the role of the (pained) female body in Taymor’s portrayal.

PAIN AS ART: THE ARTIST’S MARTYRED BODY Throughout the film, Taymor connects Kahlo’s artistic production with pain and suffering. This is a central theme not only in many biographical treatments of Frida Kahlo: the topos of the suffering artist is one of the most enduring models for the biographical explanation of exceptional talent. Consequently, the “suffering artist” is a standard feature of artist vitae and biopics, a film genre that generally tends to revel in its protagonist’s pain. As Doris Berger notes, a life story that already fits the model of the “suffering artist” is more likely to be chosen as the subject for a biographical film.16 Olsin Lent suggests that films adopt the solution of “highlighting intense personal suffering as the outward sign of the creative forces that lay within”17 because of the intrinsic difficulty of filming the creative process. The connection between suffering and artistic production is so established that the artist’s suffering is perceived as a confirmation of his (or, more rarely, her) genius.18 Physical and psychological pain thus often becomes a stand-in for unfilmable artistic creativity. In Frida, Taymor offers a complex portrayal of the relationship between art and pain. On one level, the protagonist’s pain serves as an explanation for her impulse to create art. Painting is not only inspired, in Taymor’s depiction, by Kahlo’s suffering but also has healing power. Creating art serves a therapeutic function in painful moments, ranging from fights and breakups with Rivera to operations and amputations. This connection between art and pain is especially striking since, overall, Taymor highlights the protagonist’s joie de vivre. Avoiding some of the pitfalls of the genre, the director refuses to tell Kahlo’s life as the kind of degrading story of suffering and humiliation that characterizes many women biopics. Kahlo’s disturbing and unsettling,

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sometimes brutal works form a stark contrast to the colorful character determined to enjoy life in the face of adversity that the film presents. While Kahlo’s passionate and joyful attitude can be seen, as Olsin Lent argues, as the “outward manifestation of her creative spirit,”19 her artistic work is not driven by the same force that characterizes the protagonist’s alegría. Rather, her paintings seem to express the darker sides that are not allowed to show in the hyper-stylized, eccentric, and joyous public persona that Kahlo constructs as her own artwork. While some have criticized Frida for underplaying Kahlo’s physical and psychological pain,20 what emerges from the film analysis, as well as from statements by the filmmakers,21 is not a failure to acknowledge Kahlo’s suffering but rather the refusal to portray her as a victim of her pain. Thus, pain acquires a higher, almost transcendent meaning as the source of art. The sublimation of pain into art positions Frida in the tradition of the male artist biopic. Taymor’s representation of the artist strongly relies on the models of classic male biopics and applies an idea of original creative genius—traditionally ideologically gendered male—to a female artist. On the one hand, appropriating motifs and modes of representation from the classic male biopic and artist vita serves to inscribe a female painter into a maledominated (cinematic) canon of “great artists.” On the other hand, it risks reproducing tropes of the genius discourse that have historically been used to justify the exclusion of women from the arts. This is especially striking in the instances where the film uncritically reproduces the analogy between childbearing and artistic work: historically, this analogy also posits the incompatibility of the two.22 In the portrayal of Kahlo’s accident and of her miscarriages, Taymor seems to embrace a “compensation” thesis, whereby the creative work is presented as a direct consequence of the impossibility of having children—thus highlighting the specifically female experience related to childbearing and miscarriage but also reproducing the misogynist notion that artistic production and biological reproduction are mutually exclusive. As in many accounts of Kahlo’s life, Frida presents the horrific traffic accident that left the young Frida confined to her bed for many months as a transformative event that led to her becoming an artist. (Kahlo suffered her whole life from the consequences of this near-fatal accident, which caused fractures to her spine, collarbone, ribs, pelvis, and legs and damaged several organs.)23 Taymor aestheticizes the impact between a crowded bus and a streetcar in a slow-movement sequence, at the end of which we see Kahlo lying on the floor of the bus with gold dust slowly falling on her.24 In the film’s depiction, she starts drawing on her casts as a way to pass the time during her slow recovery. The choice of self-portraits as Kahlo’s favorite subjects also seems dictated by external circumstances, as she draws what she can see from her bed: first her foot, then, with the help of a mirror, her face. In Taymor’s cinematic

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depiction, Frida Kahlo starts painting with no formal training. This is the typical mode of representation of the male biopic tradition: art as the spontaneous, instinctive, visionary creation of a “natural” artistic genius, stressing the intuitive rather than the intellectual aspect of painting. However, the choice of portraying the accident as a catalyst for Kahlo’s creativity also has a deep symbolic significance; it positions Frida in a specific tradition of biographical narratives about female artists and reproduces some misogynistic tropes of the genius discourse. This regards, in particular, the concept of the mutual exclusion of artistic creativity and childbearing. Like in other biographical accounts, Taymor presents the traffic accident not only as the source of Kahlo’s art but also as the reason for her inability to have children. Medically, this is frequently attributed to the injuries she sustained to her pelvis and internal organs.25 Symbolically, artistic production and biological reproduction are incompatible in the genius discourse. This implies that through the accident, creativity is gained at the same time as the ability to have children is lost. In Feldhaus’ words: “The abandonment of the childbearing body is the prerequisite for artistic creativity.”26 Taymor condenses Kahlo’s many miscarriages and abortions into a single event. In an emotional, fast-paced scene, we see the protagonist lying in bed covered in blood. The film cuts to her being rushed through hospital corridors on a stretcher and then to a doctor talking to Rivera. Kahlo resists the doctor’s order to go back to bed and starts screaming that she wants to see her son. After this confrontation, we cut to a jar with a human fetus floating in yellow liquid. As the camera slowly glides past the jar, we see Kahlo sitting in the hospital bed, painting. The painting, as we later see, is Henry Ford Hospital (1932), a symbolic rendition of one of the artist’s miscarriages. Through the abrupt cuts, Kahlo’s work is portrayed as an immediate psychological reaction to the trauma of losing a baby. And while the historical Kahlo did elaborate on her experience of miscarriages in her paintings,27 it is difficult to ignore the causality that the film suggests: that she made art “because” she could not have children. This implication feeds into a tradition that denies women the possibility of being creative by claiming an aut-aut alternative between (biological) reproduction and (artistic) production. By implying that the protagonist produces art “instead” of children, Frida plays into the traditionally gendered opposition of artmaking and childbearing. By this logic, analyzed by Christine Battersby in her seminal 1986 study Gender and Genius,28 men are assumed to produce art as compensation for their inability to bear children, while women are excluded from the realm of artistic production unless they are in some way “like men”—for example, childless. Battersby analyzes how, in the course of a general re-evaluation of “nature” and the “organic” in the nineteenth century, artistic production came to be described in analogy

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to conception, pregnancy, labor, and delivery.29 It became commonplace to think of artistic production as “male motherhood,” while production of art and biological reproduction were thought of as analogous but also rigidly assigned respectively to men or women.30 This distinction, fundamental to the conceptualization of creative genius, still influences widespread ideas about artistic creativity. The explicit connection of art to corporeality that informs Taymor’s representation of Frida Kahlo can be seen as an ideology that imprisons women in their bodies. It can also be given a more positive feminist spin by drawing on concepts such as that of écriture feminine, focusing on the specificity of women’s embodied experience as grounds on which to build an alternative to a male-centered or masculine tradition of art and literature. But such a conception of art, indirectly embraced by the film, is susceptible to accusations of essentialism and can inadvertently feed into age-old misogynist discourses about gender and genius.

INSIDE THE ARTIST’S MIND How can a film about an artist give insight into the inner workings of the creative mind? And what do specific artistic choices reveal about the filmmakers’ underlying conception of creativity? Taymor goes further than other directors in attempting to convey the protagonist’s creative process—not just her work or theoretical artistic positions, but a particular way of seeing the world. To this end, the director employs animation (such as in the surreal Day of the Dead dream sequence, created with stop motion animation by the Brothers Quay), tableaux vivants referencing Kahlo’s paintings and mindscreens—subjective shots meant to show what a character is thinking about, dreaming, or imagining. Such devices both incorporate Kahlo’s paintings into the film’s fabric and foreground the film’s self-conscious artificiality— a signature of Taymor’s style as a film director (perhaps influenced by her background in theater, Taymor favors nonrealistic representation in her films and tends to highlight the medium’s presence). The surreal character of many scenes can also be explained by the film’s subjective perspective: the opening sequence frames the rest of the film as a flashback: the older Kahlo’s memories, tinged by her individual (surrealistic) perspective on reality. This framing is highlighted by Taymor’s use of mirrors in the opening scene (mirrors take on a special significance in many scenes, as discussed below). The first time we see Kahlo, she is being transported in an elaborate baldachin bed decorated with photographs and embroidered pillows. Affixed on the underside of the baldachin is a mirror in which she can see herself. When the camera shifts to assume Kahlo’s perspective

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in a point-of-view shot, we see the mirror with her reflection—she is looking straight at the mirror and, hence, back into the camera. Suddenly, she appears to turn around and jump out of bed—it takes a moment to realize that the image has dissolved to a younger Frida running through a portico. The rest of the film consists of a single long flashback until the narrative returns to the moment of the opening sequence (only at this point do the viewers understand that she was being carried to her first solo exhibition in Mexico: under doctor’s orders not to leave her bed, she decided she would go in her bed). Taymor’s attempt to visualize the inner workings of the artist’s mind is most striking in the scenes that depict the genesis of specific works by Kahlo. We rarely see the film’s main character in the process of painting. Instead, Taymor tries to imagine the events that might have inspired a painting and to reproduce the inner mechanisms of the artist’s mind on screen. The film thus portrays Kahlo’s work as autobiographical, inspired by events in her life, but, more interestingly, it also ends up building its narrative of Kahlo’s life around certain famous paintings; life and art become indistinguishable. In one scene, for example, Kahlo is taking a bath, and we see her feet in the tub from a point-of-view shot that has the look of a black-and-white drawing. Suddenly, the Empire State Building emerges from the water, and a paper figurine King Kong falls from its top and splashes into the water. The painting referenced in this scene, What the Water Gave Me (1938), will be visible in full as a finished painting in Kahlo’s atelier, only much later in the film. In the completed work, the Empire State Building (now coming out of a volcano) is joined by many other things that populate the surrealistic bathtub. In another scene, Kahlo and Rivera have a heated discussion about returning to Mexico. She hates the United States and desperately wants to go back home, while he wants to stay. After he leaves, slamming the door, Kahlo looks out the window. The camera moves slowly until it takes her perspective. Outside, we see a traditional Tehuana dress hanging on a laundry line against a painted city backdrop. This painted New York appears bleak and colorless, and it is snowing. The image of the red and green Tehuana dress hanging against the urban backdrop quotes Kahlo’s painting My Dress Hangs There (1933). In both these instances, the visual references to paintings by Kahlo stand in for the main character’s individual perspective, as highlighted by the camera’s position. These are typical examples of the use of mind screen, in which what we see as viewers corresponds to what Kahlo sees in her imagination. Taymor tries to give insight into the artist’s mind: she externalizes the character’s imagination by recreating the surreal (or surrealistic) images that can be found in Kahlo’s paintings and presenting them as her view of the world. The cinematic Kahlo’s vision seems to be distorted by a “naturally” surrealistic sensibility and an exceptionally original mind. As a consequence, her paintings appear as a “realistic” representation of her very personal

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world. According to Olsin Lent, the film uses “the stylistic of Surrealism to show Frida’s point of view of events, confirming that her subjective point of view was different from everyday realism and essentially aesthetic in its distortions.”31 What follows is the film’s portrayal of the artist as a “natural” Surrealist—a reading of Kahlo’s work that was already suggested during her lifetime with labels such as “naïve Surrealism.”32 While Taymor’s artistic choice is effective in finding a compelling way to convey the workings of a creative mind, it runs a risk in terms of the politics of representation of creativity, namely, that of simplifying and reducing the scope of Kahlo’s work: if she painted reality just as she saw it, this diminishes or even negates other qualities of her work, in particular, the intellectual approach and the complex symbolism of her paintings. Kahlo’s artistic activity is portrayed as intuitive and instinctual—a direct transcription of biographical facts rather than intentional artistic work. This type of depiction, common to many biopics, ignores the broader cultural, historical, and ideological context of an artist’s work. For Olsin Lent, this means that Taymor never goes “beyond the most literal use of Kahlo’s work, and never is Kahlo credited with the intellectual, innovative, creative, symbolic, or interpretative work that constitutes art practice.”33 The example of My Dress Hangs There illustrates how the film tends to ignore the explicitly political themes in Kahlo’s work in favor of the more personal ones—or, rather, to present even the political aspects in the paintings as an emotional response to a personal situation. In the film, as well as in the actual painting, the traditional Mexican dress contrasts with the American skyscrapers and symbolizes Kahlo’s Mexicanidad. But while the painting can be interpreted as a criticism of American capitalism, the Mexican dress in Frida is stripped of the context of the rest of the painting (the images of the toilet, the dollar sign, Federal Hall, etc.) and transformed into an image of nostalgia and homesickness. Similarly, Kahlo’s political activity and her involvement in the communist movement are downplayed and portrayed as derivative of Rivera’s. Generally, the relationship between Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera is not only the emotional core around which the film revolves but also serves to characterize the protagonist and her art through the contrast with her partner and colleague. Their approach to art is portrayed along dichotomies such as political vs. emotional and public vs. personal. While Rivera tries to paint an “objective” social reality, Kahlo paints her personal reality. He works on large-scale commissions in public spaces, and his themes are overtly political. Communal work (necessary for large murals), the preoccupation with commissions, and the political themes make Rivera the opposite of the romanticized lone genius that still prevails in artist biopics. Kahlo, by contrast, works on small canvases, mostly from home and depicts herself, her pain, and her relatives.

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In the contrast set up by the film, Kahlo is concerned with issues that are deeply personal but at the same time more universal than Rivera’s concerns, for they transcend party politics with their appeal to themes such as death, pain, and birth. This view is voiced in the film by the character of Trotzky (Geoffrey Rush), who insists on the paintings’ universal message against Kahlo’s assertion that they would not mean anything to anyone but herself: “your paintings express what everyone feels—that they are alone in pain.” This depiction valorizes Kahlo’s work in the context of an idea of creative subjectivity that favors the emotional and personal qualities of artistic production. But, despite the praise for Kahlo’s art as universal, this approach also confines the cinematic Frida to a traditionally feminine domestic realm. If traditional gender roles are partially subverted in the film’s depiction of the relationship between Kahlo and Rivera (for instance, by portraying her as active and dominant),34 they are reaffirmed on a symbolical level, where Kahlo is connected to the house and family, while Rivera represents the public and political sphere. Kahlo’s intense emotivity and what is portrayed as a naïve, intuitive approach to painting align with the traditional association of femininity with nature, instinct, and feeling. (That avant-garde movements such as Surrealism, which Kahlo associated with, seek alternative philosophical frames that explicitly valued “the feminine,” is not explored in the film.) THE TWO FRIDAS: MIRRORS, SELF-PORTRAITS, AND FRAGMENTED SUBJECTS The previous section examined how Taymor tries to visualize the artist’s mind in the scenes that show the genesis of single paintings and briefly discussed some of the artistic and political implications of the director’s choices. Self-portraits occupy a special place in Kahlo’s oeuvre as well as in Taymor’s production. In the film’s scenes featuring Kahlo’s self-portraits, the attempt to convey the workings of the artist’s mind is combined with strong emotional content and a reflection on the multiple and fragmented biographical subject. To this end, Taymor frequently employs mirrors and “splits” the image of Frida Kahlo/Salma Hayek over both canvases and reflective surfaces. The motif of the mirror, recurrent throughout the film, works on several levels. On a metafictional level, the mirror can be interpreted as a hint to Taymor’s self-referential reflection on the creative process. The mirror in the opening sequence, by contrast, frames the film as the older Kahlo’s reflection on her life. On the diegetic level of the painting scenes, Kahlo uses mirrors as a practical tool to paint her self-portraits. In this respect, the fragmentation and multiplication of her image simply convey the standard situation of the self-portrait, in which the artist is both the passive object and the active

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observer. But the mirrors in these painting scenes also symbolically indicate the character’s split subjectivity and torn body. This fragmentation of the biographical subject is grounded not only in a postmodern skepticism toward unified, linear biographical narratives but also in the complex persona created by Kahlo herself through her self-fashioning in various media. In the words of Sabina Vellucci: “Kahlo staged a life narration in which the ‘I’ is neither unified nor stable, but rather fragmented, provisional, multiple, and in process.”35 Taymor tries to capture precisely this multiplication and fragmentation of the subject by creating a complex visual interaction between Kahlo/Hayek, her mirror image, and her self-portraits. An example occurs during the scenes showing Kahlo’s heartbreak after Rivera betrays her with her sister. In an emotionally central scene of the film, set to the song “Paloma Negra” (performed by Chavela Vargas), Taymor shows Kahlo moving into an empty apartment. In a room bare except for a chair and a mirror resting on an easel, she sits down and starts cutting her long hair. She is wearing a dark men’s suit—perhaps Rivera’s suit—having apparently abandoned her colorful Mexican robes. Taymor cuts repeatedly between images of Kahlo cutting her hair and of her drinking and partying in desperation. As she cuts the last strand of long hair, the image zooms out to show a door to the left of the mirror. In the other room, we see a painted version of Hayek posing as Kahlo’s Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (1940), a work that Kahlo painted after divorcing Rivera. At this moment, the film viewer can see three Fridas looking at each other: the “live” painter looking at her mirrored image and her painted self beyond the door; the painted Frida looking back at her and the viewer; and Frida’s mirror image. When Hayek turns around and leaves, her painted image comes to life, sighs, and sinks into the chair with her head down in a gesture of defeat. Another instance in which a self-portrait features prominently is similarly set to a song performed by Vargas, La Llorona—a reference to the folkloristic figure who weeps for her lost children and also appears in Kahlo’s work. (For this scene, Vargas, almost 82 years old, herself appears on screen and is credited as La Pelona, the folkloristic figure of Death.) The song accompanies a parallel editing sequence showing, on the one hand, the moment of Trotsky’s assassination and, on the other, Kahlo, emotionally distraught at Rivera’s request for a divorce, walking home from a bar and merging with the painting The Two Fridas (1939). When she gets home and opens the door, we see another Frida Kahlo sitting in front of a painted background. She is not painted but a live figure played by Hayek. Again, there is a split or multiple subjects on screen. The figure in the painted room is wearing a long European-style white dress with ruffled sleeves and a high lace collar. When the “live” Kahlo, in a bright blue and yellow Mexican dress, enters the room, the figure in white crashes the glass of a small medallion containing a portrait

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of Rivera. The blood from her injured fingers drips on the white dress and forms a red flower pattern. The “Mexican” Frida then sits down next to the “European” Frida. This image fades to a reproduction of the painting The Two Fridas (now “just” a two-dimensional canvas). A third, “live” Frida Kahlo is now sitting in front of the canvas, as if she had just finished painting, still wearing the blue-and-yellow dress. The Two Fridas has been interpreted as a representation of Kahlo’s dual Mexican and European heritage—and of her favoring her Mexican identity: the Mexican Frida, holding Rivera’s portrait, has an exposed but intact heart, while the European Frida has a sick, colorless heart, and blood is flowing from a cut vein onto her white dress. Nonetheless, the two figures are connected by a vein and are holding hands—the two Fridas are inseparable. A third scene in which Kahlo’s image is split and multiplied over mirrors and canvases depicts the creation of her self-portrait The Broken Column (1944). In the film, this scene immediately follows the amputation of her leg and, unlike the scenes featuring Self-Potrait With Cropped Hair and The Two Fridas, it focuses more directly on the character’s physical rather than emotional pain: not the pain deriving from Kahlo’s split identity or her splitting from Rivera, but from her literally broken and fragmented body following her accident and the subsequent operations and amputations. In all these instances, Taymor’s depiction of the fragmentation and multiplication of the protagonist goes hand in hand with physical or emotional pain: the split subject suffers. But here, too, as these scenes indirectly depict Kahlo’s creation of her self-portraits, pain is given higher significance as the source of Kahlo’s art. The motif of the suffering genius receives a novel twist when applied to a female artist. On the one hand, as seen above, it can be problematic from a feminist point of view, as the focus on the pained, barren female body evokes the incompatibility of artistic production and childbearing. On the other hand, this depiction takes the topos of the artist as a martyr and gives it a new spin by connecting artistic creativity to a disabled woman’s embodied experience. The narrative of the suffering artist, which borrows from the life stories of martyrs and saints, also lends a degree of transcendence to the artists and their work. Polaschek writes that “psychological suffering as a sign of sainthood, and later as a reflection of transcendent creativity, have been features of certain kinds of biographical narratives for centuries. .  .  . Significantly, Frida attributes the same degree of psychological anguish to a woman.”36 This is especially true in the final scene of the artist’s death, a triumphal and almost allegorical animated sequence. The sequence features a threedimensional rendition of Kahlo’s painting The Dream or The Bed (1940), a self-portrait of the artist lying in her baldachin bed, covered by ivy. On top of the baldachin is a skeleton holding flowers and dynamite. In the film, the

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dynamite charges explode like fireworks, creating a festive atmosphere. As the bed goes up in flames, a close-up of Kahlo’s face, now clearly bearing Hayek’s features, shows her smiling. In this last image of Julie Taymor’s film, the boundaries between life and art break down definitively, and Kahlo is one with her work: there are no multiple or split subjects, nor a transition between painting and live actors, only one Frida, simultaneously painted and embodied by Hayek. The transfiguration of life (and death) into art is complete.

NOTES 1. Julie Taymor, Frida, with the assistance of Salma Hayek et al. (2002). 2. Hayden Herrera, Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo, originally published in 1983, is the most prominent of a series of English-language biographies from the 1980s that contributed to a wave of “Fridamania.” 3. This $12-million film earned $25 million at the US box office and another $16 million internationally. See Isabel Molina-Guzmán, “Mediating Frida: Negotiating Discourses of Latina/o Authenticity in Global Media Representations of Ethnic Identity,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 23, no. 3 (2006): 233. 4. See Sabrina Vellucci, “Narrative Empathy at the Interface of Auto/Biography and Film: Frida by Hayden Herrera (1983) and Julie Taymor (2002),” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 42, no. 2 (2016): 106. Kahlo enjoyed a period of international popularity in the 1930s, but her work was largely ignored outside of Mexico after her death and was only (re)discovered internationally through the feminist scholarship of the 1970s. Now she is not only a canonized twentieth-century painter, but has become a true pop icon whose face appears on mugs, tote bags, and t-shirts. 5. Biopics about female artists and scientists made since 2002 include The Hours (2002, on Virginia Woolf), Sylvia (2003, Plath), Becoming Jane (2007, Austen), Séraphine (2008, Louis), Agora (2009, Hypatia of Alexandria), Big Eyes (2014, Margaret Keane), Marie Curie (2016), Hidden Figures (2016), A Quiet Passion (2016, Emily Dickinson), Maudie (2016, Maud Lewis), Mary Shelley (2017), Colette (2018), Radioactive (2019, Marie Curie), and many more. 6. Dennis Bingham, Whose Lives Are They Anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 23. 7. Ibid., 10. 8. Ibid., 10 and 221. 9. See also Tina Olsin Lent, “Life as Art/Art as Life: Dramatizing the Life and Work of Frida Kahlo,” Journal of Popular Film & Television 35, no. 2 (2007): 71. 10. The analysis of biographical films’ fictional status goes beyond the scope of this chapter. For more on this topic, see Anna Baccanti, Screening the Creative Process. Genius, Gender, and the Contemporary Biopic (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2023). 11. See Olsin Lent, “Life as Art/Art as Life,” 70–75.

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12. “Fact and fiction are inextricably interwoven in any biographical treatment of Kahlo because of the illusion of self-revelation in her painting, written autobiographical sketches, diary entries and interviews. The semblance of confession obscures her lifelong practice of repeatedly reinscribing and reinventing herself. She was her own favorite subject.” Ibid., 70. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., 72. 15. Ibid., 73. 16. See Doris Berger, “Unterschiede Auf Der Leinwand: Wie Sich Gender in Spielfilmen Über Künstlerinnen Manifestiert,” FKW Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und visuelle Kultur 49 (2010): 36. 17. Olsin Lent, “Life as Art/Art as Life,” 69. 18. See Reinhild Feldhaus, “Geburt Und Tod in Künstlerinnen-Viten Der Moderne: Zur Rezeption Von Paula Modersohn-Becker, Frida Kahlo Und Eva Hesse,” in Mythen Von Autorschaft Und Weiblichkeit Im 20. Jahrhundert eds. Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius and Silke Wenk (Marburg: Jonas-Verl., 1997), 85. 19. Olsin Lent, “Life as Art/Art as Life,” 72. 20. Shaw criticizes what she sees as a “shift from physical pain to romantic pain and from the disabled body to the sexualized body.” Shaw, “Transforming the National Body,” in Quarterly Review of Film and Video 27, no. 4 (2010): 302. 21. Hayek declared in an interview: “It’s a cliché of Frida that she suffered, and I’m against that. She was not a victim because from pain she created art. . . . People want to see this woman suffering, a woman who does nothing but cry. That’s how they envision her and they’re wrong.” Quoted in Shaw, “Transforming the National Body,” 302. 22. See Susan Friedman, “Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor: Gender Difference in Literary Discourse,” Feminist Studies 13, no. 1 (1987): 49–82. 23. For a detailed account of the accident based on Kahlo’s and other witnesses’ testimonies, see Herrera, Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo (New York: Perennial, 2002), 47–51. 24. Some critics and scholars have taken issue with the sexualization of Hayek’s body in the context of the accident scene. See Shaw, “Transforming the National Body,” 302. 25. See Ankori, Frida Kahlo (London: Reaktion Books, 2013), 87–88. 26. Feldhaus, “Geburt Und Tod in Künstlerinnen-Viten Der Moderne,” 77. My translation. The sexual undertone of the scene suggests another way the event can be interpreted as a catalyst for Frida’s creative energy. The comparison of the metal rod that shattered Kahlo’s pelvis with a phallus and the association of the accident with rape is strikingly common in biographical accounts of the accident, including Frida. (In the film, Frida jokes that she told the doctors that the handrail took her virginity.). Biopics about female artists frequently feature a sexual encounter, usually with an older, accomplished male artist, as an artistically transformative moment. In Frida, this function is shifted to the traffic accident, presented as sexual violence. This allows the film to avoid the implication that Kahlo might be artistically dependent from Rivera (Taymor strives to present Kahlo as independent and autonomous)

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but displays the function of “catalyst” from the mentor/lover figure to the accident through the sexualization of this traumatic event. 27. For a discussion of the themes of pregnancy, miscarriage, and mother figures in Kahlo’s work, see Alyce Mahon, “The Lost Secret: Frida Kahlo and the Surrealist Imaginary,” Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 5, nos. 1–2 (2011): 47–49. 28. Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (London: Women’s Press, 1989). Battersby traces how particularly Romanticism (which remains the most influential framework for thinking about artistic creativity) appropriated and celebrated qualities historically considered “feminine” such as irrationality, emotionality, and instinct in male artists and, at the same time, deemed women incapable of works of genius. See Battersby, Gender and Genius, 23 and 103. 29. Ibid., 73. 30. See also Linda Dietrick, “Conceiving Female Genius Around 1800: Reading Through Women’s Eyes,” in Weibliche Kreativität Um 1800 = Women’s Creativity Around 1800, eds. Linda Dietrick and Birte Giesler, 1. Auflage (Hannover: Wehrhahn Verlag, 2015), 72. 31. Olsin Lent, “Life as Art/Art as Life,” 73. 32. Mahon, “The Lost Secret,” 33. 33. Olsin Lent, “Life as Art/Art as Life,” 74. 34. The figure of the older man who serves both as an artistic mentor and as the main love interest is extremely common in biopics about female artists. In Taymor’s film, the female protagonist is given a great degree of agency in initiating the relationship and determining its course. Although some critics have criticized the conservative and heteronormative depiction of Kahlo and Rivera’s relationship (see Isabel Molina Guzmán, “Mediating Frida,” 239; and Shaw, “Transforming the National Body,” 305), Taymor departs from the tendency, particularly common in female biopics, to “punish” women (on a narrative or symbolic level) for their sexuality. Frida’s sexuality is joyous, active, liberated, and the film never connects it to her downfall, either professional or personal. See also Bartra and Mraz, “Las Dos Fridas: History and Transcultural Identities,” Rethinking History 9, no. 4 (2005): 452. 35. Sabrina Vellucci, “Narrative Empathy at the Interface of Auto/Biography and Film: Frida by Hayden Herrera (1983) and Julie Taymor (2002),” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 42, no. 2 (2016): 107–8. 36. Bronwyn Polaschek, The Postfeminist Biopic: Narrating the Lives of Plath, Kahlo, Woolf and Austen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 86.

REFERENCES Ankori, Gannit. Frida Kahlo. Critical Lives. London: Reaktion Books, 2013. Baccanti, Anna. Screening the Creative Process. Genius, Gender, and the Contemporary Biopic. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2023. Bartra, Eli and John Mraz. “Las Dos Fridas: History and Transcultural Identities.” Rethinking History 9, no. 4 (2005): 449–57.

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Battersby, Christine. Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics. London: Women’s Press, 1989. Berger, Doris. “Unterschiede Auf Der Leinwand: Wie Sich Gender in Spielfilmen Über Künstlerinnen Manifestiert.” FKW Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und visuelle Kultur 49 (2010): 36–46. Bingham, Dennis. Whose Lives Are They Anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010. Dietrick, Linda. “Conceiving Female Genius Around 1800: Reading Through Women’s Eyes.” In Weibliche Kreativität Um 1800 = Women’s Creativity Around 1800, edited by Linda Dietrick and Birte Giesler. 1. Auflage, 53–78. Hannover: Wehrhahn Verlag, 2015. Feldhaus, Reinhild. “Geburt Und Tod in Künstlerinnen-Viten Der Moderne: Zur Rezeption Von Paula Modersohn-Becker, Frida Kahlo Und Eva Hesse.” In Mythen Von Autorschaft Und Weiblichkeit Im 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius and Silke Wenk, 73–89. Marburg: Jonas-Verl., 1997. Friedman, Susan. “Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor: Gender Difference in Literary Discourse.” Feminist Studies 13, no. 1 (1987): 49–82. Herrera, Hayden. Frida. A Biography of Frida Kahlo. New York: Perennial, 2002. Lent, Tina Olsin. “Life as Art / Art as Life: Dramatizing the Life and Work of Frida Kahlo.” Journal of Popular Film & Television 35, no. 2 (2007): 68–76. Mahon, Alyce. “The Lost Secret: Frida Kahlo and the Surrealist Imaginary.” Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 5, nos. 1–2 (2011): 33–54. Molina Guzmán, Isabel. “Mediating Frida: Negotiating Discourses of Latina/o Authenticity in Global Media Representations of Ethnic Identity.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 23, no. 3 (2006): 232–51. Polaschek, Bronwyn. The Postfeminist Biopic: Narrating the Lives of Plath, Kahlo, Woolf and Austen. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Shaw, Deborah. “Transforming the National Body: Salma Hayek and Frida.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 27, no. 4 (2010): 299–313. ———. “Re-Making Frida Kahlo Through Music in Frida.” In Screening Songs in Hispanic and Lusophone Cinema, edited by Lisa Shaw, Rob Stone and Ian D. Biddle, 220–34. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012. Vellucci, Sabrina. “Narrative Empathy at the Interface of Auto/Biography and Film: Frida by Hayden Herrera (1983) and Julie Taymor (2002).” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 42, no. 2 (2016): 105–23.

Chapter 2

“We Can Work It Out” Reassessing Musicality, Fidelity and Excess in Across the Universe Leanne Weston

Since its release in 2007, Julie Taymor’s Anglo-American musical Across the Universe has maintained a curious place in the popular consciousness. Its presence remains characterized by a divisive critical discourse that continues to impact how the film is read. Described variously as either “a bold, beautiful, visually enchanting musical” or “a theme-park travesty,”1 the range of responses the film elicited upon release offers a natural entry point to reassess the critical position of Across the Universe and its artistic potential from the vantage of 2023. While the polarizing nature of the film’s reception may at first appear easily divisible into positive and negative, upon further reading, more complex patterns are revealed. Reviewer language can be roughly divided into three subcategories. The first category correlates to authorial intent and artistic merit, where the film is described in terms such as “vivid,” “bold,” or “imaginative.” These descriptors are frequently tied to Taymor’s status as a “visionary” filmmaker, even occurring within negative reviews. One such example is Kyle Smith’s New York Post review, which describes the film as approaching the “mad genius of a searing rock musical.”2 The second category is concerned with narrative and representational issues, with descriptions of the film’s plot and its representation of the 1960s as “saccharine,” “clichéd,” or “kitschy,” making connections between the film’s nostalgic potential and the “baby boomer” generation. This is typified by Stephen Holden’s New York Times review, which calls the film “unadulterated white, middle-class baby boomer nostalgia.”3 The third and final category falls somewhere between the previous two, with reviewers noting the film’s achievements while also taking account of perceived failings. Justin Chang’s Variety review is exemplary of this tendency, where Chang defines the film as “an audacious, 31

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idiosyncratic creation” while also noting that “it’s hard to dislike but hard to take seriously.”4 Implicit in Chang’s review is that Across the Universe has a crisis of identity, leading to interpretations where it is misread and, consequently, misunderstood. Writing in 2008, Alan Jacobson reflected similarly, calling it “one of the most expansive and unabashedly spectacular yet overlooked and divisive films of the year.”5 Jacobson’s observations are an important early summation of the film’s merits while attending to its growing status as critically maligned. This duality feeds into wider discourses of cult film and the film maudit, with the production and reception of Across the Universe creating the conditions for its consideration as cult and as a film maudit, one whose merits are more fully recognized and appreciated through the passage of time. Evident in articles written for the re-release, the film is typically framed as cult.6 For instance, Anne Thompson’s piece reflects upon the value of DVD in building the film’s cult status and, implicitly, finding a wider audience.7 Alongside the construction of the film as cult is a parallel discourse that allows for it to be read as a film maudit. Defined as cursed or ill-fated, the reception of Across the Universe warrants such a categorization, particularly in light of its subsequent reappreciation and reappraisal, following in the tradition of earlier maudits, including Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). J. Hoberman’s writing on the history of the maudit, built around the reception of Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales (2006), offers a more nuanced definition, describing them as films with an “unhappy destiny.”8 This distinction feels more apt to Across the Universe’s own production history, resonating with Taymor’s own observation that “the deck was stacked against Across the Universe long before the critics ever got to see it.”9 This opening analysis of Across the Universe’s reception illuminates a series of creative tensions that, this chapter argues, are textually embedded within the film despite being extra-textually generated. Evident throughout the film’s production, distribution and eventual release, they are never resolved. The chapter presents a reading of Across the Universe that accounts for these tensions while acknowledging its artistic achievements and the ways in which it challenges the codes and conventions of the musical genre. Using a combination of close reading of specific sequences alongside the analysis of the film’s relationship to genre and authorship, the chapter contributes to an ongoing cultural and scholarly work dedicated to reappreciating and reassessing Taymor’s film, coinciding with its re-release in 2018. The analysis that follows examines how Across the Universe negotiates the complex relationship between theatricality, musicality, fidelity, and excess. Using music as its focal point, the analysis presented in this chapter also attends to the impact of the aesthetic and narrative decisions surrounding song placement and use. Examining the songs’ dual status as musical

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set pieces and Beatles covers, it argues that these decisions are one potential origin point of the film’s creative tensions, founded upon the gap between the subjective interpretation of the songs’ inscribed (or originally intended) meaning, and the perception of its reappearance within the film’s diegesis.

AUTHORING THE UNIVERSE: TAYMOR VERSUS THE WEIGHT OF BEATLES CANON To begin contextualizing the contribution Across the Universe makes to contemporary film musicals, we must first consider how the production is authored and the impact of this on reading film. This process begins with answering several interrelated questions: Who does Across the Universe belong to? Is it a Beatles film, following on from A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965) to expand our understanding of the period and the cultural meaning of the band? Is it a Taymor film, building upon her reputation for innovative adaptations? Or, does the authorship of the film sit in the space somewhere between the two? Finding the answers to these questions necessitates that we also assess how authorship is complicated by the cultural weight of The Beatles and the media texts which form part of their cultural afterlife. The concept for the film was derived from an original story created in collaboration between Taymor and writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, which formed the basis of the script. The transatlantic narrative focuses on Liverpool dockworker Jude (Jim Sturgess), who travels to America in search of his father with hopes for a better life. Once there, he befriends Princeton dropout Max (Joe Anderson) and Max’s sister, Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood). The trio moves to New York into a shared apartment owned by singer Sadie (Dana Fuchs). As Jude and Lucy fall in love, their lives intersect with Prudence (T.V. Carpio), a closeted lesbian runaway from Ohio, and musician Jo-Jo (Martin Luther McCoy), fleeing the Detroit race riots and grieving the death of his younger brother. The utopia of their bohemian artistic community comes under threat after Lucy’s high school boyfriend is killed in Vietnam, and Max is drafted. Both become a catalyst for Lucy’s engagement in the anti-war movement and political activism, causing a rift between her and Jude as they both react to the turbulence of the period in different ways. So far, so simple. The film’s innovation arrives in how its boy-meets-girl narrative translates to the screen. In making the film, Taymor was guided by a single remit: “to create an original musical using only the songs of the Beatles.”10 Following the construction of popular integrated musicals such as The Sound of Music (1965), songs were not just “inserted at key points” during emotional or revelatory peaks for the characters and instead “created the story.”11 The use of music as

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a narrative driver connects to Taymor’s overall desire to engage in creative risk and create something new.12 The filmmaker’s vision is one where liveaction location shooting, animation, and CGI effects share the same diegetic space as choreographed dance sequences, puppetry, and mask work. As such, the film can be read as the culmination of all that came before it, representing an artistic and creative peak. Prior to its release, these qualities, taken in combination with her reputation for innovation—evident in her earlier films Titus (1999) and Frida (2002) and the Broadway success of The Lion King (2001)—were extolled as virtues. As Justin Chang notes, Taymor’s “visual imagination and flair for spectacle” made her natural fit for directing a film musical.”13 Joe Roth, then head of Revolution Studios, reiterated this in his own praise, describing her as a “creative genius” and “a unique talent” with whom he actively sought to collaborate.14 However, the director’s creative partnership with Roth would change over the course of the film’s production. In a direct challenge to Taymor’s authorial control, Roth chose to re-edit and screen his own cut. Financially and ideologically motivated, the cuts removed political messages, references to Lucy’s bodily autonomy, and the racial diversity of supporting characters. In Taymor’s words, it became “about a boring privileged white girl from the suburbs.”15 The highly publicized animosity between Taymor and Roth was not the only threat to Taymor’s authorial status. The weight of The Beatles musical canon represents an equally difficult challenge to overcome. For Stephanie Fremaux, the established presence of the band in popular culture necessitates a specific approach to visually representing their canon, which “would need to offer a coherent narrative based on one possible interpretation while still allowing space for the audience to project their own, often personal meanings.”16 The space for multiplicities of meaning and the complications of personal associations are reiterated in Taymor’s observations on our familiarity with Beatles songs: “What ‘Strawberry Fields’ is for John Lennon is for John Lennon. What ‘Strawberry Fields’ is for many other people listening to it is dependent on their own imagination.”17 She qualifies this further, recognizing that the songs themselves carry an intrinsic personal meaning that is separate from the narrative Across the Universe presents.18 While there may not be coherence in terms of meaning and interpretation, the presence of music does provide the coherence that Fremaux calls for, clear in Taymor’s efforts to shape the song catalogue “into a structure that reflected the growth of the Beatles.”19 In doing so, Across the Universe becomes a space that facilitates seeing and, most significantly, hearing the band’s songs in a new context. Through its re-use of the band’s music, Taymor’s film contributes to a particular strand of media texts which engage with The Beatles as a cultural product, ranging from the notorious fantasy musical Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978) to Jessie Nelson’s

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award-winning drama, I Am Sam (2001). In these remediated forms, the music functions similarly to adapted literary texts, with the source material translated into new filmic space. Emphasizing the value of these new interpretations, George Plasketes calls this process a recontextualization, one operating within the same medium, “with the artists translating the material into a particular style.”20 Like Across the Universe, the soundtrack to I Am Sam is entirely made up of Beatles cover versions, and the band are referenced in multiple ways throughout the narrative. While both films expand upon the continued cultural presence of The Beatles, they are also defined by the absence of the band as a physical and, most significantly, as an aural presence. Here, a kind of double authoring occurs. The songs within Across the Universe are still known and understood as Beatles songs due to the band’s ubiquity, coupled with preexisting familiarity with their catalogue through the consistent use of their music in contemporary media texts—most recently in Glee (2009–2015), where the band’s music featured in a two-part tribute episode that aired in 2013. The cultural context and meaning of the songs are, therefore, inextricably bound to both the film and the new performances of those songs. The songs still belong to The Beatles and to the cast who perform them Across the Universe, who reauthor them in the process of covering the songs. This double authorship extends into the film’s spectatorial experience. The film’s narrative and its use of music generate a multilayered nostalgic address that appeals to a cross-generational audience, each engaging with the text on different nostalgic levels, where, as Katharina Niemeyer argues, the text itself can both trigger and produce nostalgia for the audience.21 Younger cinemagoers engage with the film via what Ryan Lizardi calls “mediated nostalgia.”22 Lizardi frames this within the broader contexts of hypermediation and technological advancement, which make the past (and its media) more readily available. The nostalgia of the youthful audience and their understanding of the past is built upon media depictions of the period and the circulation of noncontemporary media. Consequently, they encounter The Beatles music at second- or third-hand, through streaming or inherited music collections. Older audiences maintain a direct, first-hand, and long-term relationship built on lived experience. However, this authentic experience is augmented or enriched by reengaging with the past through media texts like Across the Universe. The duality of the film’s address and its nostalgia potential opens up further creative tension regarding the film’s authorship that also cannot be resolved, built on the difference or the gap between audience expectations for the film and the actual film text, which results in a resistance or a reluctance to acknowledge the value reauthored versions of The Beatles catalogue presented in the film—a reluctance that is, in part, reflected in the negative

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responses the film has provoked. Given the value of The Beatles to popular culture, it is significant that they are also absent in the film’s surrounding promotional paratexts due to restrictions on song usage rights, which did not extend to the use of the original recordings or the inclusion of the band in promotional materials.23 However, a spot promoting the release of the film on DVD and Blu-ray is an exception to this. Clips from the film feature alongside review quotes, delivered in voiceover narration and on-screen caption.24 These include Peter Travers’s Rolling Stone review, which states, “Across the Universe sweeps you up on a wave of terrific Beatles songs.”25 Its inclusion is a rare acknowledgment of the band’s music and their authorial role in the narrative, negotiating the restrictions imposed by the then rights holders, Sony/ ATV. The absence of The Beatles in Across the Universe, therefore, becomes a presence in and of itself. Thus, it can be argued that the film maintains a dual sense of authorship, both as a production that mobilizes the popularity and cultural mythos of The Beatles and as a Taymor film. However, the dominance of auteurism and author theory, and its subsequent translation into film marketing—characterized by the use of author-as-brand—results in Taymor’s installation as the film’s central author, reasserting her status as a visionary, innovative director. This transposes the cultural weight of The Beatles and their music canon, resulting in her becoming the focal point of both the film’s success and its failure. Defining the Universe: Across the Universe and the Musical Having established the film’s complex relationship with authorship and spectatorial address, the next logical step is to consider the question of genre. How do we understand Across the Universe in relation to genre theory and the codes and conventions of the musical? Through such an analysis, we can also reveal the degree to which the film is restricted by those conventions and the limits they impose upon Taymor’s vision. This section is not concerned with attempting to define whether Across the Universe is a musical, as this is self-evident. Its classification as a musical is one of the few elements of the production that is not a source of debate, made clear in Phoebe Macrossan’s assessment of it as existing in a “near constant state of song.”26 Rather, this section considers the film’s construction—its form and its content—in relation to questions of genre and how the songs function within the context (or the filmic space) of the musical. Even without Macrossan’s observation, on the basis of Rick Altman’s most basic definition alone, “[n]o couple, no musical,” the lynchpin of Jude and Lucy’s romance and its expression in the song would qualify and classify the film as a musical at a narrative level.27 Understanding Across the Universe in relation to the traditional conventions of a musical—beyond the act of song—is where its classification becomes

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more complex. The film benefits from considering it in relation to Altman’s semantic/syntactic approach to the genre, encompassing both common formal traits (semantic) and the relationships between them (syntactic) to allow for the interplay between both types.28 Equally useful are Jane Feuer’s later observations regarding the musical’s self-reflexive capacities, illustrated in Across the Universe by the presence of Sadie and Jo-Jo’s musical collaboration and stage performances, culminating in the final rooftop performance of “All You Need Is Love” that unites the group. Ideologically, Across the Universe is closer to Altman’s definition of the “folk musical” and its utopian ideals.29 Narratively, it is closer to Feuer’s conception of the “art musical,” but neither formulation quite accounts for the musical experience of the film or fully encompasses the musical world that Taymor presents.30 This complexity is summarized in Fremaux’s observation that the production “does not neatly sit within the existing definitions or analyses proposed by scholarship to date.”31 Thus, Across the Universe sits outside the normative or traditional definitions of how a musical should look and sound. Built on different frames of reference, it has more in common with musical theater and rock concerts than film musicals. Aesthetically and sonically, Taymor’s film shares many attributes with Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! (2001), which mobilized modern pop songs, ranging from Nat King Cole to Nirvana and translated them into the period setting of 1900s Paris. The critical and commercial success of Moulin Rouge! and its classification as a jukebox musical represents a critical juncture in the life cycle of the musical genre, illustrating the significance of innovation to reviving interest in the genre both on screen and in theater at a time when musicals were considered neither popular nor profitable. Barry Keith Grant offers useful context on their decline and subsequent changes to the form, drawing a correlation between the “ever-widening gap” between the music in studio-era musicals, the increase in rock music listeners, and changing audience tastes and desires.32 While the listening gap that Grant describes has certainly closed, the shaping of taste continues, reflected by the growing appetite for pop and rock—stimulated through film soundtrack sales—which is a determining factor in the success of jukebox musical films. Making comparisons with the musical revue, Bud Coleman describes the jukebox musical as “an assemblage of pre-existing songs where the emphasis is clearly on the songs, not on plot and/or character.”33 Such a description is clearly a natural fit for Across the Universe and its musically-driven plot, but there is room for further qualification. As with Moulin Rouge! and all that would follow it—including the film adaptation of Mamma Mia! (2006)—the success or failure of such works rests upon audience familiarity with the catalog of songs being presented, where the songs are not simply preexisting but well known. In the case of Mamma Mia!, its use of the ABBA songbook

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resulted in the musical’s phenomenal success on stage and on screen, but, as George Rodosthenous notes, such success is not guaranteed, and Mamma Mia! Remains the exception rather than the rule.34 Rodosthenous’s comments are proven in mixed reaction to Across the Universe, despite its seemingly ideal combination of Taymor’s artistic vision and The Beatles music. The film’s categorization as a jukebox musical represents a point of contention for Taymor. In a discussion with Matt Fagerholm, she rejects the label, arguing that the songs in Across the Universe function differently despite their preexisting origin. For the director, they are mobilized “in a more traditional musical theatre style because they are the words of the thoughts and emotions of the character.”35 Her initial reluctance to take ownership of the label reveals an intrinsic value judgment linked to critique of the subgenre and its impact on theater, bringing in new audiences at the expense of original creative works. Taymor’s own reflections on the construction of the film raise questions concerning film form. While music and song remain the focal point of this chapter, the aesthetics of Across the Universe contribute to the film’s resistance to categorization and are of equal importance to its interpretation and reception. Beyond the delivery of the songs by their new performer, the aesthetic context of the song is the greatest determining factor of how the songs are read in their new context, separate from the perceived fidelity to the original (or lack thereof). The aesthetic of Across the Universe is frequently described by reviewers in relation to music videos, but, as with the film’s relationship to authorship and genre, its film style and how this is expressed within the mise-en-scène remains complex and difficult to categorize, highlighted in Sylviane Gold’s review, which states, “[c]all it a jukebox musical, or a rock opera, or a long-playing music video. All of those labels fit—and don’t.”36 The lack of aesthetic unity identified by Gold reflects both the wide reference base of Taymor’s aesthetic and a specific, intentional style evident in post-classical cinema. In Unruly Media (2013), Carol Vernallis describes an aesthetic defined by a heightened or accelerated relationship between sound and vision, which she calls “intensified audiovisial aesthetics.”37 According to Vernallis, this style is “based on musicality, dislocation, free-association, flux, colour and texture,” which brings high and low cultural forms into the same filmic space.38 This description provides the most accurate way to understand how the aesthetic of the film is a mimetic reflection of its narrative—characteristic of post-millennial cinematic style and the creative innovation and artistic change that defined the 1960s. Within the everchanging, intensified aesthetic of Across the Universe, its music, as Taymor and Macrossan both suggest, functions differently. Music provides the film’s aesthetic and narrative coherence, as both subject and object. Its function is beyond that of a soundtrack, forming a soundscape.

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The film indeed contains only thirty minutes of spoken dialogue. Macrossan argues that “Taymor uses The Beatles as a recognisable language.”39 Through this, the song operates in the place of speech and alongside it to express the emotional interiority of the characters, and, as Millie Taylor argues in relation to the jukebox musical, “rather than simply amplifying and expanding on their context, [songs] leap from it and make connections with other parts of the audience’s lived experience.”40 Central to these models of aesthetic and sonic meaning is an acknowledgment of cinematic excess. The representation of excess in Across the Universe exists on an incremental scale, redefined as the narrative (and the decade) progresses. Calibrated in relation to the experiences of the characters, this relationship forms the film’s internal continuity and emotional logic, built on what Taymor described as the “liberating qualities of the musical genre.”41 Excess is an anticipated and expected element of genre conventions—typified in Across the Universe through extended choreographed dance sequences— where spectacle is both encouraged and permissible. Within its filmic space, excess can additionally be factored in relation to a changing relationship to real (and reality). As the film progresses, it enters into moments of hyperrealism—exemplified in the scenes depicting a traumatized Max recuperating in a Veterans hospital following his return from Vietnam.42 As Kristen Thompson argues, excess is both perceptual (an effect) and material (present in the technological and physical elements which comprise the film).43 The foregrounding of style and calling attention to the presence of style that Thompson refers to is itself fundamental to the experience of Across the Universe. Interpreting the interplay of expression between sound and vision requires openness on behalf of the audience—a process that begins with them engaging in the freedom offered by the genre. The filmic space of the musical is a transformative one, and in Across the Universe, Taymor challenges the possibilities of what can happen when the limits of genre are tested. Sounds of the Universe: Song, Placement, and Meaning(s) To appreciate how songs and their placement impact on our understanding of Across the Universe and its textually embedded creative tensions, the chapter will now turn to addressing specific sequences from the film to analyze how they generate meaning when placed in their new remediated context, each representative of how the film negotiates the relationship or tension between theatricality and excess. It is not the intent of this analysis to assess the fidelity of the songs in Across the Universe to their original but, rather, to contextualize what its remediation means within the context of the film itself. Each chosen song moment will be placed in a schema that begins at the point of restraint (or naturalism)—evident in “If I Fell,” expressing

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Lucy’s uncertainty and fears over her romantic feelings for Jude—and ends at the point of excess (or hyperrealism), exemplified in songs that also function as set pieces; whose existence operates as conspicuous, pure spectacle, such as “I am the Walrus” featuring guru Dr. Robert (Bono); or “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” where the group stumble across Mr. Kite’s (Eddie Izzard) circus tent. Melissa Anderson’s evocation of the theme park becomes more relevant here, recalling Tom Gunning’s seminal theory of early cinema spectatorship—“the cinema of attractions.”44 Though Anderson’s use of the phrase is pejorative, it is an accurate analogy to describe the progression of the film’s narrative and aesthetic framework and the film’s “play” with form and technique, facilitated by its depiction of psychedelia and counterculture existentialist thought. In Across the Universe, the “peaks” of the theme park ride are indicative of emotional peaks within the narrative. Sometimes, these peaks coincide with a song fulfilling its traditional revelatory purpose, as in the bowling alley segment of “I’ve Just Seen A Face,” expressing the joy and exuberance of Jude’s burgeoning romantic feelings for Lucy. In others, they represent moments of aesthetic innovation, provoking awe and wonder, as in the underwater ballet during “Because.” There are other instances, too, where both kinds of “peak” occur simultaneously, such as in the transatlantic staging of “Hold Me Tight,” which creatively closes down the distance between Jude and Lucy before it happens geographically. We enter the filmic space of Across the Universe not at the beginning of the narrative but at an endpoint, during a moment of poignancy and reflection. A young man we will come to know as Jude sits alone on a beach. Looking into the camera, he appeals to the audience directly, singing the opening lines of “Girl”: “Is there anybody going to listen to my story/All about the girl who came to stay?” The camera zooms ever closer to his face as he continues to sing—part lament, part invitation—ending on his face in a close-up. This dissolves into a montage sequence set to “Helter Skelter” (sung by Dana Fuch’s Sadie) composed of later scenes from the film combined with footage of the sea, riots, and newspaper clippings, making Lucy, the “Girl” in question, appear to be struggling against the waves, each fiercer than the last.45 This two-minute sequence acts as a shorthand for Taymor’s aesthetic and sets up not only the film’s approach to the narrative but also its approach to integrating The Beatles catalog into the narrative. The beach framing device allows the film to begin from a place of convention. Borrowing from the traditions of theater, it is firmly grounded in the real. Jude is positioned both as narrator and as protagonist simultaneously; he is both our “way into” the narrative and our “guide” as we progress through it. Through Sturgess’s (re)interpretation, the song becomes infused with melancholy and wistfulness, intertwined with the enchanting qualities of the original. “Girl” sounds like speech and song simultaneously, functioning in both registers. This signposts the specific

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function of songs within Across the Universe, mobilized as expressive articulator that replaces rather than augments the dialogue, often doubling for it. Indeed, as Kathryn Kalinak suggests, music holds a dual function, whereby it operates as both an “articulator of screen expressions and initiator of spectator response [that] binds the spectator to the screen by resonating affect between them.”46 Kalinak’s observations are equally applicable to the process behind the emotionally driven spectator response occurring during musical moments when someone sings. Central to the effectiveness—and, as Kalinak would have it, the affectiveness—of “Girl” is the manner of Sturgess’s vocal performance, which is defined by a lack of “disconnect” between his speaking register and vocal register, doubling the efficiency of the music as an emotionally expressive “code” in the film.47 As Taymor observes, “Jim can go right from talking to singing.”48 This quality is emphasized by the use of live performance over that of prerecording or lip-synching.49 The attention to liveness and naturalism in performance represents a different relationship both to and with musicality, placing it in juxtaposition with the film’s intensified aesthetic to generate a sense of emotional truth. Once again, this roots the film and its production in the context of stage rather than film musicals.50 The lack of disconnect between registers of speaking and singing also brings continuity and seamlessness that allow for the ease of transition between songs. In doing so, the film breaks with the convention of songs in musicals, acting as a break or rupture in the narrative. Rather than stalling the action, the songs in Across the Universe are the catalyst that propels it forward. According to Amy Herzog, the prioritization of spectacle that occurs during musical moments is a narrative interruption and represents “a point of rupture within the larger context of the film.”51 While this is true for some musical moments in Taymor’s film, particularly in its later stages, “Girl” represents a moment of narrative fluidity, where the narrative and the musical moment coexist as a unified whole. Critical responses to the remediated and recontextualized versions of Beatles songs that appear throughout the film, reworked by producers T-Bone Burnett, Elliot Goldenthal, and Teese Gohl, are equally divided. Justin Chang’s observations are typical, defining the film’s creative choices as ranging from “obvious” to “weirdly arresting.”52 The breadth of his reaction also directly maps against the degree of fidelity to the original songs. Anne Hornaday considers the songs in greater technical detail, focusing on their orchestration and arrangement. Comparing the film’s reworked Beatles songs to the new arrangements of Bob Dylan songs in Larry Charles’s Masked and Anonymous (2003), Hornaday laments that the approach to reworking songs used in Across the Universe does not reflect “real innovation” and is limited to changes in tempo.53 In both cases, Chang and Hornaday’s reactions ultimately assert that the production’s approach to reworking songs represents

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an artistic failure, where fidelity is viewed as being creatively uninspired. The reworking of The Beatles catalog within Across Universe and how it generates meaning should not be considered solely in terms of oppositional binaries but, rather, within the context of the film’s relationship to restraint and excess (and, by implication, spectacle), and the negotiation between these two extremes. Song placement and use are important components in this negotiation process. Within Across the Universe, songs do not always “leap” out, as Taylor suggests. Rather, they emerge as part of the film’s soundscape, maintaining a level of sonic flow and coherence. If “Girl” sets out the film’s sonic and emotional logics within the conventional limits of the musical genre, “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” offers a glimpse of how the film will test the genre’s limits and expand its possibilities. Through its staging, choreography, and performance choices, Across the Universe provides interpretive innovation at a textual level that Hornaday deemed lacking at a sonic level. The “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” sequence begins from a place of familiarity, staged during a high school football practice. Cheerleader Prudence (T.V. Caprio) watches on during a break, isolated from her squad and the players. She begins to sing. The framing and composition of the shot lead us to believe the object of her affection is one of the male football players. However, as the song progresses, the pattern of editing builds a regime of looking that ultimately reveals the person she longs for is, in fact, another cheerleader. Central to the queering of the song and its context is the changes to its key and tempo, which transform it from a happy and exuberant expression of desire as yet unfulfilled into a tragic lament for a desire she cannot and may never openly express. Counter to the lyrics, she will never hold the hand of the person she is in love with, and it is a love that has to be hidden. The sequence epitomizes Taymor’s reflections on song as a narrative driver and the function it performs: “People open their mouths and sing their dreams, fears and inner thoughts.”54 For Prudence, the song represents both dreams and fears, proving Richard Dyer’s assertion that a “song is also a particularly rich semiotic mix for statement of feeling,” allowing her to express what she cannot say in words.55 The process of the transformative process of remediation that occurs during “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” opens up the potential for new meaning. As Taymor later reflected, putting “songs in the mouths of women” meant they became inherently more radical, which changed “the quality of the songs and the meaning of the lyrics.”56 This new signification is not limited to the song and its delivery, however. Its radical potential also extends into the visual. Indeed, as Prudence crosses the field, unnoticed by anyone, the drill movements of the players surrounding her shift into slow-motion ballet, lending the final moments a dream-like, otherworldly quality that underscores the yearning and melancholy of Carpio’s performance. This exemplifies Herzog’s

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characterization of the visual aspects of musical moments when arguing that they “tend toward spectacular stagings, fantastical juxtapositions, and movements that would be impossible in a rational world.”57 Herzog’s use of the phrase “rational world” is key to the new meaning generated by the staging and innovation within the sequence. The fantastical and magical elements within Across the Universe expand as the narrative progresses, revealing a changing relationship to the real and, indeed, the qualities of magical realism that have become a defining characteristic of Taymor’s work. In the case of “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” its value and meaning are complicated by its continued relationship to the original song, where a lack of fidelity to the original song becomes as challenging to reading the film as fidelity is to creative innovation. Irrespective of the innovative techniques employed, the inscribed meaning and personal associations brought by the listener remain present, textually embedded even when heard in the new remediated context. Elliot Goldenthal describes the inescapability of The Beatles being like a “ghost in the room.”58 This ghostly vestige remains, increasing the tension generated between inscribed meaning and interpretive meaning. The composer’s admission illustrates the value of acknowledging the cultural weight of The Beatles, and being open to the possibilities of innovation and meaning through creative reinvention. “Girl” and “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” illustrate the cultural and creative value of reworking songs. However, the impact of “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” in particular, is amplified by viewing the song in the context of Taymor’s film. Just as the original inscribed meaning of the song is textually embedded, it is equally hard to disassociate from their remediated context in Across the Universe, especially when hearing the song as part of the soundtrack recording. Reading the film and appreciating its value and meaning can only be fully realized once the sound and vision are considered simultaneously rather than in insolation. As K. J. Donnelly argues, “music and images in film should never be considered ‘two discourses’ but a merged unity. This makes music an element of film and makes other film elements a part of music.”59 Following Donnelly, the successfulness of Across the Universe is derived from the “merged unity” of sound and vision. The interplay of these elements within the mise-en-scène generates meaning and expresses different possibilities of signification so effectively that the familiar Beatles canon is made new. REDEFINING THE UNIVERSE: ACROSS THE UNIVERSE AND FAILURE The scale, complexity, and spectacle of Across the Universe and its commitment to remediation and reinterpretation is embodied by its most ambitious

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and contentious sequence: “She’s So Heavy (I Want You).” Staged in an Army induction center, the romantic longing of the original lyrics is rendered frightening and aggressive when translated into the mouth of an animated recruitment poster that comes to life. The “I want you” is a hook repeated again when Max finds himself alongside other recruits, standing in front of a group of recruiting officers, rendered faceless by masks modeled after G.I. Joe toys. As Max progresses through an array of medical tests, the sequence transforms into a choreographed dance between the officers and recruits as they move against a conveyor belt floor. Built on the metronomic structures of drill formation, the choreography of the dance further emphasizes aggression and is in marked contrast to the free-flowing balletic choreography used elsewhere in the film. The close of the sequence finds Max and the others ejected into the Vietnamese jungle, still in their underwear, as they sing “She’s so heavy,” struggling under the weight of a giant Statute of Liberty they carry on their backs. The “She’s So Heavy” sequence is the culmination of all that has come before it, building on the earlier group choreography of “Come Together” and the animation and puppetry of “Mr. Kite.” It represents the film at its most imaginative and overtly political, operating at a peak of emotional and creative excess. In line with the divisive response to the film as a whole, the interpretations of the sequence either lauded its boldness (Justin Chang) or criticized it for the very same qualities (Owen Gleiberman). While “Girl” and “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” were typically considered in positive terms, praising, as Taymor describes, the changes in meaning generated through their remediation and performance, the reaction to “She’s So Heavy” directly correlates to a perceived lack of restraint, where it is simply deemed too much. Here, more than anywhere else in the film, the boundary limits of genre, audience expectations, and interpretative possibility are reasserted. Ultimately, the reluctance to embrace the film’s lack of restraint—and by extension, the theatricality and excess inherent to Taymor’s aesthetic— equates to a resistance toward innovation, in spite of the critics who called for the film to do more and be more. This resistance, in combination with limited studio support throughout the film’s promotion and release, created the conditions for its financial failure at the box office, making a worldwide return of $29.6 million against a production budget of US $70 million. The production’s subsequent success in the home viewing market, reaching an excess of $27 million in estimated sales, did begin to offset the loss, but Across the Universe did not replicate the success of other post-millennial jukebox musicals of the period or fulfill the potential anticipated by the studio, which sought to capitalize on the combined success of Julie Taymor and The Beatles. One possible explanation for the film’s financial failure is due to its difference from, rather than its similarity to, other musicals. Across the Universe

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utilizes the genre’s common codes and conventions but translates them into another form of cinematic grammar, which bends, and almost breaks, the genre’s limits. Taymor’s alternative language is characterized by a unification of sound and vision that challenges traditional narrative and sonic structures. Fremaux argues that the “fusion” of song and narrative represented throughout Across the Universe “work[s] to problematise previous understandings of the narrative/musical sequence binary” both in the traditions of the genre and in the scholarship dedicated to examining it.60 Fundamental to understanding how this language operates is Fremaux’s further assertion that the narrative cohesion stems from how the arrangements of Beatles songs are deconstructed and reconstructed “to present a cohesive narrative that ties together both musical and non-musical elements.”61 Exemplary of this is the sequence that follows the performance of “She’s So Heavy.” As Max discusses his plans to dodge the draft back at the group’s apartment, Goldenthal’s instrumental orchestration of the song continues on the soundtrack, filling in the sonic transition that occurs between the induction center and the apartment, where the song’s original romantic connotations are returned to when Sadie and Jo-Jo pick up the “I want you” lyric, singing together as they dance in the bedroom. The emotional significance of the transition is intensified by Prudence watching over the couple and repeating the lyric—this time in reference to her burgeoning romantic feelings for Sadie. By creating a synergy between one song moment and the next, the spectacle associated with the song becomes diffused by being placed in a wider, coherent narrative context, where the typical boundaries that demarcate song set pieces that reinforce the narrative/musical binary opposition is no longer present. Through this cohesion, Across the Universe prefigures what would follow in terms of both narrative structure and postmodern reflexivity. Building on the referentiality of Moulin Rouge!, Across the Universe extends it into an extra-diegetic source of interest and debate, focused on the visual and/or sonic resemblances recalling Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Kurt Cobain. In this way, Taymor’s film can be understood as a natural evolution of the genre, evident in the later success of La La Land (2016) and The Greatest Showman (2017), which reinvigorated interest in the genre by creating their own “fusion” through the remediation of original songs within the familiar frameworks of the backstage musicals and studio-era Hollywood, mobilizing a similar fusion of “old” and “new” that characterizes Across the Universe. Appreciation for the film has increased over time, informed by a greater understanding of its merits. The discourse of reappreciation connected to the 2018 re-release is also indicative of a change in audience tastes, stimulated by the continued presence of intensified aesthetics and the success of the jukebox musical. In the scholarly context, the works by Fremaux and Macrossan drawn upon throughout this chapter are central to repositioning the film

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as valuable and illustrating its artistic merit. Moreover, this work facilitates a greater understanding of the film as being more than “just” a musical. Macrossan began this process in her article for Screening the Past in 2018, framing the film's relation to its nostalgic work and political motivations.62 Returning to the film in 2020 for “The Conversation’s ‘Best Worst Film’ series dedicated to giving film’s another chance,” Macrossan reflects upon the production’s cultural life cycle and reiterates its value. She argues that the film “actually asks something more complex of its audience” that extends far beyond surface interpretations as saccharine and bourgeoisie.63 In the popular context, articles are characterized by a similar desire to reinscribe its value. For example, Anne Cohen’s piece for Refinery29 forms part of their R29MovieClub, dedicated to rewatching a “beloved women-driven film.”64 Elena Nicolaou’s earlier reflection for the same publication reveals a personal connection to the film. Nicolaou looks back upon her original viewing experience ten years prior, admitting to her initial misgivings surrounding the director’s representation of the 1960s. For Nicolaou, music is central to her new-found appreciation, and it has become a contingent element of the “magic” she now sees in the film.65 Her reflections illustrate both the value and merits of returning to the film as well as the importance of reflecting upon our changing relationships with films during our lifetime. The re-release also prompted Taymor to engage in a similar kind of reflection. Interviews given to Anne Cohen and Gwynne Watkins, among others, illustrate a clear intent to reassert her authorial status following the coverage regarding the film’s theatrical cut and provided the opportunity for Taymor to address the period and reflect upon it in her own words, thereby regaining control over the narrative surrounding her own production. In her discussion with Taymor and Evan Rachel Wood, Watkins highlights both the impact of the Joe Roth discourse and the gendered aspect of the responses it generated in industry publications. Taymor and Watkins reflect on the misogynistic language that prevailed during the period, where the filmmaker’s behavior toward Roth during the period was described variously as “ballistic” and “hysterical.”66 The re-edits became their own source of debate and Taymor an object of ridicule, with Nikki Finke’s Deadline coverage framing her as hard to work with and reluctant to engage with creative challenge or critique.67 The treatment both Taymor and the film received highlights what she describes as a lack of “respect” toward female directors and a “lack of awe” regarding their work in comparison to their male contemporaries.68 As Anne Thompson argues, the press coverage has since “tainted the film.”69 This discourse is now an intrinsic part of how Across the Universe is read and understood. Though this operates at an extra-textual level, it has undoubtedly impacted the film’s meaning, further compounding the effects of its divisive critical response and cementing its status as maligned and misunderstood.

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CONCLUSION The competing creative tensions and oppositions identified and examined throughout this chapter have come to define how Across the Universe continues to be read and understood. Operating at textual and extra-textual levels, these tensions are generated from binary oppositions, founded upon value judgments—good/bad, musical/narrative, too much/too little, sound/vision— that can result in readings of the film that are closed to the increased possibility of new meaning. Based on the reactions to Taymor’s creative decisions and their perceived correctness, such readings also illustrate a resistance to innovation that is underpinned by the limits of genre and audience expectations. A focal point for this resistance is the film’s use of The Beatles songs, leaving behind an interpretive gap created in the space between the subjective interpretation of the song’s original meaning and the perception of its placement and use in the context of the film—an interpretive gap which this chapter has sought to examine. The chapter argues that these tensions are present in the origins of the project, its production, release, and the initial critical response. However, it is clear that, despite the negative impact on the film and Taymor’s own reputation, these tensions and oppositions make the film what it is, reflecting its singular artistic achievements. The discussion throughout this chapter also illustrates that financial failure does not equate with creative failure. Throughout, the analysis of the film’s reception, in combination with a close reading of specific sequences, has demonstrated that these tensions are, in fact, a natural consequence of the intensified, aesthetic, and sonic fusion that characterizes Taymor’s approach to adapting and translating The Beatles canon into a new filmic context. The director’s use of music as a narrative catalyst that is fully integrated into the soundscape of Across the Universe complicates and problematizes current understandings of narrative structure in musicals which has yet to be fully acknowledged. As such, the chapter also represents some initial steps to redefine Across the Universe in the contexts of genre and authorship, better encapsulate the film’s value to contemporary film musicals, and establish the significance of its reinvention of The Beatles canon. The Beatles and their cultural significance weigh heavily upon the film, but Across the Universe also illustrates that while it is not possible to resolve these creative tensions, they can be worked through. The film is testament to these creative negotiations. Taymor’s alternative cinematic language, which unifies sound and vision in a new filmic space, also brings new meaning to those so familiar songs. Though we know the words long before the characters sing them, this is where our familiarity ends. Representing a natural convergence between stage and film musicals, Across the Universe rewards

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repeat viewing and warrants further reassessment, where it is judged on its own merits, separate from its association with The Beatles and the many media texts that have preceded it. NOTES 1. Roger Ebert, “Nothing’s Gonna Change My World,” https://www​.rogerebert​ .com/, September 13, 2007, https://www​.rogerebert​.com​/reviews​/across​-the​-universe​ -2007; Melissa Anderson, “Across the Universe,” Time Out New York 624 (September 13, 2007), https://web​.archive​.org​/web​/20100903200501​/http:/​/www​.timeout​ .com​:80​/film​/newyork​/reviews​/84615​/across​_the​_universe​.html. 2. Nathan’s Empire review uses similar language, describing the film as “madly ambitious.” Ian Nathan, “Across the Universe,” Empire, August 31, 2007, https:// www​.empireonline​.com​/movies​/reviews​/across​-universe​-review/. 3. Stephen Holden, “Lovers in the ’60s Take a Magical Mystery Tour,” The New York Times, September 14, 2007, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2007​/09​/14​/movies​ /14univ​.html. This line of argument subsequently became characteristic of the film’s negative responses, repeated in reviews by Owen Gleiberman (Entertainment Weekly) and Ann Hornaday (The Washington Post). 4. Justin Chang, “Across the Universe,” Variety, September 11, 2007, https:// variety​.com​/2007​/film​/awards​/across​-the​-universe​-1200556459/. 5. Alan Jacobson, “Across the Universe: Julie Taymor Made the Most Spectacular Film of the Year,” Bright Lights Film Journal, July 31, 2008, https://brightlightsfilm​ .com​/across​-the​-universe​-julie​-taymor​-made​-the​-most​-spectacular​-film​-of​-the​-year/. 6. In collaboration between Sony Pictures and Fathom Events, the film was released nationwide across the US from July 29 to August 1, 2018, with an introduction by Taymor. The re-release was timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of 1968. 7. Anne Thompson, “Julie Taymor Gets What She Wants: Winning the Battle for ‘Across the Universe’,” IndieWire, July 27, 2018, https://www​.indiewire​.com​/2018​ /07​/across​-the​-universe​-julie​-taymor​-the​-beatles​-musical​-1201983163/. Thompson’s observation is supported by large body of work dedicated to cult media and DVD. See Jancovich et  al. (2003), Jancovich (2010) and Wroot and Willis (2017) for an indication of the field. 8. J. Hoberman, “No Success Like Failure: A Natural History of the Film Maudit,” Sight and Sound, April 2021, 43. 9. Anne Cohen, “Across The Universe Is A Cult Classic—So Why Doesn’t Julie Taymor Get Any Respect?,” Refinery29, July 31, 2020, https://www​.refinery29​.com​/ en​-us​/2020​/07​/9910390​/across​-the​-universe​-review​-director​-julie​-taymor. 10. Taymor, quoted in Across the Universe Production Notes. 11. Ibid. 12. Joey Nolfi, “Julie Taymor: Studio Wanted ‘Across the Universe’ to Look like ‘High School Musical’,” Entertainment Weekly, April 21, 2016, https://ew​.com​/ article​/2016​/04​/21​/julie​-taymor​-jodie​-foster​-tribeca​-talk/. 13. Chang, “Across the Universe.”

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14. Anne Thompson, “Julie Taymor Flies ‘Across the Universe’,” Variety, September 7, 2007, https://variety​.com​/2007​/film​/columns​/julie​-taymor​-flies​-across​-the​ -universe​-1117971531/. 15. Ibid. Roth’s cuts to the film have been reported variously as removing between 20 and 30 minutes from the production’s original runtime of 128 minutes. 16. Stephanie Fremaux, “‘Is This Real Enough for You?’: Lyrical Articulation of the Beatles’ Songs in Across the Universe,” in Contemporary Musical Film, eds. K.J. Donnelly and Beth Carroll (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 74. 17. Matt Fagerholm, “Forever Contemporary: Julie Taymor on the Rerelease of ‘Across the Universe’,” Roger​ -Ebert​ .c​ om, July 23, 2018, https://www​ .rogerebert​ .com​/interviews​/forever​-contemporary​-julie​-taymor​-on​-the​-rerelease​-of​-across​-the​ -universe. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. George Plasketes, “Re‐flections on the Cover Age: A Collage of Continuous Coverage in Popular Music,” Popular Music and Society 28, no. 2 (2005): 150. 21. Katharina Niemeyer (ed.), “Introduction: Media and Nostalgia,” in Media and Nostalgia: Yearning for the Past, Present and Future (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 7. 22. Ryan Lizardi, Mediated Nostalgia: Individual Memory and Contemporary Mass Media (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015), 3. 23. Chang, “Across the Universe.” 24. TV Spot Movie Fan, “Across the Universe (2007)—DVD Spot,” YouTube, March 18, 2022, https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=ba49TSq4m4U. 25. Peter Travers, “Across the Universe,” Rolling Stone, October 18, 2007 https:// www​.rollingstone​.com​/tv​-movies​/tv​-movie​-reviews​/across​-the​-universe​-109456/. 26. Phoebe Macrossan, “My Best Worst Film: Across the Universe Is a Beatles Jukebox Musical Masterpiece,” The Conversation, November 2, 2020, http://theconversation​.com​/my​-best​-worst​-film​-across​-the​-universe​-is​-a​-beatles​-jukebox​-musical​ -masterpiece​-147175. 27. Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (London: British Film Institute, 1989), 103. 28. Altman, “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre,” Cinema Journal 23, no. 3 (1984): 6–18. 29. Altman, The American Film Musical, 272–90. 30. Jane Feuer, “The Self‐Reflective Musical and the Myth of Entertainment,” Quarterly Review of Film & Video 2, no. 3 (June 5, 2009): 313–26. 31. Fremaux, “Is This Real Enough for You?,” 72. 32. Barry K. Grant, “The Classic Hollywood Musical and the “Problem” of Rock “n” Roll,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 13, no. 4 (1 January 1986): 199. 33. Bud Coleman, “New Horizons: The Musical at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, eds. William A. Everett and Paul R. Laird, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 288.

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34. George Rodosthenous, “Mamma Mia! And the Aesthetics of the Twenty-FirstCentury Jukebox Musical,” in The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical, eds. Robert Gordon and Olaf Jubin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 616. 35. Fagerholm, “Forever Contemporary.” 36. Sylviane Gold, “‘Across the Universe’: Turning Beatles Songs Upside Down,” The New York Times, September 12, 2007, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2007​/09​/11​/arts​ /11iht​-beatles​.1​.7461487​.html. 37. Carol Vernallis, Unruly Media: YouTube, Music Video, and the New Digital Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 94. 38. Ibid., 115. 39. Macrossan, “My Best Worst Film.” 40. Millie Taylor, Musical Theatre, Realism and Entertainment (London: Routledge, 2016), 162. 41. Thompson, “Taymor Flies ‘Across the Universe’.” 42. This chapter’s evocation of the word “hyperrealism” refers to the film’s intensified relationship to the real, following Alan Jacobson’s assertion that the film exists in a “hyper-reality.” The term is frequently attributed to Taymor’s work. See, for example, Quarmby’s discussion of The Tempest (2010): Kevin A. Quarmby, “Behind the Scenes: Penn & Teller, Taymor and the Tempest Divide Shakespeare’s Globe, London,” Shakespeare Bulletin 29, no. 3 (2011): 383–97. 43. Kristin Thompson, “The Concept of Cinematic Excess,” Ciné-Tracts 1, no. 2 (Summer 1977): 59. 44. Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” Wide Angle 8, nos. 3–4 (Fall 1986): 63–70. 45. The construction of this sequence is described in more detail by Lindsey Mayer-Beug, part of the animation and design team who created it. See Lindsey Mayer-Beug, “Across the Universe: Helter Skelter Sequence,” hellolindsey​.t​v, 2012, https://hellolindsey​.tv​/Across​-the​-Universe​-Helter​-Skelter​-Sequence. 46. Kathryn Kalinak, Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 87. 47. Ibid. 48. Taymor, quoted in Across the Universe Production Notes. 49. By Taymor’s own estimation, over 90 percent of the songs where recorded live. She has repeated this in numerous interviews, including Fagerholm (2018). 50. Both Taymor and lead actress Evan Rachel Wood make reference to the film’s rehearsal process and its relationship to traditional stage musical interview with Gwynne Watkins. See Gwynne Watkins, “Evan Rachel Wood and Julie Taymor: Across the Universe ‘Scared People’,” Vulture, July 11, 2018, https://www​.vulture​ .com​/2018​/07​/evan​-rachel​-wood​-across​-the​-universe​-scared​-people​.html. 51. Amy Herzog, Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same: The Musical Moment in Film (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 7. 52. Chang, “Across the Universe.” 53. Ann Hornaday, “Julie Taymor and The Beatles: She Can’t Work It Out,” The Washington Post, September 14, 2007, http://www​.washingtonpost​.com​/wp​-dyn​/ content​/article​/2007​/09​/13​/AR2007091302249​.html.

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54. Thompson, “Julie Taymor Gets What She Wants.” 55. Richard Dyer, In the Space of a Song: The Uses of Song in Film (New York: Routledge, 2012), 5. 56. Cohen, “Across the Universe.” 57. Herzog, Dreams of Difference, 7. 58. Goldenthal, quoted in Across the Universe Production Notes. 59. K.J. Donnelly, Magical Musical Tour: Rock and Pop in Film Soundtracks (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 2. 60. Fremaux, “Is This Real Enough for You?,” 74. 61. Ibid., 84. 62. Phoebe Macrossan, “A Double-Layered Nostalgia: ‘The Sixties,’ the Iraq War and The Beatles in Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe (2007).” Screening the Past 43 (April 2018). http://www​.screeningthepast​.com​/issue​-43​-dossier​/a​-double​-layered​ -nostalgia​-the​-sixties​-the​-iraq​-war​-and​-the​-beatles​-in​-julie​-taymors​-across​-the​-universe​-2007/. 63. Macrossan, “My Best Worst Film.” 64. Cohen, “Across the Universe.” 65. Nicolaou, “10 Years On.” 66. Watkins, “Across the Universe “Scared People’.” 67. Finke, Nikki. “Why Did He Hire Her in the 1st Place? Details On Taymor vs Roth Not In NYT.” Deadline, March 21, 2007, https://deadline​.com​/2007​/03​/why​-did​ -you​-hire​-her​-in​-the​-1st​-place​-details​-on​-taymor​-vs​-roth​-missing​-from​-nyt​-1629/. 68. Cohen, “Across the Universe.” 69. Thompson, “Julie Taymor Gets What She Wants.”

REFERENCES Across the Universe. Directed by Julie Taymor. USA and UK: Revolution Studios, 2007. Altman, Rick. “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre.” Cinema Journal 23, no. 3 (1984): 6–18. ———. The American Film Musical. London: British Film Institute, 1989. Anderson, Melissa. “Across the Universe.” Time Out New York 624 (September 13, 2007). https://web​.archive​.org​/web​/20100903200501​/http:/​/www​.timeout​.com​:80​/ film​/newyork​/reviews​/84615​/across​_the​_universe​.html. Chang, Justin. “Across the Universe.” Variety, September 11, 2007. https://variety​ .com​/2007​/film​/awards​/across​-the​-universe​-1200556459/. Cohen, Anne. “Across the Universe Is a Cult Classic—So Why Doesn’t Julie Taymor Get Any Respect?” Refinery29, July 31, 2020. https://www​.refinery29​.com​/en​-us​ /2020​/07​/9910390​/across​-the​-universe​-review​-director​-julie​-taymor. Coleman, Bud. “New Horizons: The Musical at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, edited by William A. Everett and Paul R. Laird, 2nd edn., 284–302. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

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Donnelly, K.J. Magical Musical Tour: Rock and Pop in Film Soundtracks. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Dyer, Richard. In the Space of a Song: The Uses of Song in Film. New York: Routledge, 2012. Ebert, Roger. “Nothing’s Gonna Change My World.” Roger​-Ebert​.c​om, September 13, 2007. https://www​.rogerebert​.com​/reviews​/across​-the​-universe​-2007. Fagerholm, Matt. “Forever Contemporary: Julie Taymor on the Rerelease of ‘Across the Universe’.” Roger​-Ebert​.c​om, July 23, 2018. https://www​.rogerebert​.com​ /interviews​/forever​-contemporary​-julie​-taymor​-on​-the​-rerelease​-of​-across​-the​ -universe. Feuer, Jane. “The Self-Reflective Musical and the Myth of Entertainment.” Quarterly Review of Film & Video 2, no. 3 (June 5, 2009): 313–326. Finke, Nikki. “Why Did He Hire Her In The 1st Place? Details On Taymor vs Roth Not In NYT.” Deadline, March 21, 2007. https://deadline​.com​/2007​/03​/why​-did​ -you​-hire​-her​-in​-the​-1st​-place​-details​-on​-taymor​-vs​-roth​-missing​-from​-nyt​-1629/. Frida. Directed by Julie Taymor. USA: Handprint Entertainment, 2002. Glee. Directed by Ryan Murphy. USA: Fox, 2009–15. Gleiberman, Owen. “Across the Universe.” Entertainment Weekly, March 3, 2015. https://web​.archive​.org​/web​/20150303130431​/http:/​/www​.ew​.com​/article​/2007​/09​ /12​/across​-universe. Gold, Sylviane. “‘Across the Universe’: Turning Beatles Songs Upside Down.” The New York Times, September 12, 2007. https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2007​/09​/11​/arts​ /11iht​-beatles​.1​.7461487​.html. Grant, Barry K. “The Classic Hollywood Musical and the ‘Problem’ of Rock ‘n’ Roll.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 13, no. 4 (January 1, 1986): 195–205. Gunning, Tom. “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the AvantGarde.” Wide Angle 8, nos. 3–4 (Fall 1986): 63–70. A Hard Day’s Night. Directed by Richard Lester. UK and USA: Walter Shenson Films, 1964. Help!. Directed by Richard Lester. UK: Walter Shenson Films, 1964. Herzog, Amy. Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same: The Musical Moment in Film. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Hornaday, Ann. “Julie Taymor and the Beatles: She Can’t Work It Out.” The Washington Post, September 14, 2007. http://www​.washingtonpost​.com​/wp​-dyn​/content​ /article​/2007​/09​/13​/AR2007091302249​.html. Jacobson, Alan. “Across the Universe: Julie Taymor Made the Most Spectacular Film of the Year.” Bright Lights Film Journal, August 1, 2008. https://brightlightsfilm​.com​/across​-the​-universe​-julie​-taymor​-made​-the​-most​-spectacular​-film​-of​-the​ -year/. Jancovich, Mark. “Cult Fictions: Cult Movies, Subcultural Capital and the Production of Cultural Distinctions.” Cultural Studies 16, no. 2 (March 1, 2002): 306–22. Jancovich, Mark, Antonio Lázaro Reboli, Julian Stringer and Andrew Willis. Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Tastes. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003.

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La La Land. Directed by Damien Chazelle. USA: Summit Entertainment, 2016. Lindsey Mayer-Beug. “Across the Universe: Helter Skelter Sequence.” hellolindsey​ .t​v, 2012. https://hellolindsey​.tv​/Across​-the​-Universe​-Helter​-Skelter​-Sequence. Lizardi, Ryan. Mediated Nostalgia: Individual Memory and Contemporary Mass Media. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015. Macrossan, Phoebe. “A Double-Layered Nostalgia: ‘The Sixties,’ the Iraq War and The Beatles in Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe (2007).” Screening the Past, no. 43 (April 2018). http://www​.screeningthepast​.com​/issue​-43​-dossier​/a​-double​ -layered​-nostalgia​-the​-sixties​-the​-iraq​-war​-and​-the​-beatles​-in​-julie​-taymors​-across​ -the​-universe​-2007/. ———. “My Best Worst Film: Across the Universe Is a Beatles Jukebox Musical Masterpiece.” The Conversation, November 2, 2020. http://theconversation​.com​/ my​-best​-worst​-film​-across​-the​-universe​-is​-a​-beatles​-jukebox​-musical​-masterpiece​ -147175. The Magnificent Ambersons. Directed by Orson Welles. USA: Mercury Productions, 1942. Mamma Mia! Directed by Phyllida Lloyd. Germany, UK and USA: Universal Pictures, 2006. Moulin Rouge! Directed by Baz Luhrmann. Australia and USA: Twentieth Century Fox, 2001. Nathan, Ian. “Across The Universe.” Empire, August 31, 2007. https://www​.empireonline​.com​/movies​/reviews​/across​-universe​-review/. Niemeyer, Katharina. “Introduction: Media and Nostalgia.” In Media and Nostalgia: Yearning for the Past, Present and Future, edited by Katharina Niemeyer, 1–23. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Nolfi, Joey. “Julie Taymor: Studio Wanted ‘Across the Universe’ to Look Like ‘High School Musical’.” Entertainment Weekly, April 21, 2016. https://ew​.com​/article​ /2016​/04​/21​/julie​-taymor​-jodie​-foster​-tribeca​-talk/. Plasketes, George. “Re-flections on the Cover Age: A Collage of Continuous Coverage in Popular Music.” Popular Music and Society 28, no. 2 (2005): 137–61. Quarmby, Kevin A. “Behind the Scenes: Penn & Teller, Taymor and the Tempest Divide Shakespeare’s Globe, London.” Shakespeare Bulletin 29, no. 3 (2011): 383–97. I Am Sam. Directed by Jessie Nelson. USA: New Line Cinema, 2001. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Directed by Michael Schultz. USA: Robert Stigwood Organization, 1978. Smith, Kyle. “It Goes Nowhere, Man.” New York Post, September 14, 2007. The Sound of Music. Directed by Robert Wise. USA: Robert Wise Productions, 1965. Southland Tales. Directed by Richard Kelly. USA: Universal Pictures, 2006. Taylor, Millie. Musical Theatre, Realism and Entertainment. London: Routledge, 2016. Thompson, Anne. “Julie Taymor Flies ‘Across the Universe’.” Variety, September 7, 2007. https://variety​.com​/2007​/film​/columns​/julie​-taymor​-flies​-across​-the​-universe​-1117971531/.

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———. “Julie Taymor Gets What She Wants: Winning the Battle for ‘Across the Universe’.” IndieWire, July 27, 2018. https://www​.indiewire​.com​/2018​/07​/across​ -the​-universe​-julie​-taymor​-the​-beatles​-musical​-1201983163/. Thompson, Kristin. “The Concept of Cinematic Excess.” Ciné-Tracts 1, no. 2 (Summer 1977): 54–63. Titus. Directed by Julie Taymor. Italy, UK and USA: Clear Blue Sky Productions, 1999. Travers, Peter. “Across the Universe.” Rolling Stone, October 18, 2007. https://www​ .rollingstone​.com​/tv​-movies​/tv​-movie​-reviews​/across​-the​-universe​-109456/. TV Spot Movie Fan, “Across the Universe (2007)—DVD Spot.” YouTube, March 18, 2022. https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=ba49TSq4m4U. Watkins, Gwynne. “Evan Rachel Wood and Julie Taymor: Across the Universe ‘Scared People’.” Vulture, July 11, 2018. https://www​.vulture​.com​/2018​/07​/evan​ -rachel​-wood​-across​-the​-universe​-scared​-people​.html. Wroot, Jonathan and Andy Willis (eds.). Cult Media: Re-Packaged, Re-Released and Restored. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

Chapter 3

From Historical Relevance to Postmodern Revisionism The Case of Julie Taymor’s Titus Andrew Grossman

INTRODUCTION: SIFTING COMEDY FROM TRAGEDY IN TITUS ANDRONICUS If Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedies survive today, they do so mainly on aesthetic grounds, not ethical ones. Thematically, the classical tragedy, steeped in ancient hierarchies and oracular determinations, should mean little in a postmodern culture that stresses individualistic autonomy above all else. Even in the Elizabethan area, the revenge tragedy was a genre divided against itself: it compelled heroes to avenge their sufferings and then, in accordance with Christian morality, punished them for failing to resist the genre’s bloody compulsions. In the Elizabethan tragedies that followed Norton and Sackville’s Gorboduc (1561) and Kyd’s A Spanish Tragedy (circa 1582), the agonistic qualities that characterized Greek tragedy are diluted, and the Elizabethan revenger rarely follows a moral duty higher than his appetite for revenge. He (and it is generally a “he”) might act according to political, social, or familial obligations, but the revenger primarily seeks to redress a wounded ego, exacting somewhat more than an eye for an eye. Shortsightedly, the revenger believes his violence will redeem rather than debase him, and, in an infantile manner, he mistakes the aesthetic pleasures of exacting revenge for moral righteousness. The psychologism introduced by Macbeth and Hamlet existed only nascently, if at all, in earlier revenge tragedies. Though mad scenes and examples of what is now called “trauma” were common enough in late-sixteenthcentury drama, overtures to proto-psychology were usually overtaken by the incessant mechanics of revenge plots, which propelled heroes from one 55

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trial to the next, with few pauses for introspection. Characterologically, the standard Elizabethan revenger undergoes only a limited set of transformations, usually from power-holder to victim to antihero. His quest for revenge is preferable to suffering in silence, but he, a fallen Christian, learns too late that personal justice cannot supersede the retributive justice reserved for a providential God. Furthermore, the revenger is as politically powerless as he is violent. Hannah Arendt suggests that “the extreme form of power is All against One; the extreme form of violence is One against All.”1 Challenging the world through violence alone, the revenger’s mantra is indeed “One against All,” but his moral transgressions (and frequent madness) disqualify him from legitimate spheres of power. Despite revenge tragedy’s deference to fated conclusions, the Elizabethans and Jacobeans did not practice “pure” tragedy in its Attic form but an updated, hybrid style that incorporated elements of political scheming, romantic intrigue, and bloody farce. As Western European culture became more diverse and cosmopolitan, the old Greek forms became increasingly fractured, thematically and tonally. For the Greeks, comedy arose, as Walter Kerr suggests, from a “burlesque of the solemn and sacred,” most obviously in Euripides’s Cyclops (early fifth century BCE) and other satyr plays.2 One might argue that some Elizabethans and Jacobeans came to mock not only familiar subject matters but also the themes underlying tragedy itself. Jonathan Dollimore argues that, for the Jacobeans especially, “parody was . . . not merely a source of comic effect but . . . a complex dramatic process” that (in the plays of John Marston, for instance) lampooned the “stoical endurance” of earlier Elizabethan heroes, such as “Kyd’s Hieronimo and Shakespeare’s Titus.”3 Much of the history and experience of drama is indeed staked upon the necessary tension between stoic heroism and the temptation to parody that heroism, which one suspects is pretentious or merely mythic. What Dollimore ascribes to the Jacobeans could well describe a universal perspective that admits to the impossibility of tragedy without comedy. The desire to laugh in the face of tragedy expresses “a distrust of the sufficiency of stoicism as a philosophy of mind,” for “contemptus mundi and stoic apathia are no longer possible responses” to truly complex moral dilemmas, whether real or dramatized.4 If the stoic hero has undergone surprisingly few revisions in the three millennia that separate Homer and Hollywood, it is because audiences still rely on Stoic ideas to order life’s chaos. But stoical masks cannot rationalize chaos, and they thus become pretensions susceptible to parody. Few Elizabethan dramas better represent the weakness underlying the stoic hero than Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. For some contemporary critics, such as Harold Bloom, Titus Andronicus can be treated only as a bloody travesty, so far-fetched are its plotting and its terrors.5 The stoicism of the titular hero,

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a Roman general, is tested so grotesquely that his ostensible tragedy slips, intentionally or not, into bathetic comedy. Shakespeare himself was not blind to this internal tension. When Titus sinks to his lowest point in Act 3—his daughter has been raped and dismembered, he has been fooled into cutting off his own hand, and two of his sons have been decapitated—he helplessly begins to laugh. His brother Marcus is understandably bewildered. “Why, I have not another tear to shed,” Titus explains (III.i.271). But then Titus suggests that this anguished laughter might fortify his quest for revenge: “Besides, [my] sorrow is an enemy / And would usurp upon my watery eyes / And make them blind with tributary tears: Then which way shall I find revenge’s cave?” (III.i.272-75) Comedy and tragedy meet in Titus’s exasperated laugh, yet without either element neutralizing or superseding the other. The play’s transgression of (or obliviousness to) generic boundaries lends it a subversively modern cast, as it both extends and lampoons the bloodthirsty tradition of Kyd and Marlowe. Titus Andronicus not only pushes Aristotle’s tragic ingredients of suffering, pity, and fear past their breaking points, but, like its Senecan models, it emphasizes most the aspect of suffering (which Aristotle believed less important than fear and pity). The sufferings recounted in the drama are so grotesque that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics deemed the play a youthful aberration. For generations, Samuel Johnson’s dismissive opinion held sway. Not only appalled by the “barbarity of the spectacles .  .  . and the general massacre,” Johnson regarded the play so “wholly different” stylistically from Shakespeare’s later work that he doubted the Bard’s authorship,6 an opinion repeated by William Hazlitt and Friedrich Schlegel. As scholars often note, the story is largely unoriginal. Not only does Shakespeare lard the scenario with Ovidian allusions, but he steals the cannibalistic finale of Seneca’s Thyestes (circa 62 CE), which Shakespeare would have known from Jasper Heywood’s 1560 translation. Its violences aside, the play is lexically less sophisticated than Shakespeare’s other early works and seldom improves on the lusty blank verse of Marlowe’s two-part Tamburlaine (1587–1588) or The Jew of Malta (1589–1590), from which Titus Andronicus borrows the character of a villainous Moor. The play’s exposition, furthermore, is unconvincing dramatically and psychologically. Contemporary scholars tend to agree that the far-fetched first act is the work of coauthor George Peele, a second-tier playwright whose first play, The Arraignment at Paris, appeared in 1584 and who likely penned an earlier Titus Andronicus, no longer extant.7 Nevertheless, the play improves as it progresses, as Peele’s clumsy first act gives way to the bizarre pathos (perhaps bathos) of the third and the Grand Guignol catharsis of the fifth. Titus Andronicus cannot be called “psychological” in the modern, individualistic sense. The drama has a declamatory style that emphasizes appearances over interiorities, and its plot proceeds like a gruesome machine,

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driving forward both heroes and villains unencumbered by guilt, self-doubt, or moral vacillation. As Victor Kiernan remarks, the play offers “no breathing characters, only passions personified, though one or two, if not fully human, may be called humanoid.”8 Kiernan’s description is less facetious than it seems. For all the play’s blood and thunder, its characters inhabit a rhetorically performative world in which they are what they say. They do not think anything they are not doing or experiencing at the moment. Their loves, hates, and allegiances fluctuate and dissipate in ways unfathomable for “realistic” characters of later eras (or even of later Shakespeare). Most importantly, they are not “psychological” in that audiences cannot imagine their offstage lives. Realists such as Ibsen and Chekhov create the dramatic illusion that audiences witness transformative episodes in lives that would unfold regardless, even if no one were watching. In Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare offers the inverse: entirely reactionary characters who exist only through exigently staged circumstances. Although Titus descends into (apparent) madness, he undergoes no character transformation in the traditional sense. At best, he uses his quest for vengeance to reunify his (literally) dismembered family, but the revenge plot offers avenues only for deeper suffering, not for deeper insight. Every modern staging of Titus Andronicus must confront its contradictory dynamics, as the combination of extreme pathos and extreme grotesquery can easily slip into a travesty. Many productions of old reportedly failed the test. According to Xu Qiping, when the play was performed at the Old Vic in 1923, “it wasn’t considered a successful evening unless a dozen people fainted at the horrors.”9 Peter Brook’s 1955 revival of Titus (with Olivier in the title role) attempted to legitimize—that is, humanize—the play, removing the most bathetic moments, particularly scenes of hysterical dismemberment that might cause audiences to unsuspend their disbelief.10 Whereas Brook deemphasized the gore, using red ribbons for blood, contemporary productions tend to take the opposite approach, playing up the violence in the name of contemporary “relevance,” as if the bloody intrigues of Elizabethan theater could—or should—allegorize the Arendtian banality of evil that characterizes the postindustrial age. Almost inevitably, today’s politically conscious director will use the Shakespearean text as a pretext for social commentary. For instance, director Blanche McIntyre’s 2017 modern dress production for The Royal Shakespeare Company turns ancient Rome into a neofascist European Union, replete with wailing police sirens and protestors bombarded with tear gas. Insisting on the “contemporaneity” of Titus Andronicus, the production draws superficial parallels between the oppressions of Roman autocracy and those of republican neoliberalism. Arguing that the play has “strong[er] political themes .  .  . than its reputation suggests,” McIntyre analogizes Shakespeare’s bloody power struggle to the “political situation”

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in the UK (circa 2017) and a United States “plagued by unchecked gun violence.”11 For McIntyre, stylized violence cannot represent a contemporaneous world desensitized to real violence: “If you set [Titus Andronicus] in 2017, you have to be naturalistic with the blood . . . you can’t use ribbons or something else symbolic.”12 This realism manifests itself graphically in the play’s most pathetic moment, in which Titus’s daughter Lavinia is raped and dismembered (offstage). In McIntyre’s production, she reenters the set not only blood-soaked but crawling on her knees, with her trousers and underwear lowered to her ankles. For an Elizabethan audience, Lavinia’s violation affronts Titus’s patriarchal honor; in this contemporized production, her rape is necessarily foregrounded according to modern conceptions of female trauma. The character of Titus himself does not easily yield modern interpretation or allegory, as do the totalitarian impulses of Richard III or the existential ambivalence of Hamlet. Director Trevor Nunn, who staged Titus Andronicus in 1972, has argued that the play’s themes of Roman imperial succession and filial sacrifice do not lend themselves to transcultural re-adaptation. The play, he affirms, cannot be carelessly reset in “Renaissance Italy or Greece or medieval Britain.”13 Nevertheless, the archaic Roman setting perhaps resonated with Shakespearean audiences. As Mark Pizzato suggests, Titus Andronicus presented “Elizabethan audiences .  .  . with a dilemma still current in their own era: to obey patrilinear rules and rulers, even when cruel, or to risk social chaos.”14 Many contemporary directors seize upon the drama’s chaotic violence as a sign of sociopolitical relevance, as if chaotic butchery signified a timeless, inexorable human condition. When enacted in modern dress, the play’s violences chastise Hegelian pretensions to historical progress: postEnlightenment democracy did not make modern nation-states any less violent than the leaders of imperial Rome, who in Titus Andronicus delusionally believe that they are morally superior to their enemies, the barbarian Goths.

THE SEARCH FOR RELEVANCE IN JULIE TAYMOR’S TITUS The issue of moral and thematic relevance comes to a head in Julie Taymor’s 1999 Titus, a film adaptation that emphasizes the ritualistic and mechanistic elements of Shakespeare’s original but adds an incongruously humanistic ending that can be relevant only to contemporary viewers. In Taymor’s version, derived from her 1994 off-Broadway production, Titus’s grandson Lucius (or “Young Lucius,” interpreted by Osheen Jones, and not to be confused with Titus’s grown son Lucius) rescues the mixed-race infant of the Moorish villain Aaron (Harry Lennix) and carries him toward a fantastic

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sunrise symbolic of multicultural harmony—a theme utterly at odds with the Elizabethan bloodbath that has just transpired. Clearly, Taymor attempts to redress and transcend the moral abysses (and generic limitations) of revenge tragedy by balancing the horrors with a glimmer of ecumenical hope. Though naive, this final gesture is arguably necessary if one wishes to step beyond what the play’s amoral, self-interested violence can historically signify. Taymor, in fact, goes to lengths to render the drama’s violence in fantastic, stylized, and deliberately “unrelatable” ways, rebuffing the realistic approach common in contemporary stage productions and redirecting audiences’ attentions to extratextual possibilities. Taymor’s approach is thematically viable but dramatically and structurally problematic. Whereas Brook and Olivier organically humanized the drama through realistic performance techniques, Taymor does not excavate humanistic meaning from the body of the text but rather grafts a humanitarian coda onto a drama remade as stylistically as possible. In a “straight” version of Titus Andronicus, such a revisionist ending could never work. Throughout Titus, however, Taymor intensifies the play’s inhumanities and psychological unrealism; the fantastic vision Taymor establishes thus prepares audiences to accept a truly fantastic coda that rejects textual faithfulness entirely. Indeed, it is Taymor’s trademark stylization that renders the coda palatable and more “relatable” to a contemporary audience already desensitized to the most pornographic displays of violence. Subsumed under Taymor’s auteurism, the humanitarian coda begs to be accepted as part and parcel of the directorial style, even though an optimistic conclusion (obviously) conflicts thematically with the preceding atrocities. In much of Taymor’s work, ritualistic fancifulness yields humanistic themes—in her productions of Juan Darién (1988) and The Lion King (1997), for instance, in which puppet-like stylization paradoxically evinces more “human” emotions and heightened moralities. Taymor’s grotesque style, steeped in her study of Indonesian and Balinese puppet theater, negotiates the protohuman and posthuman, the tragic and the comic. Her gestural world is entirely appropriate to what might be called the “rhetorical performativity” of Titus Andronicus, in which characters are what they say and how they act. While Titus betrays traces of the literal puppetry of Taymor’s stage works—in the robotic procession of marching centurions, for instance—the notion of the marionette here becomes metaphorical. These are two-dimensional characters whose strings are pulled by fate and literary convention alike. Beyond its multicultural puppetries, Taymor’s style fits into larger schemes of modernism, combining elements of what Peter Brook calls the Holy Theater (epitomized by Artaudian objectivity and transcendental experience) and the Rough Theater (marked by immediate sensation and folk culture).15 Though a borderline mainstream director, Taymor shares with Artaud, Becket, and

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other avant-gardists a fascination with the Dionysian ritual that Nietzsche associated with states of ecstatic becoming. As George Steiner suggests, it is no accident that twentieth-century modernists (such as Hofmannsthal and Cocteau) returned to ancient forms, claiming the premodern as a transhistorical, immanent element of the modern and rejecting the intervening periods of classicism and Romanticism as bourgeois (and therefore corrupt) aesthetic movements.16 The ideological element is absent in Taymor, whose appeals to the Rough Theater are unambiguously commercial (as was Shakespeare himself) and often trespass into petit-bourgeois aesthetics (e.g., The Lion King). Nevertheless, one must ask how Taymor’s gestural, neo-primitive humanism reflects on the general nature of tragedy and on the bathetic tragedy of Titus Andronicus in particular. For Nietzsche, Greek tragedy (potentially) reconciled the Apollonian and Dionysian antitheses, dialectically relating the stoic repose of spoken language to the aesthetic abandonment of ritual music.17 Elizabethan tragedy, of course, largely discards the musical component the Greeks believed was integral. In the case of Titus Andronicus, one might continue to adjust the tragic antitheses: stoic repose, represented by Titus himself, confronts not the Dionysian muse but the gory burlesque Shakespeare inserts into the drama (and which Peter Brook’s production sought to diminish). As the play progresses, Titus’s stoic stiffness eventually breaks apart, giving way to apparent madness and a comical cannibal feast. Not merely travestying tragic pretenses, the ludicrous finale reinforces Dollimore’s point that the stoic apathia informing tragic heroism cannot truly account for realistic, multifaceted human experience. Dramas (like Titus Andronicus) that taunt and travesty the hero’s stoicism know enough to deflate the pretense upon which the tragic illusion is founded. At the same time, a travesty, like a fated tragedy, is a severely limited form that cannot describe contemporary crises of autonomy. Taymor finds a solution not by negotiating the Dionysian and Apollonian but by magnifying Titus’s stoicism (through the performance of Anthony Hopkins), making the whole mise-en-scène a Dionysian spectacle, and adding a “relevant” coda that proposes autonomy for Young Lucius. Her solution, therefore, creates a humanistic sensibility not by synthesizing elements native to the drama but by forcefully adding a new element, a notion analyzed in this chapter’s conclusion.

THE TRAGICOMIC NARRATIVE: DEHUMANIZATION AND REHUMANIZATION Before examining how Taymor attempts to resolve the Gordian-knot problems of Titus Andronicus’ tragicomedy, a brief synopsis of Shakespeare’s original

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is in order. In the first act (perhaps George Peele’s work), the Roman general Titus returns from war against the Goths with prisoners and fallen sons in tow. Among Titus’s prisoners are the Goth Queen, Tamora; Tamora’s lover Aaron, a scheming Moor; and Tamora’s three sons, one of whom, Alarbus, Titus sacrifices in accordance with superstitious Roman doctrine. “O cruel irreligious piety,” screams Tamora, castigating the hypocrisy of murderous Romans who believe themselves above the wild Goths (I.i.130). The killing of Alarbus foreshadows Titus’s tragic flaw—not the hubris of standard tragic heroes but pietas (that particularly Roman devotion to the state) so excessive that he ignores the natural virtues of kinship and compassion. Titus soon learns the emperor has died, leaving a power vacuum his rivalrous sons, Bassianus and Saturninus, vie to fill. While the vox populi believes Titus should rule, he insists that Saturninus rightfully ascend the throne. As his first imperial act, Saturninus announces that he will wed Lavinia, Titus’s daughter, even though Bassianus has already claimed her as his bride-to-be. Almost immediately, a legal dispute ensues: Titus’s sons defend Bassianus’s prior claim to Lavinia’s hand, while Titus, ever loyal to the state, supports the claim of Saturninus. Within minutes, Titus accuses his sons of treason and kills one of them, Mutius, who facilitates Lavinia and Bassianus’s escape. To avoid losing face, the fickle Saturninus immediately (and incomprehensibly) takes as his bride the captive Tamora, his erstwhile enemy. The latter, meanwhile, plots with her remaining sons, Chiron and Demetrius, a convoluted revenge against Titus for killing Alarbus. Titus, still enraged by his sons’ defiance, refuses a proper burial for Mutius. His brother Marcus, a consul and the play’s recurrent voice of reason, tells him, “My Lord, this is impiety in you,” recalling Tamora’s earlier imprecation (I.i.362). Begrudgingly, Titus buries Mutius and attempts to build bridges with Bassianus and Saturninus by joining them on a hunt the following day. The villainous Moor Aaron, Tamora’s lover, meanwhile schemes against his Roman captors, arranging the death of Bassianus and framing Titus’s sons Quintus and Martius for the deed. To compound his revenge, Aaron further convinces Demetrius and Chiron to jointly rape Lavinia, with whom both are smitten. In one of the play’s most notorious moments, Chiron and Demetrius cut off Lavinia’s hands and remove her tongue so she cannot name them as her rapists (the actual dismemberment occurs offstage). To complete his plan, Aaron sends to Titus a messenger who claims that Saturninus will pardon Quintus and Martius if Titus cuts off his own hand as a tribute. In a moment that impossibly blurs comedy and horror, the Roman general realizes too late that he has fallen for Aaron’s ruse: the messenger returns not only with Titus’s unwanted hand but with the severed heads of Martius and Quintus. Swearing revenge, Titus dispatches Lucius to forge an alliance with the Goths and unseat Saturninus and the traitorous Tamora.

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A Moorish variant of Marlowe’s Machiavellian Barabas, the antihero of The Jew of Malta, Aaron unexpectedly becomes the most “human” character in the play. When a nurse informs him that he must kill his mulatto child with Tamora to avoid a scandal, Aaron realizes whatever his conniving, he always will remain a subaltern Other. Indeed, many contemporary productions, as well as Taymor’s film, frame Aaron as an ersatz Caliban. After murdering the nurse (who knows too much), he plans to flee with his son, only to be captured by Lucius, now returning to Rome with the Goths. Tamora and her two sons then attempt to trick a grieving, seemingly crazed Titus in a scene that can only be read as vulgar burlesque. Preposterously costumed as living allegories of Revenge, Murder, and Rape, Lavinia and her sons claim that they will avenge Titus’s wrongs if he convinces Lucius to withdraw his advancing Goth allies. Though teetering on the edge of madness, Titus cannot be fooled. Convincing Tamora to leave Chiron and Demetrius in his custody, he seizes them both, slits their throats and bakes their bloody remains into pastries he will serve to Saturninus and Tamora, who have offered an apparent truce. Before fatally fêting his enemies, Titus asks Saturninus if (according to legend) the centurion Virginius was righteous in murdering his violated daughter. When the emperor affirms that Virginius had no choice but to end his daughter’s shame, Titus immediately delivers Lavinia’s death blow. Most contemporary productions, including Taymor’s, imply that Lavinia, through approving glances, sanctions her own death. She is granted a final moment of agency, lest her murder become nothing more than the Elizabethan equivalent of a patriarchal “honor killing.” When Saturninus wonders why Tamora’s sons are absent, the Roman general gleefully reveals that they have always been present (in the pastries), at which point Titus stabs Tamora and is stabbed by Saturninus, who is then stabbed by Lucius. A conventional denouement sees a pontificating Marcus restore political order and condemn Aaron to death. In a speech that echoes the dying Barabas’s defiant final words in The Jew of Malta, Aaron curses his Gentile tormentors, regretting only that he failed to upset political orders more substantially. Even the nimblest actors could struggle with such a psychologically unworkable scenario. Certainly, much of Shakespearean drama is fanciful and far less “realistic” than Oscar Wilde claimed. In Shakespeare’s most convincing scenarios, however, actors are fortified by the Bard’s peerless diction and prosody. That Richard III might seduce the grieving Lady Anne seems preposterous on its face, but the famous seduction scene works because Shakespeare emboldens Richard with ample rhetorical resources. By contrast, Titus is a taciturn caricature, as bloodthirsty as Richard but far less eloquent. The implausibility of the play’s plot devices further renders the drama incompatible with realist aesthetics, the efforts of an Olivier notwithstanding. For instance, after murdering his son Mutius, Titus appears the

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following morning oddly refreshed: “I have been troubled in my sleep this night/But dawning day new comfort has inspired” (II​.ii​.9​​-10). Are audiences to believe that a pleasant night’s sleep could erase the memory of filicide? Far too often, the plot mechanics demand that characters act irrationally, without any semblance of human reason. Why would Titus mindlessly obey a messenger who asks him to slice off his hand? Why would Tamora assume that anyone—even a madman—would immediately believe her absurd “allegorical” ruse? And how could Saturninus turn his conjugal affections from Lavinia to Tamora within a few seconds of performance time? This last point is so absurd that Lucy Bailey’s 2014 Globe production plays Saturninus’s romantic fickleness for broad comedy. Here, the emperor is a horny fop who will crown Tamora queen just to get her into bed. The performance highlights Saturninus’s prancing vanity, and the Globe audience (in the video record of the performance) responds with approving, if nervous, laughter.18 Though garishly stylized, Taymor’s Titus never resorts to buffoonery to resolve the play’s tonal contradictions and dramatic weaknesses. Grotesque farce—and the nervous laughter it produces—can neither legitimize nor explain away the play’s bathos. While some (like Bloom) might treat Titus Andronicus as a horror-comedy, the play is, in fact, not terribly funny. Shakespeare’s double entendres are as obvious today as they were in the 1590s, and the phallic wordplay between Tamora’s sons never rises above sitcom banter. The scene in which Titus is visited by Tamora’s “allegories” is simply embarrassing, an inane conceit beneath Shakespeare’s talents. Much to the dismay of Dr. Johnson, the play was popular in its time, but we cannot know whether the average seventeenth-century spectator treated it as a violent farce, a tragicomedy, or a tragedy with ancillary comic interruptions. If, as Susan Sontag suggests, the distinction between comedy and tragedy turns on the objectivity of one’s perspective, not on the subject matter,19 Taymor never draws the audience into intimate and thus tragic identification with Titus. Nor does she truly engender the disinterested detachment of comedy. Rather, her sense of fantasy suppresses the drama’s farce, mutes the cartoonish violence, and instead fosters an intimate identification with Young Lucius, a nontragic figure who embodies an anachronistic hope for individualistic self-determination in the film’s coda. Taymor is not the only director to instantiate a symbolic perspective within the person of Young Lucius. In Jane Howell’s acclaimed 1985 BBC production, Titus’s adolescent grandson, speechless until the drama’s midpoint, is ever-present as a silent spectator, witnessing the atrocities as uncomprehendingly as a contemporary audience might. In Howell’s set-bound production, Young Lucius wears anachronistically modern spectacles, as if to emphasize his witness to the violent “spectacle” in which eventually he will participate and become complicit. This is not necessarily to suggest that Taymor has

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borrowed from Howell. Rather, the symbolization of Young Lucius, first as a spectator of and then as a participant in Titus’s schemes, might irresistibly reflect the position of contemporary audiences, who likewise become complicit in violence they might either relish or reject. Taymor’s version begins with Young Lucius as an addled boy awash in twentieth-century pop culture, playing war in a 1950s-era American kitchen where a TV blares the cartoonish brutality of Popeye. Suddenly, real violence intervenes. Bombs explode outside the kitchen window, and Young Lucius takes cover under a table. A body-armored soldier bursts into the kitchen, snatches Young Lucius, and trans-temporally spirits him up a flight of stairs into a quasi-Roman setting, where WWI-era tanks and motorcycles (rather than chariots) parade through a coliseum. The postmodernist mise-en-scène established, Act I proceeds—but where most directors mine the scenario for bloody tragicomedy, Taymor suppresses the farcical elements in favor of the fantastical semi-humanity that, in her stage works, is embodied by puppetry and non-Western ritualism. At times, this semi-humanity is blatant, from the puppet-like marching of centurions encased in stony armor to the fascistic monumentalism of sets that dwarf individual characters. These inhuman qualities become more pointed when Titus’s fallen sons are entombed. The bodies are filed away to the tune of composer Elliot Goldenthal’s clockwork ostinato beats: the corpses become cogs in a ritualistic machine as unsentimental as Titus himself. Elsewhere, the implied inhumanity ambiguously signals a potential for rehumanization. For instance, in a stylized tableau, the statuesque centurions, caked in mud, wash under a waterfall. As the pouring water gradually denudes them, they are not only purified but also revivified: flesh-and-blood humanity emerges from contrived uncanniness, at least for the moment. In the film’s coda, it is Young Lucius who (re)embodies this potential for rehumanization on a grand scale, as the entire narrative is recast in a humane glow. Much of the film’s fantastic inhumanity is anchored in Anthony Hopkins’s stony, rather monotonous turn as Titus. Far removed from the measured expressiveness of Trevor Peacock’s Titus in Howell’s production, Hopkins suppresses the prosaic cadences and emotive dynamics typical of Shakespeare’s “music.” Hopkins’s acclaimed turn as Othello onstage—and even his manic turn in Richard Attenborough’s Magic (1978)—ably demonstrates his emotional range; one can only conclude the impassiveness of his Titus is a calculated choice. Notably, Hopkins’s coldhearted delivery recalls and reembodies the iciness of his Hannibal Lecter in Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (1991). As Emma French observes, posters and ad campaigns for Titus, in fact, presented Hopkins “in a manner that insistently recalls his role” as Lecter, apparently a bid to commercialize a Shakespearean adaptation that, like Demme’s thriller, involves cannibalistic themes.20 Only in a

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few moments does Hopkins emote humanly—for instance, when he learns “to wrest an alphabet” (III​.ii​​.44) from the mute Lavinia’s (Laura Fraser) signs and gestures, or when he, grieving, erupts at Young Lucius for killing a helpless fly. When Young Lucius explains that he, as an Andronici, is obliged to smite (black) creatures reminiscent of Aaron, Hopkins’s Titus becomes momentarily pacific and avuncular. Importantly, it is Marcus (Colm Feore), the play’s voice of reason, who kills the black fly in Shakespeare’s original text. Slyly altering the text, Taymor has Young Lucius kill the fly, preparing an ending that will demonstrate his progression from cruel henchman to an autonomous, compassionate individual. Taymor’s handling of Lavinia’s rape crystallizes her style of humanist inhumanity. The dramatic and emotional centerpiece of every production of Titus Andronicus is Lavinia’s pathetic (perhaps bathetic) re-entrance onto the stage, where she appears dismembered and blood-soaked after her offstage assault. Perhaps no character in all English literature embodies more acutely the notion of senseless victimhood. The pathos is compounded by the way in which Lavinia had previously implored Tamora (Jessica Lange) to kill her rather than allow Chiron (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) and Demetrius (Matthew Rhys) to rape her: “’Tis present death I beg . . . O, keep me from their worse-than-killing lust . . . Do this, and be a charitable murderer” (II​.iii​.​173 . . . 178). Most stage productions frame the aftermath of Lavinia’s rape not only as a moment of shock but as a rare point of repose amid the machinated violence. Not merely a crime of passion, Lavinia’s rape is an act of calculated revenge. Tamora shames her sons into accosting Lavinia (“The worse to her, the better loved of me,” II​.iii​.​167), and they amplify the disgrace by savaging her atop the fresh corpse of Bassianus (James Frain) (“Make his dead trunk pillow to our lust,” says Chiron, II​.iii​.​130). The scene poses a conundrum for directors who approach the play tragicomically. Despite its excessiveness, the sequence itself is essentially tragic, not tragicomic. For this scene, even the most irreverent productions would convey tragicomic affects through juxtaposition rather than synthesis—it is nearly impossible to imagine the moment synthesized with farce or burlesque. Even the “foppish” Globe production (mentioned above) plays this scene straight, as gory sentimentality awkwardly abuts (but never fuses with) the preceding comedy. Our sense of the tragicomic thus has an implicit and perhaps conservative moral dimension. An outrageous, foolhardy, or improbable death can be rendered tragicomic easily enough, but a savage rape retains its indissolubly tragic aura. In The Empty Space, Peter Brook poses a scenario that, though theoretical, captures the problem at hand: A girl, raped, walks on to a stage in tears—and if her acting touches us sufficiently, we automatically accept the implied conclusion that she is a victim

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and an unfortunate one. But suppose a clown were to follow her, mimicking her tears, and suppose by his talent he succeeds in making us laugh. His mockery destroys our first response. Then where do our sympathies go? The truth of her character, the validity of her position, are both put into question by the clown, and at the same time our own easy sentimentality is exposed.21

Brook highlights the sentimentality underlying the tragicomic problem. The murders, rapes, and bloodshed audiences associate with tragedy are predesigned to elicit sentimental responses. From sentimentality, audiences proceed to thematic conclusions: Lavinia’s agonized body, in its dismembered state, speaks (if mutely) to how easily familial and social fabrics can be torn asunder. For the ancient Greeks, sparagmos—the ritualistic, often anthropophagous tearing of the flesh—was a religio-dramatic rite of consumption and rebirth. For secular (or monotheistic) audiences, however, sparagmos can be little more than sensual shock, even if enacted with funereal or ecstatic pretensions. Directors who stage the play’s cannibalistic finale in the most horrific manner possible attempt to exceed tragic sentimentality only through that very excessiveness, through the over-quantification of shocks. But excess alone does not guarantee that a production will overcome the pathetic nature of tragic bloodshed. Treating the drama’s violence through a lens of Felliniesque fantasy, Taymor overcomes the sentimentality to which even tragicomic productions are susceptible. Many killings, such as those of Mutius and the nurse, are bloodless, denying easy catharses of gore, while the gruesome ones are unrealistic and bizarre, defying conventional pathos. Treating as fantasy the violence most directors treat as either horror or comedy, Taymor refuses the giddy farce many have claimed is embedded in the text.22 Taymor’s presentation of Lavinia’s rape is a key example. Rather than treat the episode with humanistic pathos, the filmmaker presents Lavinia much like one of her signature puppets. She appears motionless (and handless) atop a tree stub. Branches have been inserted into her arm stumps as if to literalize the metaphor of Marcus’s speech when he stumbles across her: “What stern, ungentle hands have lopped and hewed and made thy body bare of her two branches?” (II​.iv​​.17–18) Taymor’s presentation conveys no “trauma” in any realistic sense. As the humiliating tree branches miraculously cauterize Lavinia’s wounds, she stands upright, blood trickling from her mouth in slow motion. The avant-garde pose seems more suitable for a glib album cover than Elizabethan tragedy. More to the point, the fantastic imagery is spatiotemporally removed from the action proper, much as dance numbers transcend spatial and diegetic logic in the classical Hollywood musical. As such, the scene connotes and describes tragedy but stands outside of textual reality. The following scene continues the allusion to Taymor’s

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puppetry in an equally masochistic fashion. In a sequence invented by Taymor, Young Lucius visits an icon craftsman who fashions wooden hands for Lavinia—an artificial answer to her fantastically branched arm stumps. Perversely, Lavinia becomes something less than a puppet: her wooden hands are immobile and impotent, unable to handle even tableware. She is subhuman, destined to be euthanized by Titus’s hand. Notably, her female sub-humanity is distinct from the potentially agentic semi-humanity of the mud-caked soldiers from the film’s opening, who are revivified with nothing more than a waterfall. Elsewhere, Taymor introduces fantasy through extradiegetic interludes she calls “Penny Arcade Nightmares.”23 While the director intends these “nightmares” to provide glimpses of “the inner landscapes” of characters’ psyches,24 these sequences provide only exterior symbolizations of the dramatic action, rather than insights into characters’ interior lives. These “nightmares” are (arguably) a miscalculation on Taymor’s part: the drama’s pre-psychological characters have no interiorities to excavate. In one surreal montage, Lavinia transforms into a deer and Chiron and Demetrius turn into pouncing tigers, who leap at her as she stands atop a pedestal (rather than a tree stump). While tigers figure prominently in Shakespeare’s text as symbols of savagery, envisioning rapists as hunters and victims as deer hardly adds profound insight. In an earlier nightmare, spectral images of Titus and Tamora face one another in profile, while Tamora’s son Alarbus dies amid superimposed flames. Multiplying cherubs then appear to trumpet the appearance of a sacrificial altar marked “Mutius.” Again, Taymor’s surreal interlude provides a rather redundant commentary. There is no need to reiterate symbolically the notion that sons are sacrificed on the altars of patriarchs; the theme is already apparent, and pseudopsychological music-video imagery adds little. Nevertheless, these nonintegral inserts, existing beyond the diegesis, signal an alternative to standard approaches to Titus Andronicus, which attempt to integrally resolve the drama’s tragic-comedy dialectic. In the play’s infamous finale, the fantasy reaches a fever pitch, yet Taymor’s Felliniesque treatment dilutes the violence that most directors would amplify. The scene returns to the mid-twentieth-century American kitchen from which Young Lucius was first abducted in the opening scene. Titus’s steaming human pastries cool on the window sill, as if they were all-American apple pies (probably Taymor’s critique of the violence beneath mythic American nationalism). The film cuts to a toque-topped Titus entering a dining room, where Tamora and Saturninus await unsuspecting. Because Shakespeare indicates that Titus should arrive in chef’s attire, the scene unavoidably broaches burlesque, though Taymor’s fanciful handling of the violence is neither strictly comic nor tragic. Whereas Shakespeare indicates the characters merely stab one another, Taymor has Saturninus bite the

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candles off a candelabra and impale Titus with the steel tines. The general’s son then jams a long spoon down Saturninus’s esophagus (parodying the removal of Lavinia’s tongue), yet without a trace of blood. In computer-generated slow motion, the emperor is finished with a bullet to the face (again, surprisingly bloodlessly), at which point the ghastly dinner table and the corpses around it magically teleport to the opening scene’s coliseum. From the stands, an assembled crowd—the civitas—stares aghast at the carnage. Whereas Young Lucius had served the role of innocent spectator, now the Roman people judgmentally spectate the animalistic violence their leaders wreak. As “society” looks on, Taymor plays her trump card, rewriting Shakespeare’s ending. The film retains Marcus’s “all’s well that ends well” oration, which even an audience of Elizabethan rowdies would have seen as a stale convention. As in the original, Aaron is crucified and buried. In a departure from the original, Young Lucius liberates Aaron’s mixed-race infant from his cage, carrying him from the coliseum and toward a golden horizon as Goldenthal’s score imitates the strains of Samuel Barber. As Young Lucius cradles Aaron’s child in his arms, the sun rises, and the film ends on a freeze frame that portends more multicultural futures. Rebuking a world—at once Roman and Christian—that renders Aaron subaltern and his child illegitimate, Taymor provides an ecumenical ending that liberates Aaron’s child from a history for which he bears no responsibility. Just as she adds a sanguine coda to a sanguinary tragedy, so does Taymor judiciously cut lines that tie Young Lucius to a decadent history. As Pizzato observes, Taymor excises Young Lucius’s final, tender speech to Titus: “O grandsire, grandsire! Ev’n with all my heart / Would I were dead so you did live again!” (Shakespeare V.iii.174–75). The meaning of the omission is clear: “Instead of the next generation being bound to that vengeful ghost,” Young Lucius must free himself from Titus, rebuking the filial sacrifice and impious pietas that Titus signifies.25 Young Lucius must also overcome the poisonous prejudice baked into his grandfatherly relationship: he cannot remain the boy who, in Taymor’s tweaked version, killed a fly because its blackness reminded him of Aaron. Her postmodernist posturing aside, Taymor proposes a basically Romantic vision that hinges upon the rebirthed innocence of a child—a notion that belongs neither to ancient Rome nor to Elizabethan England but to post–Enlightenment Europe. The pivot to a fantasized yet more “relatable” Romantic subjectivity reconceptualizes the pseudo-transcendental qualities that Brook ascribes to the Holy Theater. Rather than Taymor’s object-related, dehumanized world signifying a retreat from Romantic ideals, her mise-en-scène allows Young Lucius to emancipate his generation (signified by Aaron’s child) from the tragic aesthetics his patriarchal ancestors conflate with state politics.

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CONCLUSION: TRAGICOMEDY AS A DIALECTICAL PROBLEM If the film’s romantic revisionism makes Titus “relevant” for multicultural, anti-racist audiences, it also transfers the dialectical tension from the tragiccomic paradox inherent in the play to a new inflection point at the drama’s end, where Shakespeare’s original text stands dialectically against an incongruously humanistic coda. (Because Taymor so dilutes the play’s farcical elements with auteurist fantasy, the fantasy overtakes the farce; what remains is mostly tragic, albeit camouflaged under a veil of style.) The disjunction between comic and tragic tones that most adaptations attempt to either resolve or exacerbate becomes a tension between the archaic revenge tragedy that Young Lucius rejects and the futuric sunrise that awaits him. That Young Lucius now possesses a historical consciousness means that he rejects two overlapping histories of oppression: the stifling Roman pietas of the setting and the colonialist Elizabethan mores that Shakespeare maps on top of the drama’s action. Those who adhere to (orthodox) Hegelian solutions might accuse Taymor of cheating her ending, counterfeiting a totalized resolution that exceeds the text’s contradictions. Doubtless, some might argue that the play’s tonal contradictions should neither be exceeded nor be resolved, even in the name of humane or progressive revisionism. In the best of Shakespeare, Brook argues, the Rough Theater (the comic and sensual) and the Holy Theater (the Artaudian and transcendental) exist adjacently, in unsynthesized negativity. “It is through the unreconciled opposition of Rough and Holy,” Brook says, “through an atonal screech of absolutely unsympathetic keys” that audiences experience Shakespeare’s “disturbing and . . . unforgettable impressions.”26 Those who seek to dispel Shakespearean atonalities raise ideological as well as aesthetic problems, particularly in a big-budget film that seeks commercial appeal. Taymor’s appended coda proposes a harmonious solution to the drama’s comic-tragic dialectic not by doing the oppositional work demanded of dialecticism but by rewriting Shakespeare’s final act under the aegis of auteurist license. Brook’s argument that the Rough and Holy should exist in unresolved tension—or in a tension resolvable only in the minds of audiences—finds ideological support in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics (1966). Adorno goes to lengths to reject the preordained contrivances of Hegelian synthesis. So historically ingrained is the mandate to synthesize and achieve resolution, Adorno argues, that we overlook the vital atonalities that arise from unconjugated antitheses. In the worst-case scenarios, the mandate to resolve for the mere sake of positivity becomes a counterfeit solution, a homogenized tonality that denies the reality of opposites that do not warrant historical

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reconciliation.27 By appending to Titus Andronicus an open-ended sunrise, Taymor offers a variation on this problem, indefinitely deferring—rather than synthesizing—the ramifications of the play’s oppositions of tragedy and comedy. The director can justify this approach through her self-professed artificiality: because she is a “theatrical” auteur practiced in alchemical stage techniques, she can alchemize Shakespeare’s ending, turning desultory closure into shining optimism. But one should recall Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of stylization as a means of artificial homogenization: “a style might possibly be called artificial if it had been imposed from outside against the resistance of the intrinsic tendencies of form.”28 Taymor’s “feel-good” revisionism is precisely an imposition against the possibility of resisting the synthesis proposed by the contradictorily comic and tragic elements “intrinsic” to Titus Andronicus’ form. The audience might wonder whether—or to what degree—the “feel-good” addendum can be attributed to the homogenizing demands of commercialism or to Taymor’s authentic, undiluted style. Underpinning the critical problem addressed by Brook and Adorno is the historicization of tragicomedy, a construct that, though known to the Greeks, accrued existentialistic currency in the twentieth century, especially after the Holocaust. Of course, tragicomedy is multifarious and multiform, but one might venture about the tragicomic paradox two general premises that are themselves paradoxical. On the one hand, the form’s tragic and comic elements apparently accentuate one another and help bring each other into being rather than canceling each other out or creating a sterile synthesis. On the other, the common understanding of tragicomedy assumes that the universality of absurdity, in the Sartrean sense, overrides any individualistic pretenses to tragedy. An atheistic, fateless, and unheroic society can no longer recognize a “tragic downfall” as an intellectually legitimate idea. Because tragedy is so historically frail a construct, it collapses under the weight of Sartrean absurdity. Tragicomedy, therefore, might simply be satire in disguise, an essentially comic presentation of tragedy rather than a form in which comedy and tragedy, carrying more or less equal weight, beg for synthesis. Such a thesis was proposed by Friedrich Dürrenmatt in his 1970 translation cum readaptation of Titus Andronicus. Rather than treat the play’s apparent comic and tragic elements as antipodes to resolve, Dürrenmatt refused to recognize Titus’s downfall as tragic, at least in the traditional sense. Instead, he transformed the nature of the comic element, turning Shakespeare’s moments of burlesque into an all-embracing satire. Dürrenmatt not only omits much of Lavinia’s rape, which even tragicomic productions sentimentalize, but he also, more importantly, presents Titus’s murderous devotion to the state as a kind of fascism. As Lukas Erne argues, Dürrenmatt’s Titus “grotesquely clings to his flawed beliefs about Rome, the ‘fatherland,’ and . . . the ‘justice’ meted out by those in power.”29 Dürrenmatt’s rewrite ridicules not the tragic

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patriarch’s downfall per se but the pseudo-Apollonian honor that underwrites his alleged virtue. Many adaptations of Titus Andronicus implicitly ask whether Titus is a Stoic man undone by absurd consequences or an absurd man undone by Roman pretensions to Stoicism. Taymor’s conclusion puts aside this intratextual question to pose extratextual, theoretical questions. Does the sunrise into which Young Lucius ventures actually offer autonomous, post-tragic futures? Does Young Lucius stand before an ahistorical realm as fantastic as the spaces that encompass Lavinia’s rape or Taymor’s music-video nightmares, or does the sunrise connect to viable, actionable histories? Will the future into which Young Lucius steps inexorably repeat the histories that transformed ancient tragedy into contemporary tragicomedy? Such questions remain relevant, since the rising sun does not announce a revelation that stands beyond dialectical history. Rather than negating the possibility of future dialectical (op)positions, the rising sun raises new objections. Possibly, the image implies that Young Lucius will cast aside the pietas that Dürrenmatt finds ludicrous, just as audiences might one day mature beyond the narrowly contrived aesthetics of revenge tragedy. The shattering sunrise thus contains Julie Taymor’s own sparagmos, not a ritualistic ripping of helpless flesh but a tearing apart of Shakespeare’s bloody text, construing ambivalent meanings where old ones lay dead.

NOTES 1. Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt Brace Janovich, 1970), 42. 2. Walter Kerr, Tragedy and Comedy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), 25. 3. Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, 3rd edn. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 31. 4. Ibid. 5. Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1968), 86. Bloom affirms, “I can concede no intrinsic value to Titus Andronicus . . . I don’t think I could see the play again unless Mel Brooks directed it, with his company of zanies.” 6. Samuel Johnson, Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies, ed. Arthur Sherbo. Project Gutenberg. Ebook #15556, 2005, https://www​.gutenberg​.org​/cache​/ epub​/15566​/pg15566​-images​.html. Accessed on April 2, 2023. 7. According to some scholars, Titus Andronicus was based on an earlier, now lost Titus Andronicus written by Peele alone. Perhaps the play’s cruder elements can be chalked up to Peele, reportedly “a haunter of taverns, a dangler after

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courtesans, and a common cheat.” See Thomas Marc Parrott and Robert Hamilton Ball, A Short View of Elizabethan Drama (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 68. 8. Victor Kiernan, Shakespeare: Poet and Citizen (London: Verso, 1993), 134. 9. Qiping Xu, “Directing Titus Andronicus in China,” in Titus Andronicus: Critical Essays, 2nd edn., ed. Philip C. Kolin (New York: Routledge, 2015), 441. 10. Daniel Scuro, “Titus Andronicus: A Crimson-Flushed Stage!,” in Titus Andronicus: Critical Essays, 2nd edn., ed. Philip C. Kolin (New York: Routledge, 2015), 403. 11. Blanche McIntyre, Titus Andronicus. The Royal Shakespeare Company, 2017. “Interview with Blanche McIntyre” included as supplementary video material. 12. Ibid. 13. Ralph Berry, On Directing Shakespeare (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1989), 67. 14. Mark Pizzato, Ghosts of Theatre and Cinema in the Brain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 69. 15. Peter Brook, The Empty Space (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), 6–7, 78–79. 16. George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 304. 17. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), 33. 18. In truth, the production’s foppery is crude and unfunny; probably, the audience foreknowingly responds not to actual wit but to the play’s reputation as a semi-farce. 19. Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp’,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), 288. As Sontag famously remarked, “If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.” 20. Emma French, Selling Shakespeare to Hollywood (Hertfordshire: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2006), 44. 21. Brook, The Empty Space, 87. 22. Tragical farce intervenes only when the heads of Titus’s sons are delivered by a clown in a carnival wagon, at which point Goldenthal’s score echoes the modish jesting of Michael Nyman and Danny Elfman. One gets the impression that Taymor inserts a bit of low farce to remind audiences that Titus Andronicus should be taken with a few grains of salt. 23. Pizzato, Ghosts of Theatre and Cinema in the Brain, 75. 24. Ibid., 84. 25. Ibid., 95. 26. Brook, The Empty Space, 105. 27. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 4–8. 28. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 102.

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29. Lukas Erne, “Lamentable tragedy or black comedy?: Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s adaptation of Titus Andronicus,” in World-Wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance, ed. Sonia Massai (New York: Routledge, 2005), 92.

REFERENCES Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E.B. Ashton. New York: Routledge, 2004. Arendt, Hannah. On Violence. New York: Harcourt Brace Janovich, 1970. Berry, Ralph. On Directing Shakespeare. New York: Viking Press, 2004. Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Penguin Putnam, 1968. Brook, Peter. The Empty Space. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968. Dollimore, Jonathan. Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, 3rd edn. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Erne, Lukas. “Lamentable Tragedy or Black Comedy?: Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s Adaptation of Titus Andronicus.” In World-Wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance, edited by Sonia Massai, 88–94. New York: Routledge, 2005. French, Emma. Selling Shakespeare to Hollywood. Hertfordshire: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2006. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Johnson, Samuel. Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies, edited by Arthur Sherbo. Project Gutenberg. Ebook #15556, 2005, https://www​ .gutenberg​ .org​ / cache​/epub​/15566​/pg15566​-images​.html. Kerr, Walter. Tragedy and Comedy. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967. Kiernan, Victor. Shakespeare: Poet and Citizen. London: Verso, 1993. McIntyre, Blanche. Titus Andronicus. The Royal Shakespeare Company, 2017. “Interview with Blanche McIntyre” is included as supplementary video material. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, 1967. Parrott, Thomas Marc and Robert Hamilton Ball. A Short View of Elizabethan Drama. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958. Pizzato, Mark. Ghosts of Theatre and Cinema in the Brain. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Scuro, Daniel. “Titus Andronicus: A Crimson-Flushed Stage!” In Titus Andronicus: Critical Essays, 2nd edn., edited by Philip C. Kolin, 399-410. New York: Routledge, 2015. Shakespeare, William. Titus Andronicus, edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005.

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Sontag, Susan. “Notes on ‘Camp’.” In Against Interpretation and Other Essays, 275–92. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966. Steiner, George. The Death of Tragedy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Titus. Directed by Julie Taymor. USA/Italy/UK: Fox Searchlight Pictures, 1999. Titus Andronicus. Directed by Jane Howell. UK: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1985. Titus Andronicus. Directed by Lucy Bailey. UK: Shakespeare’s Globe, 2014. Titus Andronicus. Directed by Blanche McIntyre. UK: The Royal Shakespeare Company, 2017. Xu, Qiping. “Directing Titus Andronicus in China.” In Titus Andronicus: Critical Essays, 2nd edn., edited by Philip C. Kolin, 441–50. New York: Routledge, 2015.

Chapter 4

Across the Universe How Political Mood Shapes Viewers’ Choices and Box Office Success Shawn Williams

Across the Universe (2007) had everything to be a very successful film as it featured some of the most influential music of the previous half-century, it included cameo performances by bankable musicians, and it was cowritten and directed by Julie Taymor, a multi-Tony Award winner and Oscar nominee whose previous efforts included the immensely profitable stage production of The Lion King and Selma Hayek’s award-winning movie Frida (2002). Additionally, Across the Universe’s director and cast were given the full press treatment, appearing on popular talk shows such as Good Morning America, Charlie Rose and The Oprah Winfrey Show (where Oprah declared the film left her “in awe”). RogerEbert​.c​om gave it a 4-star rating, proclaiming it “joyous” and among the best of the year.1 However, Across the Universe was a reported financial disappointment. The film ultimately finished 154th in the 2007 global box office, making back less than two-thirds of its $45,000,000 budget. At the U.S. domestic box office, it came to be just 101st and appeared on a mere 964 screens (by comparison, the top thirty films released in the United States that year were all screened on at least 3000). Over the course of a few months, the production had gone from being one of the year’s most anticipated films to being just another of the dozens of films that underperformed their way into the dustbin of cinematic history—or so it seemed. Now, over 15 years after its release, Taymor’s Across the Universe has emerged as a cult classic. By the end of 2022, the film held an 82 percent audience score on RottenTomatoes​.c​ om against a paltry 53 percent professional reviewer opinion.2 The key difference: while most of the 180 professional reviews were written contemporaneously to the film’s release, most of the more than 250,000 audience scores were posted years later. A new generation of filmgoers has met the film on 77

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their own terms, without the media hype. More importantly, they have met the movie in a different media reality. This chapter argues that Across the Universe provides an interesting case study of the consequences of an artist’s vision becoming disconnected from the period within which it is produced. The chapter begins by first discussing the movie itself and how Taymor’s ambitious work looked backward in an effort to look forward. It looked backward by attempting to harness the music of the Beatles and the events of the 1960s while looking forward to the next generation of moviegoers. The chapter concludes by examining the impact of the “9/11 Effect” and how, by not adapting to it, Across the Universe (AtU) was doomed to box office failure before it was released. Major events such as 9/11 fundamentally shift audience tastes. The years after 9/11, and the collective choices Americans made during them, fundamentally changed the nation’s cinematic tastes. As will be demonstrated, this environment rewarded simplicity, fantastical distraction, and art that reinforced the justness of wars. It also rewarded realism, but only when that realism was directed toward providing a simplified version of contemporary truth. What it did not reward, and what contemporary viewers have come to appreciate, is the dream-like inauthenticity that Taymor used to deliver a message about the complexity of consequences.

ACROSS THE JUKEBOX MUSICAL Across the Universe was as ambitious and risky a project as any that Taymor has attempted. The film patterns itself after previous “jukebox musicals” by adapting existing songs instead of creating an original musical score. The filmmaker adapts the music of the British rock band the Beatles, among the most revered bands in history, into a unique and original vision. Familiar lyrics motivate character choices; familiar tunes become key to establishing the film’s context and mood. Using existing music in this way is not a new approach, but Taymor used it in what may be the riskiest way possible. Some of the best and earliest examples of the jukebox musical genre were little more than long music videos designed to promote album sales. Since their success is ultimately measured by records sold and not tickets, production companies typically see them as relatively low financial risks. This often results in low quality but can also create opportunities for the musical group to explore other forms of artistic expression.3 A second type of jukebox musical is biopics featuring the music of the featured artist or act. This version can be particularly profitable on both stage and screen since it attracts a preexisting audience already familiar with the music or artist.4 Across the Universe falls into a third, and riskiest, category. Taymor

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did not simply “borrow” the songs of the Beatles. She, along with her cowriters Dick Clement, Ian La Frenais and Tom Stoppard, reframed them in ways unintended by the original artists. This effort goes beyond a simple retelling or reperformance of an album or a few borrowed songs. Rather, they sought to draw songs that originally stood alone into a narrative that did not previously exist.5 The allure of the jukebox musical is obvious. Creating and marketing entirely original content requires establishing a new audience with no experience or relationship with the piece. Jukebox musicals overcome this problem. Audiences are drawn to this genre by their preexisting love for the artist and their work and a curiosity of how music that they love might be remade into a new experience. This familiarity or excitement has a tremendous upside in that the fans may be more likely to buy tickets to these shows than those with which they are unfamiliar. But, as Taymor discovered with Across the Universe, it can also have a potential downside if the audience feels that the new work has failed to appropriately honor the source material or if it moves so far from the original. Specific scenes will be discussed later, but a brief overview of the film’s structure is illustrative. The story centers around a brother, Max (Joe Anderson), after Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, and his sister Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood), as they attempt to navigate the height of the Vietnam War era. They come from an upper-middle-class American family but are forced to grow up when confronted by the realities their parents have tried to protect them from. They sing their way into and out of drug-induced adventures and meet a cast of characters who, like themselves, borrow their names from the titles of Beatles hits. Some of their friends are stereotypes of individuals important to the period, including a Janis-Joplinesque rock singer named Sadie (Dana Fuchs) and the loner Jimi Hendrix knock-off called Jo Jo (Martin Luther McCoy). Max is shipped off to war, Lucy (in the Sky with Diamonds) falls in love with her brother’s best friend Jude (Jim Sturgess), a Brit from Liverpool, and all of the relationships in the film are at various points ripped apart by the typical 1960s American combination of bigotry, war radicalism, and greed. The film ends with the entire cast getting back together for a rooftop concert, where they perform “Don’t Let Me Down” and “All You Need Is Love.” In an alternative-ending throwback to the infamous 1969 Beatles performance, the police fail to break up the concert once they realize that “love is all you need.” The movie ends with Lucy standing above them all, with the sky as the backdrop. The credits roll to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” along, apparently, with the eyes of much of the film’s contemporary audience.

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INITIAL RECEPTION The secret to a strong box office opening is to generate excitement for a title before its release. Columbia Pictures certainly went to considerable effort to attempt to draw attention to the film. Members of the cast and crew appeared across the spectrum of the entertainment industry. Then NPR-darling Charlie Rose invited Taymor to his round table to discuss the film’s reviews.6 Oprah Winfrey, whose endorsements created the careers of entertainers from James Blunt to Dr. Oz, went one step further by ending her Taymor interview with performances from members of the movie’s ensemble.7 A team of documentarians captured the filming process from start to finish and produced a behindthe-scenes expose that included in-depth interviews with major players.8 It did not work. As production ended in 2006, test audiences voiced concerns about AtU’s length and pacing. Joe Roth, chairman of production company Revolution Studios, responded to these criticisms by creating and screening a shortened, recut version that eliminated much of the early political overtone in the film.9 Taymor fought back, arguing that the deleted content was necessary to provide emotional context to later scenes. She ultimately won the argument and succeeded in restoring most of the cuts, but the damage had already been done. The extended editing process pushed the movie back from its intended 2006 launch into late September 2007. News of the conflict over the edit spilled into the press, potentially poisoning initial reactions from reviewers. Unsurprisingly, these initial reviews were largely not positive. Detractors argued that the film was poorly written and poorly executed. Some of these complaints focused on Taymor’s casting. Others specifically focused on the effect of having their favorite Beatles tunes remade to suit actors with little musical background and adapted into contexts separated from the Beatles. Reviewers also parroted early concerns about the length and direction of the plot. Some claimed the story was underdeveloped or found plot devices superficial, two-dimensional, and predictable.10 Peter Hartlaub went so far as to call the film “silly,” suggesting it was out of touch with the reality of the 1960s time period within which it is set.11 Many reviewers specifically directed their objections to the choices that Taymor acknowledges as key to her vision for the film. In interviews, the director has identified these bits of originality as strengths of the film. She has repeatedly stated that her goal was to focus attention on the plot by building a primary ensemble of largely unknown actors, supported by performance stars including Bono and Joe Cocker. She has also frequently discussed the curation of the expansive Beatles catalog and its adaptation to fit the storyline and performers as key to her artistic achievement.

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Columbia Pictures premiered the film at the Toronto Film Festival on September 14, 2007. Perhaps out of fear of the effects of the negative press, it slowly opened the film over the next month until it ultimately reached a limited release of just 964 screens on October 12, 2007. The hope, it seemed at the time, was that the promotion campaign would help fill the limited number of theaters and that “real” audiences would fall in love with the production once they had a chance to see it for themselves. But, unfortunately, that did not happen. Additionally, the drawn-out nature of the release also meant that the movie’s success never became a story in and of itself, which means discussion of the film never broke into the wider media. The movie never performed better than eighth in weekly ticket sales. Based on these depressed sales and overall critics’ responses, one might assume that the production would, like so many others, simply have faded away from relevance. Interestingly, even at the time of its lackluster release, there were those who argued for Across the Universe’s greatness. Roger Ebert, the Chicago Sun-Times reviewer considered among the period’s most influential and highly respected, delivered to the film one of the most glowing reviews of his career. Where some called it silly, he praised it as “bold, beautiful, visually enchanting.”12 Where others complained of poor editing and bad acting, he praised the film’s “cutting-edge visual techniques, heart-warming performances.”13 The same movie some derided as pointless and meandering, he considered it to be “not political, which means it’s political to its core.”14 He was not alone. While reviewer Ryan Dembinsky titled his review “Worst Movie Ever” and claimed he walked out before the film ended,15 Stephen Holden joined Ebert in declaring the production as one of the ten best motion pictures of the year.16 The movie went on to receive a number of nominations, including the Golden Globes. Other nominations included Academy Awards—Best Achievement in Costume Design, Golden Globes, Golden Globe, USA—Best Motion Picture—Musical or Comedy at Grammy Awards—Best Compilation Soundtrack Album for Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media.17 The bipolarity of the response to Across the Universe, in particular, and to the work of Taymor, in general, begs a lot of questions. How is it possible that a film reviewed so poorly by many would simultaneously be so positively received by some of the United States’ most widely read critics? How can a movie largely ignored by the American mass audience so capture the imagination of members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association as to be considered one of the year’s best? What does this mixed reception say about Taymor’s legacy as a movie director? It is the search for the answers to these questions that the balance of this chapter turns.

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EXPLAINING THE TRANSFORMATION In the years since its release, a number of explanations have been given for Across the Universe’s initial failure. Anne Cohen’s 2020 retrospective of the film provides an excellent example of a review that focuses too closely on the biases of professional reviewers. In a piece that titularly asks, “So Why Can’t Julie Taymor Get Any Respect?”,18 Cohen recounts both the excitement of the publicity around AtU’s original release and her own love for the film. She then seeks to explain why a movie she loved fell so flat with audiences. Her argument can be distilled to the position that the industry as a whole did not (and does not?) respect Taymor as an artist and, therefore, did not approach her work with the same sort of open-mindedness as elite reviews such as Ebert. She provides two explanations for the disrespect thesis, neither of which withstands much interrogation. First, she argues that Taymor had been pigeonholed as a stage director by the movie industry. It is possible this is true for a few reviewers, but even she acknowledges it lacks generality. AtU was not Taymor’s first theatrical release. Her 2002 Frida was well-received and widely acclaimed by the movie industry. It received six Academy Award nominations and was nominated for four British Academy Film Awards, winning two and one, respectively. It also appeared on several Top 10 Lists. Selma Hayek, who makes a cameo appearance in AtU, was nominated in the best actress category by both of these prestigious academies. Several of Taymor’s other films also received critical acclaim. It seems implausible that a person picked to lead a project based on their previous film successes would suddenly be pigeonholed in the way suggested. Most of Cohen’s evaluation focuses on her second thesis that gender bias played a key role in how reviewers evaluate Taymor’s work. Cohen suggests that women are judged more harshly than their male counterparts and given less “benefit of the doubt” for making bold or controversial choices. By placing Taymor front-and-center in the marketing strategy, Columbia Pictures inadvertently distracted viewers from the quality of the film. Cohen recounts a quote from Taymor herself, suggesting that taking the lyrics of a white, British rock group and placing them into “female mouths” had a disconcerting effect on reviewers. Contemporary reviewers of the age failing to appreciate this approach was, in and of itself, a political statement that added missed depth to the film. This problem was compounded by the tension created over the final edit between the male-dominated studio leadership and Taymor’s more feminine artistic vision. It is plausible gender played a role for some reviewers. At the same time, it would seem that Taymor’s gender should have played a role throughout her career and not just on this project. Period-piece biopics about

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gender-bending female Mexican artists or major screen adaptations of Shakespearean plays must somehow be safer or more expected than a jukebox musical. In fairness, the editing dispute between the studio and Taymor may have been handled differently had the filmmaker been male. But she was recruited by the same studio; one might assume that gender bias would impact who is hired for such a controversial project if that factor was determinant. Finally, the argument that women are criticized more harshly for singing Beatles music also misses. Multi-award-winning female artists from Aretha Franklin to Allison Kraus have covered Beatles songs in the decades since their release. There is little evidence to suggest that they were poorly received for doing so. Elana Nicolaou (2017) uses a second, more insightful approach to understanding the evolving fortunes of AtU. She considers her personal relationship with the film as her tastes evolved during the decade following its release. Her analysis, provided for the tenth anniversary of the film’s theatrical release, identifies that she was precisely the sort of person that this movie targeted. In 2007, she was an admittedly young Beatles aficionado with an appreciation for the 1960s. She prided herself on her knowledge of the decade’s history and artistic presentations of the period. And, being familiar with Taymor’s previous work, she entered her first viewing of the film with anticipation. She was initially disappointed. Nicolaou recounts that the film “wasn’t as profound” as she had hoped. She, like other reviewers, complained of its “reductive portrayal” of the time period within which it was set.19 She also critiqued how the film failed to communicate the era’s grittiness as conveyed by contemporary works of the day. In short, she approached the film expecting a realistic portrayal of the period set to the soundtrack of the most important band of the age. She came away feeling let down by the “fun” romance flick that greeted her. Upon rewatching the film 10 years later, however, she discovered that the very problems that had originally “irked” her now made the film a “delight.”20 She gave into the romance, accepted the film’s two-dimensionality, and bought into the notion that the New York City of Taymor’s “fever dream” did not have to be realistic. In so doing, Nicolaou was able to better appreciate the film for what it was rather than what she wanted it to be. This voyage of discovery is an experience that most consumers of art have had at one point or another. A work is considered profound when young and immature ages poorly, while a piece of comedy suddenly becomes funny years later once old enough to find relevance in the jokes. But what Nicoloau is capturing is not simply a change in her relationship with AtU. Rather, what she describes is a shift from realism to romanticism reflective of the tastes of the American public when considering a film that, as Ebert pointed out, is “politics at its core.” It is to this shift this chapter now turns.

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ART, POLITICS, AND 9/11 Art appreciation depends partly on the intrinsic value of the work and partly on how the audience views or receives it. Cohen and Nicolau hint at this as they explore how perceptions of gender or changes in taste played a role in the critical and popular reception of Taymor’s Across the Universe. Both discussions consider perceptions as essentially individualistic in nature, though Cohen’s evaluation admittedly assumes common bias. What these evaluations miss, however, is that films intended for wide release are not marketed to individuals. They are released to whole communities. And perceptions of movie reviewers and audiences, as members of a community, are shaped by the times within which they live. Art misaligned with the times is ignored or rejected. Art in alignment, however, will appeal to a broader audience. This section argues that the initial response to AtU was a function of social and cultural changes caused by what might be termed “The 9/11 Effect.” This expression refers to the shift in cultural and individual perceptions caused by the events surrounding September 11, 2001. The tragedy and the American response to it were shared experiences that shifted audience preferences for historical and/or political cinematography for almost a decade. One consequence, Prince (2009) explains,21 was that moviegoers found allegories to 9/11 in all movies, whether intended or not. Taymor’s directorial vision was misaligned with these changes, resulting in the apathy and negativity reflected in some reviews. As importantly, the eventual fading of the 9/11 Effect has allowed for a reappraisal of the film based on its merits, resulting in its rediscovery by a new audience and a new appreciation from those who first discounted the production. For example, it would be expected that members of an audience will approach any new work with a set of expectations or preconceived notions of what quality work “should” look like. They certainly consider their past experiences with similar works, make predictions about the plot or style of the film, and are likely to anticipate the truth claims that the works will make. These expectations can be intensely personal but likely have been shaped by the previous reactions of others. Arguably, the whole point of movie posters and trailers is to set these expectations; it also explains the impact of movie reviews on ticket sales. Audience expectations of art are also a function of the broader, cultural zeitgeist into which the work is released. As members of a society, individuals share with one other common truths about what art “should” be or what truths art should communicate about how the world is ultimately ordered. This commonality is often shaped by a shared experience that provides a frame of reference against which the future is judged. McLaughlin and Parry

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(2006), for example, focus on the role that cinema played in creating a common sense of what it meant to be an American in the 1930s and 1940s. They demonstrate that ideas and personal affectations became more homogenized as individuals across the country began to mimic the behavior of screen actors such as Cagney, Bogart, and Garbo. They also argued that films provided society with shared “dreams and fantasies” and provided propagandists with new tools to create emotional connections to preferred understandings of justice or truth. These tools can be particularly useful during politically charged eras, such as World War II.22 This helps forge common truths across a generation, which is never more accurate than for movies perceived as political in nature.23 Political communication, if effective, speaks to the very fabric of a community since this is where the solutions to moral dilemmas are woven. It is a discussion of what it means to be accepted, of the values that a community shares, and about the community’s past and future. Ultimately, it is based on these collective truths that societies evaluate claims to justice, equality, and fairness. Films such as Across the Universe must be understood as inherently political, even when their content does not obviously address contemporary issues. Film as political communication, Mark Lacey (2003) points out, “is a space where myths about history and the origins of the state are told to a populist audience.”24 Where myths do not exist, cinema helps create them. Where myths have been called into question, cinema helps to shift or establish new ones. Films whose themes or content challenge collectively held myths are evaluated against preexisting views of history or origins. It seems reasonable, then, that any production that directly conflicts or disagrees with widely shared views will perform poorly at the box office. Those that reinforce dominant cultural perceptions about the political world are likely to be embraced by reviewers and audiences alike. The events of 9/11 served precisely as the sort of common, shared experience that helped define and reframe the American entertainment audiences’ collective understanding of the political in the United States. The movie industry (as part of the broader media) certainly helped to create the common memories and “prosthetic visuals” that shaped such an understanding.25 It also helped to shape the sorts of experiences that movies were anticipating when engaging in inherently political content. Nevertheless, by doing so, the movie industry also helped create shared myths that placed limits on what the audience would accept. Unfortunately, perhaps intentionally, AtU did not rest neatly within these myths. This disharmony, while part of its inherent artistic value, is also partially responsible for the film’s mixed reception. As this chapter argues, Across the Universe’s release came during a period when most of society had accepted a dominant set of myths and largely reached an agreement on how they should be discussed.

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Isolation vs. Leadership Exemplary in a study of how the “9/11 Effect” impacted AtU’s critical reception is Hellmut Lotz’s (1997) evaluation of the ways that films can be understood as “political.” Lotz argues that films need not directly engage the events of the past or present to be political, but they can promote political awareness, particularly around foreign policy choices, whenever they use their heroes to advocate for preferred solutions when confronting an existential threat.26 Lotz scores films along a continuum from “Isolation” to “Leadership.” Isolationistic films tend to glorify solutions that seek to avoid conflict or that promote heroes that strive to remove themselves or their loved ones from a threat. These films also advocate for small group unity in the face of threat and tend to take a pessimistic view of outsiders. Conversely, Leadership films promote the acceptance of broad responsibility to right injustices or provide care or protection to others. They are also more likely to advocate myths suggesting that “good people” have a responsibility to outsiders, should accept their burden, or come to their aid. By reinforcing the belief that one position of this continuum is uniformly more correct than the other, films can help shape public perceptions of how their governments respond to a crisis. According to Joyce (2017), the net effect of 9/11 was to push American films further toward the Leadership pole of this continuum.27 The end of the Cold War in the 1990s started this cultural shift as the nation began to heal itself from a Vietnam experience that promoted more Isolationistic themes. Whereas the United States of LBJ-Nixon-Ford had been framed as a meddling empire, the United States of Bush I-Clinton was a nation coming to grips with its role as a naive global policeman out to promote democracy and avenge genocide. This “crusader narrative,” as Joyce calls it, was seized upon by the Bush II administration’s public relations campaign to frame the events of 9/11 as an “evil” perpetrated against a force of good. Any American response to this threat is, therefore, justified in the face of this evil. The primary storylines in AtU ran counter to the Leadership-centric nature of American culture at the time of the movie’s release. Much of the drama of the film centers on Lucy as she first confronts the loss of her first high school crush to the war and then later with her brother’s experiences as a draftee and soldier. As a protagonist, she adopts an Isolationistic position by joining the anti-war movement. Interestingly, rather than placing her into conflict with a pro-Leadership rival, her activism and anti-war zeal create tensions with other pro-Isolationistic characters, her mother and her boyfriend, Jude. Neither fight for the war effort; instead, they promote the argument that the need to protect beauty and love within their family necessitates a disengagement from politics altogether. One of the film’s plot threads climaxes as Jude storms the offices of the Students for Democratic Reform, using the lyrics

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of the Beatles hit “Revolution” to draw into contrast Lucy’s drive to protest with his own belief that the organization’s radicalism will ultimately lead to nothing. The plot line ends as Lucy discovers her “peaceful” protest group is building bombs. Viewers of AtU, conditioned by the 9/11 Effect to support Leadership-oriented heroes, are uncomfortably asked to not only choose between different versions of Isolationism but are also forced to consider the terroristic approaches embraced by the protest leaders of their own past. The centrality of Isolationism as a theme also means that many of the Beatles’s most famous arrangements must be transformed into anti-war rhetoric. The Beatles would never be viewed as a pro-war rock band, and John Lennon’s personal pacifism is well-established. Still, most of the group’s music was apolitical, focusing instead on standard themes of love and heartbreak. Appropriating these songs to the film’s Isolationistic theme required Taymor’s team to reframe the lyrics to create allusions to a political meaning that previously was not there. “I Want You/She’s So Heavy,” originally a lustful ode with sexual overtones, is transformed by the director into a dance number set in a New York City draft induction center. “Dear Prudence” begins as an effort among friends to cheer up a housemate; it ends with phrases such as “Won’t you come out and play” and “Look Around!” set as backdrops to an anti-war protest and complaints that America had become “the image of violent imperialism.” The strawberries from “Strawberry Fields Forever” become bombs dropped on a Vietnamese battlefield, targeting both friends and foes. It may have been Taymor’s goal to use these transformations to lead audiences to re-evaluate America’s past. The 9/11 Effect forced them to confront their relationship with wars in Afghanistan and Iraq through the lens of beloved music, now distorted. Reality vs. Artifice Understanding how audiences use films to address, or avoid, their contemporary reality provides additional insights. Film can indeed be used to create common political narratives by simplifying otherwise complex choices or by providing audiences with a means of “escaping” the reality of those choices’ consequences. Susan Faludi (2007) affirms that this is an explanation for the stylistic shift in horror and fantasy films following 9/11.28 A world where collapsing skyscrapers and destroyed villages are daily reality requires a different type of movie to create a sense of fear in the audience. Wheeler Winston Dixon (2004) argues that it is impossible to critique films in the years immediately after 9/11 without appreciating the audience’s needs to frame or avoid their choices. American audiences in these years were trying to make sense of the causes of 9/11; they were also trying to reconcile the desires for peace and security with the violence and death that the wars

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they loosed on the world were creating. Their need for vengeance and their desire to alleviate the fears created by the former served as justifications for the latter. He affirms that: while some contemporary films offer escapism, the bulk of mainstream American cinema since 9/11, whether the films were in production before or not, seems centered on a desire to replicate the idea of the “just war,” in which military reprisals, and the concomitant escalation of warfare, are simultaneously inevitable and justified.29

Choice simplification and consequence shifting can also be achieved by manipulating the levels of familiarity, realism, or abstractness when confronting a topic. Political themes can be communicated in films through realistic imagery or by trying to portray events and periods with as much historical accuracy as possible. This can create certainty around the need to confront fear and can help create a sense of familiarity for individuals who lived the events of the period. Alternatively, topics can be presented allegorically or fantastically, with political concepts linked on largely philosophical levels. Prince (2009) argues that post-9/11 filmmakers were forced to tread a very thin line when addressing concepts of war or violence.30 On the one hand, historical or action films NOT about 9/11 were called to higher levels of gritty realism. On the other hand, the ubiquitous nature of the event itself left viewers with little interest in fictitious films that appeared to be dramatizations of the events surrounding 9/11. He specifically identifies 2007, the year of AtU’s release, as a year in which a number of movies tried and failed to critically engage the decision to go to war in Iraq. Robert Redford and Meryl Streep, two of the most bankable actors in entertainment, grossed a mere $14 million with their release (Lions for Lambs). Rendition, starring Reese Witherspoon and Angelina Jolie, grossed a mere $10 million.31 By comparison, AtU’s $29,000,000 seems like a success. Where the academic literature suggests filmgoers and reviewers wanted either fantastical escapism or just wars presented realistically, Taymor gave them precisely the opposite. Her 1960s was a simplified version that seemed almost cartoonish to those who had lived or studied it. Rather than being escapist, it demanded audiences to confront the bigotry of the American past. Rather than presenting war as just, Taymor ignored the causes of the Vietnam War, focusing exclusively on its consequences. In the filmmaker’s war, patriotism kills both the boy next door and the innocence of young love held by his promised return home. Brothers are drafted, wounded, and broken. The ideals of peaceful protest movements collapse into bomb-making and lifetaking when the state proves too powerful. The movie ends by proclaiming,

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“All You Need Is Love,” but only after everything else you might want is lost. Also lost was any chance of finding a contemporary audience.

AtU AS A CULT CLASSIC? Fortunately, being out of step with contemporary audiences does not make a work of art bad, even if it makes it unprofitable. It does, however, mean that a work may need to be discovered by a different audience, perhaps years after its release, in order to be fully appreciated. Nicoloau’s review suggests this to be the case with AtU. American audiences had not merely aged 10 years between her two viewings of the film. Audiences had moved 10 years beyond the shadow that 9/11 had cast on American culture. Newer audiences are again familiar with the lessons learned from endless war and are more prepared for a film that shares their concerns. Older audiences’ tastes had shifted to a point where the perceived weakness of the film can be ignored and even appreciated. AtU can now be accepted as a work of both art and political communication that is untainted by the era within which it was created. Phoebe Macrossan’s (2018) treatment of the film is an example of why this is true.32 She considers how Taymor used two artistic devices to craft her production. The first of these is a call to adolescence. Adolescence can be understood as a period of growing from innocence into knowledge, as much as the specific period in a person’s life when that transformation happens. The adolescent experience is often one of raw emotion driven by the effects of change without an understanding of either the causes or the consequences. Whereas studio executives probably assumed that incorporating the music of the Beatles into a film about the 1960s would attract middle-aged audiences, Macrossan suggests that the film is actually more appealing to audiences who are experiencing adolescent transformation. This might mean viewers with little knowledge of the 1960s and thus less interested in seeing them accurately portrayed. It could also mean viewers who are emerging from a generational shift (such as the 9/11 Effect) and are growing more fully in their appreciation of the world. The second device Macrossan indicates is nostalgia. Nostalgia can be thought of as a type of longing or homesickness for the past. Those who experience it often fail to hold realistic images of the past in their minds, preferring instead more two-dimensional versions that justify their desire to return. Macrossan argues that Across the Universe presents a nostalgic view of the 1960s, attractive to those who “are constantly reconstituting” their memories of the period.33 Those who lived it are recreating it more fondly than experienced; those who did not are attempting to construct a past through the vantage point of their own present. Either way, the 1960s take on

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a more dream-like abstraction 50 years after they occurred. This could not be true during the time of AtU’s release. Considering adolescence and nostalgia as artistic devices that become more powerful as the 9/11 Effect erodes helps to explain many of the AtU’s early criticisms. The movie is “goofy” or “2-Dimensional” in the same way that dreams or fond memories can be. It also helps to understand why early reviewers took so much exception to the soundtrack. The music of the Beatles was part of the soundtrack of the 1960s for much of the intended 2007 audience. But later audiences understand the Beatles far more through their personal, lived experiences than through a 1960s lens. “Penny Lane” has never been a real place for today’s audiences, and the Beatles never “invaded” America. The idea of repurposing their music is no more offensive to a 20-year-old today than repurposing the classical works for cartoons would have been to an audience in the 1930s. The soundtrack finally becomes what it was always intended; something familiar that draws the audience in, provides familiarity, and helps them better understand what is happening on the screen. Macrossan provides evidence to suggest that Taymor’s use of adolescence and nostalgia was intentional. Whether it was or not, though, is not entirely the point. Artists frequently make decisions whose brilliance in the moment escapes even them. The broader point is that these two strengths of the film, as it communicates complicated political concepts to the current generation of moviegoers, were not advantages at the time of the film’s release. They were lost to reviewers and an audience that were trapped into judging the film more on the merits of a post-9/11 world than on the qualities of the art itself. In the final balance, it seems that much early criticism of AtU, and of Taymor as an artist, was unfair. To the degree they were accurate, it was because the director was one of many skilled movie makers that either failed to adequately appreciate how shifts in political attitudes can affect the public’s taste for cinema during the post-9/11 era or who simply did not care enough to alter their artistic vision to ensure their work would be profitable. This begs a series of questions about Taymor’s future that are beyond the scope of this chapter. Artists care about their art; those who fund artists care about their profits. Time has revealed that AtU is a quality work of art that should be judged positively on its merits. It has also demonstrated that Taymor’s previous successes were not flukes and that the director should be given more credit for her filmmaking than she receives. This will be of little comfort to movie studios as they consider when, and if, to give Julie Taymor the opportunity to write and direct movies in the future. If society is going to continue to have more films like AtU, it is either going to need to be more forgiving with their release or more patient with their production.

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NOTES 1. Roger Ebert, “Nothings gonna change my world, Review of Across the Universe (2007),” RogerEbert​.co​m, September 13, 2007. https://www​.rogerebert​.com​/ reviews​/across​-the​-universe​-2007. 2. “Across the Universe,” Rotten Tomatoes. Fandango Media, 2023. 3. The Beatles themselves were the stars of four examples of this type, including the groundbreaking A Hard Days Night (1964) and the cult classic Yellow Submarine (1968). Pink Floyd—The Wall (1982) might also fall into this category. 4. Stage shows such as Jersey Boys and Million Dollar Quartet, and films like Ray (2004) or Elvis (2022), are examples of productions that use an artist’s music to explore transitions through the various phases of their life or career. 5. Stage and film productions of Mama Mia! (based on the catalog of the Swedish band Abba) or We Will Rock You! (adapted from the work of the British band Queen) are both examples of jukebox musicals that drew on the entire breadth of an artist’s work. Other examples, such as American Idiot or Jagged Little Pill (adapted, respectively, from the artists Green Day and Alanis Morrisette) are less adventurous by focusing on the songs in a single album, with perhaps one or two others brought along for length or narrative. 6. “John F. Burns; Julie Taymor,” Charlie Rose. October 8, 2007. https://charlierose​.com​/videos​/18716. 7. “High Style on A Budget with Superstar Designer Vera Wang,” The Oprah Winfrey Show. HBO Films, High Noon Productions. September 14, 2007. 8. Across the Universe: All About the Music. Dir. Julie Taymor. USA: Sony Pictures, 2008. 9. Sharon Waxman, “Film Has Two Versions; Only One Is Julie Taymor’s,” The New York Times March 20, 2007. https://go​.gale​.com​/ps​/i​.do​?p​=HWRC​&u​=aca​ _campbells​&id​=GALE​%7CA160735515​&v​=2​.1​&it​=r​&sid​=ebsco​&asid​=ee064eba. 10. For examples of the criticisms, see James Berardinelli, “Across the Universe (United States, 2007): A movie review,” Reelviews​.ne​t. n.d. https://www​.reelviews​.net​/reelviews​/across​-the​-universe; Ryan Dembinsky, “Across the Universe: Worst Movie Ever?” Glide Magazine, March 18, 2008. https://www​ .rogerebert​ .com​/reviews​/across​-the​-universe​-2007; Owen Gleiberman, “Across the Universe,” Entertainment Weekly. Sept. 12, 2007. https://ew​.com​/article​/2007​/09​/12​/across​ -universe​-3/. 11. Peter Hartlaub, “Across the Universe Recycles Songs, Offers Great Visuals,” SFGate​.com​. Sept. 13, 2007. https://www​.sfgate​.com​/movies​/article​/Review​-Across​ -the​-Universe​-recycles​-songs​-2540999​.php. 12. Ebert, “Nothings Gonna Change My World.” 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Dembinsky, “Across the Universe.” 16. Stephen Holden, “Films That Look Death in the Eye.” New York Times, Dec. 23, 2007, link.​​gale.​​com​/a​​pps​/d​​oc​/A1​​72725​​358​/H​​WRC​?u​​=aca_​​campb​​ells&​​ sid​=e​​bs​co&​​xid​=5​​298fe​​2a; Roger Ebert, “The Year’s Ten Best Films and Other

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Shenanigans,” RogerEbert​.co​m. December 20, 2007. https://www​.rogerebert​.com​/ roger​-ebert​/the​-years​-ten​-best​-films​-and​-other​-shenanigans. 17. “Across the Universe,” IMDB​.co​m. https://www​.imdb​.com​/title​/tt0445922/. 18. Anne Cohen, “Across the Universe is a Cult Classic—So Why Doesn’t Julie Taymor Get any Respect,” Refinery29​.com​. July 17, 2020. https://www​.refinery29​ .com​/en​-us​/2020​/07​/9910390​/across​-the​-universe​-review​-director​-julie​-taymor. 19. Elena Nicolaou, “10 Years on, Across the Universe is Even More of a Delight,” Refinery29​.com​, September 14, 2017. https://www​.refinery29​.com​/en​-us​ /2017​/09​/172388​/across​-the​-universe​-movie​-review​-anniversary. 20. Ibid. 21. Stephen Prince, Firestorm: American Film in the Age of Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 2. 22. Robert L McLaughlin and Sally E. Parr, We’ll Always Have the Movies: American Cinema During World War II (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 6–14. 23. A work of art can narrowly be judged as “political” when it overtly speaks to government behavior or popular perceptions around government action. More broadly, a work of art becomes political if it considers the economic and moral tradeoffs inherent in the difficult and complicated choices society must make. As Laswell affirms, politics is both “how we decide who gets what and when,” and how we morally and ethically justify those choices to ourselves. Harold Laswell, Politics; Who Gets What, When How (New York: Whittlesey House, 1936). 24. Mark Lacey, “War, Cinema, and Moral Anxiety,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 28, no. 5 (2003): 611–35. 25. Stephen Joyce, “Foreshadows of the Fall: Questioning 9/11’s Impact on American Attitudes,” in American Cinema in the Shadow of 9/11, ed. Terrence McSeeney, 207–24 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017). 26. Hellmut Lotz, “Myth and NAFTA: The Use of Core Values in US Politics,” in Culture & Foreign Policy, ed. Valerie M. Hudson, 73–96 (London: Rienner, 1997). 27. Ibid. 28. Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream: Fear And Fantasy in Post 9/11 America (Melbourne: Scribe, 2007). 29. Wheeler Winston Dixon, “Introduction: Something Lost–Film after 9/11,” in Film and Television after 9/11, ed. Wheeler Winston Dixon, 1–28 (Carbondale: Southern University Press. 2004). 30. Prince, Firestorm. 31. Interestingly, the top box office draws of 2007 were all films that were obviously fantastical or, if political, used a heightened style of action realism. Nine were also based on existing franchises or books. The only film that introduced an original cast or original characters was Pixar’s Ratatouille. 32. Phoebe Macrossan, “A Double-layered Nostalgia: ‘The Sixties,’ the Iraq War, and The Beatles in Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe (2007),” Screening the Past 43 (Apr. 2018): 1–13. 33. Ibid.

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REFERENCES Across the Universe. Directed by Julie Taymor. USA: Sony Pictures, 2007. “Across the Universe.” IMDB​.co​m. https://www​.imdb​.com​/title​/tt0445922/. “Across the Universe.” Rotten Tomatoes. Fandango Media. 2023. https://www​.rottentomatoes​.com​/m​/across​_the​_universe. Across the Universe: All About the Music. Directed by Julie Taymor. USA: Sony Pictures, 2008. Berardinelli, James. “Across the Universe (United States, 2007): A movie review.” Reelviews​.ne​t. n.d. https://www​.reelviews​.net​/reelviews​/across​-the​-universe. Briefel, Aviva and Sam J. Miller (eds). Horror after 9/11: World of Fear, Cinema of Terror Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012. Cohen, Anne. “Across the Universe Is a Cult Classic—So why Doesn’t Julie Taymor Get any Respect.” Refinery29​.com​. July 17, 2020. https://www​.refinery29​.com​/en​ -us​/2020​/07​/9910390​/across​-the​-universe​-review​-director​-julie​-taymor. Dembinsky, Ryan. “Across the Universe: Worst Movie Ever?” Glide Magazine, March 18, 2008. https://www​.rogerebert​.com​/reviews​/across​-the​-universe​-2007. Dixon, Wheeler Winston. “Introduction: Something Lost–Film after 9/11.” In Film and Television after 9/11, edited by Wheeler Winston Dixon, 1–28. Carbondale: Southern University Press. 2004. Ebert, Roger. 2007. “Nothings Gonna Change My World, Review of Across the Universe (2007).” RogerEbert​.co​m. September 13, 2007. https://www​.rogerebert​.com​ /reviews​/across​-the​-universe​-2007. ———. 2007. “The Year’s Ten Best Films and Other Shenanigans.” RogerEbert​.co​ m. December 20, 2007. https://www​.rogerebert​.com​/roger​-ebert​/the​-years​-ten​-best​ -films​-and​-other​-shenanigans. Faludi, Susan. The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post 9/11 America. Melbourne: Scribe, 2007. Gleiberman, Owen. “Across the Universe.” Entertainment Weekly. Sept. 12, 2007. https://ew​.com​/article​/2007​/09​/12​/across​-universe​-3/. Hartlaub, Peter. “Across the Universe Recycles Songs, Offers Great Visuals.” SFGate​ .com​. Sept. 13, 2007. https://www​.sfgate​.com​/movies​/article​/Review​-Across​-the​ -Universe​-recycles​-songs​-2540999​.php. “High Style on A Budget with Superstar Designer Vera Wang.” The Oprah Winfrey Show. HBO Films, High Noon Productions. Sept. 14, 2007. Holden, Stephen. “Films That Look Death in the Eye.” New York Times, Dec. 23, 2007, link.​​gale.​​com​/a​​pps​/d​​oc​/A1​​72725​​358​/H​​WRC​?u​​=aca_​​campb​​ells&​​sid​=e​​bs​ co&​​xid​=5​​298fe​​2a. Izzard, Eddie. 2007. “Julie Taymor.” Interview 37, no. 9 (October 2007): 90–92. “Julie Taymor: In Order to Innovate You Must Play with Fire.” The Nantucket Project. March 28, 2014. https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=5aFoWU​_JYHo​&t​ =678s. “John F. Burns; Julie Taymor.” Charlie Rose. October 8, 2007. https://charlierose​ .com​/videos​/18716.

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Joyce, Stephen. “Foreshadows of the Fall: Questioning 9/11’s Impact on American Attitudes.” In American Cinema in the Shadow of 9/11, edited by Terrence McSeeney, 207–24. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Kellner, Douglas. Cinema Wars: Hollywood Film and Politics in the Bush-Cheney Era. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Lacey, Mark. “War, Cinema, and Moral Anxiety.” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 28, no. 5 (2003): 611–35. Landy, Marcia. “‘America Under Attack’: Pearl Harbor, 9/11, and History in the Media.” In Film and Television after 9/11, edited by Wheeler Winston Dixon, 79–100. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004. Laswell, Harold. Politics; Who Gets What, When How. New York: Whittlesey House, 1936. Lotz, Hellmut. “Myth and NAFTA: The Use of Core Values in US Politics.” In Culture & Foreign Policy, edited by Valerie M. Hudson, 73–96. London: Rienner, 1997. Macrossan, Phoebe. “A Double-layered Nostalgia: ‘The Sixties,’ the Iraq War, and The Beatles in Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe (2007).” In Screening the Past 43 (Apr 2018): 1–13. McLaughlin, Robert L and Sally E. Parr. We’ll Always Have the Movies: American Cinema During World War II. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2006. Monsoon, Leigh. “Ten Years Later, Across the Universe Remains Mystifying and Relevant.” Substream Magazine. September 14, 2017. https://substreammagazine​ .com​/2017​/09​/ten​-years​-later​-across​-the​-universe/. Nicolaou, Elena. “10 Years on, Across the Universe is Even More of a Delight.” Refinery29​.com​, September 14, 2017. https://www​.refinery29​.com​/en​-us​/2017​/09​ /172388​/across​-the​-universe​-movie​-review​-anniversary. Noh, David. “Across the Universe.” Film Journal International 110 (Oct 2007): 55–56. Prince, Stephen. Firestorm: American Film in the Age of Terrorism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Smith, Kyle. “‘It goes nowhere, Man’: Review of Across the Universe (2007).” New York Post. September 14, 2007. https://nypost​.com​/2007​/09​/14​/it​-goes​-nowhere​ -man/. “The Story of Casting Across the Universe.” Academy Originals. September 12, 2016. https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=ySk2i​-ykVrw. “The Story Behind Creating Across the Universe.” Build Series. July 30, 2018. https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=XqVRG1PMvFc. Waxman, Sharon. “Film Has Two Versions; Only One is Julie Taymor’s.” The New York Times. March 20, 2007. link.​​gale.​​com​/a​​pps​/d​​oc​/A1​​60735​​515​/H​​WRC​?u​​=aca_​​ campb​​ells&​​sid​=e​​bs​co&​​xid​=e​​e064e​​ba.

Part II

GENDER AND SEXUALITY

Chapter 5

Disruptive Desires and Creative Transgressions in Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe Sony Jalarajan Raj and Adith K. Suresh

Julie Taymor’s career as a stage director, filmmaker, and costume designer has demonstrated the many possibilities of artistic adaptations that visualize characters, situations, emotions, and reality as a whole in new ways. Her works deconstruct classic texts and creative worlds to bring an altered visual experience through which she challenges the relationship between creation, adaptation, and perception. Taymor’s investigations seek to extract what an artistic work contains and imagine how it can be presented using different mediums. Whether it is adapting dramas for the stage, directing films, or staging operas, she finds her own versions by incorporating elements and art forms that reinvent a fresh way of telling a story. She believes that “the telling of the story, how it’s told, the mechanics, the methods that you use, is equal to the story itself.”1 Her aesthetic interventions constitute the innovative experiments on the medium she chooses to communicate by portraying expressions and experiences that recontextualize realities already solidified in particular historical periods. The creative universe of Taymor consists of adaptations that reimagine historical and artistic negotiations from new angles. The visual politics of her films fundamentally deal with the construction of desire as a signifying practice and transgressive method to define the complexities of human interactions, relationships, and identities. Portraying characters through different perspectives and altered contexts of human experience, the diegetic space of her films creates exceptional situations that challenge and subvert the normative practices of desire. This chapter focuses on the director’s musical drama Across the Universe (2007) to demonstrate how Taymor, as a filmmaker, establishes her own semiotics of desire that explore the many subjectivities of characters antagonized and alienated in mainstream society and history. This 97

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further illuminates the protagonists’ emerging social and cultural isolation, which can be observed as one of the fundamental ideas Taymor discusses in her films. Engaging with the problem of conflicting identities that lead to the crisis of the masculine and feminine gaze, Taymor’s films are experiments on emotions and desires which explore new terrains of cinematic adaptation. This chapter examines the visual style, narrative structure, and politics of the director through the phenomenology of desire and transgression to theorize that Taymor is one of the greatest modern auteurs of world cinema who can fictionalize the realities of human experience in cinema. It is apparent that Taymor’s experiments with the theater shaped her visual imagination and aesthetic language. In her high school years, she was part of experimental theater workshops and later traveled to Paris to attend Jacques Lecoq’s mime school. She had also been associated with theater director and scholar Herbert Blau’s experimental group, Kraken. Combining a range of artistic practices such as puppetry, music, dance, and digital media, she designed costumes, sets, and props in a way that creates a multisensory visual experience. As a theater artist who has extensive knowledge of various art forms and cultural traditions, Taymor’s inspirations are reflected in her work through juxtapositions and careful adaptations. Eileen Blumenthal notes that: Only historians of European theater might notice how closely the stage arrangement in Taymor’s design for a Passover Haggadah pageant resembles that of medieval Christian Passion plays. Only viewers familiar with Chinese theater would be likely to realize that the show’s Red Sea of billowing cloth derives from a Peking Opera convention. Taymor’s Juan Darién incorporates techniques from Japan, Indonesia, Czechoslovakia, and Western fairgrounds.2

Taymor’s stage images are characterized by designs with unique stylistic features that enhance visual exaggeration. To achieve this, she brings narrative techniques, performance strategies, cultural allusions, mythical symbols, and themes from non-Western performance arts into her works. Her obsession with masks and puppetry is an example of such a crossbreeding through which figures in their act of fantasy enactment find new contexts and meanings. According to Doulas Lanier, Taymor “shares a self-conscious celebration of theatricality” with other stage directors of the late twentieth century and in the manner of a postmodern pastiche, her vision mixes different sources “to get maximum effect from a minimum of theatrical means and feature moments that bare their theatrical devices or encourage the audience’s delight in unusual technique.”3 In her theater adaptation of The Lion King, she presents both the puppet and the puppeteer on stage, which she calls the “Double Event,” and allows a double performance that emerges from the relationship between the mask and the performing body behind it. Puppet characters such as the giraffe, the cheetah, the zebra, the elephant, and the

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gazelles in The Lion King are representations of theater in its traditional and postmodern sense, which is explicit in its self-reflexive metafictionality. The director explains, [I]n traditional puppet theatre, there is a black-masking or something that hides the wheels, and you see these little gazelles going like that. The puppeteer is hidden. But let’s just get rid of the masking. Because when you get rid of the masking, then even though the mechanics are apparent, the whole effect is more magical. And this is where theatre has a power over film and television. This is absolutely where its magic works. It’s not because it’s an illusion and we don’t know how it’s done. It’s because we know exactly how it’s done. On top of that, this little Gazelle Wheel is the circle of life. So then over and over again, with the audience conscious or not, I’m reinforcing this idea of the wheel.4

In building her cinematic universe, she uses strategies and ideas that are meant for the stage and incorporates them into the narrative structure of the film. Creating a sense of magical realism through visual effects, songs, and costumes is fundamental to all her films, where spectacles celebrate deliberately constructed structures and images. For example, the frequent use of masks, puppets, and figures in her productions imitates a form of theatrical performance that was adapted from the storytelling traditions and cultural practices of Southeast Asia and Japan.5 In her first directorial debut, Fool’s Fire (1992), a teleplay adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “HopFrog,” she designed puppets, masks, and costumes to establish the characters. The film was screened at the Sundance Film Festival in 1992 and was noted for its visual surrealism and bizarreness through the use of characters and scenes that composed a “spectacularly stylized, brilliantly imaginative tale of humiliation and revenge.”6 The way Taymor weaves historical events, mythology, and folktales in narratives adds a cultural perspective to them. Her fascination with Eastern theater forms such as Bunraku, Noh, wayang golek, and wayang kulit, the shadow puppetry of Indonesia emphasized an Oriental angle in her works. This act of conjoining both Eastern and Western cultural elements into a single text brought new meanings to stage performance and its reception. Taymor’s Titus (1999) transforms Shakespeare’s revenge tragedy Titus Andronicus into a fantasy world where the narrative is juxtaposed with images from different historical periods and settings. In the opening scenes of the film, the narrative deconstructs the concept of time by introducing the character of Titus’s grandson, Young Lucius (Osheen Jones) as a boy who plays with his toy soldiers in the modern world before shifting the time to Ancient Rome. The film contains locations, costumes, choreographed performances, and music that allow narrative temporal transitions that go through the Roman Empire to the Italian Republic, constructing a sense

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of reimagination that makes the past inseparable from the present. This approach “self-consciously translates Shakespeare’s play for a modern audience and medium using contemporary as well as classical myths to tell the story.”7 Marina Gerzic (2018) observes, Taymor’s Titus is set in an undetermined time and setting. Through a stylised mise-en-scène and amalgamation of genres, times, and setting, the world created in Taymor’s film is a visual extravaganza of epic proportions that is both ancient and modern. Taymor’s approach to adapting Shakespeare for the screen is not to rewrite the words, but what I term as filling them out visually. This visual “filling out” of Shakespeare is achieved through the numerous references to historical events, periods, and figures, as well as popular cultural references.8

The desire to use the concept of the historical past as a construct and continuation is a recurring theme in Taymor’s films. In her next film, Frida (2002), she uses real paintings of Mexican surrealist artist Frida Kahlo to begin scenes, which she soon transforms into live-action sequences with characters. This technique of dissolving the real into the fictional brings new dimensions to the autobiographical aspect of the film. In the production, Taymor picks fragments from Kahlo’s artistic and real life and infuses them with her own personal experiences. For example, one of the prominent aspects the director explores in the film is the struggles of a female artist in a male-dominated environment. The parallel between Kahlo’s physical pain and suffering and Taymor’s own struggles with a spinal injury is apparent. Taymor also uses Kahlo’s surreal artwork as a canvas and applies elements of fantasy, magical realism, and dream sequences, which the filmmaker as a theater artist is often associated with. Her background in theater is strongly reflected throughout the film, especially in the use of puppetry and surreal images. In a similar sense, Taymor repeated this method of immersing authentic artistic elements from the past into the present to generate a hybrid visual art in Across the Universe, a jukebox musical romantic drama situated in the context of the 1960s and the Vietnam War. The film is noted for incorporating thirty-four original compositions of the Beatles in its narrative in a way that the songs themselves help narrate the story. All these experimental approaches reveal Taymor’s fundamental ideology of artistic creation, which, in its abstract sense, is the urge to disrupt an existing narrative structure and semiology through visual aesthetics that explicitly transgresses an accepted previous version or form. In this sense, we can assert that Taymor’s films bring new perspectives into past narratives when they are reimagined through adaptations. Taymor achieved her auteur status for her subversive style of filmmaking that consciously depicts explorations into the human realm in ways that dissect the complex terrains of emotional dimensions manifested in the form of

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love, lust, sexuality, solitude, and alienation. Evocative of the desires that define the human condition, her tales often contain bizarre character performances and situations that magnify the complexity of life through a form of artistic originality that violates logic and rationality. The culmination of an artist’s obsession with the visual and adaptive possibilities of cinema is what defines the art of the director. The transgressive narratives that structure her cinema achieve their final form through the subversion of structural and thematic modes involving cultural, moral, and social angles that express an affinity to disturb some form of a natural order. Taymor’s Across the Universe is a perfect example of a film where the notion of desire and transgression is redefined through a range of visual narratives that challenge the normalized perception of the mainstream audience. The film follows the stories of a number of characters who get interconnected through art, music, politics, war, and revolutions of the turbulent 1960s. The story begins with Jude (Jim Sturgess), a shipyard worker from Liverpool, traveling to America to meet his father whom he has never met before. After a failed encounter with his father, Jude meets Max (Joe Anderson), a rich and energetic student who soon drops out of college, and the two of them go to New York to live with singer Sadie (Dana Fuchs) and her musician friends and start engaging with their nomadic lifestyle. Jude develops a romantic relationship with Max’s sister, Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood), who moves to New York after her boyfriend dies in the Vietnam War. This community of artists and young bloods is joined by guitarist Jo-Jo (Martin Luther McCoy) and a closeted young lesbian, Prudence (T.V. Carpio). All these characters are named after various Beatles songs, which are also featured in different sequences throughout the movie. Taymor’s efforts to bring a female-centric perspective in her works are more explicit in Across the Universe.9 In the 2007 film, she examines feminine desires, expectations, and responses through three strong female characters: Lucy, Prudence, and Sadie. One of the most iconic scenes in the film is the way it uses the Beatle’s hit song “I Want to Hold Your Hand” to introduce Prudence and her sexuality. The context portrays Prudence as a cheerleader who performs with her peers on a football ground where she is singing a cover version of the song in a slow-paced melancholic tone, which ultimately refers to her unrequited love for another cheerleader girl. In this scene, Taymor does not initially reveal that Prudence is singing a love song to the beautiful cheerleader but instead tactically convinces the audience that the song is about a male football player. Then, the camera changes its focus to the cheerleader who is with the football player and ultimately gives a new meaning to the song and the character. The sequence continues as Prudence keeps singing her sad song and walks through the fighting footballers, whose masculine expressions signify that her love is not only not reciprocated but

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also unacceptable in a social structure that is defined by heteronormative narratives and taboos. The way Taymor breaks down the semiotics of queer romantic desire and the hidden sexual identity of a character by adapting a Beatles song shows how subversion can be used as a powerful tool of adaptation. Subverting the normative semiotics of desire as a masculine–feminine encounter means that it asserts a counternarrative that discusses intimacies, relationships, and desires that are conventionally considered problematic and forbidden. In a later scene, the melancholic Prudence is seen hiding in a closet in her room and refuses to come out when her friends ask her to. This scene carefully emphasizes the isolation and confusion the character encounters as she struggles to come to terms with her sexual identity. It features the Beatles’s “Dear Prudence,” which her friends sing in the form of a request to the character to come out of the closet and join them. Taymor uses the song’s lyrics to convey the meaning of an inclusive world which is possible through friendship, love, and mutual respect. Prudence finally comes out of the closet, joins her friends, and then they all march together in what looks like an anti-war rally. This scene builds larger meaningful contexts through the use of songs where the lyrics become dialogues and the music contextually elevates the emotional state of characters. According to the director, the Beatles songs that were used in the film are not cover versions but interpretations, which only make more sense when put in the mouths of women.10 This way the Beatles songs become reinforcements that push the narrative forward in a direction that allows women to explore their conflicts. The rendition of songs in this context narrates the story of an individual character whose existence is more explicit in the film than in the original songs. Taymor changes the romantic universality of a classic Beatles song and adds a nuanced reinterpretation to it through recontextualizing. Here, she simultaneously compliments and challenges the art form by changing its original historical context and reconfiguring it to present it to a newer audience. It is also significant to note that in this process of recontextualization, Taymor achieves her imagination of cinema that showcases alternative versions of already established canonical texts. Her desire to disrupt the very structure of art and its meaning is central to the way her creative productions capture the attention of both the old and new generations of audiences. This narrative recalibration presents a world defined by inexplicable circumstances where characters express the primal urge to violate what is collectively perceived as natural. The altered version of reality reflected here shows the aberrations with which cinema not only tries to understand the signs of the incomprehensible but also creates its own language of transgression. Transgression as a concept and activity is an essential category for understanding the relationship between different boundaries in social, cultural, and political

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structures. A transgressive act demonstrates the possibility of expanding the boundary and thereby opening up a space for multiple discourses. In cinema, transgressions are not simply about crossing a boundary but expanding the distance between two boundaries to establish the freedom needed for artistic expression. The transgressive acts produce emotions that are deeply disturbing from a collective psychological point of view, sensations that affect the physical form, and imaginations that challenge artistic notions. Transgressions in filmmaking contain the possibility of revolt and transformation, where experimental approaches bring changes to the cinematic medium.11 Taymor can be recognized as one of cinema’s most creative figures in terms of manipulating art and reality. The narrative realm of her films alters perception by depicting a serious encounter with an unfamiliar context, and the resulting ambiguity in such encounters shapes the transgressive art of cinema as a manifestation of the relationship with the Other. Her films deal with identities and their flexible subjectivity with respect to specific environments in which the self and the other are blended to create a space for new definitions and meanings. When filmmakers adapt reality into the film language, they tend to appropriate the real in favor of the imaginary or vice versa, making the very process a form of transgression. The grammar of cinema is structured in a way that demands new changes to avoid repetition and redundancy. Every film movement in history was a reaction to existing normalcies, an attempt to recognize the limits and possibilities of cinema. The revolt against these rules and perceptions through new experiments changed the evolution of cinema as new filmmakers emerged with their crafts to make genre-defying works of art. The perception of the unnatural and its representation through cinematic language create a space for deliberations upon the differences between cinema and reality.12 Film as an art form is a paradox that describes its ability to represent reality while being an artificial medium.13 Cinema’s ability to manipulate the real and the imagined makes it an art about perception and transgression, and the very artificiality of cinema gives the audience the possibility to engage in the meaning-making process involved in the cinematic experience.14 Films show a tendency to combine reality and imagination to the point of making them indiscernible; they are often swapped from their respective points of origin to make a context where the subject and its background are displaced from each other. As a result, the element of authenticity is suspended as a means to produce a spectacle of the unnatural as something completely unavoidable and inevitable. The film narrative has its own logic when it comes to rendering the new laws that only work within the frames of the cinematic. Taymor’s creative interventions in filmmaking often take familiarized contexts from already established texts and alter their meaning in favor of

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the conditions of the new text she creates. In his review of Across the Universe, Roger Ebert observes that “the arrangements are sometimes familiar, sometimes radically altered, and the voices are all new; the actors either sing or sync, and often they find a mood in a song that we never knew was there before.”15 This, as a form of disruption, sees those interventions between characters and contexts as transgressions that disseminate the power to challenge perceptions. The concept of transgression has multiple implications in different contexts. Discussions of it can be found in the moral, social, and cultural epistemologies, where activities, behaviors, practices, and procedures are influenced by how things are set within certain boundaries and limits. According to Chris Jenks, transgression is “conduct that goes beyond the limits” and “break[s] rules or exceeds boundaries.”16 The constraints that limit the freedom of human activities, both physical and psychological, are essential for the collective operation of societies as they avoid chaos and collapse. However, every boundary is defined by what it separates and how it structures the inside and outside in terms of the legitimized and the illegal. Therefore, boundaries not only contain the power to restrict but they also arouse the fundamental curiosity to imagine their transgression. Since transgression is a behavioral aspect, it depends on the personal realm of the individual rather than being imposed by an outside agency. This is why “limits to behavior are always personal responses to moral imperatives that stem from the inside,” and “any limit on conduct carries with it an intense relationship with the desire to transgress that limit.”17 The desire to cross boundaries allows the possibility for expansion. Georges Bataille remarks, for example, that eroticism is different from sexual activity because the former is about the violation of rules set by the latter—“a matter of going beyond the limits allowed.”18 Max Silverman opines that “modernism thrived on the transgression of boundaries.”19 For Michel Foucault, transgression is about “the excessive distance that it opens at the heart of the limit.”20 The relationship between limits and transgression is ambiguous, making it an elusive category that “slips through at the very moment of seizure.”21 Here, the excess is the result of transgression where what was previously considered as the standard is challenged and pushed to new limits. However, even if transgression is about the limit and its crossing, it is not merely about these two points that encompass a fixed binary. The way transgression occurs reveals much about the whole structural surface of the context in which the limit and its excess are revealed but exist as interdependent. The excess specifically reminds us of the limits of the subject that transgresses and reaffirms the order of things. Jenks argues, Transgressive behaviour .  .  . does not deny limits or boundaries, rather it exceeds them and thus completes them. Every rule, limit, boundary or edge

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carries with it its own fracture, penetration or impulse to disobey. The transgression is a component of the rule. Seen in this way, excess is not an abhorration nor a luxury, it is rather a dynamic force in cultural reproduction—it prevents stagnation by breaking the rule and it ensures stability by reaffirming the rule. Transgression is not the same as disorder; it opens up chaos and reminds us of the necessity of order. But the problem remains. We need to know the collective order, to recognise the edges in order to transcend them.22

Films present transgression in different modes, and different film genres contribute their own versions of it. For example, in French cinema, the art of transgression can be found so specific and explicit as a genre that it is often described as “extreme cinema,” “cinema of evil,” or “cinema of the abject.”23 Transgressive acts related to violence and sexuality are much common in cinema, and they generally reflect the real-life situations of these acts. Films include transgressive acts in their narrative for shock value, as it occurs frequently in horror films, through which they intend to create a sudden emotional outburst in the form of fear and disgust. The visuals of horror contain surreal images and acts that can be considered cringeworthy and provocative, but one can measure their intensity in terms of how explicitly they are presented in a film and to what extent their exaggeration crosses the limits of society’s moral boundaries. The depiction of transgressive contexts in films reflects the way societies collectively make sense of what is socially accepted in society. A transgressive act often reminds the audience about the rules which are violated from time to time to make transgression a social reality. According to John Cline and Robert G. Weiner, the very essence of transgression is that “societal limits are crossed, and then they are reinforced or redefined—sometimes both.”24 Therefore, transgressive acts are references through which the social structure maintains its boundaries intact. Transgressions in cinema are not limited to an ideal social collective. Their social and political implications with respect to individual subjectivity are equally important. For instance, sexual transgressions are considered “evil” on a collective level but might have a different interpretation on a personal level. Transgressions that happen as a result of repressed desires, unresolved guilt, emotional indifference, and psychological trauma show a spectrum of causes that “rationalize” the transgressive act in question. When transgression operates in cinema through a protagonist or a filmmaker, it reveals its individual aspects, which are affected by a wide range of factors, including personal experiences, incidents, and preferences. Therefore, understanding the filmmaker as an individual creator and their craft as a text that manifests different forms of transgression that subvert the natural law by any means is essential to the very discourse of cinema as a transgressive art.

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One of the recurring contexts in Taymor’s cinema is the Othering of the individual in stressful circumstances. Characters often get trapped in spaces that gradually become strange and hostile, eventually making them lose their sense of perception and identity. These films deal with the estrangement and exclusion faced by characters caught in the surreal fantasies and fears that emerge from interactions with historical realities of oppression. The exiled identity of the character Jude in Across the Universe, for instance, is shaped by such a spatial perception through which his image is constructed as a displaced other. As a young man from Liverpool, Jude struggles to adapt to the American culture. For him, America is a representation of his estranged father, a distant land with many possibilities for those who are able to make sense of their belonging. In the film, he fails to unite with his parent because the concept of a father is so distant and unfamiliar to Jude that he cannot make sense of the reality of accepting him. The physical and cultural distance that operates between Jude and other characters in the film are also visible in the film, in which he is often pictured in the background of the frame. Since the film is set in the backdrop of the 1960s, its references to the countercultural movement in America as a sign of a collective desire for liberation and change is something that contradicts Jude’s oppressive working-class background in Liverpool, thus making his exile and displacement more real and excruciating. In Across the Universe, the protagonists are defined by a simple plot that is pretty much fictional in the sense that it integrates the possibility of a “transgressed scenario,” a context that comprises the “abnormal” in relation to the normal. The psychological tension that emerges in such a situation reveals the vulnerability of certain elements ingrained in the collective imagination, cultural practices, and moral constructs. These elements, whether it is sexuality or identity, for instance, make the idea of transgression a meaningful process rather than just a mindless violation of established norms. John Jervis opines, The transgressive is reflexive, questioning both its own role and that of the culture that has defined it in its otherness. It is not simply a reversal, a mechanical inversion of an existing order it opposes. Transgression, unlike opposition or reversal, involves hybridization, the mixing of categories and the questioning of the boundaries that separate categories. It is not, in itself, subversion; it is not an overt and deliberate challenge to the status quo. What it does do, though, is implicitly interrogate the law, pointing not just to the specific, and frequently arbitrary, mechanisms of power on which it rests—despite its universalizing pretensions—but also to its complicity, its involvement in what it prohibits.25

Transgressions are intended to disturb the normative structure of human imagination. However, they also reveal the flexible nature of structures and, therefore, actually consider the possibility of further deliberations and

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criticisms. Taymor’s cinema, as a cultural medium and source of entertainment, depends on transgressions in the fundamental sense that the film narrative is composed of signs and performances that intend to break the rules of reality. In Taymor’s film, there are montages of war combined with the conflicts of individual psychological states. The romantic relationship between Jude and Lucy shatters once Max is drafted into Vietnam, and they reunite only after his return from the war. The frequent use of bright colors and psychedelic visual effects reinforces the spatial disorientation that results from the juxtaposition of the present and past. For example, in the visualization of the song “I am the Walrus,” the film delves into a psychedelic state through strong imagery and vibrant color combinations. Similarly, the sequences accompanied by the song “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” reflect similar color patterns and visuals that place human subjects within a trance state of imagination. The spatial and temporal disorientation that results from these sequences emphasizes the surreal depictions of emotions that can only be explained through such vivid imagery. Even though Across the Universe is about the 1960s, it refuses to take authenticity as a narrative goal but rather consciously transcends the very notion of authenticity and presents the story as if it is part of the contemporary world. In the film, the narrative is enriched with colorful visuals that highlight historical moments, cultural shifts, and artistic revolutions from the 1960s America when the Vietnam War engulfed the aspirations and energies of a generation of young people who were forced to join the Army to fight the war. The film is narrated in this historical background defined by the anxieties and fears of the youth who were fighting for freedom and democracy. This fight was reflected in the form of street riots, protests, and anti-war movements, and the film portrays such responses through different characters who choose either the path of violence or the path of love in which only the latter survives the test of time. Here, Taymor’s film is more than a story of starcrossed lovers united by love but a political statement that exposes the horrors of war. In an important scene, young soldiers in their Jockey shorts are seen carrying the Statue of Liberty as they march through a Vietnam field singing, “She’s so heavy!” Taymor says, I used the songs to push forward the story, and as a result, it’s not a jukebox musical. Technically you could probably say that it is because the songs existed before the story, but they are used in a more traditional musical theatre style because they are the words of the thoughts and emotions of the characters.26

The director uses the technique of historical contextualization in the film to bring back the memories of an era that was defined by its artistic and political interventions. She carefully places her subjects in this context to define

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them through negotiations and characteristics that align with the transgressiveness of the time period. For Taymor, the anti-war activities, the Hippie movements, and the Beatles music of the 1960s give a positive angle to the notion of transgression as they were expressions of a young generation that rejected traditional values and authoritarianism. They challenged dominant forms of power by embracing the universality of love, peace, and friendship through the formation of communities that reject the philosophies of war and violence. In these contexts, Taymor’s protagonists ultimately display signs of transgression as a form of resistance to totalizing forces that control individual freedom in the name of nationalism, tradition, and consumerism. NOTES 1. Julie Taymor, “Julie Taymor: Spider-Man, the Lion King and Life on the Creative Edge,” YouTube, https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=SN7wO06Yz1E​&t​ =933s. 2. Eileen Blumenthal and Julie Taymor, Julie Taymor, Playing with Fire: Theater, Opera, Film (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995), 7–8. 3. Douglas Lanier, “Julie Taymor,” in The Routledge Companion to Directors’ Shakespeare, eds. John Russel Brown (Milton Park, UK: Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009). 4. Julie Taymor and Richard Schechner, “Julie Taymor: From Jacques Lecoq to The Lion King.” TDR: The Drama Review 43, no. 3 (1999): 42. 5. Marvin Carlson, “A Concise Introduction to Julie Taymor,” Digital Theatre Plus (New York: City University of New York, 2019), 7. https://edu​.digitaltheatreplus​.com​/login​?redirect=​%2Fcontent​%2Fguides​%2Fjulie​-taymor. 6. Geoffrey Gilmore, “Fool’s Fire,” Sundance Digital Archive, 1992. https://history​.sundance​.org​/films​/469​/fools​_fire. 7. Elsie Walker, “‘Now Is a Time to Storm’: Julie Taymor’s Titus (2000),” Literature/Film Quarterly 30, no. 3 (2002): 196. 8. Marina Gerzic, “From Cabaret to Gladiator: Refiguring Masculinity in Julie Taymor’s Titus,” in From Medievalism to Early-Modernism: Adapting the English Past, eds. Marina Gerzic and Aidan Norriepp (New York and London: Routledge, 2018), 82. 9. Taymor’s portrayal of strong female characters often shifts the narrative’s focus from its male protagonists. This is more emphasized and important in her adaptations that deliberately centralize the female subjective positions and subsequently disrupt the historical and hegemonic power structures accentuated by male characters. For example, in Titus, the focus on Lavinia, the daughter of the titular male protagonist, explores the traumatic experiences of a woman in a story that was previously narrated and dominated by the experiences of men. Similarly, in her 2010 adaptation of The Tempest, Taymor changes Shakespeare’s Prospero into a female character and calls her Prospera (played by Helen Mirren). In this act of subversion, Taymor not

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only challenges audience expectations and conventional gender roles but also breaks the conventional rules of adaptation. 10. Matt Fagerholm, “Forever Contemporary: Julie Taymor on the Rerelease of ‘Across the Universe,’” Roger Ebert​.com​, July 23, 2018. https://www​.rogerebert​.com​/ interviews​/forever​-contemporary​-julie​-taymor​-on​-the​-rerelease​-of​-across​-the​-universe. 11. Niall Richardson, Transgressive Bodies: Representations in Film and Popular Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 2016). 12. Kendall Walton, “The Unnaturalness of Film,” in Film Theory and Philosophy, eds. Richard Allen and Murray Smith, 179–96 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). 13. Dudley Andrew, Film in the Aura of Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). 14. David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 15. Roger Ebert, “Nothing’s Gonna Change My World,” Roger Ebert​.com​, Sept. 13, 2007 https://www​.rogerebert​.com​/reviews​/across​-the​-universe​-2007. 16. Chris Jenks, Transgression (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 3. 17. Ibid., 7. 18. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy Vol. II, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1993), 124. Original emphasis. 19. Max Silverman, Facing Postmodernity: Contemporary French Thought on Culture and Society (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), 4. 20. Michel Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” in Bataille: A Critical Reader, eds. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 36. 21. Chelsea Birks, Limit Cinema: Transgression and the Nonhuman in Contemporary Global Film (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 15. 22. Jenks, Transgression, 7. 23. Martine Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 16. 24. John Cline and Robert G. Weiner, “Introduction,” in From the Arthouse to the Grindhouse: Highbrow and Lowbrow Transgression in Cinema’s First Century, eds. John Cline and Robert G. Weiner (Lanham: The Scarecrow Press, 2010), xvii. 25. John Jervis, Transgressing the Modern: Explorations in the Western Experience of Otherness (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 4. 26. Fagerholm, “Forever Contemporary.”

REFERENCES Andrew, Dudley. Film in the Aura of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy Vol. II., translated by Robert Hurley, 3 vols. New York: Zone Books, 1993. Beugnet, Martine. Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007.

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Birks, Chelsea. Limit Cinema: Transgression and the Nonhuman in Contemporary Global Film. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. Blumenthal, Eileen and Julie Taymor. Julie Taymor, Playing with Fire: Theater, Opera, Film. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995. Bordwell, David. Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Carlson, Marvin. “A Concise Introduction to Julie Taymor.” Digital Theatre Plus. New York: City University of New York, 2019. https://edu​.digitaltheatreplus​.com​ /login​?redirect=​%2Fcontent​%2Fguides​%2Fjulie​-taymor. Cline, John and Robert G. Weiner. “Introduction.” In From the Arthouse to the Grindhouse: Highbrow and Lowbrow Transgression in Cinema’s First Century, edited by John Cline and Robert G. Weiner, xv–xxi. Lanham: The Scarecrow Press, 2010. Ebert, Roger. “Nothing’s Gonna Change My World.” Roger Ebert​.com​, September 13, 2007. https://www​.rogerebert​.com​/reviews​/across​-the​-universe​-2007. Fagerholm, Matt. “Forever Contemporary: Julie Taymor on the Rerelease of “Across the Universe’.” Roger Ebert​.com​, July 23, 2018. https://www​.rogerebert​.com​/interviews​/forever​-contemporary​-julie​-taymor​-on​-the​-rerelease​-of​-across​-the​-universe. Foucault, Michel. “A Preface to Transgression.” In Bataille: A Critical Reader, edited by Fred Botting and Scott Wilson, 24–30. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988. Gerzic, Marina. “From Cabaret to Gladiator: Refiguring Masculinity in Julie Taymor’s Titus.” In From Medievalism to Early-Modernism: Adapting the English Past, edited by Marina Gerzic and Aidan Norriepp. 82–98. New York and London: Routledge, 2018. Gilmore, Geoffrey. “Fool’s Fire.” Sundance Digital Archive, 1992. https://history​ .sundance​.org​/films​/469​/fools​_fire. Jenks, Chris. Transgression. New York and London: Routledge, 2003. Jervis, John. Transgressing the Modern: Explorations in the Western Experience of Otherness. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. Lanier, Douglas. “Julie Taymor.” In The Routledge Companion to Directors’ Shakespeare, edited by John Russel Brown, 457–73. Milton Park, UK: Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009. Richardson, Niall. Transgressive Bodies: Representations in Film and Popular Culture. New York and London: Routledge, 2016. Silverman, Max. Facing Postmodernity: Contemporary French Thought on Culture and Society. New York and London: Routledge, 1999. Taymor, Julie. “Julie Taymor: Spider-Man, the Lion King and Life on the Creative Edge.” TED. YouTube, 2013. https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=SN7wO06Yz1E​ &t​=933s. Taymor, Julie and Richard Schechner. “Julie Taymor: From Jacques Lecoq to the Lion King.” TDR: The Drama Review 43, no. 3 (1999): 36–55. Walker, Elsie. “‘Now Is a Time to Storm’: Julie Taymor’s Titus (2000),” Literature/ Film Quarterly 30, no. 3 (2002): 194–207. Walton, Kendall. “The Unnaturalness of Film.” In Film Theory and Philosophy, edited by Richard Allen and Murray Smith, 179–96. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.

Chapter 6

Framing a Feminist Vehicles, Bodies, and Clothing as Biography in The Glorias Dominique Angela M. Juntado

The Glorias (2020) is a biographical drama based on My Life on the Road (2015) by Gloria Marie Steinem, which recounts the story of her life journey, beginning with her humble childhood in Ohio in the 1940s and describing the influential figures as well as the personal and national events that motivated and shaped her into becoming a preeminent leader in advancing women’s rights. While biographies conventionally gain their substance from dates, places, people, and names, of interest to this study is how Taymor’s film tells Gloria’s life story by using three predominant classifications of thematic devices: vehicles, the positions of the bodies in the mise-en-scène, and clothing. This includes framing the biography as a literary and sociological form that incorporates interpretive aspects and phenomenology by taking into account the human encounter with the everyday.1 The study of identity involves, in fact, the relationships and boundaries between human beings, objects, animals, substances, and places, as the ongoing interactions between people and things are what produce identities, as Chris Fowler argues.2 The placement of objects in a biography shows how they are not mere means or settings for human action but are essential to it. As several critics affirm, human and object histories inform each other through the myriad ways things are used, exchanged, consumed, interacted with, and lived with over time.3 In describing things and exploring their distinctiveness, we are given information about the lives of their users because objects become distinct by how they relate to the “conscious ideas and intentions” that the person provides, as Tim Dant and Chris Tilley et  al. suggest.4 Things are regarded as a robust medium for the materialization and externalization of ideas shaping the self, but they also play a role in containing and preserving memories and embodying personal and social experiences.5 According 111

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to Dant, a biography of things begins with selecting objects as worthy of inspection, which are then examined “as if [they] had a life” and “demands a focus on them and the cultural context of their use.”6 This involves “asking” the objects a particular set of questions, including the sociological facets that discuss their status along with their period and culture of origin, the place of origin and their creators, their “careers” or uses and functions so far, the periods in the objects’ life and their cultural markers, how the use of the things change with their age, and what becomes of the objects when they reach the end of their usefulness.7A biography of things thus incorporates the idea that objects acquire meanings through social practices and contexts over their life course,8 as well as considers the political and social circumstances surrounding acquisitions and exchanges. This study also includes the sociopolitical dimensions of the interaction of objects through their users.9 To think of a biography based on things encountered and interacted with in a lifetime is to recognize how culture and material culture are two sides of the same coin, dialectically dynamic rather than fixed.10 The meanings of things change through time, according to the processes of acquisition, circulation, and exchange of the objects, together with the way they pass through varying social contexts.11

GLORIA’S GARAGE: VEHICLES, WORLDVIEWS, AND DESTINATIONS Gloria Steinem has never owned a car and does not even have a driver’s license.12 In Taymor’s film, she is always brought to her destinations, either by taxi or by some other form of public vehicle. Vehicles are culturally interesting: they exemplify and interrogate the binary opposites of private and public, based on the way the enclosures are structured and the seats are positioned. These potentially influence any form of social interaction, as well as the composition and, if possible, the identities of the passengers. Vehicles have, in fact, the potential to reveal something about who an individual is through their conduct as a passenger, whether commuters or occasional travelers. As she admits, Gloria considers herself a traveler, having spent a cumulative two decades on the road, including one year in Europe during her twenties and two years in India.13 Her journey to India was formative as it introduced her to “the way most people live in the world,” something that she thought was way beyond anything she knew.14 She also has memories of uprooting and driving across sections of the United States at the insistence of her father, to escape winter, see the sights, and make money along the way, which subsequently included also traveling from state to state in America

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with her fellow lawyers when working on different legal causes. Traveling also brought Gloria to coin an idea of a type of traveler—a woman traveler, whose charisma strangers naturally gravitate to and which is characterized by her sympathetic ear.15 It is by riding on public transportation that Gloria realized during her life how listening to others is a revolutionary act.16 The Greyhound Bus and the “Road Less Traveled” Taymor’s film begins in the middle of nowhere, with a point-of-view shot of the road from a moving vehicle. The camera then pans to the front of an Express trip, a Greyhound bus, before focusing on the people on board. There are four female passengers of interest that the camera frames one by one. The first is a six-year-old child (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), who looks out of the window, the view morphing into the scene of a sleepy neighborhood. The second is a young woman in her twenties (Alicia Vikander), her window view showing her a busy scene from everyday life in a city in India. Gloria Steinem, in her prime (Julianne Moore), is identified as the third passenger, recognizable through the signature combination of long, highlighted hairstyle and the Aviator glasses, through which she is looking at a view of Dakota and motorbikes. The fourth character, a twelve-year-old girl (Lulu Wilson), is shown only later; her window view mirrors that of the earlier child. What each passenger sees out of her respective window is inconsistent with the actual location they are traversing. This sequence sets the idea that these four passengers are all Gloria Steinem in different periods of her life, each reflecting a dearly held aspiration at the time. The way Taymor weaves this life story does not portray a linear timeline as would a typical biography. Each of these Glorias serves as a chapter of the protagonist’s life, but none of them begins or ends an age-specific, chronological discussion. In the narrative of the film, the Glorias are appreciated for their part in specific tropes: looking back, the older/future self offers insight and wisdom and cathartic release from past misunderstandings and regrets to the younger self and presents a series of questions and remarks that allow the narrative to transition to the topics and themes shaping Gloria’s biography. Gloria’s life is mostly spent on the road; she has taken the road less traveled. Beginning with a literal view of the road brings to mind Gloria’s condensed, contextual history of physical mobility and her exploration of how the road is framed as an overwhelmingly masculine territory. Indeed, as set against men who embody adventure, women embody hearth and home, as she argues in her biography.17 History, literature, and film likewise indicate how being on the road has not been a kind experience for women, turning such narratives into indirect cautionary tales, from Amelia Earhart to Thelma and Louise. Gloria then mentions the cultural practices of disciplinary measures

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and honor killings of women enacted if and when they leave their home without a male relative, or in the case they leave their country without the written permission of a male guardian,18 and further lists cultures that deny women certain rights and privileges. In Saudi Arabia, for example, driving a vehicle is still outlawed for women. The democratic uprisings of the Arab Spring are also cited as an occasion in which female citizens and foreign journalists were sexually assaulted for appearing in the public square.19 Finally, Gloria mentions the role of molecular archaeology in exposing the fact that the hampered geographical mobility of women in modern-day society is a mode of social control; ironically, she asserts, ancient DNA shows that it was the women who were travelers while the men stayed at home.20 Taking the road less traveled, therefore, means defying gender customs and roles, together with rejecting the notion of what constitutes the “feminine” as being merely submissive, domestic nurturers. Hence, the purple motorcycle, which the opening scene ends with, alludes to the individual adventure waiting to be discovered and ridden. Steinemite and the Family Wagon: Windows and Worldviews In Taymor’s film, Gloria associates her father, Leo Steinem (Timothy Hutton), with his Nash LaFayette, which is foremost an extension of his body and being, as he is a traveling salesman. Leo attempts to balance his profession with his obligations as a father to a family of four by attaching a trailer to the vehicle and bringing them with him on his trips—the vehicle thus becoming a small home. In this sense, the Nash LaFayette is energized with the same optimism and street-smarts that Leo leads his life with. It embodies how the family has, to an extent, lived off the land on their terms, surviving by earning money during their trips through opportunities and clever means. On different occasions, the trailer carries small antiques such as china and silver, which Leo purchases with Ruth’s assistance from other roadside antique dealers or country auctions “anywhere within a day’s journey”21in order to resell and barter them along the way. The bench-type seats of the car force the passenger to be front-facing: in the customary seating arrangement for the nuclear family, the father is at the wheel, and the mother sits in the front passenger side, while the children are seated in the back. Conversation is natural for the passengers on the same bench, as they have a view of each other’s gestures and expressions and can make eye contact. During road trips, attention is also usually directed out of the windows of the family car. For children, looking out of the window by their seat affords some extent of individual solitude from social interaction; it allows a chance to practice keen observation as well as it allows the imagination to wander.

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An initially disinterested Gloria, who learns the virtues of looking out of the window, helps introduce the significance of travel for the acquisition of wisdom. Leo Steinem believes travel to be “the best and only education.” While Gloria has written that she learned how to read by looking at signs on the road, the context of this scene is the significance of lived experience, the cross-, inter-, and sub-cultural encounters that can make an individual truly learned. As stated in the biography, the road brings one “out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories.”22 This idea is exemplified and developed later in Gloria’s sojourn in India. In retrospect, she thinks about how all of her many trips have provided insight into understanding the state of the everyday and how these also motivated her to pursue the prospects of “what could be.”23 Her father’s vehicle, therefore, is associated with the permanence of the road. When Leo divorces his wife Ruth Nuneviller in 1944, the Nash LaFayette loses its identity as a family wagon and becomes a full-fledged symbol of independence in living out the perennial wanderlust and full-time quests for the “Big Deal.”24 A revived show business dream involves the purchase of the contract of a young Italian pop singer. The singer and his wife become the latest passengers of the vehicle, which is then driven to gigs at bars and roadhouses. It is a short-lived pursuit as expectations fail to be met; there are few callbacks, no music records are created, and the expenses outweigh Leo’s dedication to his dream. His next trail is in Ecuador, a trip financed through the sale of his car, which explains why Leo is seen driving a light blue vehicle later when he meets Gloria after her India immersion. When Leo dies, a Nash LaFayette vehicle of the same color and model as Gloria’s childhood memory recalls it is seen passing the bus that the four Glorias are on, each of them weeping as they watch it. Later, the bus overtakes the car, which symbolizes not so much the fact that Leo is being left behind but that life moves inevitably forward for the protagonist. In hindsight, Gloria justifies the choice to begin her story by talking about her father because he was a significant influence on her. The Womens’ Railway Car and the Bull-Drawn Carriage: Learning about the Ethnographic Gaze It is during her sojourn in India that Gloria first realizes the truth of travel as the best education, along with the extent of the knowledge she still needs to gather. She boards a women-only railway car (a legacy of the British) at the advice of her student friends as she travels on her own from Calcutta to Kerala. In its practical function, riding the women-only car is a measure to avoid “Eve teasing,” meaning the “sexual harassment and touching that women may suffer in public.”25 The car is compressed, each enclosure consisting

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of two benches facing each other; without any seat partitions, it allows the shoulders and the sides of one’s thighs to jostle with those of others. Two overhead racks are positioned above each bench; while intended for luggage, they also function as additional seating or laying spots for small-framed people. The maximum capacity appears to be based on how many passengers can fit. The interior is painted white, while the vehicle’s actual age is evident in the slight stains, faded panels, and peeled spots. There are two adjacent large steel windows on the car’s sides, each of them by the side seat of each bench, big enough for all passengers to appreciate the view. The seating arrangement inevitably bares everything into the open—from glances, expressions, gestures, pastimes, and conversations to the task of patiently caring for a child, eating meals in tiffins and doing transactions with vendors—everyone being bound to interact more, especially with the lone foreigner wearing a sari. The women-only car thus becomes an ethnographic space. As Paloma Gay y Blasco and Huon Wardle argue, practicing ethnography comes with the intention of “transmitting knowledge about diverse experiential worlds” and involves asking and answering the question of what it means to be “human.”26 Ethnography shares the dimension of storytelling; its discussions involve narrative and imagery, both of which draw from and contribute to the wider flows and ripples of human conversation. As a genre, it would appeal to Gloria as it is possible to compose an ethnography that reconciles objective representation with the literary and the artistic and still includes elements of introspection. An ethnographic gaze would require suspending an immediate response and learning to appreciate the particular instance of an encounter or an observation “as it takes its place in, or embodies in itself, a particular context.”27 One must also attempt to look at things with fresh senses: quickly dismissing things as “normal” runs the risk of missing details which would have informed a certain cultural noun or event.28 According to Gay y Blasco and Wardle, making sense of a cultural thing, place, or event unavoidably begins with setting it against the familiar, taking what the individual sees and experiences in an encounter and then comparing it to one’s own life experiences, ideas, and expectations.29 Gloria compares the train car to a women’s dorm. Such a parallel begins with the age and phenotypical diversity of the passengers, together with their respective social groupings in conversation. In the film, Gloria learns how riding public transportation equates to “being in India.” The groups are drawn to her difference, but they regard her with kindness. There is a reference to how the women bargain on Gloria’s behalf, and snacks are also shared. In her memoir, she indeed recounts how she was also offered curries, rice, and homemade breads as a gesture of friendship. The transitory sisterhood formed with the fellow passengers shows an amazing affinity among them, as they have grown close to each other in a matter of only two days.30 As Gloria

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affirms, its foundations have more to do with the “very Indian habit of asking personal questions.”31 The women ask why Gloria’s family has not found her a husband (a cultural comparison of expectations corresponding to age and gender), and one of them expresses the assumption that “All Americans are rich” while commenting with curiosity over her choice of transportation (savoring of taste and social class stratification). A third woman asks about access to guns (which represents an outsider’s interpretation of American liberty), while a fourth one inquires if America is open to non-citizens (possibly hinting at an interest in geographic mobility). Interestingly, the scene turns the ethnographic question on its head—who is learning about whom? The women know how to search for (as well as interpret) differences through comparison. This also expands Gloria’s perceptions of what constitutes personal questions versus the regular every day, according to Indian culture. The cognitive dissonance helps her realize that reproductive rights issues are the marker of what constitutes the more personal affairs, being often discussed with women friends. Later on, this becomes a part of the larger theme treated in different parts of the film. The train car scenes teach Gloria about the art of observation and how to ask questions. In the carriage ride to the next village, she learns active listening in a larger group setting. This sequence begins with the protagonist being forced to part with the familiar “American” comforts of bringing too much stuff.32 She joins the woman, with only the clothes on her back, the bracelets that tightly hug her wrist, a comb, and a cup. Being asked to “travel light” is instrumental for mobility, but it also allows her to become a participant observer who encounters the simplicity and material minimalism experienced by these women. At the village destination, the women take turns talking about their experiences of gender-based violence and/or caste hostility. Seated outside on the dirty ground, in a circle engulfed by another wider circle of women, testimonies are then being told in front of the flicker of a small fire at the center. As Martha A. Brown and Sherri Di Lallo argue, this Talking Circle “increases voice, decreases invisibility, and does not privilege one worldview or version of reality over another”;33 it is designed to increase empathy and to make stories known and “empowers individuals to transform their world.”34 By sitting in a circle, every participant can see and be seen by the others, and the absence of physical barriers humanizes the activity. The Talking Circle is based on the relationship between the facilitator and the members conveying personal narratives. The facilitator’s duty is to gain knowledge from the sessions using the stories from the circle to come up with solutions. They then find people to raise their concerns, thereby improving the reality of the people they have communed with.35

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Sharing Cabs in the Big City: On Gender Stratification There are two conversations held in cab scenes which can be set against each other as well as complement each other in that they provide two different discussions condensing the themes of gender roles, inequality, and sex roles. In the first instance, Gloria is in the backseat of a Manhattan taxi, seated between two of her fellow writers, Gay Talese (Eric Mendenhall) and novelist Saul Bellow (Jim McKeny). The scene is mostly framed through a mediumlong shot with the three characters facing the camera. Gloria’s companions are both male but differ in age range, Saul being older and with some air of seniority over Gay. It is a tight squeeze, with Gay somewhat turned to the side, legs crossed, part of his scapula already leaning toward the front of Gloria’s shoulder. A similar pose is mirrored by Saul on her left. Gloria is limited in her movements to the head and hand gestures above the wrist, her knees are held together, with her hands clasped on her lap, but what stifles her is the nature of the conversation. She begins by proudly sharing a technique she learned from Jack Newfield of The Village Voice, which might help them extract the answers they needed from Bobby Kennedy, who has been known to dodge interviewers and selectively answer questions. Gay, seen facing slightly to the window for the duration of her explanation, reacts to her words by subtly rolling his eyes and scoffing. He then turns to face Saul, leaning somewhat across Gloria as if she was neither talking nor present, and delivers the punchline: “Did you know, Mr. Bellow, that every year there is a pretty girl who comes to New York pretending she’s a writer before she gets married? Well, Gloria is this year’s pretty girl.” In what is perhaps the closest act to propriety, Saul presses his lips to avoid laughing but does nothing to alleviate the passive-aggressive communication. Gay’s is a loaded rhetorical question which encapsulates the prominence of sexism in the journalism of the time. This scene brings audiences back to what Gloria has been told in earlier job interviews: women were typically assigned to do research for stories, but the fieldwork, writing, and credit from the story remained in the hands of male journalists. The second cab scene presents the conversation between Gloria and Flo Kennedy (Lorraine Toussant). In contrast to the previous sequence made of male journalists, this scene uses a combination of medium shots and eye-level, side profile angles throughout the discussion, giving the viewer the impression of being a passenger him/herself, too. This results in a more personal, natural gaze toward Flo. The two women talk about abortion as well as about the methodology behind Flo and Diane Schulder’s 1971 book Abortion Rap, a seminal work in the fight for abortion rights that includes the chronicled testimonies of women who filed a lawsuit in the early 1970s challenging the constitutionality of New York’s abortion laws. During the conversation, the

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camera is momentarily shifted to the woman taxi driver (Lynne Ashe), who takes an interest in the discussion and listens to her passengers. An insight is presented when Flo makes an observation about the radio broadcast: she notices that basketball scores are repeated all day long, but women die every day of illegal abortions, and that information does not get even the slightest form of visibility. The woman taxi driver ends the scene by affirming: “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.” The woman taxi driver is last seen with her gaze into the rearview mirror, looking at the duo. The difference in this second discussion lies in the characters’ dynamics. Unlike the first sequence, no interlocutor is talking over another one, and, regardless of the separated seating of the third participant, who is also a stranger, the taxi driver is not excluded from the conversation. The sequence involves three women belonging to different races and ethnicities, socioeconomic backgrounds, and occupations, but they are united in a common concern that could potentially apply to all women.

GLORIA’S CLOSET: WOMENS’ UNIFORMS, WOMENS’ PERSONAS In a biography of things, clothing and accessories begin as commodities. The baseline function of clothing is to provide protection from the elements, which then evolved to meet other human needs as well, as Charlotte Perkins Gilman affirms.36 It is a universally held opinion that the way people dress and carry themselves provides others some preliminary information about who or what they are, without speaking. Clothing has indeed been thought of as “a social tissue.”37 If we consider the human body as mediating communication with other human beings, it is not only represented but can be read according to what it is being covered and adorned with, from the clothes themselves to accessories such as jewelry, but also makeup, hairstyles, and even the features of one’s skin.38 A classic idea behind clothing is how it defines the age and gender of the individual.39 When Gloria is a child, she first wears pastel floral dresses, then plaid. She has a wide collar, on some occasions, ruffles, short-puffed sleeves, and an unfitted bodice, the dress itself ending above the knee. Young Gloria also wears ankle-high socks and doll shoes; her hair is cut mid-length with two low, braided pigtails. The idea of dress as a marker of age is furthered when a transition is enacted in the design of the protagonist’s dress, specifically after Gloria and her mother move back to their ancestral farmhouse in Ohio. The film’s protagonist is now in her early adolescence, still wearing an above-the-knee dress but with distinct details such as a narrower collar, regular sleeves, a darkercolored fabric with a slightly more sophisticated print and knee-high socks.

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Her hair has been cut into a mid-part pageboy. Toward the end of the Ohio arc, she appears to have a voice in the way she dresses, opting for a more muted, button-up, plain, short-sleeved shirt tucked into cropped trousers and flat shoes resembling the Oxford style. This outfit is introduced in the scene in which Gloria learns about Ruth’s past as a journalist writing under a male pseudonym. Historically, women began wearing trousers for work when the men went to war. Gloria likely dresses for practicality, as she has a more physically active lifestyle and becomes her mother’s companion. The purpose of this outfit is to introduce the trouser look, which would become her brand as an adult.40 As a young woman in the 1950s, Gloria’s everyday outfits revert to dressing for gender distinction.41 This includes the somewhat ballooning, midcalve A-Line, and pencil-cut skirt up to the mid-knee, both of which were fitted at the waist, a ladies’ trousers, and varied blouses. When she pursues her career as a journalist, spectators see an extension of her dressing for biological sex distinction, but this time in accordance with the rules of corporate attire. Gloria wears these outfits in scenes which coincide with instances exemplifying gender oppression in the workplace. She is indeed forced to do menial chores instead of proper journalistic work, suffers a significant downplaying of her accomplishments, is denied the choice of the topics to write about, and the men around her express sexual harassment through their gestures and words. Clothing as a mode of control and constraint42 is depicted when Gloria volunteers to guest speak at Dorothy Pitman Hughes’s (Janelle Monae) assembly. Dressed in a black, short-sleeved dress which ends some inches above the knee, she struggles to climb up the platform without accidentally baring herself from the hips down, while her strappy shoes cause her to somewhat slip while climbing on the platform. Her journalist persona outfit is incompatible with the occasion of a protest and public speaking. The content of her speech also mirrors her outfit as she spits data rather than telling stories bearing information, much to the disinterest of her audience. Among the protagonist’s more memorable outfits is the powder blue sari with a baby pink edge and white floral print she wears for most of the sequences covering her sojourn in India. The sari is a single-length, unstitched fabric, typically forty-five to fifty-two inches wide and between four and nine yards in length (depending on the style of draping).43 Geographically, there are textile techniques and designs for sari which are exclusive to specific locations, but despite the regional differences, the sari is commonly suited to reconcile the “blazingly hot climate and the modest-dress customs.”44 Its cultural significance varies from being a garment for everyday wear or an outfit dictated by tradition, to an heirloom passed through generations, a wedding gift, or a milestone gift.45 As a socially versatile fabric, it cuts across ages and socioeconomic divisions; it both identifies as well as embraces different castes,46 often through the color of the fabric.47 As a soft sculpture of femininity, the sari

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exposes the midriff and accentuates curves. It also has the ability to conceal and reveal the personality of the individual wearing it,48 much so that there are women who would bring their own weavers as part of their marriage dowry, as they believe their saris form part of their identity.49 A sari can be worn in more than one hundred different ways, depending on the region it is from, the type, and dimensions of the fabric, as well as what the wearer might be doing on a specific day.50 Also, it is among the earliest types of material culture in India which evidences sophistication in handicraft design, exemplifying the processes of dyeing, printing, and silk weaving, all of which are given representations in at least one of the thirty regional varieties of saris.51 The sari has an ethnographic significance for Gloria: she is taught by her train car friends the many ways it could be tied and draped, together with the respective functions of a particular style.52 It permits social interaction in that it facilitates conversation and also becomes a mode of communing; it comes with the honor of learning about and being part of a deeply entrenched material culture through its democratized production in which “both the weaver and the wearer are considered to be artists.”53 Gloria’s fondness for the sari remains to this day: she has adapted it as part of her wardrobe even long after her India sojourn.54 An outfit which becomes memorably definitive for Gloria is the one she wears when she is a guest at a talk show. The interviewer (Michael Lowry) who comments on it latently begins a discussion on the idea of clothing being a collection of signs which, combined, convey a collective message. Gloria’s outfit consists of a black, fitted long-sleeved top, black jeans, a chunky belt, boots, and her tinted Aviator glasses; she wears rings, one of which is designed like a snake wrapped around her middle finger. Her long hair is worn loose. The interviewer “alludes and flirts to the fact that [Gloria] is a sex object.”55 Eventually this outfit does become the protagonist’s defining brand. An analysis of it points to the fact that, first of all, the monochromatic black is usually identified as magnetic and attractive,56 expressive of aggressiveness,57 and in many cultures it is associated with the idea of evil and death.58 The materials for the shirt and jeans accentuate Gloria’s curves while observing the balance between the modest and the daring. The Aviator lenses have a long history of originally being related to the First World War Triplex Safety Goggle.59 As a protective eye gear worn by fighter pilots, its style became defined by the Ray-Ban glasses in the 1930s, which had a lighter, thinner, and more elegantly proportioned take. From being a masculine-gendered accessory, Gloria alters its function by using this protective gear as a partial form of seclusion. This is a means for her to obscure her appearance to some extent, in response to the comments focusing on her beauty rather than on what she had to say. The ring with the snake motif can be interpreted as an impression of the mythical Medusa giving the patriarchy the “middle finger.”

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Considering all of these details, the interviewer’s thoughts may be interpreted in terms of how he sees the ensemble as suggestively deviant against the typical woman clothing expressive of demure and passivity. The “sexiness” aspect is not in the clothing itself, but in the challenge, it presents to convention. Gloria disappoints the TV host by stating that what she wears is her “uniform,” which is “minimalist perhaps” and more comfortable than what he is wearing, as she draws attention to his “striped tie that pinches [his] neck” and the “cuffs [he] keep[s] adjusting.” Uniforms are clothes denoting a profession or a publicly acknowledged role. What comes with them is the magnitude of the responsibility and the quality of the roles played by the persons wearing them.60 For Gloria, uniforms consist of the different roles, expectations, and specific personalities society anticipates for women; these are ideas reinforced in the choice of clothing. At the end of the presentation of the second outfit she says, “We love our girls in uniform.” The Bunny costume is introduced in the surreal sequence: it references the time that Gloria had gone undercover as a Bunny to do participant observation about working conditions in the Playboy Club. The significance of such an attire is difficult to exactly pinpoint in the sociocultural context as it is intended to be both “constricting” and “liberating.”61 Some critics find it empowering because it plays on “the idea of women who unapologetically owned their attractiveness or leveraged it as part of their job.”62 In this alternative perspective, it is the Bunnies who are exploiting men, and not the other way around. The Bunny suit might be the uniform in a club, but it provides Gloria with a sense of power (through the access to specific social circles) that comes with it and allows her to fulfill her mission to find and expose the truth. Gloria’s closet shows how everyone begins with obedience to what culture dictates, whereas life experience is a factor that influences the variety of clothes one encounters. Gloria’s outfits record cultural immersion. Her uniform reflects how clothing begins as the power of the dominant culture, of control by an organization, but she has harnessed it for personal power, eventually contributing to a subculture which subverts traditional notions of feminine beauty.

SOME LASTING THOUGHTS ON GLORIA’S BIOGRAPHY OF THINGS If we refer back to the interviewer’s opinion and think of Gloria as an object, we could argue that she would be a pair of Aviator sunglasses. By now included among the roster of the ubiquitous when it comes to mass consumer culture, the Aviator sunglasses are the object which she was able to successfully recontextualize; they have become a symbol of agency, first in terms

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of breaking from the masculine gendering of the lenses. Second, Gloria has used them to extend herself63 in controlling and eventually overcoming the criticism coming from those who affirm that her public charisma has to do with her physical beauty rather than her substance. She has contributed to the cultural history of the Aviator sunglasses, by effect, by turning them into an unconventional symbol of free speech reinforced by real-world evidence; they are a metaphor for women not being afraid to seek out stories and speak about what they have seen. They have become her brand, as traditional print media themselves have confirmed in her day.64 Along with the depiction of Gloria’s life story, Taymor’s film thus presents the association of the Aviator lens with a fearless woman icon. Women wearers of the Aviator lenses who have taken to their road on their purple motorbikes may want to channel the same energy Gloria has shown (and continues to show) in her pursuits of equality and the advocacy and protection of women’s rights around the globe. If we think of Gloria as a vehicle, she would be the railway car and the bull-drawn carriage. Public transportation has been seen in her story as a potential microcosm of community. The relaxed state and leisure that usually come with long-distance travel may be conducive to conversation and reflection, with each stranger telling their own story. Also, looking out of windows is a distinctively reflective and observational act: it becomes potentially ethnographic because it involves images that are literally framed by what can be seen in the bounds of the window frame while the vehicle is moving. The relaxed state of the passengers may also imply a suspension of immediate judgment about what they see and what they regard or assume is normal in favor of “taking in the sights” as part of the travel experience. Together with taking on the spontaneity and inspiration of life in general, this is part of what Gloria calls “having an on-the-road state of mind,” which involves staying open to what may come along. It also encourages open-mindedness and thinking critically as a habit, keeping in mind that “what seems to be one thing from a distance is very different in close up.”65 Julie Taymor’s The Glorias reflects Gloria Steinem’s personas as journalist, feminist, and ethnographer in her own right. At the point of intersection is the belief that the highest function of telling a story and conveying truths is what could be done with this information. Hence, the permanence of the road: to keep traveling, to keep going to places, listening to more stories, and sharing them, until such stories reach the right people. NOTES 1. Julian Thomas, “Phenomenology and Material Culture,” in Handbook of Material Culture, eds. Chris Tilley, et al. (London: Sage, 2006), 43.

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2. Chris Fowler, “From Identity and Material Culture to Personhood and Materiality,” in The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, eds. Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 352–85. 3. Ibid.; Chris Gosden and Yvonne Marshall, “The Cultural Biography of Objects,” World Archaeology 31, no. 2 (1999): 169; Anthony Harding, “Introduction: Biography of Things,” Distant Worlds Journal 1 (2016): 1–8; Chris Tilley, “Objectification,” in Handbook of Material Culture, eds. Chris Tilley, et al. (London: Sage, 2006), 61. 4. Chris Tilley, et al., Handbook of Material Culture (London: Sage, 2006), 4; Tim Dant, “Fruitbox/Toolbox: Biography and Objects,” Auto/Biography 9, nos. 1 and 2 (2001): 11–20. 5. Janet Hoskins, “Agency, Biography and Objects,” in Handbook of Material Culture, eds. Chris Tilley, et al. (London: Sage, 2006), 74–84. 6. Dant, “Fruitbox/Toolbox.” 7. Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in The Social Life of Things, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 64–94. 8. Dant, “Fruitbox/Toolbox.” 9. Arjun Appadurai (ed.), “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3–63. 10. Tilley, “Objectification,” 61. 11. Hoskins, “Agency, Biography and Objects.” 12. Catherine Spangler, “Gloria Steinem Doesn’t Drive,” Culture Desk, The New Yorker, October 20, 2015, https://www​.newyorker​.com​/culture​/culture​-desk​/video​ -gloria​-steinem​-doesnt​-drive. Accessed on January 9, 2023. In this section, the word “garage” is used to cover a specific listing of vehicles seen in the film (instead of a covered parking space); it is a device that introduces the different chapters of Gloria’s life as they are marked by travel and destinations. 13. Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road (New York: Random House, 2015). 14. Ibid., xxii. 15. Ibid., xxiii. 16. Ibid., xxvi. 17. Ibid., xxiv. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., xxv. 21. Ibid., 4. 22. Ibid., xix. 23. Ibid., xviii. 24. This term is interpretable as a fortuitous moment of opportunity in which a task, project, or endeavor yields significantly large profit. Steinem, My Life, 11. 25. Ibid., 32. 26. Paloma Gay y Blasco and Huon Wardle, How to Read Ethnography (London: Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006). 27. Ibid., 4. 28. Ibid., 13.

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29. Ibid., 4 and 9. 30. Ibid., 33. 31. Ibid. 32. This refers to a remark made by the woman Gloria meets at Bhave’s ashram, who identifies the protagonist as American by observing the largeness of her suitcase. 33. Martha A. Brown and Sherri Di Lallo, “Talking Circles: A Culturally Responsive Evaluation Practice,” American Journal of Evaluation 41, no. 3 (2020): 367. 34. Ibid., 269. 35. Shawn Wilson, “What Is an Indigenous Research Methodology?” Canadian Journal of Native Education 25, no. 2 (2001): 177. 36. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Dress of Women: A Critical Introduction to the Symbolism and Sociology of Clothing (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 4. 37. Ibid., 3. 38. Patrizia Calefato, Fashion as Cultural Translation (London: Anthem Press, 2021), 43. 39. Ibid., 44. See also Hill and Deegan’s introduction in Gilman, The Dress of Women, ix; and Tilley, “Objectification,” 62. 40. Mentioned in Sandy Powell’s interview by Jazz Tangcay for Variety, published online October 2, 2020. 41. Ibid. 42. See Calefato, Fashion as Cultural Translation, 44 and 46; and Gilman, The Dress of Women, 11. 43. Cynthia Green, “Why Saris Are Indian Material Culture,” JSTOR Daily Art & Art History. February 23, 2018, https://daily​.jstor​.org​/why​-saris​-are​-indian​-material​ -culture/; Malika V. Kashyap, “9 Facts You Might Not Know about the Sari,” Google Arts & Culture. n.d., https://artsandculture​.google​.com​/story​/9​-facts​-you​-might​-not​ -know​-about​-the​-sari​/ewIi5LK9aiamJA; Vijai Singh Katiyar, Indian Saris Traditions Perspectives Design (New Delhi: Wisdom Tree, 2009), 33. Accessed on January 9, 2023. 44. Charu Suri, “The Surprising History of India’s Vibrant Sari Tradition,” National Geographic Travel September 24, 2020,https://www​ .nationalgeographic​ .com​/travel​/article​/the​-story​-of​-the​-sari​-in​-india#:~​:text​=The​%20textile​%20is​%20a​ %20symbolic​,wielded​%20as​%20a​%20political​%20prop. Accessed on January 9, 2023. 45. Kashyap, “9 Facts,” Katiyar, Indian Saris Traditions Perspectives Design. 46. Kashyap, “9 Facts,” 33. 47. See Sujatha Gidla, Ants among the Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017). 48. Suri, “The Surprising History.” 49. Green, Why Saris Are Indian Material Culture. 50. Suri, “The Surprising History.” 51. Katiyar, Indian Saris Traditions Perspectives Design; and Suri, “The Surprising History.” 52. Steinem, My Life, 33. 53. Green, Why Saris Are Indian Material Culture.

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54. Sandy Powell, in Jazz Tangcay’s 2020 interview for Variety. 55. The New York Times, “How Julie Taymor Brings Visual Flair to ‘The Glorias.’ Anatomy of a Scene,” October 2, 2020, https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​ =bTQZgirEkn4. Accessed on January 9, 2023. 56. Duje Kodzoman, “THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CLOTHING: Meaning of Colors, Body Image and Gender Expression in Fashion,” Textile & Leather Review 2, no. 2 (2019): 90–103. 57. Mark G. Frank and Thomas Gilovich, “The Dark Side of Self-and Social Perception: Black Uniforms and Aggression in Professional Sports,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54, no. 1 (1988): 74–85. 58. Francis M. Adams and Charles E. Osgood, “A Cross-Cultural Study of the Affective Meanings of Color,” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 4, no. 2 (1973): 135–56. 59. Vanessa Brown, Cool Shades: The History and Meaning of Sunglasses (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 36. 60. Calefato, Fashion as Cultural Translation, 44. 61. Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, “Down the Rabbit Hole: The Surprising Tale of the Bunny Suit,” The Atlantic, October 4, 2017, https://www​.theatlantic​.com​/ entertainment​/archive​/2017​/10​/history​-of​-the​-playboy​-bunny​-suit​/541929/. Accessed on January 9, 2023. 62. Tori Lynn Adams, Cat Auer, Andie Eisen and Michele Sleighel, “Diamond Days,” Playboy Online, December 10, 2019, https://www​.playboy​.com​/read​/diamond​ -days. Accessed on January 9, 2023. 63. According to Simmel’s work The Philosophy of Money, objects are fascinating and covetable because they objectify the self and they play a role in defining one’s self. Yet objects are separate and cannot ever be completely contained by the self. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (London: Routledge, 2004). 64. Recall that newspaper issue with that large image titled “Pin the Penis on the Feminist.” 65. Steinem, My Life on the Road, xv.

REFERENCES Adams, Francis M. and Charles E. Osgood. “A Cross-Cultural Study of the Affective Meanings of Color.” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 4, no. 2 (1973): 135–56. Adams, Tori Lynn, Cat Auer, Andie Eisen and Michele Sleighel. “Diamond Days.” Playboy Online. December 10, 2019 https://www​.playboy​.com​/read​/diamond​-days. Appadurai, Arjun (ed.). “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value.” In The Social Life of Things, 3–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Blasco, Paloma Gay and Huon Wardle. How to Read Ethnography. London: Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. Brown, Martha A. and Sherri Di Lallo. “Talking Circles: A Culturally Responsive Evaluation Practice.” American Journal of Evaluation 41, no. 3 (2020): 367–83.

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Brown, Vanessa. Cool Shades: The History and Meaning of Sunglasses. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Calefato, Patrizia. Fashion as Cultural Translation, translated by Alessandro Bucci. London: Anthem Press, 2021. Chrisman-Campbell, Kimberly. “Down the Rabbit Hole: The Surprising Tale of the Bunny Suit.” The Atlantic. October 04, 2017. https://www​.theatlantic​.com​/entertainment​/archive​/2017​/10​/history​-of​-the​-playboy​-bunny​-suit​/541929/. Dant, Tim. “Fruitbox / Toolbox: Biography and Objects.” Auto/Biography 9, nos. 1 and 2 (2001): 11–20. Fowler, Chris. “From Identity and Material Culture to Personhood and Materiality.” In The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, edited by Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry, 352–85. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Frank, Mark G. and Thomas Gilovich. “The Dark Side of Self-and Social Perception: Black Uniforms and Aggression in Professional Sports.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54, no. 1 (1988): 74–85. Gidla, Sujatha. Ants among the Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Dress of Women: A Critical Introduction to the Symbolism and Sociology of Clothing. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002. Gosden, Chris and Yvonne Marshall. “The Cultural Biography of Objects.” World Archaeology 31, no. 2 (1999): 169–78. Green, Cynthia. “Why Saris are Indian Material Culture.” JSTOR Daily Art & Art History. February 23, 2018. https://daily​.jstor​.org​/why​-saris​-are​-indian​-material​-culture/. Harding, Anthony. “Introduction: Biography of Things.” Distant Worlds Journal 1 (2016): 1–8. Hoskins, Janet. “Agency, Biography and Objects.” In Handbook of Material Culture, edited by Chris Tilley, et al., 74–84. London: Sage, 2006. Kashyap, Malika V. “9 Facts You Might Not Know about the Sari.” Google Arts & Culture. https://artsandculture​.google​.com​/story​/9​-facts​-you​-might​-not​-know​ -about​-the​-sari​/ewIi5LK9aiamJA. Katiyar, Vijai Singh. Indian Saris Traditions Perspectives Design. New Delhi: Wisdom Tree, 2009. Kodzoman, Duje. “THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CLOTHING: Meaning of Colors, Body Image and Gender Expression in Fashion.” Text Leath Rev 2, no. 2 (2019): 90–103. Kopytoff, Igor. “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process.” In The Social Life of Things, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 64–94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Lennon, Sharron J., Alyssa Dana Adomaitis, Jayoung Koo and Kim Johnson. “Dress and Sex: A Review of Empirical Research Involving Human Participants and Published in Refereed Journals.” Fash Text 4, no. 14 (2017). Simmel, Georg. The Philosophy of Money. London: Routledge, 2004. Spangler, Catherine. “Gloria Steinem Doesn’t Drive.” Culture Desk, The New Yorker, October 20, 2015 https://www​.newyorker​.com​/culture​/culture​-desk​/video​-gloria​ -steinem​-doesnt​-drive.

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Steinem, Gloria. My Life on the Road. New York: Random House, 2015. Suri, Charu. “The surprising history of India’s vibrant sari tradition.” National Geographic Travel. September 24, 2020 https://www​.nationalgeographic​.com​/travel​/ article​/the​-story​-of​-the​-sari​-in​-india#:~​:text​=The​%20textile​%20is​%20a​%20symbolic,%​,wielded​%20as​%20a​%20 %20prop. Tangcay, Jazz. “Sandy Powell Breaks Down Gloria Steinem’s Iconic Looks in ‘The Glorias’.” Variety. October 2, 2020 https://variety​.com​/2020​/artisans​/news​/sandy​ -powell​-gloria​-steinem costumes-1234788151/. The New York Times. “How Julie Taymor Brings Visual Flair to ‘The Glorias.’ Anatomy of a Scene.” October 2, 2020 https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​ =bTQZgirEkn4. Thomas, Julian. “Phenomenology and Material Culture.” In Handbook of Material Culture, edited by Chris Tilley, et al., 43–59. London: Sage, 2006. Tilley, Chris. “Objectification.” In Handbook of Material Culture, edited by Chris Tilley, et al., 60–73. London: Sage, 2006. Wilson, Shawn. “What Is an Indigenous Research Methodology?” Canadian Journal of Native Education 25, no. 2 (2001): 175–79.

Chapter 7

Frida Creativity, Trauma, and the Woman Artist Gabrielle Stecher

At the 2002 Venice Film Festival, Julie Taymor debuted Frida on the opening night of the competition. While her film, a biopic of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo starring Salma Hayek, missed out on the prestigious Golden Lion, it was rightfully awarded the Mimmo Rotella Award—an award designated for films that enrich or make explicit the connection between cinema and other visual arts. Narratively speaking, the film follows three decades of the artist’s life, rightfully beginning with the rise of the artist as a young adult. Stylistically, many of the film’s scenes are inspired by the rich and often surreal artistic and cultural traditions of which Kahlo was a student. There is no shortage of striking tableaux vivants, where Kahlo’s paintings, such as her marriage portrait with muralist Diego Rivera, are recreated and animated with assistance from live actors. It is not a surprise, then, that under Taymor’s direction, the film was the recipient of the AFI Award in 2003 for its “unique visual language [that] takes us into an artist’s head and reminds us that art is best enjoyed when it moves, breathes and is painted on a giant canvas, as only the movies can provide.”1 Additionally, as a testament to the film’s excellence across a variety of artistic categories, it would go on to win two of the six Academy Awards for which it was nominated, Best Original Score and Best Makeup. But Frida is more than a dramatic biopic about one of the world’s most famous women artists. The film, and the work and advocacy of star Salma Hayek to bring Kahlo’s life to the screen, became part of what many have called “Fridamania” or the cult-like status that Kahlo has achieved in the past few decades that has landed the artist’s image on everything from T-shirts to makeup palettes to home goods. Kahlo’s image and her works have been endlessly commodified, but she has also become, for casual art viewers and 129

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the general public, the woman artist. This phenomenon was initiated in many ways with the feminist movement of the 1970s, and Frida is certainly part of this legacy. As a serious work of art, however, Taymor’s portrait of the artist is one of both fire and blood. It is, on the one hand, a blazing account of Kahlo’s greatest passions, not just for her art but also for her husband, Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina), her politics and her lovers in between. On the other hand, the film is an intimate study of trauma and embodiment. Taymor herself has described this intention: “I’m not interested in creating something that I’m not willing to spill blood over . . . You don’t get fire without rubbing two stones together.”2 In the film that spans thirty years of the artist’s life, it is Kahlo’s blood that is spilled again and again in a meditation on trauma, disability, and artistry. But what we now know is that the trauma of Frida is not just what was recreated to play out on screen. This chapter considers the relationship between creativity and trauma as reflected in Taymor’s film and in its reception post #MeToo. It explores the film’s depiction of art and creativity as forces for healing and self-expression following moments of intense personal and physical trauma. Much of the trauma Kahlo suffered caused irreparable damage to her body and left her permanently disabled, beginning with the streetcar accident that impaled her at the age of eighteen and ending with an amputation that left her bedridden before her death. It is possible to consider, then, how the film depicts her reliance on artistic production as a means of healing and navigating such intense physical and emotional pain. In conclusion, I survey how the #MeToo movement has influenced how Salma Hayek has grappled with Harvey Weinstein’s involvement in the film’s production and her own suffering at his hands. In particular, I examine how Hayek’s writing about her traumatic experiences with Weinstein has shifted how we may understand Frida’s status and importance in Taymor’s oeuvre. On its limited release in the United States in October 2002, Frida received mixed but generally positive-leaning reviews. Before analyzing how the film depicts art inspired by and as a means of grappling with trauma, it is worth examining how three critics addressed (if not glossed over) Frida’s depiction of trauma on the film’s release. Reviewing for the Wall Street Journal, Joe Morgenstern points out that a feature-length film can only dive so deep into each period of the artist’s oeuvre, politics, and relationships. His review ends with the notion that the film’s “real issue is too little dramatic focus. Even Frida’s recovery from her injuries is scanted in a story that skips from episode to episode without illuminating the essence of the woman or her art.”3 A.O. Scott, in his review of the film for The New York Times, begins by arguing that artist biopics are rarely satisfying, in part because “the psychology of inspiration and the tedium of artistic labor seem to elude the conventions

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of filmmaking, so that our desire to glimpse the inner workings of genius is teased and thwarted.”4 Scott argues that Frida “comes tantalizingly close” to rising above the genre’s common pitfalls.5 And Desson Howe’s rather scathing review for the Washington Post ends on this note: “Ultimately, the movie’s biggest crime is its inability to convey the delicate, damaged texture of Kahlo’s life, but also the triumph of her will over intimidating defeat.”6 What these reviews share is an inability to recognize the nuances of the film’s representation of trauma, disability, and creation. What cannot be understated is the extent to which we do, in fact, see her recovery—albeit through less conventional or explicit means. Under Taymor’s direction, Frida’s labor (simultaneously artistic and rehabilitative) is laid bare. The audience is not teased; we do witness how suffering lends itself to creativity and creativity to healing. In her chapter on trauma, temporality, and the work of Israeli artist Bracha Ettinger, Griselda Pollock writes: “trauma challenges all temporal thinking since it is both a continuous unknown present and a haunting absence.”7 We need not think of Frida’s recovery from the debilitating trolley accident or the single miscarriage she suffers in the film as having a before and after. Rather, the film allows us to see its continuity and more clearly understand what Micki Nyman calls the way “Taymor anchors subjectivity to the disabled body.”8 Instead of falling in line with the way Hollywood has traditionally “characterized disability in terms of lack or loss,” Frida, on the surface, falls into the category in which Hollywood is only accepting of differently abled bodies in cases where they can clearly contribute “to the collective good.”9 Frida’s disabilities are, indeed, represented as a creative and productive force. The art she creates after being bedridden does allow her to enter a national, political, and commercial marketplace, as well as the society of artists who shaped it. But instead of centralizing how her art affords her varied participation in these broader institutions, we must reframe how her artistic production is ultimately an intimate rehabilitative process and that her art, at its most basic level, is both of and for herself. Following the scene in which the protagonist walks in on the most crushing marital betrayal (her husband successfully seducing her sister, Cristina, played by Mía Maestro), she tells him that “there have been two big accidents in my life, Diego. The trolley, and you. You are by far the worst.”10 This is the lens through which we can examine two traumatic experiences that shape how we are to understand how Frida uses art to grapple with physical and emotional pain and the places they intersect. Casting Rivera’s constant infidelity aside, the most graphic scene in the film, following the trolley accident, depicts the miscarriage of Rivera’s child that Kahlo suffered in 1932. These two scenes are key for understanding how and why Frida turns to art as an intimate means of self-expression and self-care.

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THE TROLLEY ACCIDENT Kahlo’s life was punctuated by chronic pain. At the age of six, she contracted polio, resulting in a deformed right leg. Frida’s bout with polio is not explicitly depicted in the film. Rather, it is the trolley accident that severely hinders her mobility. This scene occurs very early in the film following the opening sequence in which a bedridden Frida, at the end of her life, is taken from her family home in Coyoacán to her solo exhibition in Lola Alvarez Bravo’s Galeria de Arte Contemporáneo—the first and only on Kahlo’s native soil during her lifetime. The next scene is a flashback to the artist’s teenage years, setting the scene for the accident that would interrupt her wild and carefree youth and, eventually, be the major contributing factor to her bedridden condition. From there, the film moves chronologically through the rest of her life. The young Frida (Hayek), a student at the National Preparatory School, is brazen and larger than life. Outspoken and fearless, the young girl has a passionate, intimate relationship with fellow student Alejandro, and she has already identified Rivera as a prolific artist, a man someone needs to keep in check, and a worthy mentor. On September 17, 1925, eighteen-year-old Frida and her boyfriend Alejandro (Alex) Gómez Arias (Diego Luna) boarded the bus after school, which would change her life forever. In the film and in a cruel act of fate, Frida insists that the late pair chase after and catch this bus. Once on board, the couple talks books and politics while Frida, noticing a woman with a baby in need of a seat, offers the mother her own. This act of generosity resulted in the repositioning of her body—the consequences of which would prove dire. Ellen McCracken reads this moment as Taymor not just illuminating Kahlo’s consideration for others but as encouragement for the audience to speculate about the extent of the artist’s injuries if she had not given up her original seat.11 Alex and Frida continue discussing Marx and their reading habits until she is distracted by a painter onboard carrying gold leaf flakes. This moment of awe is interrupted by the crash: first, Frida is covered by the gold flakes when the bus comes to an abrupt halt. But then, the bus is rocked by a second impact, one that slams the vehicle and its passengers into a wall. In the film’s depiction of the trolley accident’s immediate aftermath, Frida is framed as an art object—and not one of her own making. Hayek as Frida is isolated, in one of the film’s most memorable shots, as a single victim. She lies, as if a broken odalisque, across the shattered floor of the trolley, covered as much in gold dust as in her own blood. Her shirt has come unbuttoned, revealing her stomach and much of her chest, and the flakes continue to rain down on her unconscious body. This image aligns with much of Alejandro’s eyewitness account, in which he remembered that “someone in the bus, probably a house painter, had been carrying a packet of powdered gold. This

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package broke, and the gold fell all over the bleeding body of Frida. When people saw her they cried, ‘La bailarina, la bailarina!’ With the gold on her red, bloody body, they thought she was a dancer.”12 While the film does not recreate the crowd’s misguided interpretation of Frida-as-dancer, what Alejandro’s and Taymor’s versions share is the impetus to display Frida as a work of art and a figure who can totally and completely demand our gaze, a fact demonstrated through Kahlo’s own subsequent and consistent practice of self-portraiture. In an interview with the director, Liane Hansen described this highly “stylized” scene as a “crucifixion image”; Taymor, in turn, reveals she imagined this scene as “the birth of an artist” from a “wood womb.”13 Yet, the artist child has no artistic agency in the immediate moment, for this is something she will have to claim as part of her rehabilitative process. In the biography on which the film is based, Hayden Herrera catalogs the extent of the injuries Frida sustained in the accident: Her spinal column was broken in three places in the lumbar region. Her collarbone was broken, and her third and fourth ribs. Her right leg had eleven fractures and her right foot was dislocated and crushed. Her left shoulder was out of joint, her pelvis broken in three places. The steel handrail had literally skewered her body at the level of the abdomen; entering on the left side, it had come out through the vagina.14

The film delivers the facts of Frida’s case—her prognosis and the list of injuries to her body—as part of a surrealistic hallucination that Frida experiences once she has been delivered to the Red Cross Hospital. The doctors and nurses are not humans but rather puppets inspired by the Mexican Día de los Muertos iconography and the skeleton illustrations of José Guadalupe Posada. Distorted and dancing, these figures distress Frida, unable to open her eyes to face the reality of her situation. Taymor herself has described this stop-animation scene, developed by the Brothers Quay, as an “impressionistic sequence” and “the first glance into the dark imagination of the artist, Frida, and how the real events of her life will dominate her art while helping her to survive.”15 Once she has regained consciousness, it becomes clear that both the doctors and her family doubt Frida will ever walk again. Despite being bedridden for an indeterminate amount of time, her hands are free to sketch and paint, and art truly becomes her survival mechanism. As if being bedridden in an almost full-body cast was not enough for the teenager, Frida is also abandoned by her lover. Alex, who did not sustain life-threatening injuries, is off to Europe to study at the Sorbonne. When he visits Frida at home for the first time following the accident, he enters Frida’s room to the artist lying still yet sketching her foot, for this, she says, is “my only good angle at the moment.”16 When Alex delivers the news that he will, in fact, be staying to study and not returning with his family to Mexico,

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she immediately begins drawing a butterfly on her chest cast. Her turn to sketching is partly a way to expel frustrated energy, for Alex will miss her learning to walk again—a fact she is insistent upon. It is also partly a ticking time bomb: “I want you to leave before I finish this butterfly,” the artist snaps.17 Following Alex’s departure, Frida must suffer through the changing of her bandages, but her new cast will soon be covered in well over a dozen red and blue butterflies. Her parents (Roger Rees as father Guillermo and Patricia Reyes Spíndola as mother Matilde) acknowledge that Frida’s turn to sketching is a productive way to occupy both her mind and her time; when her cast is no longer a blank canvas, they gift her with painting supplies and an easel that can be mounted to her bed, opening up the possibilities for her artistic production beyond her bodily limitations. Tina Olsin Lent argues that “painting is shown to be a direct and intuitive outgrowth of both her physical and psychological injuries, and when her butterfly-covered cast is finally removed, Frida ‘emerges’ as a full-blown portrait painter .  .  . Painting has ‘healed’ her; she takes her canvases to Rivera whose approval and love stimulate her ‘rebirth’ as an authentic artist.”18 Yet, there is no before and after, no single rebirth into artistic authenticity. Frida does, in fact, seek Rivera out as part of her own legitimizing process, but his acknowledgment is not what stimulates her rebirth. There are no singular acts of rebirth or healing. Instead, there is a continual opening and closing of wounds, both physical and emotional and of which Rivera is often the catalyst.

MISCARRIAGE AND HENRY FORD HOSPITAL Due to the pelvic and vaginal wounds sustained during the trolley accident, Kahlo suffered from severe fertility issues. Three miscarriages and several abortions during her marriage to Rivera left the couple (save for Rivera’s children from previous relationships) childless. The first loss followed their wedding, during which she had been pregnant. The grief that the artist experienced while suffering from pregnancy loss became an important theme in her paintings; art became a means of grappling with the, of no fault of her own, failures of her body to bear children. Only one of Kahlo’s miscarriages is depicted in the film, and this is perhaps the most traumatic instance of pregnancy loss that she experienced. In 1932, the couple traveled to Detroit, Michigan, as Rivera was commissioned by the museum’s director to paint a series of frescos for the Detroit Institute of Arts. Kahlo was unhappy in Detroit and longed for home, and she was also haunted by fears that the pregnancy would not result in the birth of a healthy child. The pregnancy was, unsurprisingly, not easy on Frida. In a letter to one of her doctors, she described it as “bothersome,” writing, “I want to vomit

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all the time and I am fed up. I get tired from everything since my spine hurts and I am also rather bothered by the thing of the foot since I cannot exercise and as a result my digestion is not functioning!”19 The toll the pregnancy was taking on Frida’s body, as well as her decision to wait and see if this would be a viable pregnancy past the three-month mark rather than abort, however, is not depicted in the film. As represented in Frida, this period instead centralizes the couple’s joy at discovering she is pregnant before quickly cutting to a graphic depiction of her subsequent miscarriage. Frida delivers the news of her pregnancy to Diego abruptly; she had gone to the doctor to discuss her chronic pain, and the pregnancy was discovered. Immediately, Diego questions if Frida’s body could handle being pregnant. In turn, she responds that “if it can take you, it can take a little Dieguito” but that, while the doctor was less than optimistic about her ability to carry the child to term, she was “used to pain” and that her desire to have a child outweighed the risks.20 The very next scene depicts the miscarriage Kahlo experienced on July 4, 1932. Diego returns late at night to their hotel suite to find an agonized Frida in their bed, in a pool of blood. After rushing his wife to the hospital, he waits for news of her condition, but Frida wills herself out of bed and into the hallway, where Hayek delivers some of the most painful lines of dialogue in the entire film. “The baby came out in pieces,” and “it never formed properly,” she states, as if in a trance, before begging to know what the doctors did with the remains of her child.21 This is the last time Frida speaks of the pregnancy in the film. While still hospitalized, the artist, once again, turns to painting as a means of capturing the many dimensions of her experience of grief, physical pain, and loss. As a result, Henry Ford Hospital (1932) is one of Frida’s most explicit and uninhibited paintings. In the film, she paints her body and experience in solitude, and she is intensely focused on the task at hand. There is a real sense of urgency; this painting must be completed before she is released and within the immediate aftermath of her loss. The artist, in the film as in reality, depicts herself as bloodied, naked, and lying on one of the Detroit hospital’s beds. Attached with red thread to her stomach are six objects: a model of the female reproductive anatomy, a male fetus, a snail, medical apparatuses employed at the hospital, a wilted orchid (taken by many to symbolize a uterus), and her pelvis. As David Lomas and Rosemary Howell suggest, by depicting the graphic and harsh reality of miscarriage, Kahlo flouts Western tradition, wherein illustrations of this have historically been relegated to medical textbooks.22 In the film, the artist paints from her hospital bed, observing a preserved fetus as a point of reference for the self-portrait of the artist miscarrying. Miscarriage was, in Kahlo’s culture, understood as “the abject failure of a socially conditioned expectation of motherhood and a travesty of creation

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in which birth yields only death and detritus.”23 Yet the way the scene of her painting Henry Ford Hospital is framed allows the artist to reclaim her creative power through the act of painting. Painting a whole and fully developed fetus was, ultimately, a means of stitching together the pieces of her son that were not fully formed in the womb. Frida is refused the ability to see the remains of her own child, so she turns to painting as a means to process and express maternal pain. Additionally, Herrera describes the painting’s “unflattering” depiction of a swollen and traumatized body as a clear indicator of female authorship.24 Aside from the rather gory view of her miscarrying on the bed, this is the only glimpse the audience gets in the film of her pregnant and maternal body, and we see it explicitly in Frida’s terms. But it is through Diego’s perspective that we study the painting, just as we initially witness the miscarriage. After the rapid hospital bed painting session, Diego walks in to check on the now-sleeping Frida, and he takes the painting into the hallway to see what she has created. Viewing the painting as an intimate look into Frida’s suffering breaks Diego: he is overtaken by grief and tries to prevent his sobs from being overheard. There is tension, here, in the way the creation and consumption of the painting are framed. For Frida, the painting represents a means to regain control over her body and its ability to create, but the scene ends with and is subsumed by Diego’s grief, rather than Frida’s. While it is important to not write off the grief of the father who has lost not just the child but also, almost, his wife, it is through Henry Ford Hospital that Frida most powerfully and directly speaks about her body and her ability to create. As Minae Inahara has suggested, “Kahlo lends her body to the world, giving expressive content to feelings that are present in lived experience and allowing the viewers to grasp the content in those feelings.”25 This applies both to Alfred Molina’s Diego as much as it does to Frida’s viewers. As viewers, we have to slow down to process this moment, the painting, and its ramifications for our understanding of Frida and her relationship with her body before the film rapidly volleys us into the next scene of the couple having returned to their hotel. The couple fights over breakfast, and there is only a quick exchange where Diego mentions being grateful God kept Frida safe for him before she is rocked by the news of her mother’s failing health and has to rush home to Coyoacán. Grief follows grief—for her son, for her mother, for herself, and her family. Frida’s painting through trauma and witnessing Diego’s reaction to an evocative, intimate painting such as Henry Ford Hospital begs the question of how viewers observe and digest trauma that is depicted in another’s artwork. For Betting Papenburg and Marta Zarzycka, to witness trauma in artistic/cultural artifacts is to be affected by the absence and the loss through which images fail to show rather than represent. The aesthetics

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of trauma relies on the slippage between signification and materiality, on the aporia between the seen and the unseen.26

The witnessing of trauma—particularly by a man—in Frida’s works is complex, for she herself believes that her “little paintings can’t mean anything to anyone but me.”27 Prior to the miscarriage, Diego describes her work, including her painting of the trolley moments before the accident, as achieving something that he could not. “I could never paint like this,” Diego states, “I couldn’t. I’m serious. I paint what I see, the world outside. But you . . . you paint from here . . . it’s wonderful.”28 It is not until well after the miscarriage and at the end of Frida’s life that Diego, at her solo exhibition, becomes more apt at describing her oeuvre: “I’ve never stopped looking . . . Her work is acid and tender, hard as steel and fine as a butterfly’s wing, lovable as a smile and cruel as the bitterness of life . . . I don’t believe that ever before has a woman put such agonized poetry on canvas.”29 Now that he has been present for so much of her physical suffering, he has come to better read and understand the nuances of her work. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera were married, on and off, for twenty-four years; as such, he naturally witnessed how Frida experienced and grappled with trauma and chronic pain following the trolley accident and until her death. Leon Trotsky (Geoffrey Rush), on the other hand, provides a different glimpse into male consumption of her work. Trotsky, the Marxist revolutionary, had been exiled from the Soviet Union and sought asylum in Mexico at the end of 1936. In the film, Diego, a member of the Trotskyite International Communist League, implores Frida to let Trotsky and his wife shelter in Frida’s family home. Soon begins the brief and passionate affair Frida has with the political revolutionary. How does Trotsky, then, attempt to describe Frida’s work, and how well does he come to understand her trauma and complicated relationship with her body? During their visit to the Teotihuacán ruins, Trotsky asks Frida outright what hurt her, and he is taken aback by the extent of Frida’s pain, though she does not reveal all of the gory details of the breaks and procedures that have attempted to heal them. Instead, she compares her body to a “jigsaw puzzle,” in which the hands of doctors have attempted time and again to reset her bones.30 Frida is forthright about her experience with enduring chronic pain; Trotsky immediately locates this sentiment in her paintings. Fixating on the theme of endurance, Trotsky responds that “that’s what I loved about your paintings. That they carry that message . . . You said nobody would care about them, but I think you’re wrong. Because your paintings express what everyone feels—that they are alone, in pain.”31 Frida does not pause to entertain this generalization and Trotsky’s desire to depersonalize her pain; she responds with a less-than-confident “maybe.”32 Trotsky, we learn next, has

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lost children, and he reveals that he is haunted by guilt that all of his children were murdered because of his political beliefs and activism. Frida has not mentioned her miscarriages or desire for children to him; these topics did not explicitly drive his discussion of her work. But, perhaps, he feels he is able to identify this subject matter and relate in his own way. What Frida’s hesitancy reminds us of, however, is how important and necessary it is to recognize how her art is so explicitly and intimately tied to her own body and trauma. Her art is not just for public consumption; it is also a private form of recovery.

FRIDA IN THE AGE OF #METOO Today, it is no secret that the power wielded by Harvey Weinstein as the co-founder and executive producer of Miramax, the film’s distributor, was grossly abused. Weinstein’s downfall was initiated by women whose writing about how they were victimized by the movie mogul served both public and personal functions. Weinstein’s rapid downfall began on October 5, 2017, when Ashley Judd (Tina Modotti) and other former colleagues came forward as part of the Jodi Kantor’s and Megan Twohey’s initial expose of sex crime allegations against Weinstein for The New York Times. Later that month, Taymor also spoke against his brutality.33 Two months later, at Judd’s and others’ urging, Salma Hayek herself came forward, publishing “Harvey Weinstein Is My Monster Too” in The New York Times. Her account is as much about herself and her trauma as it is about Frida, her (and Taymor’s) work of art. Hayek had been Frida’s first champion. She was responsible for developing the concept, acquiring rights and permissions, and bringing Taymor on board to direct. Hayek was—and still is—passionately committed both to the artist and to showcasing her own Mexican cultural heritage. During preproduction, Hayek sought out Weinstein, believing that his expertise could ensure the film’s success. Like Frida seeking out the guidance of established muralist Diego Rivera, Hayek approached Weinstein as part of her own legitimizing process. What we can now clearly see, though, are the ways that Weinstein became a catalyst for pain and a frequent enemy to the film and the women artists so intimately involved in its production. As such, these women’s testimonies rightfully encourage us to reexamine this film and the contexts of its making. What Hayek’s, Judd’s, and the other victims’ accounts reveal are how repeatedly and aggressively Weinstein would harass women. Hayek’s list of accusations against her monster is long. Not only did he have a history of showing up uninvited, making any number of unwanted sexual advances involving massages and showers; he also crossed lines and then became enraged when it came to directing Hayek’s body—now also Frida’s—in the film. Although there

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were many, there are two especially relevant aspects of the film that enraged Weinstein: Frida’s limp and lack of sex appeal. His insistence that Hayek stop limping was an attempt to overwrite the artist’s very well-documented history of disability and chronic pain. Weinstein’s desire to regulate Hayek-as-Frida’s body became even more explicit in his insistence there be added a full-frontal love scene between Frida and another woman. As Hayek explains it: He had been constantly asking for more skin, for more sex. Once before, Julie Taymor got him to settle for a tango ending in a kiss instead of the lovemaking scene he wanted us to shoot between the character Tina Modotti, played by Ashley Judd, and Frida. But this time, it was clear to me he would never let me finish this movie without him having his fantasy one way or another. There was no room for negotiation. I had to say yes.34

Despite Taymor’s negotiations, a sex scene of this nature was eventually shot. The scene is part of the montage featuring Frida’s jaunt through Paris following Diego’s discovery of her affair with Trotsky; gratifying Weinstein’s gaze, the scene adds nothing of value to the narrative. Hayek’s recollection of the mental and physical breakdown she experienced while shooting this scene is difficult to read, as it is clear that Hayek performed under duress rather than consensually. Though Taymor was able to temper Weinstein’s vision for Frida’s and Tina’s tryst, the monster eventually got what he wanted. For Mette Hjort, “knowledge of the conditions under which the sex scene . . . was shot necessarily identifies abusive unethical behaviour as the cause, not only of the very existence of the sequence, but of its having some of the features that it does.”35 Hjort concludes that the artistic value of Taymor’s film is ultimately undermined by the severity of the ethical flaws introduced by Weinstein. While it is true that the ethics of the film’s production were compromised by Weinstein’s abuse of power, it is unfortunate, if not unfair, to dismiss what Taymor, Frida, and their partners achieved with this biopic. Twenty years and an entirely new cultural climate later, the film means even more now than it did on its initial release. Previously, this essay emphasized the ways in which trauma is a continual specter rather than something that can simply be forgotten, closed up, or moved past. In Hayek’s own words, “I had brainwashed myself into thinking that it was over and that I had survived.”36 Through her op-ed, Hayek publicly named and willingly reopened wounds in order to help prevent new ones from opening up in herself and in other victims. Writing, an act of creation not unlike Frida’s, then, became a form of healing. It is because of Hayek that viewers en masse can begin to reconsider the complexities of the film and its sexual politics. As more critical and compassionate ways of seeing develop, the way we articulate, justify, and/or complicate Frida’s importance within Taymor’s oeuvre can and should continue to evolve.

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NOTES 1. IMDB, “Frida: Awards,” accessed November 30, 2022 https://www​.imdb​.com​ /title​/tt0120679​/awards/. 2. Ellen Blumenthal, Julie Taymor and Antonio Monda, Julie Taymor: Playing with Fire: Theater, Opera, Film (New York: Abrams, 2007), 216. 3. Joe Morgenstern, “The Truth about ‘Charlie’: In this Hepburn Remake, Wahlberg is no Cary Grant: Bright Thriller Brims with Homage but Lacks Romance: ‘Frida’ is Gorgeous but One-Dimensional,” Wall Street Journal, Oct. 25, 2002, W1. 4. A.O. Scott, “Film Review: A Celebrated Artist’s Biography, on the Verge of Being a Musical,” New York Times, Oct. 25, 2002, E8. 5. Ibid. 6. Desson Howe, “‘Frida’: So Much Material, so Little Story.” The Washington Post, Nov. 01, 2002, H41. 7. Griselda Pollock, “Trauma, Time and Painting: Bracha Ettinger and the Matrixial Aesthetic,” in Carnal Aesthetics: Transgressive Imagery and Feminist Politics, eds. Bettina Papenburg and Marta Zarzyca (London: I.B. Tauris), 21. 8. Micki Nyman, “The Disabled Body in Julie Taymor’s Frida,” Disability Studies Quarterly 30, no. 3 (2010). https://dsq​-sds​.org​/article​/view​/1274​/1304. 9. Ibid. 10. Frida, directed by Julie Taymor (Los Angeles, CA: Miramax, 2002). 11. Ellen McCracken, “Hybridity and Supra-Ethnicity in Plastic and Filmic Representation: Frida Kahlo’s Art and Julie Taymor’s Frida,” Interdisciplinary Journal for Germanic Linguistics and Semiotic Analysis 8, no. 2 (2003): 251, 257 n9. 12. Hayden Herrera, Frida: The Biography of Frida Kahlo (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 49. 13. Julie Taymor, “Director Julie Taymor Discusses the Movie ‘Frida,’” interview by Liane Hansen, NPR, Nov. 3, 2022. 14. Herrera, The Biography of Frida Kahlo, 49. 15. Frida: Bringing Frida Kahlo’s Life and Art to Film (New York: New Market Press, 2002), 43. 16. Frida, 00:14:15 to 00:14:17. 17. Frida, 00:16:20 to 00:16:42. 18. Tina Olsin Lent, “Life as Art/Art as Life: Dramatizing the Life and Work of Frida Kahlo,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 35, no. 2 (2007): 73. 19. Herrera, The Biography of Frida Kahlo, 140. 20. Frida, 1:00:09 to 1:00:25. 21. Frida, 1:02:16 to 1:02:21. 22. David Lomas and Rosemary Howell, “Medical Imagery in the Art of Frida Kahlo,” British Medical Journal, no. 6715 (1989): 1584. 23. Ibid. 24. Herrera, The Biography of Frida Kahlo, 144. 25. Minae Inahara, “The Art of Pain and Intersubjectivity in Frida Kahlo’s SelfPortraits,” in Encountering Pain: Hearing, Seeing, Speaking, eds. Deborah Padfield and Joanna M. Zakrzewka (London: UCL Press, 2021), 225.

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26. Bettina Papenburg and Marta Zarzycka, “Introduction,” in Carnal Aesthetics: Transgressive Imagery and Feminist Politics (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013), 8. 27. Frida, 1:27:46 to 1:27:48. 28. Frida, 00:37:23 to 00:37:43. 29. Frida, 1:52:43 to 1:53:32. 30. Frida, 1:30:11 to 1:30:12. 31. Frida, 1:30:41 to 1:30:59. 32. Frida, 1:31:00 to 1:31:01. 33. Gordon Cox, “‘Frida’ Director Julie Taymor on Harvey Weinstein: ‘I Think He Should Go to Jail,’” Variety, accessed November 30, 2022, https://variety​.com​ /2017​/legit​/news​/julie​-taymor​-harvey​-weinstein​-m​-butterfly​-1202600675/. 34. Salma Hayek, “Harvey Weinstein Is My Monster Too,” New York Times, Dec. 17, 2017, 3. 35. Mette Hjort, “The Ethics of Filmmaking: How the Genetic History of Works Affects Their Value,” in Truth in Visual Media: Aesthetics, Ethics and Politics, eds. Marguerite La Caze and Ted Nannicelli (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021), 86. 36. Hayek, “Harvey Weinstein Is My Monster Too,” 3.

REFERENCES Blumenthal, Ellen, Julie Taymor and Antonio Monda. Julie Taymor: Playing with Fire: Theater, Opera, Film, 3rd edn. New York: Abrams, 2007. Cox, Gordon. “‘Frida’ Director Julie Taymor on Harvey Weinstein: ‘I Think He Should Go to Jail.’” Variety. Oct. 26, 2017 https://variety​.com​/2017​/legit​/news​/ julie​-taymor​-harvey​-weinstein​-m​-butterfly​-1202600675/. Frida. Directed by Julie Taymor. Los Angeles, CA: Miramax, 2002. “Frida: Awards.” IMDb. https://www​.imdb​.com​/title​/tt0120679​/awards/. Hayek, Salma. “Harvey Weinstein Is My Monster Too.” New York Times, Dec. 17, 2017, 3. Herrera, Hayden. Frida: The Biography of Frida Kahlo. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. ———. Frida Kahlo: The Paintings. New York: Harper Perennial, 2002. Hjort, Mette. “The Ethics of Filmmaking: How the Genetic History of Works Affects Their Value.” In Truth in Visual Media: Aesthetics, Ethics and Politics, edited by Marguerite La Caze and Ted Nannicelli, 79–103. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021. Howe, Desson. “‘Frida’: So Much Material, so Little Story.” The Washington Post, Nov. 1, 2002, H41. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Inahara, Minae. “The Art of Pain and Intersubjectivity in Frida Kahlo’s SelfPortraits.” In Encountering Pain: Hearing, Seeing, Speaking, edited by Deborah Padfield and Joanna M. Zakrzewka, 219–29. London: UCL Press, 2021. Lent, Tina Olsen. “Life as Art/Art as Life: Dramatizing the Life and Work of Frida Kahlo.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 35, no. 2 (2007): 68–76. Lomas, David and Rosemary Howell. “Medical Imagery in the Art of Frida Kahlo.” BMJ: British Medical Journal 299, no. 6715 (1989): 1584–87.

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McCracken, Ellen. “Hybridity and Supra-Ethnicity in Plastic and Filmic Representation: Frida Kahlo’s Art and Julie Taymor’s Frida.” Interdisciplinary Journal for Germanic Linguistics and Semiotic Analysis 8, no. 2 (2003): 243–59. Morgenstern, Joe. “The Truth about ‘Charlie’: In this Hepburn Remake, Wahlberg is no Cary Grant: Bright Thriller Brims with Homage but Lacks Romance: ‘Frida’ is Gorgeous but One-Dimensional.” Wall Street Journal, Oct. 25, 2002, W1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Nyman, Micki. “The Disabled Body in Julie Taymor’s Frida.” Disability Studies Quarterly 30, no. 3 (2010). Papenburg, Bettina and Marta Zarzycka. “Introduction.” In Carnal Aesthetics: Transgressive Imagery and Feminist Politics, edited by Bettina Papenburg and Marta Zarzyck, 1–20. London: I.B. Tauris, 2013. Pollock, Griselda. “Trauma, Time and Painting: Bracha Ettinger and the Matrixial Aesthetic.” In Carnal Aesthetics: Transgressive Imagery and Feminist Politics, edited by Bettina Papenburg and Marta Zarzycka, 21–41. London: I.B. Tauris, 2013. Sigal, Clancy. Frida: Bringing Frida Kahlo’s Life and Art to Film. New York: New Market Press, 2002. Scott, A.O. “Film Review: A Celebrated Artist’s Biography, on the Verge of Being a Musical.” New York Times, Oct. 25, 2002, E8. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Taymor, Julie. “Director Julie Taymor Discusses the Movie ‘Frida.’” Interviewed by Liane Hansen, National Public Radio, Nov. 3, 2002.

Chapter 8

Why Feminism? An Examination of the Philosophy of Gender in The Glorias Samuel Vandeputte and Adam Barkman

Julie Taymor’s choice to pay homage to Gloria Steinem’s legacy is deeply revealing. From being raised by a mother who was a political activist to spending years in Southeast Asia and wrestling her way through a maledominated industry, it is obvious why the director is drawn to Steinem. The Glorias (2020) presents her as an icon of the feminist movement based on her memoirs collected in the 2015 My Life on the Road. The biopic’s reception was lukewarm at best. A scathing review by The Guardian critiques Taymor’s depiction of Steinem as “an inhumanly rosy fantasy: a collection of diverse women standing around a table, laughing and agreeing with one another.”1 That is, The Glorias can be seen as converting Steinem’s endlessly complex and difficult journey to a simple, reductionist fairy tale. While this critique may or may not be entirely warranted, one of the film’s notable deficiencies is in its portrayal of gender debates and the complex philosophies of gender that goes into these. In this chapter, we will explore the philosophical underpinnings of feminist and traditionalist gender theory orbiting Taymor’s production. THE ODD DANCE OF LIFE: GENDER AS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT Frustrated by the professional hardships that come with being a woman, Steinem (Alicia Vikander) asks “why masculinity means leading and femininity means following, in the odd dance of daily life?”2 Steinem’s question gets at the core of the divergent streams of thought within the philosophy of gender; whether gender is a mere social construct or something ontologically deeper. This question is not a recent one by any stretch of the imagination. 143

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In ancient Greece, traditionalists and feminists were already fiercely debating their positions. Aristotle defended the traditional view that women were, in some ways, subordinate to men, while Plato took a decidedly feminist approach. In the quest of generating a robust understanding of the philosophy of gender, Plato will be taken as the starting point, providing a helpful theoretical framework as well as being the first philosophical feminist. As such, Plato’s thought can be seen as the philosophical trunk of the feminist tree. Later feminists—knowingly or not—depart from the philosophical foundations laid by Plato, at the heart of whose philosophy of gender is the theory of forms. Forms are ideals that permeate the essence of objects that inhabit the physical world around us. The chair you may be sitting on is thus merely a low-definition reflection of the eidos of “chair-ness,” according to Plato’s theory. It may not be hard to understand the theory of forms pertaining to physical objects such as a chair, but it gets trickier when we think about human beings. The Greek philosopher viewed humans embodied rational souls. Our bodies (belonging to the realm of flux) merely occlude the soul (which has some relation to the realm of forms), which is the essential element of our existence.3 The realms of forms and flux provide an essential differentiation for the discussion of gender. If gender is a property or characteristic of the soul and thus has a root in the realm of forms, it possesses genuine ontological worth. If gender is merely part of the realm of flux, however, masculinity and femininity are not essential properties of our soul and constitute nothing more than, at best, a changeable social construct. Plato argued for the latter point of view, becoming, arguably, the first feminist philosopher. Despite his view of gender as a social construct, Plato did not deny the existence of physical differences between the sexes; he saw women as “the weaker sex.”4 This did not imply, however, that women had to abstain from any aspect of social life. In a fashion revolutionary for his time, Plato states that “it is natural for women to take part in all occupations as well as men, though in all women will be the weaker partners.”5 Steinem’s famous dictum that “we have become the men we wanted to marry”6 may conflict with the idea that women are weaker partners, but the radicality of Plato’s conception of gender for the ancient Greeks can hardly be overstated. Breaking with traditional concepts of gender, Plato demoted masculinity and femininity to a rank of insignificance. For the first time in the history of philosophy, the idea of gender as a social construct was entertained. Although Plato is widely seen as one of the most influential philosophers of all time, his philosophy of gender has been hotly contested, including by his most famous student, Aristotle. If Plato was the prime feminist philosopher of his day, Aristotle was the foremost representative of ancient Greek gender traditionalism. In contrast to Plato, indeed, Aristotle believed “the relation of

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male to female is naturally that of the superior to the inferior, of the ruling to the ruled.”7 Aristotle, however, is not representative of gender traditionalists in general. After the time of the Greeks, the Christian tradition advanced a philosophy of gender that suggested masculinity and femininity are either essential properties of the soul or, if not this, at least, essential properties of the concrete person. In his Confessions, Augustine (354–430 AD) argues that women are equal in rational capacities but are submissive to men by their sex.8 He thus agrees with the Platonic idea of rationality being inherent to human existence as such while also agreeing with Aristotle that gender is primarily about ruling and submitting. The idea of gender roles not being a mere human construct but essential to our diversified humanity was further developed by C. S. Lewis, one of the most important Christian thinkers of the twentieth century. In Perelandra (1943), Lewis gives a description that gets at the heart of the traditional conception of gender: “Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex. Sex, in fact, is merely the adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity which divides all created beings.”9 Lewis, speaking from a more articulated Christian traditionalism, distinguishes between sex and gender. Sex, as a biological component, belongs to the realm of flux so-to-speak, while gender, as a spiritual component, belongs to the realm of forms soto-speak. Lewis sees sex as an inferior copy of gender,10 with, perhaps, a human’s bodily features developing from their gender: masculine souls corresponding to male bodies and feminine souls corresponding to female bodies. Yet, be this as it may, few essentialists—Christian or otherwise—spell out explicitly what the two gender properties look like. Theologian John Piper is one of the few who attempts this, stating, At the heart of mature masculinity is a sense of benevolent responsibility to lead, provide for and protect women in ways appropriate to a man’s differing relationships. At the heart of mature femininity is a freeing disposition to affirm, receive and nurture strength and leadership from worthy men in ways appropriate to a woman’s differing relationships.11

Piper’s definition entails that masculine and feminine souls have a relational bond of complementarity. On the traditionalist account, gender not only causes your biological make-up but informs the ways in which men and women relate to each other. Feminists, with Steinem at the forefront, have taken the traditionalist differentiation in gender roles to be oppressive to women. Steinem wrote that “without campuses in the Bible Belt, I wouldn’t know that the belief that women’s subordinate role is ordained by God is still with us.”12 While it is true that there are sexist traditionalists, it is unreasonable to assume

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that traditionalist gender philosophy is inherently sexist. As will hopefully become clear throughout this chapter, the philosophy of gender is more complex than a black-and-white distinction between two major strands of gender philosophy. Instead, there can be a differentiation made between gender traditionalists who view a particular gender as ontologically superior and those who do not. The same can be said about gender feminists. Taymor missed an opportunity to supplement Steinem’s My Life on the Road with examples of nonsexist gender traditionalists. A more full-bodied portrayal of the complexity of the philosophical debate of gender would have added understanding to Steinem’s strand of feminism and would have nuanced Taymor’s film.

ANOTHER KIND OF BULLSHIT: THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN The concept of racism and sexism being intertwined is a second shaping element of Steinem’s philosophy. For Steinem, the fight against sexism is not one that stands alone. Rather, she sees gender equality as an ideal that can only be achieved in tandem with racial equality. In an important way, the civil rights movement forms the vanguard of the fight for the liberation of women. In The Glorias, this sentiment is perhaps most aptly summarized in Flo Kennedy’s statement at a press conference that “when you’ve experienced bullshit in one form, you’re more likely to recognize it in another. Racism and sexism are intertwined; they cannot be uprooted separately.”13 Taymor carefully crafts a narrative surrounding the race–gender struggle parity and places Steinem at the heart of this narrative. A subtle moment is when Steinem is portrayed as refusing a cover story for Newsweek, stating, “A movement is lots and lots of people moving. Not one person being photographed. Not one white woman. Not me.” The emphasis on Steinem being white shows the importance of race for the feminist movement. Another way in which Taymor introduces the race-gender connection is by weaving fragments of Steinem’s trip to India throughout the film, starting with the opening scene. The India experience and interactions with locals give the feminist struggle a global and interracial dimension. In India, Steinem is shown to be inspired by Gandhi’s nonviolent struggle against colonialism and racial oppression. It is thus no coincidence that the first cover of Ms. magazine features a woman styled as a Hindu goddess. Taymor further develops the notion of the intertwined nature of racial and gender equality by prominently featuring Steinem’s allies with a nonCaucasian background, such as Dorothy Pitman Hughes (Janelle Monáe), Flo Kennedy (Lorraine Toussaint), and Wilma Mankiller (Kimberly Norris-Guerrero). The choice to emphasize these women of color shows the importance

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of the issues of racial and gender inequality that Steinem believed in and Taymor wanted to bring to the fore in The Glorias. The greatest philosopher who has contributed to the idea of the parity between racism and sexism is John Stuart Mill. In 1865, he was elected as a Member of Parliament in England on a platform that advocated the right of women’s suffrage and introduced an unsuccessful petition to that end a year later. In what would turn out to be his most influential contribution to the suffragette movement, Mill published The Subjection of Women in 1869.14 In this essay, he advances his case against the legal subordination of women. He articulates the aim of his work to be: That the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes—the legal subordination of one sex to the other—is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.15

Mill applies Plato’s metaphysics of gender to the system of legal inequality between the sexes in Britain. From the premise that gender is a social construct, he concludes that any legal subordination of one sex to the other is unjust. The element of Mill’s feminism that is truly unique is the concept of female subordination being the last slavery in the West. Britain had abolished slavery decades earlier, and Mill concluded, in Enlightenment spirit, that it would only be a matter of time until women were freed from their bonds of slavery as well. Stemming from Mill’s view of gender as an artificial construct, “the inequality of rights between men and women has no other source than the law of the strongest.”16 After accepting the arbitrariness of race, it was now an urgent time to view the ontological irrelevance of gender as well. In siding with Plato, Mill also rejects Aristotle’s notion of natural slavery. To the Greek philosopher, it was evident that “just as some are by nature free, so others are by nature slaves, and for these latter the condition of slavery is both beneficial and just.”17 At the time of Mill’s writing, race was no longer seen as a fixed characteristic or property. The fluidity of race logically implies that racial slavery is not natural. The fluidity of gender, once assumed, leads to the same conclusion. Female legal subjection is an evil, just as is the case with race. In contrast, gender traditionalists reject the premise that race and gender are of the same kind. Gender is often seen as an essential property of the soul, while race and sex are merely biological in nature. Gender being something more essential than a feature of biology, Mill’s argument becomes invalid. Interestingly, Mill himself seems to hint at race being something more than a mere biological feature. In his rejection of there being an eidos to gender, he poses that the subjection of women only appears normal by virtue of being a universal custom.18 Ironically, this argument may actually affirm the traditional position.

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For, if gender exists, universal customs serve as proof of this reality. Mill stops short of explaining why gender roles have become customary across the globe, strengthening the traditionalist position. What Mill does reckon with is how to eliminate the difference between the sexes. He saw the discrepancy in education as the deciding factor in the observable differences between the sexes. When everyone in society is educated equally, differences will fade away. To gender traditionalists, too, it seems obvious that equal education erodes artificial distinctions. At the same time, Mill’s hunch that all differences would fade away through education seems a bit unwarranted, especially in light of today’s higher numbers of female college graduates compared to men. For gender traditionalists, then, even if males and females were identically educated, differences would continue to exist. The traditionalist belief in gender differences does not exclude notions of equality. Gender traditionalist typically view men and women to be equal in worth. C. S. Lewis, for instance, has described the masculine and feminine as “complementary organs of a mystical body.”19 This does not imply that one is worth more than the other, but rather that there are differences between genders. Furthermore, in sharp contrast to a model of subjection, the earlier definition of gender provided by Piper shows that the masculine ought to be concerned with the flourishing of the feminine. It must thus be understood that the disagreement between gender feminists and traditionalist centers around specific notions of equality, such as equality of outcome, opportunity, or legal equality. The respectful traditionalists and feminists alike in no way question the equality of humanity across gender divides. In some ways, Steinem can be seen as an heir to Mill’s feminism. One of the points in the movie where her commitment to legal gender equality becomes most clear is the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). With historical footage added in, Taymor depicts the 1977 National Women’s Conference that was aimed at popularizing the ERA. Although ultimately unsuccessful, the passing of the ERA would entail a riddance of any legal distinction between males and females and can be seen as a contemporary incarnation of the same fight Mill waged in the English parliament with his women’s suffrage petition. Nevertheless, Mill’s feminism shows some foundational dissimilarities with that of Steinem. Christina Hoff Sommers—a first-wave feminist—disputes that Steinem fits with Mill’s Enlightenment philosophy. Sommers singles out second-wave feminists (including Steinem) for leading the movement away from its Enlightenment values. In Who Stole Feminism? (1994) Sommers writes, [John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor] grounded their feminist demands on Enlightenment principles of individual justice. By contrast, the New Feminists

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have little faith in the Enlightenment principles that influenced the founder of America’s political order and that inspired the great classical feminists to wage their fight for women’s rights.20

Sommers legitimately points to the philosophical difference between Mill’s thought and that of Steinem. Steinem’s philosophy of gender goes beyond a mere sense of liberal Enlightenment values, being influenced by Marxism, existentialism, and critical theory. WE HAD ABORTIONS: SEIZING THE MEANS OF REPRODUCTION The Glorias presents reproductive rights as a requirement for gender equality, both in Steinem’s personal life as well as in the feminist movement more broadly. One of the more memorable moments of the movie occurs when the protagonist has an abortion on her way to India. The British doctor conducting the, at the time illegal, proceeding makes Steinem promise him two things: “First, you must not tell anybody my name. Second, you will do what you want to do with your life.” Facing the choice of marrying her fiancé or studying in India, Steinem resolutely chooses her own way. While Steinem’s abortion is a deeply personal and intimate experience, later in the film, when deciding on the content of the opening issue of Ms. magazine, it becomes clear that abortion is not unique to Steinem’s story. In a serene moment, about half of the women in the editorial team make known to have had an abortion. They decide to publish the “We Have Had Abortions” declaration, signed by fifty-three prominent American women who have had an abortion. This scene is a good depiction of reproductive rights being a binding element of the feminist movement. The hallmark importance of reproductive rights can be traced back to the Marxist influence on the movement. Feminists have drawn on Karl Marx’s social paradigm to frame their struggle. Linda Nicholson, scrutinizing Marxism from a feminist perspective, notes that “gender . . . should be viewed as a significant class division even following a traditional understanding of class.”21 The feminist movement has looked to Marx for a framework to make sense of a history of subjection. Mill’s observations of gender oppression as well can make more sense when viewed as a perpetual class conflict. Despite finding an ally in Marxism, feminists have their qualms with the theory. In classical Marxism, production has narrowly been understood as the manufacturing of goods. Nicholson asks, “Why ought we to eliminate or to count as less important in our theory of history changes in reproduction or childrearing practices than changes involved in food or object producing

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activities?”22 By including duties that are not financially rewarded in capitalist systems, Marxist ideas are adapted to fit the feminist struggle. Instead of restricting labor to factories, businesses, and farms, a feminist definition of economy includes reproductive duties. Consequently, as proletarians need to seize the means of production, women need to seize the means of reproduction. Gaining control of female reproductive rights required breaking with traditional patterns of heterosexual marriage. Hence, the sexual revolution was born. Reproductive rights, particularly abortion, became a highly controversial element of feminism. The 1977 National Women’s Conference shows the decisive turn feminism took in its advocacy of reproductive rights. Instead of uniting American women, the conference gave feminism an exclusively progressive character. Steinem played a key role in pushing the feminist movement in a direction which alienated traditional feminists. In The Revolution from Within, she describes the appeal of traditional gender roles for women to be that “the promise is safety in return for obedience, respectability in return for self-respect and freedom—a sad bargain.”23 Christina Hoff Sommers, as a proponent of “equity feminism,” excoriates Steinem’s remarks: That is a harsh judgment to make about millions of American women. Ms. Steinem is of course free to disagree with conventionally religious women on any number of issues, but she is not morally free to cast aspersions on their autonomy and self-respect. The New Feminism is supposed to be about sisterhood. Why are its most prominent practitioners so condescending?24

The focus on reproductive rights represents a revolutionary turn in feminism. The first wave of feminism transitioned into the second with the Marxist impulse centered around reproductive rights. Taymor misses a great opportunity to highlight Steinem’s role in the development of feminist philosophy into a decidedly progressive direction by glazing over the complexities of this event. Instead of representing the rift in feminism as a two-way split, Taymor depicts conservative feminists as irrational, hateful, and fanatic. A good example is an intimidating scene where Steinem—depicted as a little girl—is on her way to deliver a homily at a church. Pro-life activists are presented as an angry mob shouting phrases like “go home murderer,” “baby killer,” and “death to you all.” To add a dramatic effect to what could have been a scene from a thriller or horror movie, intense music is added, and the lighting is dimmed. Another example is a feminist gathering being canceled due to a pro-lifer making a bomb threat. Perhaps most remarkable, though, was Taymor’s portrayal of Farmworkers’ Union activist Dolores Huerta. While part of a pro-life demonstration as a convicted Catholic, Huerta undergoes a transformation experience. Being against abortion all her life, Huerta converts to the pro-choice camp due to

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the make-up of the pro-life crowd, which she now alleges consists of “angry people, extreme right wingers and Klan members.”25 By depicting pro-lifers negatively as radical activists or positively only when they renounce the prolife movement, Taymor’s depiction of pro-lifers is not only one-sided but also diminishes Steinem’s contributions to the feminist movement. The absence of significant, constructive resistance makes the feminist struggle seem less impressive than it was. Had Taymor chosen to present gender traditionalists as rational, loving, and thoughtful people, The Glorias would have been a more meaningful ode to Steinem’s legacy.

MS. STEINEM: WOMEN AS OTHER Existentialism forms a fourth major influence on the feminist philosophy of gender. Existentialist philosophy rejects the traditional notion that there is an instilled meaning to life. Instead, the existentialist argues that we were born without any purpose or meaning. In this purposeless universe, we ought to create our own meaning. Simone de Beauvoir has done the most significant work at inducing existentialism into the feminist movement. Taking the existential position that there is no fixed essence to womanhood, Beauvoir uses the Hegelian conception of “the Other” to make sense of “woman” as a social construction. The masculine, being the norm for humankind, is understood in contrast with femininity. Beauvoir writes, “She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute—she is the Other.”26 Taking the paradigm of Otherness, Beauvoir explains that “man represents both the positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity.”27 According to existentialist feminists, the patriarchal nature of the world throughout history explains the subjection of women by men. These feminists go a step further than their predecessors by asserting that even sex is a construct. For those who hold a traditional view, essence does precede existence, just as gender precedes biological sex. The biological component is not unimportant to a traditional understanding, as sex flows forth from gender. Gregg Johnson, a biology professor, argues for the existence of a biological basis for gender-specific behavior. He covers a broad number of biological differences that have played a role in the development of different gender roles, going well beyond the reproductive system. Scientists have demonstrated that there is a broad range of significant sex-related physiological differences in organ systems, metabolism, nervous systems, stress levels, limbic systems,

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hormone levels, and more.28 Contrary to the feminist notion that cultural discrimination is the root cause of educational differences, even verbal and visual-spatial skills have been thought to have a biological origin.29 As to the purpose of sex differences, Johnson concludes that “males and females have been differently gifted in God’s plan because of their historic roles in feminine child rearing and masculine provision and protection of the family.”30 As with Marxist influence, existentialism sows division among feminist ranks. Whereas feminists of all stripes tend to agree with Mill’s feminism, Beauvoir is more controversial. If one doubts the very existence of women, the fight for gender equality becomes meaningless. For if women do not exist as a noteworthy category, how can they be equal? Under Beauvoir’s influence, the feminist struggle has turned to language as a tool of oppression. In gauging the influence of Beauvoir on Steinem, her fight for the Ms. honorific comes to mind. A month after the launch of the magazine with the same name, Steinem (Julianne Moore) celebrates the US Government Printing Office’s approval of using Ms. in government documentation. By advocating the use of a distinct abbreviation for a female form of address severed from marital status indication, Steinem can be seen to share in the existentialist fight against oppressive language. Apart from Steinem’s existentialist focus on fighting sexist linguistics, she is also at least nominally in line with Beauvoir’s dictum that “one is not born but becomes woman” through her support of the LGBT movement as a feminist pillar. Despite the sizable impact of Beauvoir’s feminist philosophy on Steinem, they differ on the historical extent of patriarchy. Beauvoir claims that “throughout history [women] have always been subordinated to men.”31 Steinem, in her homily at St. Joan of Arc church, presents a different historical account, “Original cultures saw the presence of God in all living things, including women. Only in the last 500 to 5,000 years, depending on where you lived, has godliness been withdrawn from nature, from females and from particular races of men.”32 For Steinem, the Cherokee nation of Chief Wilma Mankiller is an example of a traditionally matrilineal culture. Yet, in the grand scheme of things, Steinem’s minor diversion from Beauvoir is rather inconsequential.

FEMINISM AT A CROSSROADS: BUTLER’S QUEER THEORY Finally, critical theory helps to shed light on gender feminism in The Glorias. Critical theory aims to expose and challenge social power structures. Judith Butler is the most prominent queer theorist, applying critical theory to the philosophy of gender. She pushes Beauvoir’s notion that one becomes a

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woman further. Queer theory works with the assumption that there is a difference between gender and sex, the former originating in culture and the latter in biology. From this basic distinction, Butler defines gender as “a kind of imitation for which there is no origin.”33 Each person develops their gender through imitation. Some would argue that homosexuality is then an imitation of heterosexuality, a form of otherness if you will. Butler problematizes this claim as heterosexual identity is a copy of nothing. Queer theorists, spearheaded by Butler, claim that heterosexuality is as baseless as homosexuality. Gender identities are, instead, performative. The performative theory of gender means that nobody has a particular gender from the start. Instead, gender is a phenomenon that is acted out in a repetitive fashion. Following queer theory, you are not masculine or feminine, you merely consistently act in that manner. For feminists holding to queer theory, this is a logical continuation of the course set out by Beauvoir’s existentialist turn. If the historical defining of women in relation to men is wrong, surely the same must apply to gender identity. With Butler, the feminist movement is frequently described as having moved into a third wave. Over the years, the gap between traditional and feminist gender philosophy has dramatically widened. The traditionalist view of gender, still adhered to by many Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, and nonreligious persons around the world, has maintained that gender is an essential feature that precedes biology. Simultaneously, Butler’s philosophy of gender has taken feminist philosophy of gender to a point where it is diametrically opposed to traditional notions. While both sides agree to a differentiation between sex and gender, queer theorists take sex to be the basis from which one develops a gender. The third-wave feminist rejection of essentialism does not only put the movement at odds with gender traditionalists but with earlier feminists as well. While feminists from the 1960s and 1970s expanded the fight for gender voting parity, third-wave feminism cannot be seen as a continuation of the same kind. A form of gender essentialism, even if it is merely biological, is needed to be able to fight for equality between the sexes. In the absence of any meaningful definition of gender, feminism evolves into a new movement, severed from its female character. Steinem’s background as a second-wave feminist living through the rise of queer theory puts her in a unique position. She has advocated for a broad vision that led to a feminist embrace of the LGBT movement. Women have always been Steinem’s central focus, though. Queer theorists hold a radical skepticism toward the feminist movement’s identification as it has the potential to perpetuate existing power structures; for Steinem, uniting people under the female banner is liberating rather than oppressive. The ongoing rift between second- and third-wave feminists would have been an interesting refinement of Taymor’s analysis of Steinem’s legacy.

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Taymor’s choice not to portray the complexities surrounding this new tension within the feminist movement is understandable, given that Steinem’s work is mainly situated before the rise of third-wave feminism. Yet, to assess the viability of Steinem’s legacy, it would have been an interesting angle that could have left the movie open-ended, leaving the final judgment of Steinem’s legacy to future generations. Within such a construction, Steinem could have been emphasized as the pragmatic activist that built bridges and forged alliances across a diverse group of people, surmounting barriers of ideology, race, ethnicity, creed, and language. Today’s feminist movement is once again characterized by deep internal division. Feminism is in dire need of a Gloria, again.

CONCLUSION The philosophical underpinnings of Steinem’s activism are rarely addressed, yet foundational to her work and legacy. While Steinem owes much to the feminist philosophers preceding her, the reverse is perhaps even more true. Without the likes of Steinem, much of the philosophy discussed in this chapter would have been little more than a relic of the past. Equally, the work of Julie Taymor is a critical part of the feminist story in channeling the feminist story to a broader audience. Through The Glorias, Taymor shows she is keenly aware of the importance of the popularization of the feminist story through a range of media, including written press, TV, protests, rallies, politics and, of course, film. The Glorias not only provides a look into Gloria Steinem’s journey but also offers keen insights into the feminist philosophy of gender. At the end of the film, reflecting on the 2016 presidential election, Steinem writes, “Yet I know that in the future, Hillary’s loss will be part of our victories. Because the path up is always a jagged line, not a straight one. Our victory is not a one-person marathon but a relay race.”34 Viewing the feminist movement as a relay race is a helpful metaphor for understanding the development of the feminist philosophy of gender. As we have demonstrated, great thinkers have developed a robust philosophy of gender by continuing the journey started by their predecessors. Platonic philosophy laid the groundwork for gender feminism, Marxism added texture to Mill’s fight for legal equality and existentialism, and critical race theory flowed from Marxist ideas in turn. Taymor is faithful to My Life on the Road, yet missed an opportunity to highlight the complexities of Steinem’s journey by more robustly portraying the contending philosophies shaping the feminist movement throughout Steinem’s life. The rich tradition of feminist gender philosophy could have been fleshed out more thoroughly by representing the movement’s differing

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factions more credibly. In particular, adherents to a traditional philosophy of gender are represented inadequately. A more open-minded and objective portrayal of opposing views would have enhanced the relevance of the film. Instead of an unrealistically idealized portrayal, a more realistic and balanced take on Steinem would have been more engaging for viewers. Despite the biopic’s imperfections, The Glorias deserves a prominent place in Taymor’s repertoire. With the decision to honor Steinem’s legacy, the filmmaker adds an intimate project to her own legacy. As the mysterious Greyhound bus that has been driving throughout the entirety of the film approaches the 2017 Women’s March, we get a glimpse of Taymor. Her appearance besides Steinem—at this point, the real Steinem—shows the passing of the torch from one feminist icon to another.

NOTES 1. Adrian Horton, “The Glorias Review—Gloria Steinem Biopic Is a Laughably Shoddy Mess,” The Guardian, September 29, 2020 https://www​.theguardian​.com​/ film​/2020​/sep​/29​/the​-glorias​-review​-gloria​-steinem​-biopic. 2. The Glorias, dir. Julie Taymor (United States: Page Fifty-Four Pictures, 2020). 3. See Plato’s Phaedo, which is one of the dialogues where he describes his theory of the forms. 4. Plato, The Republic (London: Penguin Books, 2007), 457a. 5. Ibid., 455d. 6. Gloria Steinem, The Quotable Jewish Woman, ed. Elaine Bernstein Partnow (Woodstock, Vermont, 2004), 368. 7. Aristotle, Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 1254b14. 8. Augustine, Confessions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), XIII xxxii. 9. C.S. Lewis, Perelandra, in The Space Trilogy (London: HarperCollins, 2013), 322. 10. Adam Barkman, C.S. Lewis & Philosophy as a Way of Life (Allentown, PA: Zossima Press, 2009), 428–29. 11. John Piper, “A Vision of Biblical Complementarity,” in Recovering Biblical Manhood & Womanhood (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2021), 41. 12. Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road (London: Oneworld Publications, 2020), 103. 13. The Glorias, dir. Julie Taymor. 14. Mill developed the ideas of The Subjection of Women jointly with his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill. 15. John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (London: Penguin Books, 2006), 133. 16. Ibid., 138. 17. Aristotle, Politics, 1254b39. 18. Mill, The Subjection of Women, 146.

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19. C.S. Lewis, “Priestesses in the Church?” in C.S. Lewis Essay Collection (London: HarperCollins, 2002), 401. 20. Christina Hoff Sommers, Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 22–23. 21. Linda Nicholson, “Feminism and Marx: Integrating Kinship with the Economic,” in The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory, ed. Linda Nicholson (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 1997), 140. 22. Ibid., 138. 23. Gloria Steinem, Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem (Boston: Little, Brown, 1992), 260. 24. Christina Hoff Sommers, Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 260. 25. The Glorias, dir. Julie Taymor. 26. Simone De Beauvoir, “Introduction to The Second Sex,” in The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory, ed. Linda Nicholson (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 1997), 13. 27. Ibid., 13. 28. Gregg Johnson, “The Biological Basis for Gender-specific Behavior,” in Recovering Biblical Manhood & Womanhood, eds. John Piper and Wayne Grudem (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2012), 351–69. 29. Ibid., 364. 30. Ibid., 368. 31. Beauvoir, 15. 32. The Glorias, dir. Julie Taymor. 33. Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” in The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory, ed. Linda Nicholson (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 1997), 306. 34. The Glorias, dir. Julie Taymor.

REFERENCES Aristotle. Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Augustine. Confessions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Barkman, Adam. C.S. Lewis & Philosophy as a Way of Life. Allentown, PA: Zossima Press, 2009. Beauvoir, Simone De. “Introduction to The Second Sex.” In The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory, edited by Linda Nicholson, 11–18. New York: Routledge, 1997. Butler, Judith. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” In The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory, edited by Linda Nicholson, 300–16. New York: Routledge, 1997. The Glorias. Directed by Julie Taymor. United States: Page Fifty-Four Pictures, 2020. Horton, Adrian. “The Glorias Review—Gloria Steinem Biopic Is a Laughably Shoddy Mess.” The Guardian. September 29, 2020 https://www​.theguardian​.com​/ film​/2020​/sep​/29​/the​-glorias​-review​-gloria​-steinem​-biopic.

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Johnson, Gregg. “The Biological Basis for Gender-specific Behavior.” In Recovering Biblical Manhood & Womanhood, edited by John Piper and Wayne Grudem, 351–70. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2012. Lewis, C. S. Perelandra. In The Space Trilogy. London: HarperCollins, 2013. Lewis, C. S. “Priestesses in the Church?” In C.S. Lewis Essay Collection. London: HarperCollins, 2002. Mill, John Stuart. The Subjection of Women. London: Penguin Books, 2006. Nicholson, Linda. “Feminism and Marx: Integrating Kinship with the Economic.” In The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory, edited by Linda Nicholson, 131–46. Oxfordshire: Routledge, 1997. Piper, John. “A Vision of Biblical Complementarity.” In Recovering Biblical Manhood & Womanhood. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2021. Plato. The Republic. London: Penguin Books, 2007. Sommers, Christina Hoff. Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994. Steinem, Gloria. My Life on the Road. London: Oneworld Publications, 2020. ———. The Quotable Jewish Woman, edited by Elaine Bernstein Partnow. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2004. Steinem, Gloria. Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1992.

Chapter 9

Wanton Boys Queering Childhood and Youth in Julie Taymor’s Titus Jeff Turner

Midway through Titus, Julie Taymor’s film adaptation of William Shakespeare’s tragedy Titus Andronicus, Young Lucius, the grandson of the titular character, approaches the underground lair of Demetrius and Chiron, the adolescent sons of Tamora, Queen of the Goths and newly inaugurated Empress of Rome. This young boy has been pulled into his grandfather’s plans to exact bloody revenge against Tamora’s loathsome offspring, who, earlier in the film, raped and mutilated Titus’s only daughter Lavinia. Tentative in his approach, Young Lucius is yanked into the dark and cluttered space—what Taymor refers to as a “defunct torture chamber entertainment center”—by Chiron, who slams the dungeon gate and wraps the younger boy in a mocking embrace.1 “Demetrius, here’s the son of Lucius. He hath some message to deliver us,” crows the youth to his older brother.2 Demetrius lifts the boy and places him on top of a billiards table as Chiron inspects a set of weapons gifted from the Andronici armory, seemingly presented as tribute to these malicious teenagers. “Gramercy, lovely Lucius,” Demetrius teases. “What’s the news?”3 In the play and film, Young Lucius responds by jockeying between two performative modes: childlike innocence in deference to the older youths and an aside to the audience reflecting the boy’s knowing subterfuge and strength of purpose. In her study of Shakespeare’s boy characters, Katie Knowles argues Young Lucius’s competing personas suggest “it is possible to read him simultaneously as a boy masquerading as a man, or a man masquerading as a boy—cementing further the idea of masculine identity as both constructed and fragile.”4 For Taymor, the duality of Young Lucius and the way in which he is positioned against Demetrius and Chiron in the dramatic action will become one of the primary conceits of her film. On one level, Taymor is 159

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completely committed to the boy’s innocence, but her source text requires Young Lucius to explore what it might mean to enact revenge in honor of his aunt, uncles, and grandfather. The boy will be asked to try on the mask of manhood to serve his grandfather’s horrific plans; what Young Lucius will learn from this experience will be the guiding force behind Taymor’s conceptual approach to the material. Admittedly, Taymor’s Titus is an overstuffed film full of subversive, often contradictory pleasures. Released in February 2000 by Fox Searchlight Pictures, Taymor’s film is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy, Titus Andronicus, and Harold Bloom has excused Shakespeare’s awkward, juvenile plot as a brash parody of late sixteenth-century revenge tragedy conventions.5 Jonathan Bate disagrees and argues the play “asks perennially troubling questions about humankind’s capacity to commit acts of extreme cruelty in the name of religion, for the pursuit of power or out of the desire for vengeance.”6 Gustav Cross, however, is quite candid when he declares the play to be ridiculous, little more than a “gallimaufry of murders, rape, lopped limbs and heads baked in a pie, lavishly served with the rich purple sauce of rhetoric.”7 Taymor’s film has done very little to change this perception. Her adaptation is a campy, Grand Guignol curiosity—a phantasmagoric spectacle of nightmarish imagery. Perhaps it is most kind to think of the film as a palate-cleansing exercise after the far superior yet fundamentally corporate success of Taymor’s 1997 Broadway adaptation of Disney’s The Lion King, but that would be too easy, for Taymor’s intent is not to wallow in the extravagances of Shakespeare’s early modern text; she wants to appropriate it to interrogate the violent impulses of late twentieth-century culture. Shakespeare’s play begins with a war of words as two sons clash to become the new Emperor of Rome. The oldest, Saturninus (Alan Cumming), calls upon the Roman Senators to declare him emperor by right of birth. The younger and more popular, Bassianus (James Frain), asks that the will of the people be respected and “desert in pure election shine.”8 It is the arrival of Titus Andronicus (Anthony Hopkins), whose army has returned to Rome having defeated the Goths and who has lost twenty-one sons on the battlefields of war, who incites the action when he sacrifices the first-born son of Tamora, Queen of the Goths (Jessica Lange), in an act of retribution and public ritual.9 This decision unleashes a wave of murder and vengeful cruelty spurned on by the malevolent Tamora (now Saturninus’s Empress), her African lover Aaron (Harry Lennix), and her teenage sons Demetrius (Matthew Rhys) and Chiron (Jonathan Rhys Meyers). What follows includes rape, murder, two decapitations, three severed hands, the cutting out of a tongue and, finally, a feast in which Tamora’s sons are served up to the Emperor and his Empress baked in a meat pie.

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Titus tells the story of an ancient Roman patriarch whose violent miscalculations lead to greater acts of barbarism, madness, and his own tragic demise. Confronting the horrors of the play’s violence, Taymor utilizes representations of childhood and youth to interrogate the play’s acts of cruelty. Specifically, Taymor turns to Shakespeare’s play to make sense of the barbarity humans inflict upon each other that defined geo-political conflict during the 1990s. Taymor acknowledged this as a “time when racism, ethnic cleansing and genocide have almost ceased to shock by being so commonplace and seemingly inevitable.”10 She was particularly appalled by mass rape conducted against Muslim Bosniaks by Bosnian Serbs during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina following the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, but one can also point to the First Gulf War as well as civil wars in Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Somalia, the Congo, Chechnya, and Sierra Leone as markers of disturbing global discord. Using the striking visual imagery of ultraviolence to negotiate the complexities of an ultraviolent world, however, is a tricky process and requires much creative license. Ultimately, Taymor moved outside Shakespeare’s text to locate a device that would propel her social commentary into the foreground, and she found that device in a potent cultural signifier—a prepubescent boy whose idealized and disruptive presence in Titus works to queer and destabilize Shakespeare’s lurid examination of hypermasculine codes of conduct. This child, played by twelve-year-old Osheen Jones, occupies an unusual position in the film as witness and participant. Taymor utilizes the boy as a potential symbol of hope and optimism in the face of inhumanity, but inviting audiences to witness the carnage of Shakespeare’s tragedy through the eyes of a beautiful boy is an oddly profound gesture. To complicate matters, the boy also serves Shakespeare’s text when Jones morphs into the role of Titus’s grandson, Young Lucius.11 Standing inside and outside of the diegesis simultaneously, Taymor’s Boy Witness/Young Lucius is a queer presence from the start, and he invites the spectator to explore the world through his perspective, effectively queering the very act of watching Titus. A close reading of Shakespeare’s text and Taymor’s cinematic adaptation reveals childhood—particularly the director’s highly romanticized representation of childhood—to be a site of contestation. Indeed, this boy is a slippery, contradictory figure. Innocent and knowing, sweet-tempered and prone to acts of violence, the Boy Witness/Young Lucius is a seductive and destabilizing signifier. Rather than redeem the play’s carnage, this boy character reinforces the idea that the film and the play are about the savage acts adults inflict upon their children as well as the legacy of violence passed on from one generation to the next. One can certainly find such stuff in Shakespeare’s text for it dramatizes the evils that parents impose upon their children out of honor, tradition, greed, and revenge.

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Viewers encounter Taymor’s Boy Witness immediately. The opening shot reveals a tight close-up of a young boy wearing a crude paper bag mask—the eyes and mouth clumsily torn out by hand. The boy’s piercing blue eyes stare directly at the spectator. As the camera pulls back, the flickering lights of an unseen television bounce across the boy’s masked face as he chews on a hotdog at the end of a dinner fork. A collage of sounds assaults the ears, including, but not limited to, dialogue from the 1950s television series “The Lone Ranger,” dialogue from a “Popeye” cartoon, cinematic sounds of war and soldiers in battle, the song “Pop Goes the Weasel,” and the mechanized buzz and whir of children’s toys wound up and unleashed. A wider shot situates the boy in a mid-twentieth-century American kitchen; the aluminum and red Formica table covered with junk food and toys—battery-operated military helicopters, G.I. Joes, Roman warriors, superheroes, Japanese mecha fighters, and space-age figurines. Soon, Taymor’s handheld cameras sweep, rise and fall, swirling toward and around the boy from odd angles and tilted perspectives as he engages in an anarchic game of war on the tabletop. Unleashed and untamed, the boy smashes a fighter plane into a large chunk of chocolate cake with an equal mixture of aggression and jubilation. “He’s almost like a god,” Taymor suggests as the boy manipulates his army of action figures with glee.12 Breaking dishes and splattering ketchup onto the squirming toy soldiers, the boy’s frenzied actions reel out of control when suddenly a literal explosion outside the kitchen interrupts his “play.” Terrified, the boy contorts his body in what can only be described as an expressionistic scream of despair before crouching underneath the table in fear. While there, a Shakespearean “clown” (as Taymor phrases it) leaps through the blown-out window, grabs the boy, tears off his mask, and carries the crying and frightened child down a steep flight of stairs into a thick mist, emerging, finally, into a hushed, first-century Roman amphitheater.13 When this rough-hewn clown lifts the boy into the air like a prized trophy, unseen spectators erupt into roars and applause. As the boy is lowered to the ground, he is no longer crying and afraid but calmed by the attention. More at home in a civic space reserved for gladiator combat, animal slayings, and public executions than the kitchen where we first discovered him, this ancient space is restorative, and as flames cast red and orange light on his face, the boy looks down to discover one of his toy soldiers has followed him into the past. It is a mini-Titus action figure, and in close-up, the boy tenderly touches the doll with a mixture of awe and desire. Divorced from its context as a cultural product of mid-century, post-war Americana, the doll’s status as fetishized object of contemplation is even more potent. Here, in one powerfully subversive and eroticized moment, the boy conjures up a stadium full of muscular soldiers as Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus enters the amphitheater with his army, returning to Rome after victory over the northern Goths.

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Responses to this opening “Prologue” have been consistent. Most agree with Taymor that the boy’s play is innocent in design and purpose. Martha Nochimson notes the “young boy plays happily with his toys until his violence comes to life and terrifies him.”14 Taymor asserts on the DVD commentary track that the film begins with a little boy who “has very innocently created his violence.”15 But Taymor’s dazzling invention seems to undermine her intent. The boy’s play in the opening moments of the film is hyperkinetic and aggressive. Slamming toys in mounds of sugary cake and breaking dishes upon the ketchup-soaked tabletop are not so much the actions of an innocent as they are the product of cultural forces far more malevolent in spirit. It makes a great deal of sense that the boy achieves a sense of peace in the amphitheater. There he finds himself at home; his fascination with violence is no longer bound by the conventions of civilized, twentieth-century behavior. From the moment that Titus Andronicus hands his helmet to the Boy Witness, this child—first discovered engaged in an anxious fury of aggressive release—will thrive as a pupil and initiate into the violent world of barbaric ritual and bloody revenge. Taymor, however, insists on the Boy Witness’s moral goodness and inculpability as he heartily mimics the pop cultural violence depicted in the cartoon shorts, war movies, westerns, and slapstick comedy he regularly consumes on television and in the movies. It is Taymor’s insistence upon the boy’s virtue and how that trumps any moral misgivings that ultimately queers him and the film. Kathryn Bond Stockton posits four categories of queer childhood, and central to this study is her discussion of the child queered by innocence. For Stockton, “no matter how you slice it, the child from the standpoint of ‘normal’ adults is always queer,” but she argues one of the strangest things about childhood (and childhood in representation) is the adult’s compulsion to project the veil of innocence onto the child figure.16 Hannah Dyer agrees, naming “that which childhood innocence seeks to repress or disavow as ‘queer.’”17 Dyer argues queerness is that suspended state of being in the world “which must be discarded in order to ‘grow up,’”18 Stockton, however, wishes to unsettle the developmental concept of “growing up” to explore what she terms “sideways growth”—the liminal, unfixed, delightfully unstable, and chaotic space of developmental delay before the child moves forward and becomes subject to those normative discourses that will shape (for good and bad) their life as an adult. The desire to liberate the child (both fictional and real) from the fraught complexities of adult experiences informs the innocent child as a cultural construct. Dyer, however, argues that such a construct is little more than the “product of adult anxieties and epistemologies.”19 Discussing Titus as a queer film and its ubiquitous Boy Witness as a queer presence does not require the spectator to read against the text to tease out resistance to normative codes of behavior. Clara Escoda Agusti points to

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the queer liminality of the boy in representation, noting that “the witness’s subjectivity becomes a site where binary oppositions dissolve.”20 Virginia Mason Vaughan is in agreement, arguing Osheen Jones’s performance in Titus “doesn’t yet fit the categories of masculine and feminine, his softened features suggesting youthful androgyny.”21 Jones served a similar function as the “boy dreamer” in Adrian Noble’s 1996 film adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and, more telling, Jones played queer pop star Jack Fairy as a child in Todd Haynes’s 1998 glam rock melodrama Velvet Goldmine. This is not to say that Taymor’s Boy Witness or Shakespeare’s Young Lucius are meant to be read as gay or that this bifurcated character harbors unacknowledged same-sex desires. In this study, queerness, as articulated by Dyer, “references nonnormative gender and sexuality but also all that is deemed strange and unruly.”22 Additionally, Taymor’s reliance on postmodern pastiche—her ludic juxtaposition of ancient and contemporary fashions, architecture, and other kitschy design elements—lends the mise-en-scène a garish, self-reflexive theatricality that is easily labeled camp. Such ostentatiousness is prominent in the scenes set in Benito Mussolini’s Esposizione Universale di Roma (EUR)—a reimagined city center for Rome originally designed in the 1930s to celebrate twenty years of Italian fascism. Specifically, Taymor’s use of the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana (otherwise known as the Square Colosseum) functions to parody Rome’s imperial past (and Shakespeare’s appropriation of that past) through the visual display of a failed fascist playground. Lucian Ghita reads Taymor’s use of this location as high camp, arguing “the architectural space created by Taymor’s set director Dante Ferretti (a nightmarish, baroque composition intermixing elements from different cultural and historical époques) triggers stylistic associations with [Federico] Fellini’s visually stunning representation of Roman decadence, hedonism and sexual licentiousness in Satyricon (1969).”23 The film’s camp style, however, extends beyond parodying the grand modernist gestures of architectural monumentality to shape many of the central performances. Alan Cumming, who posed nude for the cover of Out magazine three months before the film’s release, oozes decadence as Saturninus. His severe, asymmetrical hairstyle, Kubuki-inspired make-up, and sullen, boyish preening renders the character as a libertine just past the prime of youth. Such an extravagant approach to character development and performance is also visible in Matthew Rhys and Jonathan Rhys Meyers’s androgynous, hyperviolent, and hypersexual Goth teens Demetrius and Chiron. Meyers also appeared in Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine (1998), channeling one of David Bowie’s gender-bending personas as glam rocker Brian Slade, and it is not difficult to see how that character’s aesthetic bleeds into his work with Taymor. Other actors, especially Lange and Hopkins, are encouraged to

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deliver audacious and flamboyant performances. Melissa E. Sanchez agrees, pointing out that Taymor’s focus on Aaron’s “relationship with the older, Amazonian Tamora is depicted as a cross-generation, gender-queer perversion of normal marriage.”24 Add to this Taymor’s extra-textural additions of a debauched wedding party, a polymorphously perverse orgy scene, and the homoerotic display of naked soldiers showering away mud and grime in a public bath, and the film starts to feel like a queer camp classic. Such cinematic excesses reflect what B. Ruby Rich has termed “Homo Pomo”—an aesthetic utilizing “appropriation and pastiche, irony as well as a reworking of history with social constructionism very much in mind.” Discussing what she named “New Queer Cinema,” Rich describes such films as “irreverent, energetic, alternatively minimalist and excessive. Above all, they’re full of pleasure.”25 The Boy Witness/Young Lucius is not the only youthful character queered in Taymor’s adaptation. Two additional youths—Tamora’s teenage sons Demetrius and Chiron—are also central. The first time their characters are privileged in the dramatic action, these ill-tempered adolescents are puffed up with hotheaded bravado. The eldest, Demetrius, taunts and belittles his younger brother as their mentor, Aaron, watches over them. Chiron is more than willing to give as good as he gets. “’Tis not the difference of a year or two makes me less gracious, or thee more fortunate. I am as able and fit as thou.”26 Demetrius responds, accusing his younger brother of sexual impotence, and their lack of impulse control, highlighted by Taymor’s volatile camera work and editing, leads the two to draw knives against one another. This escalation of violence is broken up by Aaron, who worries their “petty brabble will undo us all.”27 Aiming to prove their mettle as men, the two boys turn from knives and fisticuffs to lewd fantasies of sexual conquest over Titus’s daughter Lavinia. Both boys want to grow up, to be men, to enter the powerful realm of normative masculinity. Their desire to prove themselves no matter the consequences reveals an anxiety about their position in Saturninus’s court now that their mother is the Empress of Rome. Knowles argues that Demetrius and Chiron are vulnerable figures “not yet socially secure as men.”28 Knowles acknowledges that to be a man in Elizabethan England meant to be economically independent, married, and the head of a household, but what if one was unable to reach this position of power and status? For those excluded, other codes of behavior could reveal a man’s worth: fighting, illicit sexual conquests, drunken revelry, and homosocial friendships. Such compensatory behaviors only serve to underline the boys’ anxieties about status and power. Taymor’s film depicts these boys as unbridled ids seeking libidinal release. Although physically grown, their antics reflect profound emotional immaturity. They are pent-up hooligans with nowhere to call their own. As played

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by Rhys and Meyers, Demetrius and Chiron are sexually inexperienced lads craving phallic competency. The actors certainly look the part. Both in their early twenties while filming, Meyers’s Chiron sported stringy hair with highlights while wearing a silver jumpsuit and cape. In a snakeskin jacket and choppy, platinum-blonde hair, Rhys’s Demetrious was equally outlandish. Taymor reinforces the boys’ childish rivalry in their sleeping quarters of Saturninus’s palace. Set behind a heavy metal bank vault door, suggesting the Roman court’s awareness of the dangers these youth pose, Demetrius and Chiron sleep together on a grand bed of pillows suspended from the ceiling— a cradle to lull these savage boys asleep. As Aaron molds their temperaments to serve his and Tamora’s malicious ends, the boys’ sexually aggressive, homoerotic play on the bed marks them as liminal figures hovering between licentiousness and hero worship. Later, following Lavinia’s rape and mutilation, the boys, stripped to the waist, are caught up in the ecstasy of their brutal assault. Low-angle closeups reveal Lavinia’s disheveled hair and face, and she is found standing awkwardly on a tree trunk in a muddy bog littered with dead trees protruding out of the ground as if to grasp the air above. Clad in nothing more than underclothes, Lavinia’s hands have been chopped off and replaced with twigs, blood drips from her mouth following the cutting out of her tongue. Demetrius bares his ass, mocking Lavinia’s anguish, while Chiron laughs uproariously in the desolate quagmire. The boys’ paroxysms of glee speak to their nihilistic disdain for the young woman’s humanity. In the second half of the film, Demetrius and Chiron kill time in their underground den as hyperactive video game imagery is intercut with their uneasy play. Utilizing canted close-ups and jagged editing, Taymor captures the boys’ fractious energy. “I wanted to show them agitated and miserable,” she discusses on the director’s commentary, “battering their brains out so they wouldn’t have to think about what they had done.”29 Demetrius does seem lost in the flashing lights of the game while a drug-addled Chiron, his eyes rolling back into his head, thrashes about the space to electronic dance music. The aesthetic here is informed by MTV or what Richard Benjamin calls “fragmented, hyperkinetic, music-video expressionism,” but it is also reminiscent of cinematic depictions of dangerous and alienated youth which were abundant during the 1990s.30 Audiences across the globe seemed to be fascinated by the chic thrill of childhood in crisis narratives or what Benjamin has termed “youth apocalypse films,” and Taymor’s Titus provides a unique example of the genre.31 Others include Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991), Larry Clark’s Kids (1995), Harmony Korine’s Gummo (1997), Greg Araki’s Nowhere (1997), Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997), Kimberly Pierce’s Boys Don’t Cry (1999), and Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale (2000). One can also

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look at television shows like “Beavis and Butthead” (1993–1997) and “South Park” (1997–) as furthering the trend of 1990s cultural products depicting the transgressive behaviors of provocative youth. A number of these titles focus on queer characters or are filtered through a queer sensibility, further suggesting that queerness is dangerously other and a threat to social stability. In many of these texts, according to Benjamin, “adolescents pursue ultraviolence as a form of ecstasy that offers them momentary and incendiary power, gratification, revenge, idle recreation, sexual pleasure, and/or liberation from the alternative but dominant ‘reality’ of the (suburban) dystopia.”32 As representations of radical youth pierce, tattoo, thrash, dope, fuck, and kill, manipulating their bodies into sites of resistance, these films suggest the kids are definitely not alright. Youth in representation was celebrated for its willingness to embrace pathological violence, moral indifference, and fascistic desire. Such representations reveled in a nihilistic vision of late-modern capitalism as a consumer wasteland where there is no future and no hope—the characters and the audience hyped up by the adrenaline of decadent abandon. Anti-social and anti-relational representations of youth in Western cultural production are even more disconcerting, for youth rarely narrate or construct their own subjectivity in the public sphere but are shaped by and filtered through adult anxieties, pleasures, and desires.33 Audience members who embraced the decadent excesses of teenage cynicism during the nineties were particularly influenced by the “grunge” aesthetic. This merging of metal and punk genres was popularized by bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden, whose members fought to resist corporate hegemony and the homogenized sounds of popular music with an abrasive, often socially conscious, DIY sneer. The movement inspired a generation to reject brand-name corporate conformity in favor of anti-style and an earnest revitalization of rock tropes. The music was committed to a poetics of youthful alienation (recall Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy” video or Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” for example), yet the overwhelming success of Pearl Jam and Nirvana also marked the movement’s unexpected demise. By the time Kurt Cobain committed suicide in 1994, grunge had already been appropriated by corporate music labels, and grunge fashion could now be purchased in any mall in America. When subcultural style becomes so quickly and easily commodified by corporate interests, it is no wonder that representations of youthful nihilism become popular cultural products for cynical audiences. It was the horrific school shootings at Columbine High School in 1999 (nine months before the release of Titus) that illuminated a concern that young people felt disconnected from adults, alienated from their peers, and filled with a disproportionate amount of loneliness and rage. Edgy representations

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of marginalized youth were embraced by audiences looking to elevate such fictions—whether sincerely or ironically—as potent markers of a culture in decline. This romanticization of risk, violence, and despair shaped audience responses to representations of angry, sexually confused, and violent kids. Just as wearing black trench coats to school flaunted one’s indifference to the ruling hierarchies in the months following the Columbine murders, watching noxious teens on the big screen exposed the frustrations of spectators whose cultural ambivalence was reinforced by the exhibition of neglect and indifference. Making a consumer spectacle out of disaffected, amoral teens can be read as an empowering, albeit contradictory response to a neoliberal consumer culture shaped by conservative and reactionary modes of authority. If Demetrius and Chiron are read as extravagantly wanton products of a culture in crisis, Taymor invites the viewer to contrast them with the Boy Witness/Young Lucius, whose bifurcated presence is meant to provide a counterpoint to the teenagers’ nihilism. Her approach to Young Lucius, however, unsettles the comparison. In a dinner scene following Lavinia’s cruel assault, Titus gently attends to his grieving daughter as Young Lucius strikes at a fly that has landed on the table. Startled, Titus accuses his grandson of being a tyrant and murderer. “Poor harmless fly, that with his pretty buzzing melody came here to make us merry, and thou hast killed him,” cries out the old man.34 “How if that fly had a father and mother?” Titus asks.35 In a moment of inspiration, Young Lucius, a twinkle in his eye, pivots. No longer is the insect a mere housefly, but now “a black ill-favored fly, like to the empress’ Moor. Therefore, I killed him,” crows the boy.36 In Shakespeare’s tragedy, the killing of the fly was written for Titus’s brother Marcus, but Taymor transposes the lines to Young Lucius. Certainly, the boy’s cleverness pleases the old man and makes him laugh. Even Lavinia cannot help but express amusement. In Taymor’s adaptation, the boy has managed to bring levity to an otherwise sorrowful gathering, but the transposition of lines also reveals Young Lucius as both a jester and a wanton boy eagerly imagining the fury he could strike upon the villainous African. The boy’s words and actions compromise his assumed passivity and innocence. “O, O, O!” Titus enthusiastically responds, and together they strike at the dead fly with even more spirit as Titus pulls the boy onto his lap in a loving embrace.37 Agusti suggests Titus is teaching his grandson a lesson in morality, “setting into motion a discourse of identification with difference and attention to vulnerability,” but a counter-reading might argue the boy is being initiated into the family business of violence and bloody revenge.38 Todd Andrew Borlick has argued Shakespeare “equates gratuitous cruelty toward insects with savagery,” and one cannot help but read Young Lucius’s actions as just that.39 A consideration of the boy’s casual racism only magnifies the accusation for contemporary audiences. Furthermore, the viewer is always on alert when the boy is on the screen. Young

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Lucius makes his first appearance in Shakespeare’s third act, but the audience has been experiencing Taymor’s adaptation through the Boy Witness’ perspective since the film’s beginning. The boy’s dual personas keep the spectator off balance and curious. Vaughn notes the boy is “always watching, and we watch with him. Both actor and observer, his position inside and outside the action breaks down traditional polarities, even as it suggests the difficulty of finding a ‘place’ in this film’s imaginary world.”40 While a warm and even humorous scene, Titus’s response to his grandson’s minor act of violence and the boy’s quick-witted response to his grandfather’s playful tirade serve to construct Taymor’s version of Young Lucius as a coolly calculating youth far removed from the innocence the director insists upon. This scene, and Taymor’s strategic transposition of the lines, signals the viewer to recognize Young Lucius’s complicity in the escalating dramatic action. The unexpected arrival of Tamora and Aaron’s baby in the final third of the film radically transforms the action, focuses the plot on yet another “queer” child figure, and dramatically shifts Aaron’s motivations and desires. Tamora’s Nurse describes the babe as a demon in black skin—a “joyless, dismal, black and sorrowful issue.”41 Aaron, however, demonstrably rejects this hateful rhetoric, crying out: “Is black so base a hue?”42 Although the Nurse, Demetrius, and Chiron demand the child’s death, Aaron resists their ultimatums. Recognizing in the eyes of the child his own fragility and vulnerability as an African in ancient Rome, Aaron is suddenly willing to bring down the imperial court to secure his boy’s safety. For the first time, Aaron appears to find value in himself, and his child’s existence points toward an alternative yet undefined future where the boy will flourish. As an African in Europe, Aaron is othered in Shakespeare’s and Taymor’s vision of Rome. His baby is doubly othered, black and the bastard child of a white mother and Empress of Rome. Indeed, the child must be discussed as a queer presence, emerging into the diegesis out of a perversion of accepted behavioral norms. To be black in both the play and the film is to occupy a space outside the boundaries of society as determined by dominant cultural interests. As a Black man, Aaron is also queered by European whiteness. This was more true during Shakespeare’s lifetime, and the play reflects Elizabethan attitudes more acutely than even ancient Rome, where scholars have argued black skin was not necessarily a sign of inferior or degraded status.43 Alan Bray, for example, makes a direct connection between blackness and queerness, noting that black and brown bodies in Renaissance England “brought to mind the image of the sodomite” for the British.44 It is also clear that Africans in England were seen as undesirable threats. In 1596, for example, Queen Elizabeth I and her Privy Council issued three statements in support of expelling all “negars and blackamoores” from England. These open warrants, according to Emily Weissbourd, viewed brown and black bodies as nothing more

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than a “uniquely commodifiable subset of the population,” making a direct connection between “blackness and slavery in the early modern English imaginary.”45 As in the sixteenth century, black and brown bodies continue to be rendered deviant and made vulnerable by institutional structures central to the success of the neoliberal state. These humans are typically written out of societal and cultural narratives and so must imagine alternative spaces where they, too, are included and celebrated. This is Aaron’s dilemma. He is willing to die to save his newborn child, but Shakespeare’s play lacks the capacity to imagine a world where the child might flourish. Titus’s oldest son, Lucius, promises Aaron he will protect the boy, but Shakespeare’s text remains ambivalent about the baby’s future. Taymor’s 1994 staging of the tragedy at the Theatre for a New Audience in New York City (in which she first introduced the concept of the Boy Witness as an audience surrogate) also maintained this ambivalence. During the final moments of that production, the Boy Witness/ Young Lucius somberly contemplated a small black coffin on the stage.46 In her film adaptation, however, the possibility of hope against hope rests on the survival of this vulnerable child. Just as Taymor’s film begins with a chaotic scene around a kitchen table, the film’s conclusion takes place around another table, but here Taymor will work to address Shakespeare’s ambivalent ending with something more optimistic. The sequence begins with a shot of two meat pies cooling beside an open window as a jaunty Italian folk song celebrating the beauty of life fills the soundtrack. Soon, Marcus, the Roman Emperor and his queen, Tribunes of Rome, Goth commanders, and Titus’s remaining son Lucius arrive. Making his entrance from behind a scarlet curtain, Titus strikes a pose in chef’s whites, including a bib apron, coat, and torque blanche. Young Lucius, dressed in a tailored white suit, closely follows wheeling in the serving cart. Everything feels purposefully ironic—vaudevillian even—and Taymor gives Anthony Hopkins all the space he needs to wink and nod and chew a little scenery of his own. If the relationship between Titus and his grandson is meant to be a parodic commentary on a boy’s rite of passage into the world of adult experience, then the serving of the pie is the camp highlight of their odd partnership. The education the boy has received from his grandfather has been little more than a sideways adventure—a mocking performance of growing up orchestrated by a madman with an obsession for revenge. Both characters are enjoying themselves too much, and the extreme close-ups of faces and mouths chewing into their slices of pie elevate the scene’s awkward comedy. Should serving up human flesh to unsuspecting diners ever be this absurd? The folk song concludes, and Lavinia solemnly enters in white with a dark chiffon veil. After Titus twists her neck and lays her body gently on the

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ground, the scene erupts into acts of extreme, cartoon-level violence. Titus admits the bodies of Lavinia’s rapists have been baked into the pies and then plunges a knife deep into Tamora’s throat. As throbbing metallic rock floods the soundtrack, Saturninus runs down the table and stabs Titus in the chest with a candelabra. Young Lucius, as if pulled out of a trance, is visibly horrified as his father grabs Saturninus by the collar and drags him to the other end of the table. Lucius then thrusts a serving spoon deep into the emperor’s mouth, gagging him to death before spitting in his face. In this moment of utter confusion, Taymor freezes the action. Only Young Lucius and his father remain mobile within the frame. The boy watches in disbelief as Lucius pulls out a gun to shoot Saturninus, and with the sound of the gunshot, the scene is propelled back into the ancient amphitheater as if the entire film has unfolded before the silently stunned, contemporary audience sitting in the stone arena. On returning to the amphitheater, the characters of Young Lucius and the Boy Witness once again collapse into one another, and under the watchful eyes of the spectators, this boy takes measure of the barbarous scene at the table, shocked and uncertain as to how to respond. Soldiers cover the four dead bodies in plastic, and in the concluding moments, Lucius accepts his new role as Emperor of Rome. His first act is to bury Aaron in the sand up to his neck and leave him to starve to death in yet another act of human sacrifice, signifying Rome’s moral descent. The cycle of violence and vengeance continues unabated, and the world slouches forward. The Boy Witness/ Young Lucius, however, has other plans. The sound of a crying child fills the air, and as the boy releases Aaron’s baby from its cage, more crying babies, the sound of bells ringing, and birds fill the soundscape. The boy then walks slowly away, the baby cradled in his arms, toward, in the words of Vaughn, “an unknown destination outside of human history and far from the religious, political and military practices that have shaped that history.”47 As the boy steps just beyond a structure built for gladiator combat and other blood sports, the sun begins to rise, and with it, the promise of a new day. Calling this ending the weakest section of the film, Richard Burt suggests it is little more than the “Fascist romanticization” of childhood.48 Sanchez also finds the ending disappointing and argues it “excludes queerness rather than challenging normativity. It is more like an interracial adoption, with all that institution’s implications of assimilation and rescue, than communal experiment.”49 While Sanchez’s reading is compelling, Taymor’s ending can be read as illustrating what José Esteban Muñoz has termed “queer futurity.” “Queerness,” for Muñoz, is “a temporal arrangement in which the past is a field of possibility in which subjects can act in the present in the service of a new futurity.”50 His project is to provide a counter to political and cultural nihilism, opening a portal toward something better, more inclusive, and viable. Queer futurity, therefore, is about imagining a world beyond the world

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as it is currently experienced. It is about constructing new pathways toward a vision of the world that is “not here yet.”51 Queer futurity posits how to exist and flourish in ways that cannot be mapped under present circumstances. It is about imagining and making a commitment to unrealized possibilities. Muñoz asks how queer subjects work on, with, and against oppressive systemic structures, and he is interested in examining acts of resistance and gestures of refusal and rejection that signal a defiant negation of present structures and systemic oppression. Most significantly, Muñoz notes, “It is important not to hand over futurity to normative white reproductive futurity.”52 In the final moments of Taymor’s film, the Boy Witness/Young Lucius openly rejects the status quo, societal norms, and the institutional structures his grandfather was so blind to follow. Now the son of an Emperor, the boy chooses to remove himself from the oppressive dynamics of the amphitheater so as not to grow up and grow into such a system. To “grow up” is to actively participate in the world as it has been written, but what if one wishes to reject, resist, and delay? If Demetrius and Chiron are literally devoured by this world, Taymor authorizes this young boy to liberate Aaron’s baby, initiating an alternative modality of kinship and, together, escaping the never-ending cycles of violence Shakespeare’s play stages and celebrates. While many critics dismissed this ending as sentimental hokum, Taymor felt compelled to make visible the “birth of compassion and what that means, and mercy,” even if such a gesture feels tentative and contingent.53 Still, is it not fair to say that compassion in action—developing empathy and understanding for radical difference—is a truly queer concept?

NOTES 1. Julie Taymor, “Director’s Commentary,” Disc 1, Titus, DVD, directed by Julie Taymor (USA: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2000). 2. William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus: Revised Edition, ed. Jonathan Bate (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 4.2.1–2. References are to act, scene, and line. Shakespeare’s words have been transcribed from Titus, directed by Julie Taymor (USA: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2000). 3. Titus Andronicus, 4.2.7. 4. Katie Knowles, Shakespeare’s Boys: A Cultural History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 77. 5. Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), 77. 6. Jonathan Bate, “Reconsiderations and Reinventions,” in Titus Andronicus: Revised Edition, ed. Jonathan Bate (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 122. 7. Gustav Cross, “Titus Andronicus: Introduction,” in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Alfred Harbage (New York: The Viking Press, 1969), 823.

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8. Titus Andronicus, 1.1.16. 9. According to Bate, Rome took pride in prohibiting the practice of human sacrifices, and this action signifies the city is becoming more barbaric. See note 127 in Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, 175. 10. Maria De Luca, Mary Lindroth and Julie Taymor, “Mayhem, Madness, Method: An Interview with Julie Taymor,” Cinéaste 25, no. 3 (2000): 28. 11. Young Lucius is not introduced in Shakespeare’s text until Act Three, scene two. 12. Taymor, “Director’s Commentary.” 13. Ibid. 14. Martha Nochimson, “Titus,” Cinéaste 26, no. 2 (2001): 48. 15. Taymor, “Director’s Commentary.” 16. Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke UP, 2009), 7. 17. Hannah Dyer, The Queer Aesthetics of Childhood: Asymmetries of Innocence and the Cultural Politics of Child Development (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2020), 2. 18. Dyer, Queer Aesthetics, 7. 19. Ibid., 11. 20. Clara Escoda Agusti, “Julie Taymor’s Titus (1999): Framing Violence and Activating Responsibility,” Atlantis 28, no. 1 (2006): 59. 21. Virginia Mason Vaughn, “Looking at the ‘Other’ in Julie Taymor’s ‘Titus,’” Shakespeare Bulletin 21, no. 3 (2003): 78. 22. Dyer, Queer Aesthetics, 5. 23. Lucian Ghita, “Reality and Metaphor in Jane Howell’s and Julie Taymor’s Productions of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 6, no. 1 (2004): https://doi​.org​/10​.7771​/1481​-4374​.1215. 24. Melissa E. Sanchez, Shakespeare and Queer Theory (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 169. 25. B. Ruby Rich, “New Queer Cinema,” in New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader, ed. Michele Aaron (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2004), 16. 26. Titus Andronicus, 1.1.530–32. 27. Titus Andronicus, 1.1.561. 28. Knowles, Shakespeare’s Boys, 63. 29. Taymor, “Director’s Commentary.” 30. Richard Benjamin, “The Sense of an Ending: Youth Apocalypse Films,” Journal of Film and Video 56, no. 4 (2004): 34. 31. Benjamin, “Sense of an Ending,” 34. 32. Ibid., 36. 33. This was certainly true before digital tools and social media sites provided young people with greater agency for self-presentation. 34. Titus Andronicus, 3.2.64–66. 35. Titus Andronicus, 3.2.61. 36. Titus Andronicus, 3.2.67–68. 37. Titus Andronicus, 3.2.69.

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38. Agusti, “Framing Violence,” 66. 39. Todd Andrew Borlick, “Shakespeare’s Insect Theater: Fairy Lore as Elizabethan Folk Entomology,” in Performing Animals: History, Agency, Theater, eds. Karen Raber and Monica Mattfeld (University Park, PA: Penn State UP, 2017), 133. 40. Vaughn, “Looking at the ‘Other,’” 77. 41. Titus Andronicus, 4.2.68. 42. Titus Andronicus, 4.2.73. 43. See Frank M. Snowden, Jr., Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the GrecoRoman Experience (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1970). 44. Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (Boston: Gay Men’s Press, 1982), 72. 45. Emily Weissbourd, “‘Those in Their Possession:’ Race, Slavery, and Queen Elizabeth’s ‘Edicts of Expulsion,’” Huntington Library Quarterly 78, no. 1 (2015): 17. 46. David Foley McCandless, “A Tale of Two Tituses: Julie Taymor’s Vision on Stage and Screen,” Shakespeare Quarterly 53, no. 4 (2002): 509. 47. Vaughn, “Looking at the ‘Other,’” 78. 48. Richard Burt, “Shakespeare and the Holocaust: Julie Taymor’s Titus Is Beautiful, or Shakesploi Meets (the) Camp,” The Colby Quarterly 37, no. 1 (2001): 83. 49. Sanchez, Shakespeare and Queer Theory, 170. 50. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: NYU Press, 2009), 16. 51. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 99. 52. José Esteban Muñoz, “Cruising the Toilet: LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Radical Black Traditions, and Queer Futurity,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13, no. 2–3 (2007): 365. 53. Taymor, “Director’s Commentary.”

REFERENCES Agusti, Clara Escoda. “Julie Taymor’s Titus (1999): Framing Violence and Activating Responsibility.” Atlantis 28, no. 1 (2006): 57–70. Bate, Jonathan. “Reconsiderations and Reinventions.” In Titus Andronicus: Revised Edition, edited by Jonathan Bate, 121–62. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. Benjamin, Richard. “The Sense of an Ending: Youth Apocalypse Films.” Journal of Film and Video 56, no. 4 (2004): 34–49. Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books, 1998. Borlick, Todd Andrew. “Shakespeare’s Insect Theater: Fairy Lore as Elizabethan Folk Entomology.” In Performing Animals: History, Agency, Theater, edited by Karen Raber and Monica Mattfeld, 123–37. University Park, PA: Penn State UP, 2017. Bray, Alan. Homosexuality in Renaissance England. Boston: Gay Men’s Press, 1982. Burt, Richard. “Shakespeare and the Holocaust: Julie Taymor’s Titus Is Beautiful, or Shakesploi Meets (the) Camp.” The Colby Quarterly 37, no. 1 (2001): 78–106.

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Cross, Gustav. “Titus Andronicus: Introduction.” In William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, edited by Alfred Harbage, 823–25. New York: The Viking Press, 1969. De Luca, Maria, Mary Lindroth and Julie Taymor. “Mayhem, Madness, Method: An Interview with Julie Taymor.” Cinéaste 25, no. 3 (2000): 28–31. Dyer, Hannah. The Queer Aesthetics of Childhood: Asymmetries of Innocence and the Cultural Politics of Child Development. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2020. Ghita, Lucian. “Reality and Metaphor in Jane Howell’s and Julie Taymor’s Productions of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 6, no. 1 (2004): https://doi​.org​/10​.7771​/1481​-4374​.1215. Knowles, Katie. Shakespeare’s Boys: A Cultural History. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. McCandless, David Foley. “A Tale of Two Tituses: Julie Taymor’s Vision on Stage and Screen.” Shakespeare Quarterly 53, no. 4 (2002): 487–511. Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: NYU Press, 2009. Muñoz, José Esteban. “Cruising the Toilet: LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Radical Black Traditions, and Queer Futurity.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13, nos. 2–3 (2007): 353–67. Nochimson, Martha. “Titus.” Cineaste 26, no. 2 (2001): 48–50. Rich, B. Ruby. “New Queer Cinema.” In New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader, edited by Michele Aaron, 15–22. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2004. Sanchez, Melissa E. Shakespeare and Queer Theory. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Shakespeare, William. Titus Andronicus: Revised Edition, edited by Jonathan Bate. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. Snowden, Jr., Frank M. Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1970. Stockton, Kathryn Bond. The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Durham: Duke UP, 2009. Taymor, Julie. “Director’s Commentary.” Disc 1. Titus. DVD. Directed by Julie Taymor. USA: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2000. Titus. Directed by Julie Taymor. USA: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2000. Vaughn, Virginia Mason. “Looking at the ‘Other’ in Julie Taymor’s ‘Titus.’” Shakespeare Bulletin 21, no. 3 (2003): 71–80. Weissbourd, Emily. “‘Those in Their Possession:’ Race, Slavery, and Queen Elizabeth’s ‘Edicts of Expulsion.’” Huntington Library Quarterly 78, no. 1 (2015): 1–19.

Part III

ADAPTATION

Chapter 10

Fool’s Fire, Titus, The Tempest Revenge in the Films of Julie Taymor Antonio Sanna

As a very personal experience involving excessive feelings and strong emotions (and passionate actions), it might be difficult to offer a precise and comprehensive definition of “revenge.” The Cambridge Dictionary defines the term as “harm done to someone as a punishment for harm that they have done to someone else.”1 According to Ronald Broude, In modern usage, the noun revenge, according to the American College Dictionary, denotes “retaliation for injuries or wrongs.” Unlike retribution, which ‘suggests just or deserved punishment, often without personal motives,’ revenge has a distinctly personal cast, implying “the carrying out of a bitter desire to injure another for a wrong done to oneself or to those who seem a part of oneself.”2

The personal aspect of revenge is strongly tied to the wrath or anger a person feels for the wrong and injuries that they have suffered, even indirectly in the case of harm done to a dear person. As Marcel Hénaff argues, “Wrath itself is not violence; it is a strong emotional state that can accompany or be followed by a violent action. . . . [Wrath] is the element of confrontation among subjects, of aggression and reply, which associates wrath to revenge. What revenge wants is to restore a broken balance . . . by targeting the author of the offence.”3 As we can see in many literary texts and cinematic productions throughout the decades and millennia (and as some readers themselves may have experienced, heard of, or witnessed), once enacted, revenge often results in a sensation of satisfaction and enjoyment after it and the restoration of the broken balance. Investigating or listing such sources throughout different cultures and centuries would be practically impossible, but our analysis will focus on the representation of revenge in Julie Taymor’s films, specifically in her debut production, Fool’s Fire (1992) and the cinematic adaptations 179

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of William Shakespeare’s plays Titus (1999) and The Tempest (2010). This chapter examines how, in Taymor’s films, revenge is portrayed as scheming, passionate, or villainous, and how much pleasure and satisfaction it gives the characters after its enactment through an analysis of the various characters’ words, expressions, and actions, as well as the films’ mise-en-scène.

FOOL’S FIRE Taymor’s debut film (which aired on PBS in 1992) represents a continuation of the director’s theatrical career through her translation of her previous techniques and tastes (learned and applied in her experiences in Asia, Europe, and America) into the medium of TV. The film is an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Hop-Frog” (1849), a narrative set in an undefined period of the Middle Ages on the titular crippled dwarf (Michael Anderson), who is captured by the king’s soldiers and forced to serve as the court’s jester. Taymor’s fifty-six-minute adaptation—which she defined as “a fantastical black comedy of revenge, replete with a fabulist plot, lush color, and grotesque characterizations”4—is faithful to the original narrative, though it does not make verbally explicit some of the details of the story, such as the attraction between the two protagonists, but rather alludes to them through the postures and glances of the performers. The director also adds a few scenes to the precursor text, including the portrayal of Hop-Frog’s life previous to his capture, as well as the moment he is taken captive by a knight in armor. The initial atmosphere of simplicity and familiarity depicted in the protagonist’s white house is juxtaposed with the opulence and decadence of the colored court, where the oily and obese monarch and his seven ministers feast on sumptuous banquets, discuss futile arguments, and enjoy a life of pleasures. HopFrog is often the object of ridicule by the noblemen and is forced to provide hilarious entertainment for them. The inhumanity of the grotesque noblemen is further accentuated by the fact that they are all interpreted by puppets. Indeed, the film questions the identity and essence of humanity by means of the use of puppetry and masks for all characters, except the two victimized human characters, which is instrumental in the stimulation of the spectators’ sympathy toward the two characters suffering unjust treatment and finally enacting revenge. The director’s use of frames from below further increases the difference in size between Hop-Frog and the members of the court, while the use of distorted frames (especially in the nightmarish sequence in which the protagonist is forced to get drunk and then remembers the moment of his capture) exaggerate the distorted features of the noblemen’s faces. During Hop-Frog’s captivity, a beautiful dwarf woman, Trippetta (Mireille Mossé), is brought to court in a cage, and she also becomes a prisoner of the

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king and his men. After she defends the protagonist on one occasion, she is humiliated by the king in front of his ministers, a moment during which Hop-Frog immediately conceives his revenge by proposing to the noblemen the orangutan costumes they are going to wear at the forthcoming ball. As in the original text by Poe, the protagonist’s intentions are not revealed to the viewer, and in the following scenes spectators merely watch the complicit Hop-Frog and Trippetta sewing the costumes, merrily dressing up the ministers and the king with them, chaining them to each other (to pretend they are beasts escaped from captivity), and finally leading them to the ball. HopFrog then raises the chained noblemen a few meters over the room’s floor with a hook tied to their chain (in order for nobody to be able to help them) but before he sets them on fire, a close-up of his face depicts his expression of hatred and rage, his revenge about to be accomplished. He then tells the entire court below that those who are burning are actually the king and his ministers: though his words do not explicitly affirm that this is his vengeance for the wrongs he and Trippetta suffered, his scorning tone expresses his hatred toward them in a series of medium shots and close-ups that are alternated to the images of the orangutan costumes burning and the men inside them screaming in pain. Before reaching his female companion and escaping through a window, Hop-Frog takes a moment to look below at the burning bodies to further savor his moment of revenge. By means of these details, the director, therefore, makes the spectators fully aware of the protagonist’s anger as well as his satisfaction in exacting revenge. In the final scene (during the end titles), the model representing the medieval castle and town is portrayed as burning in several places, meaning the titular fool’s fire (the choice of the title itself indicates the focus on the final conflagration rather than on the protagonist) has probably extended over the bodies of the king and his ministers, leading to the destruction of the entire location (and symbol) of power that previously oppressed him. A voiceover by the main character recites Poe’s poem “The Bells,” whose words further comment on the narrative that has just ended (“Hear the loud alarum bells— / Brazen bells! / What tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells! / In the startled ear of night / How they scream out their affright! / Too much horrified to speak, / They can only shriek, shriek, / Out of tune, / In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire, /In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire”). In the meantime, a puppet of a winged horse carrying two people over his back represents Hop-Frog and Trippetta’s escape toward a happier future. The widening frame reveals that a towering Hop-Frog has become a puppeteer over the now-tiny world that imprisoned him earlier: he has (literally) become larger than the villains and their world and, by means of his revenge, has triumphed over tyranny and injustice. Revenge has, therefore, guaranteed a positive outcome, Taymor seems to be suggesting, and Hop-Frog’s reaction

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is legitimate and can be approved by/generate sympathy in the audience. As we shall see in the next two sections, revenge is a fundamental theme in Taymor’s screen adaptations of the two Shakespearean plays Titus Andronicus and The Tempest, though it assumes different characterizations and facets in the two films.5

TITUS Titus Andronicus is Shakespeare’s first tragedy, written between 1588 and 1593, performed on stage in 1593 and first published in the quarto format in 1594.6 As several Shakespearean critics have indicated, Titus is part of a tradition of Renaissance and Jacobean revenge tragedies (which includes Thomas Kyd’s 1586 Spanish Tragedy, Christopher Marlowe’s 1592 The Jew of Malta, John Marston’s 1600 Antonio’s Revenge, and John Webster’s 1612 The Duchess of Malfi) that were influenced by Senecan plays, depicted images of crude violence and physical horror and focused on the tragic dilemma of the single individual bent on the sacred duty of revenge.7 Specifically, Titus is a play in which, as Jan Kott points out, “35 people die . . . not counting soldiers, servants and characters of no importance. At least ten major murders are committed in view of the audience . . . [This is] by no means the most brutal of Shakespeare’s plays.”8 Revenge plays are generally based on the execution of a crime against a character’s family member, which then needs to be avenged by the protagonist.9 In the case of Titus Andronicus, it is the ritual sacrifice of Tamora’s eldest son Alarbus that leads her to plot her revenge against the protagonist’s family, which in turn motivates Titus to retaliate against the Queen of the Goths in a final tale of parallel revenge and counter-revenge in which “physical violence, of the action, and verbal violence, of the planning and registration of the action, run on the same rails.”10 Indeed, the very structure of revenge plays dictates that, as Giorgio Melchiori has affirmed, “each character becomes at turn an avenger, up to the final destruction of everybody . . . each oppressor becomes a victim and vice versa with no possibility of redemption.”11 This is exemplified in Shakespeare’s 1593 tragedy by the play’s structure in which Act II and Act III respectively constitute the planning and realization of Tamora’s revenge, whereas Act IV and Act V focus on the planning and actualization of Titus’s revenge.12 Revenge and death are therefore central to the play and its culmination in a bloody climax ending with a littering of corpses on the stage. Such violence is extremely physical indeed, as Cristina Paravano has pointed out when arguing that Titus Andronicus is filled with references to body parts, both real and metaphorical, with the word “hand” recurring most frequently, followed by “tongue,”

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“head,” and “arms.”13 According to William W. Weber, the play “stands out as especially histrionic in its virtuosic, almost gleeful depiction of bodily destruction.”14 In its depiction of graphic violence, Taymor’s film is not, however, keen in its lingering on the consequences of violence on the human body, at least, not in its first half. As in the original drama, Alarbus’s (Raz Degan) abrupt and brutal sacrifice is not shown on screen: Tamora’s son is merely brought off-screen/off-stage by Titus’s sons, and only his entrails are depicted when the Roman general’s sons return to burn them on the pyre. This scene rather focuses on the medium shots of Tamora’s (Jessica Lange) desperation. The first murder to occur (both on the stage and) on screen is instead that of Titus’s youngest son Mutius (Blake Ritson), which, however, actually involves no shedding of any drop of blood on the staircase he rolls down after being stabbed in the abdomen. The primal act of violence leading to the two parallel vendettas, as well as the play’s second killing, is not, therefore, as important and realistic as the actual representation of the acts of vengeance that follow them in the film, whose graphic details, we will see later, become more and more visual and explicit as the narrative progresses. Simultaneously, Taymor’s focus is rather on the reactions of the main characters to the revenge that is (and is being) enacted. As we shall see, the director distinguishes between the enjoyment of revenge by the heroes and the villains. In Titus, revenge is about honor, trauma, and shame, as Deborah Willis has argued. Indeed, according to her, parents confronting murder and rape of their children “are also subjected to potentially overwhelming experiences of loss, powerlessness, humiliation, and other threats to psychological integrity.”15 The helplessness experienced by both Tamora and Titus (Anthony Hopkins) is combined with humiliation and damage to the self, which can be overcome only through the enactment of a bigger (more cruel and more spectacular) revenge against the perpetrator of the former crime. Indeed, as Willis further argues, “The psychological aftereffects of trauma in this play include not only grief but also fear, helplessness, vicarious suffering, and psychic numbing, as well as shame, humiliation, and outrage.”16 Tamora cannot understand the ritual sacrifice of her son Alarbus, a typical Roman tradition extraneous to her Gothic origins and traditions, but sees it only as an unnecessary cruelty and an act of humiliation against herself when, in spite of her supplication and “a mother’s tears in passion for her son,” she has to witness the dismembering of her own son in front of an indifferent and hostile crowd of foreigners.17 She then swears revenge in an aside I’ll find a way to massacre them all, And raze their faction and their family, the cruel father and his traitorous sons,

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To whom I sued for my dear son’s life; And make them know what ‘tis to let a queen Kneel in the streets and beg for grace in vain.18

These verses are recited by Jessica Lange in a backlight close-up in which she addresses the camera, thus underlining the importance of her need for revenge and forthcoming planning of it. The aside, as it occurred in Elizabethan theater at the time of the original performances of the play, is indeed directed to the audience and creates a moment of confidence in which the internal thoughts of the character are shared openly with the spectators. Tamora’s serious mood changes instantly once the aside ends and the frame changes, and she gaily and accommodatingly addresses again the Roman general and her newly married husband Saturninus (Alan Cumming). Her determination is then sanctioned by a sequence absent in the original play in which Tamora and Titus face each other, with flames enveloping the background over which several body parts unburnt by the flames appear. It is Alarbus’s body parts and Tamora’s static posture and firm glance toward her rival that demonstrate her full resolution and intentions of revenge. Later on, after meeting Bassanius (James Frain) and Lavinia (Laura Fraser) in a secluded area of the forest and pretending that her life has been threatened by the two of them, Tamora asks her sons Demetrius (Matthew Rhys) and Chiron (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) to be avenged while tightening herself to the latter and indignantly claiming for the life of Bassanius, thus indirectly involving her sons in the plot initially conceived by the Moor Aaron (Harry Lennix). The Queen of the Goths reacts with thunderous laughter to Bassanius’s death and, after revealing her own motivations for revenge—in a scene in which Lavinia’s supplication on her knees parallels Tamora’s previous supplication for Alarbus’s life—she (barely) looks at her victim with coldness and annoyance, refusing the young woman’s appeal to shared femininity, leaving her with cruelty to the satisfaction of her sons’ lust (“the worse to her, the better loved of me”) and smiling (in a medium shot) while anticipating the satisfaction of her own lust with the Moor. Such cruelty and satisfaction in obtaining revenge for the wrongs previously suffered is further portrayed in a subsequent scene when Demetrius and Chiron mock Lavinia for her mutilated body. Up to this moment, the director has not explicitly presented viewers with graphic horrors: the woman’s stumps are substituted with two bare branches,19 but she spills blood only from the mouth when attempting to talk to her uncle, Marcus Andronicus (Colm Feore). The emphasis is, however, rather on the satisfaction and pleasure deriving from the evil caused to others rather than the consequences of revenge’s brutal enactment. This further establishes Tamora and her sons as the villains of the narrative (and, in contrast, Titus’s revenge subsequently appears nobler).

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In the case of the eponymous protagonist, the humiliation suffered after the rape and mutilation of Lavinia, the incarceration of Quintus (Kenny Doughty) and Martius (Colin Wells), the impiety of the tribunes, and the banishment of Lucius (Angus Macfadyen) needs to be overcome through revenge in order to restore the family self-image.20 Titus’s sufferings, especially for Lavinia’s fate (“dear Lavinia, dearer than my soul,” he affirms), are prolonged by Aaron’s trick, leading him to self-mutilation and the execution of Quintus and Martius, whose heads are then paraded in front of the grieving father. Viewers are spared a close-up of Titus’s hand being chopped by an axe, and no blood is shown spurting from such a wound. The focus of the camera is instead on the agonized face and expression of pain (in close-up) of the protagonist, whose action is committed as a self-sacrifice for the salvation of his own children. The attention of the viewer is then directed to Aaron’s pleasure in the realization of his trick (“O, how this villainy / Doth fat me with the very thoughts of it!”) through the medium shot that follows his movements while leaving Titus’s home (bearing with him the protagonist’s severed hand in a plastic bag) and while he smilingly addresses the camera. Aaron, the “chief architect and plotter of these woes” (V, iii, 122), is subsequently defined as “the incarnate devil” by Lucius near the end of the film: he laughs and enjoys telling his captor about all the villainies he has suggested and committed (in a close-up in which he is bragging while addressing Titus’s last remaining son). Aaron has no shame and no regret for what he has done and after being beaten by Lucius, his blood is spilled and spit from his mouth. This is the first realistic blood depicted in the film (emphasized by the close-up on the Moor’s face), which indicates that the revenge enacted on the story’s villain is portrayed as visually more realistic (and horrifying) than the violence committed over the bodies of the heroes and good characters. When Tamora and her sons—disguised with extravagant costumes as Revenge, Murder, and Rape—meet Lucius, the Empress’s proposal to what she believes to be a raving lunatic Titus is actually ridiculed by the Roman general, who is only pretending madness while mockingly addressing her and reversing her own plot to subsequently enact revenge on his enemies. Anthony Hopkins’s shabby attire and merry delivery of the Shakespearean lines work as an ironic counterpoint to the three Goths’ extravagant costumes and underestimation of their adversary. And revenge is indeed swiftly enacted on the part of Titus, who deceives Tamora by letting Demetrius and Chiron stay at his place, has them tied up, and soon kills them, then prepares their flesh for the following banquet. This is probably the goriest scene of the whole film as the two naked villains are bound head down, their mouths gagged, and, after Titus cuts their throats, they moan, suffocate, and wriggle horribly while their pouring blood is collected by Lavinia in a basin. Titus’s

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calm delivery of the monologue in which the charges against his two foes are listed—a mocking smile on his face, his posture relaxed, and accompanied by slow gestures—turns into a wrathful tone (emphasized by the change to a close-up and the crescendo of the music) when he describes what atrocious treatment is awaiting them. The final part of his monologue is, however, recited seriously and in a lower tone of voice, which characterizes revenge as a sacred duty on the part of the protagonist, who seems to feel almost no enjoyment in what he is about to perform. It is only Lavinia’s suffused smile that expresses actual satisfaction in revenge, but this is not comparable to Tamora and her son’s demented enjoyment of their iniquitous actions. In the following climatic scene, the tragedy’s “inevitable” conclusion is unleashed, and the cycle of revenge is complete with the end of the barbaric family feud and the destruction of all its main participants. Titus, dressed up as a cook, benevolently and gently serves the pie made from Chiron’s and Demetrius’s flesh to his guests and graciously invites them to eat it in a presumably joyous atmosphere further established by Gino Bechi’s song “Vivere” ([“to live,”] an ironic title considering what is about to happen). A smiling Titus further incites Tamora to taste the pie, nodding his head and miming the gesture of swallowing a good dish. This is the moment his revenge is being accomplished, though his performance does not let any actual enjoyment of the severe punishment he is inflicting on his adversary transpire. Then, unexpectedly, the Roman general kills his own daughter to free her of the shame she suffered21 and, at the request of an explanation by Saturninus, he reveals the ingredients of the pie, reciting rabidly the lines while hopping in a clownish way, closing in on Tamora, and finally stabbing her throat. A close-up of the fatally wounded Tamora, bleeding from her neck and spouting blood from her mouth, lingers on the last moment of the Empress’s life. Revenge is doubly “served”, and Taymor’s choice of the frame does not hide it from the viewer. Furthermore, Tamora has no time to voice her pain; she even occludes her own mouth with her fingers while trying to vomit the meal of her own children before being stabbed. She is therefore not allowed to mourn her children or to avenge herself, but is given, as Cristina Paravano argues about the drama, “an instantaneous death, paralyzing her face in a glance of horror and preventing her to express with words her disgust, to find a justification for her actions or to regret them.”22 Saturninus instantly kills Titus in his rage, and, in reply, Lucius kills the emperor by driving an enormous spoon into his mouth and shooting him. The final step in the family feud is underlined by the use of a static image that marks the end of the perpetrators of violence and, as the play concludes, the return of justice, legality, and piety in Rome (the setting cuts instantly from Titus’s living room to the middle of the Colosseum, where a crowd of Romans witnesses Marcus’s explanation of the events).23 It is a bitter end

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to the tragedy, as no satisfaction can be derived from such carnage of the protagonists, neither for the surviving characters nor for the film’s public (who have probably been left as speechless as the immobile and silent crowd circling the pile of corpses on the scene).24 The moral of the story (if any is actually intended) is that the results of violence and revenge lead to no satisfaction, not least to the common good. However, Taymor’s depiction of the characters’ reactions to the realization of their revenge positively distinguishes between the heroes and the villains of the story, almost suggesting that by actually not enjoying their revenge, Titus and his family are merely enacting the course of retribution and justice (and therefore restoring order to a corrupt Rome).

THE TEMPEST The Tempest, first represented at court in 1611, is “the last of Shakespeare’s great works . . . Shakespeare’s crowning work.”25 Considered by many critics as a testament and farewell to the theater as much as a compendium of the English Bard’s previous works (for its reprisal of many thematic concerns and the style of other plays),26 it represents a calmer and more detached vision of life, which is effectively realized by its final message of peace. Indeed, all the last four plays by the English playwright—Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest—(which are called “romances” or “tragicomedies”) are marked by “miraculous reconciliations, the overcoming of suffering and injustice.”27 In terms of this chapter’s argument, The Tempest presents the initial enactment of revenge on the part of its protagonist, the magician Prospero, who, however, renounces it by the end of the story in favor of reconciliation and forgiveness. As is the case with Titus, Taymor’s 2010 film only alters a few details of the original play,28 with the major exception of the change in the sex of its protagonist. In the director’s version of the story, Prospero has now become Prospera (Helen Mirren), an amendment which does not actually alter the course of the events or the majority of the issues and thematic concerns of the original story. Indeed, the film cannot be considered a feminist retelling of the precursor text, as Prospera is depicted as strong, powerful, resolute, and protective of her daughter as her male equivalent is, with none of the weaknesses of her sex that may have been attributed to her character in the Elizabethan age instead. Furthermore, she is equally bent on revenge against her enemies. The betrayal by her brother Antonio (Chris Cooper) and the following dispossession of the dukedom of Milan, the banishment, and twelve-year-long exile on the desert island have filled her with the desire for revenge. This is evident on the first occasion in which her character is shown

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on screen when she is evoking the titular tempest through her magic. The camera initially depicts her figure from behind on the top of a cliff facing the sea where the ship bearing her enemies is a cluster of clouds accumulating and moving toward the vessel. Her position invokes the very power of her magical art and the evocation of a strenuous spell as she raises the rod toward the sky while she is framed from different angles (respectively, from her right side, from behind, and from below). The frame then moves to an extreme close-up of her face and on her eyes while she screams a wrathful single cry, which expresses both her exertion and her rage. Exertion and rage are then emphasized by the very choice of the sorceress’ costume (created by Sandy Powell), whose shape reproduces the geographical features of a volcano and thus further symbolizes the explosion of Prospera’s wrath, whose static pose is set against the frenetic movements of the mariners attempting to save the vessel from sinking and destruction in the frames that focus on what is happening simultaneously on the ship. Prospera’s indignation for the wrongs she has suffered by her brother is then evident in the following sequence, when she recounts the story of her past to her daughter Miranda (Felicity Jones), though the medium shot framing her does not give viewers access to the fullest, interior expression of it. As compared to the enjoyment of revenge depicted in Titus, Prospera’s merry attitude when being informed by the air spirit Ariel (Ben Whishaw) about the tempest that has stranded her enemies on the island is definitely blander and more contained. The directorial choice to portray her in a medium shot including Ariel, in half-light and by three-quarters, indicates the minor emphasis on the protagonist’s pleasure for the initial results of her revenge. What rather seems to be stressed is her impatience for the fulfillment of her plan, especially when walking up and down the cave she resides in while tapping her rod on her hand and counting the time of the day in hourglasses. Later on, a close-up of Prospera in her cave portrays the moment she is informed about her revenge being realized by Ariel—when the apparition of a harpy in front of her rivals drives the four men to folly and desperation. The sorceress, though resolute, is however not smiling on this occasion, nor is she directly addressing the camera, which indicates her detachment from the spectators. After twelve years of exile, she does not seem to enjoy her revenge. The only smile depicted on her lips takes place subsequently, after she has unleashed the infernal hounds on the three conspirators led by her nonhuman slave Caliban (Djimon Hounsou) and is waiting for her final encounter with the four ravishing noblemen lost in their madness. On this occasion, a medium shot of Prospera on the steps of her cave conveys the satisfaction she is experiencing in the moment of full power and authority when she affirms: “[A]t this hour lay at my mercy all mine enemies. Now does my

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project gather to a head.” The lines are delivered slowly as if she tastes them all while the camera closes on her. However, once Ariel reports the affliction of the four men, Prospera immediately has pity on them, recognizing her own human nature and compassion (in a very intimate scene in which she talks softly and tenderly to her spirit servant in a frame that contains both of them). This sequence sanctions the moment her resentment abates and leads the way to forgiveness and reconciliation. She states: “[W]ith my nobler reason ’gainst my fury do I take part. The rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance,” half explaining it to Ariel and reasoning to herself. Prospera then breaks her spell and renounces her magic in a sequence that first actually demonstrates her powers (and the way they influence the natural environment) and then their dismissal. As I have argued elsewhere, in this sequence the environmental turmoil corresponds to the internal turmoil of the character. When Prospera raises the volume of her voice, many clouds completely hide the blue sky in the background, the wind strengthens and light gradually grows in its intensity whilst the incantation proceeds and the sun’s eclipse disappears. . . . Simultaneously, the camera circles around the character as if it were positioned in the very ring of fire she has created: the accelerating movement and kinetic energy around the sorceress definitely intensify the suspense and suggest the physical reaction of nature to the powers she possesses. As soon as Prospera utters the words “my so potent art” the flames are extinguished, her glance and head are lowered to the ground, the sky becomes serene and nature returns to a peaceful state. At the same time, the camera stops spinning around the sorceress and is distanced from her. A long pause of silence (not indicated in the original text) defines this frame . . . Her glance seems for the first time to reveal insecurity, whilst she seems to be sadly saying goodbye to nature itself (and to the island).  .  .  . The flow of emotions expressed by the Academy Award-winner actress in this scene contains and almost summarizes the characterization of Prospera in the story at large, from her growing rage, firm determination and will to avenge herself to the calm which defines the finale. . . . In this sequence, the return of the sun and the tranquility of nature expressly correspond with the calm of Prospera and the atmosphere of restored harmony, repentance and reconciliation.29

The sorceress discovers the value of piety after partially tasting her revenge over her enemies, after having them in her power, paralyzed within the magic circle. She indeed forgives her rivals explicitly after she reveals herself to them, re-taking possession of her dukedom and finally disclosing the newly formed couple of Miranda and Prince Ferdinand (Reeve Carney), which will further ensure peace between (and the union of) the two reigns of Milan and Naples. On the other hand, Taymor’s film depicts the pleasure experienced in planning revenge through the character of Caliban, whose plot to be avenged

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of being robbed of the island by Prospera is whispered to the Neapolitan butler (and comedic character) Stephano (Alfred Molina) with evident malignity: Caliban has willingly and happily decided to serve a new master and wants to get rid of his former, severe master. His simple rhetoric is intended to persuade Stephano for pure, personal revenge as he would not be inheriting the island but would hold his position as a slave. Caliban’s attempt at convincing the butler is expressed through the proximity of his body to (and fixed gaze on) his interlocutor, accompanied by the use of simple gestures, appealing to the man’s greed, vanity, and lust (as well as his drunken state). The slave’s interior rage and desire to be avenged specifically emerges when he describes the means of Prospera’s murder (“thou mayst knock a nail into her head”), anticipating with gusto her death. A close-up of his face emphasizes his smile and satisfaction when Stephano promises: “monster, I will kill this witch.” Nevertheless, when the plot to kill the sorceress fails and is then revealed in front of the other characters, Caliban’s shame and fear of punishment is silently expressed through the humiliated position of his body and his fear of even looking at Prospera. The latter arranges for the group’s departure to Milan while Caliban stands immobile in the background. When she turns to face him, a series of shots alternating between the two characters depicts a silent conversation based only on their looks at each other. Caliban, with tears in his eyes, seems to repent of his treacherous plot, whereas Prospera shows no inclination to anger or vengeance. As I have affirmed elsewhere, the sorceress is apparently sad to say goodbye to Caliban and seems to be experiencing a moment of revelation, in which she finally realizes the evil she has committed against him in the past and willingly gives him back the dominion over the island.30

This is the scene depicting the final moment of forgiveness on the part of both characters, and Caliban leaves the cave silently (to finally take possession of the island he is about to be left on alone), without even expressing his happiness for the liberation from the “colonial” slavery he has previously suffered on the part of the white, European sorceress. The Tempest thus presents a more intimate dimension of revenge, which is expressed in softer terms (both in words and through the visuals) and not brought to its completion because forgiveness takes its place. No real satisfaction is expressed by Prospera, as was instead the case of Hop-Frog in Fool’s Fire and Tamora in Titus. Although Hop-Frog’s act of revenge (and his reaction to its enactment) can be sympathized with by the audience, however, Tamora’s and her sons’ enjoyment of vengeance is depicted negatively by the director as exaggerated and too joyous. On the other hand, in Taymor’s rendition of Shakespeare’s 1593 tragedy, Titus does not seem to experience

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pleasure in enacting revenge but rather merely fulfills his sacred duty as a father. Similarly, Prospera, who does not actually bring her revenge to its bloody completion, apparently does not experience joy and satisfaction when she is exacting vengeance and has her adversaries in her power, but rather chooses peace and reconciliation. The 2010 film is, in this respect, closer to Taymor’s other non-Shakespearean productions, in which a more peaceful message is expressed, whether through the direct invocation of peace, as in Across the Universe (2007), or equality between the sexes in The Glorias (2020).

NOTES 1. Cambridge Dictionary. http://dictionary​.cambridge​.org​/dictionary​/english​/ revenge. Accessed on December 5, 2022. 2. Ronald Broude, “Revenge and Revenge Tragedy in Renaissance England,” Renaissance Quarterly 28, no. 1 (Spring 1975): 38. 3. Marcel Hénaff, Figure della violenza: ira, terrore, vendetta, 2nd edn., trans. Mario Bertin (Roma: Castelvecchi, 2020), 4–5, 28. My translation. Italics in the original. 4. Eileen Blumenthal and Julie Taymor, Julie Taymor: Playing with Fire. Theatre, Opera, Film, updated and expanded edn. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999), 144. 5. Taymor’s Shakespearean films could be considered as “filmic” adaptations, according to Jack J. Jorgens’ characterization of them as “emphasiz[ing] the camera’s expressive possibilities, foregrounding non-illusionistic, deliberately stylized or ‘poetic’ lighting, editing, sound, and production design.” Simultaneously, because of their accuracy and fidelity to the original texts, Titus and The Tempest can be interpreted as “transpositions,” according to Geoffrey Wagner’s division of screen adaptations into “transpositions” (accurate), “commentaries” (altering the original) and “analogies” (using the original text as a point of departure). Jorgens is quoted in Douglas Lanier, “William Shakespeare, filmmaker,” in Literature on Screen, eds. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan, 61–74 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 65–66; Wagner is quoted in Deborah Cartmell, Interpreting Shakespeare on Screen (London: Macmillan, 2000), x–xi. 6. The play Titus has been largely ignored in the 18th and 19th century, its authorial paternity even coming into dispute (for its stylistic discrepancies). According to William W. Weber, “Not until the middle of the twentieth century did audiences and commentators overcome a distaste for Titus’s graphic violence, heightened rhetorical key, and allusive exuberance, and while the past few decades have seen a steady resurgence of both dramaturgical and critical interest in the play, it still lags far behind the majority of the Shakespearean canon in terms of overall scholarly attention.” On the other hand, Deborah Willis argues that “the dramatic rise in favor of Titus Andronicus . . . has paralleled the growth of feminist Shakespeare criticism,” whose interest has particularly

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focused on Lavinia’s victimization and rape, the “monstrous, sexualized mother, Tamora; and its imagery of womb, tomb, and pit.” See William W. Weber, “‘Worse Than Philomel’: Violence, Revenge, and Meta-Allusion in Titus Andronicus,” Studies in Philology 112, no. 4 (Fall 2015): 698–717, 702; Deborah Willis, “‘The Gnawing Vulture’: Revenge, Trauma Theory, and Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly 53, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 21. See also Alessandro Serpieri (trans.), “Prefazione” in William Shakespeare, Tito Andronico, xxxvii–li (Milano: Garzanti, 1999), xxxviii. 7. Rajabali Askarzadeh Torghabeh, “The Study of Revenge Tragedies and Their Roots,” International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature 7, no. 4 (2018): 235–36; and Max M. Reese, Shakespeare: il suo mondo e la sua opera (Bologna: il Mulino, 1986), 77. 8. Jan Kott, Shakespeare: Our Contemporary, trans. Boneslaw Taborski (London: Routledge, 1991), 281. 9. In his study of Renaissance revenge tragedies, Ronald Broude indicates that “The Renaissance word revenge had a more extended meaning than the modern one, a meaning more nearly equivalent to today’s retribution. . . . In all cases, however, revenge and vengeance were appropriate to denote the response of the outraged party, whether individual, state, or god. Revenge was used to indicate retribution effected directly by an individual or family, that is, retribution effected without the intervention of any civil authority.” Broude, “Revenge,” 39 and 41. 10. Serpieri, “Prefazione,” xlv, xlvii. My translation. 11. Giorgio Melchiori, Shakespeare: Genesi e struttura delle opere (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1994), 37. Weber argues: “each reciprocal act of vengeance must pay back the former with an additional facet of hate.” Weber, “Worse than Philomel,” 716. 12. Melchiori, Shakespeare, 37. 13. Cristina Paravano, “Cibo e Vendetta in Titus Andronicus,” in ExpoShakespeare: Il Sommo Gourmet, il cibo, i cannibali, eds. Paolo Caponi, Mariacristina Cavecchi and Margaret Rose, 65–79 (Milano: Ledizioni, 2020). My translation. 14. Weber, “Worse than Philomel,” 699. 15. Willis, “The Gnawing Vulture,” 26. 16. Ibid., 31. 17. Ibid., 36–37. 18. William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, trans. Alessandro Serpieri (Milano: Garzanti, 1999), I, i, 36. 19. This occurs also in the theatrical version of the play. Taymor interprets it as “a poetic metamorphosis in the manner of Ovid.” The 1999 film retains much of the dreamlike, surreal, and mythic imagery first employed in the 1994 theatrical adaptation, including the collision of different times exemplified by the costumes belonging to different eras. See Blumenthal and Taymor, Playing with Fire, 184. See also pages 183–94 and 219–33. 20. Willis, “The Gnawing Vulture,” 48. 21. According to Willis, Titus kills his daughter to end his own grief and shame. Willis, “The Gnawing Vulture,” 49. 22. Paravano, “Cibo e Vendetta in Titus Andronicus.”

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23. The passage from the interiors of Titus’s house to the Colosseum has a symbolic function, as the director affirms when describing the latter location as “the archetypal theatre of cruelty, where violence as entertainment reached its apex.” Blumenthal and Taymor, Playing with Fire, 220. 24. This has been suggested by Taymor herself: “this time, the bleachers are filled with spectators, watching. They are silent. They are us.” Blumenthal and Taymor, Playing with Fire, 232. 25. Kott, Shakespeare, 239. 26. Kott, Shakespeare, 240; Melchiori, Shakespeare, 620. 27. Mary Beth Rose, The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 179. See also Nemi d’Agostino, “Introduzione,” in William Shakespeare, La Tempesta, vii–xxxvi (Milano: Garzanti, 1999), xxviii. 28. Taymor had directed the theatrical production of Shakespeare’s 1611 play in 1986 for the Theatre for a New Audience at Classic Stage Company. The play was performed in New York City that year and in Stratford, Connecticut, the following year. The changes in scenery as well as Prospero’s magic were realized on stage through lighting. See Blumenthal and Taymor, Playing with Fire, 114–25. 29. Antonio Sanna, “Adapting the Tempest: Julie Taymor’s Revels,” Kinema: A Journal for Film and Audiovisual Media (Spring 2015): 63–64. 30. Ibid., 70.

REFERENCES Blumenthal, Eileen and Julie Taymor. Julie Taymor: Playing with Fire. Theatre, Opera, Film. Updated and expanded edn. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999. Broude, Ronald. “Revenge and Revenge Tragedy in Renaissance England.” Renaissance Quarterly 28, no. 1 (Spring 1975): 38–58. Cambridge Dictionary. http://dictionary​.cambridge​.org​/dictionary​/english​/revenge. Cartmell, Deborah. Interpreting Shakespeare on Screen. London: Macmillan, 2000. d’Agostino, Nemi. “Introduzione.” In William Shakespeare, La Tempesta, vii–xxxvi. Milano: Garzanti, 1999. Hénaff, Marcel. Figure della violenza: ira, terrore, vendetta. 2nd edn. Translated by Mario Bertin. Roma: Castelvecchi, 2020. Kott, Jan. Shakespeare: Our Contemporary. Translated by Boneslaw Taborski. London: Routledge, 1991. Lanier, Douglas. “William Shakespeare, filmmaker.” In Literature on Screen, edited by Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan, 61–74. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Melchiori, Giorgio. Shakespeare: Genesi e struttura delle opere. Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1994.

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Paravano, Cristina. “Cibo e Vendetta in Titus Andronicus.” In ExpoShakespeare: Il Sommo Gourmet, il cibo, i cannibali, edited by Paolo Caponi, Mariacristina Cavecchi and Margaret Rose, 65–79. Milano: Ledizioni, 2020. Reese, Max M. Shakespeare: il suo mondo e la sua opera. Bologna: il Mulino, 1986. Rose, Mary Beth. The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. Sanna, Antonio. “Adapting The Tempest: Julie Taymor’s Revels.” Kinema: A Journal for Film and Audiovisual Media (Spring 2015): 55–74. Serpieri, Alessandro (trans.). “Prefazione.” in William Shakespeare, Tito Andronico, xxxvii-li. Milano: Garzanti, 1999. Shakespeare, William. Titus Andronicus. Translated by Alessandro Serpieri. Milano: Garzanti, 1999. Torghabeh, Rajabali Askarzadeh. “The Study of Revenge Tragedies and Their Roots.” International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature 7, no. 4 (2018): 234–37. Weber, William W. “‘Worse Than Philomel’: Violence, Revenge, and Meta-Allusion in Titus Andronicus.” Studies in Philology 112, no. 4 (Fall 2015): 698–717. Willis, Deborah. “‘The Gnawing Vulture’: Revenge, Trauma Theory, and Titus Andronicus.” Shakespeare Quarterly 53, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 21–52.

Chapter 11

From Titus to Tempest Taymor’s Divergent Lenses on Shakespeare Claire Kimball

In 1994, Julie Taymor directed a production of William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus at Theatre for a New Audience in New York. The performance incorporated the use of scrim projections, framed sideshow vignettes, and an abstract Romanesque period. It also critiqued visualized emblems of both classic and modern myth and interrogated contemporary receptions of violence through stylized acts.1 All of these theatrical elements, as well as other inspirations from the performance, appear recontextualized in Taymor’s 1999 film adaptation, Titus. The director’s 1986 production of The Tempest similarly incorporated a highly theatrical imagining of Shakespeare’s text. Her stylized design for the various groups of characters emphasized the “timeless, simple” and “earth-toned” three-dimensional world of Prospero and Miranda, while the intensely colored “Kabuki-style” world of the court counterpointed clowns wearing commedia dell’arte half-masks and the stylized masks of Caliban and Ariel.2 Few of these staging elements, however, appear in Taymor’s cinematic reimagining of the play. Rather, her film adaptation of The Tempest, more than a decade after Titus, represents a creative pivot which prioritizes natural landscapes, modern digital effects, and adaptive revision. As a consequence of importing and reimagining the significant theatrical influences from the Titus Andronicus stage production, Taymor’s cinematic frame consistently engages with that play’s inherent early modern underpinnings—that is, the performance conditions and concerns which Shakespeare and his contemporaries incorporated in their play texts. Her explicit interest in highlighting the performative nature of violence, and the witnessing of violence, anchors the entire film in cinematic analogues for such Shakespearean conventions as induction prologues, audience interaction, and meta-theatric spectacle. In contrast, The Tempest emphasizes a primarily visual aesthetic which features the use of realistic landscapes, self-reflective soliloquy, and 195

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computer-generated images. This chapter will analyze the respective theatrical and cinematic techniques in Titus and The Tempest in order to examine the ways in which the two films represent a distinct shift in Taymor’s artistic response to Shakespeare on film.

ADAPTING EARLY MODERN THEATRICALITY IN TITUS The screenplay of Titus begins by circumventing the play’s original opening (which focuses on Saturninus’s claims to the empery) in favor of an extended meta-theatrical framing device which begins with a close-up of a young boy (Osheen Jones) wearing a makeshift paper helmet. As he watches cartoons and plays with various soldier figurines at a kitchen table (a mirror of the play’s final banquet), his play descends into chaos. The television soundtrack, the boy’s vocal sound effects, and his dinner condiments collide in an abrupt frenzy of violence. As the television noises transition to deafening sounds of war, the boy hides under the table, and an explosion rocks the kitchen. When a Clown (Dario D’Ambrosi) with goggles and a leather helmet appears on screen to take the boy out of the apartment and descend a darkened stairway, the scene dissolves into a crash of darkness that eventually dissipates to reveal a Roman coliseum filled with cheering attendants. With this, the very opening extends the frame of the film to introduce a modern character, from outside of the coliseum world, entering the central story space. This kind of framing device mimics features similar to the early modern staging convention of an induction prologue, in which characters begin the performance like fictionalized members of the audience or stage company and take part in watching the play along with the actual spectators. In the case of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, for example, the audience observes a trick in which a wealthy lord takes Christopher Sly, an unconscious drunkard, from a tavern into his own home. There, the lord and his servants attempt to convince Sly that he has been asleep for many years and is, in fact, a rich lord himself. Though he initially denies this identity, it does not take him long before he starts to doubt his exterior reality and accept the new one he has been assigned. Eventually, a troupe of players arrive to perform for him, at which point The Taming of the Shrew begins. As Rebecca Yearling notes, inductions like these “encourage the real theatre spectators to respond to the play in more thoughtful, analytical fashion than they might otherwise” and view the performance as one “constructed upon particular principles, and with particular aims in mind.”3 Like the boy in Taymor’s Titus, induction characters represent liminal spaces of meta-theatricality in which audiences reflect on themselves as critical observers of, or commentators upon, the

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production. By incorporating the extra-textual framing with the boy, Taymor’s film similarly engages with her audience as analytical viewers and encourages them to be more conscious of the film’s objectives. As a character situated outside of the main events, the boy (who becomes Young Lucius in the play) provides modern audiences with a character like Sly through which they may participate as analogous outsiders in the main action of the film. Once in the coliseum, a space and sigil of performative trauma, the displaced boy of our contemporary reality becomes, in effect, the audience for Shakespeare’s play in the coliseum and, thus, the audience of the film. At the same time, the film asks its viewers to read the semiotics of the device and accept the boy as a character both outside of the play and within the play; as the actor himself and the character in the film; as the viewers’ modern selves, sitting in their seats, and yet not themselves, thrust into the story. Young Lucius’s distinct appearance in modern dress, set against periodesque costuming in the coliseum, distances the boy from the main action of the film and allows a cinematic audience to align themselves with him as a kind of induction character on screen. His reflexive presence, then, forces Taymor’s audience to grapple with notions of identity, storytelling, and their own relationship to the film. The fluid experience of being in the theater or cinema—of negotiating and conflating our awareness of the film as both an artificial presentation and a world in which we are insubstantially merged—is something Taymor turns to repeatedly in her production design for Titus. Despite the implied realism of the Roman army’s stark, grimy appearance with clay-smeared armor, wounded flesh, and matted hair, Taymor continues to incorporate contrasting images which underline the “play world” in which the boy finds himself: soldiers march in formation with a staccato choreography reminiscent of jointed figurines, the camera sweeps across several dead bodies which appear unrealistically uniform, synecdochic boots stand in a row as Titus (Anthony Hopkins) pours ceremonial sand in remembrance of dead sons, and disrobed figures with amputated limbs sit in motionless tableaux of silhouette until, after they are splashed with water from the founts of a Roman bath, we cut to a wide establishing shot of the set-like sound stage. This formalist style, in which the very theater-making of Titus’s return takes precedence over cinematic realism, is drawn directly from the director’s previous treatment of the play on stage. As we move from the coliseum into the main plot, Young Lucius continues to follow the Andronicus family to a mausoleum. From this point on, as Thomas Cartelli and Katherine Rowe observe, Young Lucius functions “variously” as a “companion, witness, interrogator, and mirror” within the film’s consistently self-conscious narrative structure.4 Moreover, his liminal relationship within the film itself—as an observer, participant, and mediated commentator—begins to obscure the distinctions between the boy’s

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modern consumption of violence as entertainment, the film’s presentation of violence as entertainment, and the cinematic audience’s consumption of the film. Like the induction characters of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, the boy in Taymor’s adaptation of Titus Andronicus complicates the viewer’s association with the story, as well as the violence it embraces. Though his involvement in the vengeful story discomforts each viewer’s relationship with the violence they witness in the film, it also allows them to eavesdrop on the story in a way which stimulates their empathy for the characters. In his first autonomous act of physical connection, for instance, the boy touches Titus’s arm, and his gesture of intimacy coincides with a small moment of interiority: TITUS sheathes his sword. For a second he falters as if from a skipped heartbeat or loss of wind. YOUNG LUCIUS, concerned, touches his grandfather TITUS’ shoulder gently. TITUS continues to talk, but to himself. TITUS (cont’d) Titus unkind, and careless of thine own, Why suffer’st thou thy sons unburied yet To hover on the dreadful shore of Styx?5

While in the film, we might reasonably expect a Shakespearean character to speak contemplative lines without intending to be heard, Young Lucius’s presence within the frame creates a viewpoint through which the audience continues not only to actively engage with Titus’s interiority but also to feel complicit in his story. Here, drawing from her theatrical work with the play, Taymor incorporates the early modern text’s critically reflexive nature. As Jean E. Howard asserts, audiences attending Shakespeare in performance often remain “self-conscious about the nature of its role as spectator” through, for example, the use of characters who eavesdrop and disrupt the main action to form a “new frame through which to view” that action.6 Though adapted for the screen, Taymor’s Titus similarly integrates this inherent self-consciousness typical of early modern drama. As an avatar for the audience, now within the main action, Young Lucius often looks on as Titus speaks quietly to himself, signaling that the words are meant to be overheard.7 His presence serves throughout as a conduit for the audience’s gaze, throwing focus on the events or characters he is watching, joining with the Andronicus family and becoming increasingly integrated into their story. With each successive sequence, Taymor’s film encourages its viewers to associate themselves more and more with the modern child, torn from his modern home and transported to a performance space to witness an imagined Roman world. This kind of “repeated visual motif of looking on,” Howard notes, has “disquieting implications” for an audience because it highlights their complicity in the violence

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through the act of watching.8 The director carefully synthesizes this kind of disquieting complicity when Titus and Lucius (Angus Macfadyen) heat their swords over a ceremonial flame to prepare for Alarbus’s execution. Standing beside Titus at the fire, Young Lucius grips his own set of blades when Lucius joins from behind and extends his arms around the boy’s body.9 Though the child says nothing, he physically participates in the event and, consequently, renders the audience complicit in the death of Alarbus. As the story unfolds, the film remains attentive to the thematic relevance of audience voyeurism in the play. Indeed, the very act of seeing someone and watching them speak becomes a cinematic analogue for the intrinsic practices of early modern playwrights like Shakespeare, who wrote with “an eye to the potential responses of the audience.”10 Because Shakespeare wrote plays like Titus Andronicus for performances in the shared daylight or candlelight of various public and private playing spaces, his texts consistently incorporate an awareness of the audience’s perpetual presence. As Tiffany Stern notes: The fact of the audience itself, its very presence, was also, selectively, part of the play. In the indoor and outdoor theatres of the time, spectators and actors clearly saw each other and borrowed reactions from one another . . . Audiences nowadays sit in the dark, unable to see the reactions of other spectators . . . But Shakespeare’s audience was as well-lit as the actors, as visible and, sometimes, as talkative.11

Despite the fact that cinema audiences, much like modern theater audiences, are used to sitting in dark spaces and unable to see each other as events unfold on screen, Taymor’s film repeatedly insists on attentiveness to its audience as an integral part of the cinematic experience. As a theater-maker turned filmmaker, she transcodes her theatrical experience of the audience as a perpetual, watching presence into the themes and objectives of her adaptation. Moreover, Taymor’s conscientious framing of the story through this transcoded theatrical lens of “witnessing” and “eavesdropping” on the main action extends to other characters and even set designs. Saturninus’s throne room, for example, includes a semi-circular gallery for the tribunes, which consistently situates subtexts of spectacle and literalizes observation within the royal space. At Aaron’s capture, a host of Goths encircle their prisoner like gathered spectators in the round, listening to his defiant speech. Perhaps most significant, however, is Taymor’s restructured end of act 1, scene 1, which transforms Shakespeare’s straightforward meeting of two groups on stage into a more textured consideration of eavesdroppers and observers. The original text calls for a simple two-door entrance into the space before beginning a conversation between Bassianus (James Frain), Saturninus (Alan Cumming), and an already present Titus:

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Flourish. Enter the Emperor [Saturninus], Tamora, and her two sons [Chiron and Demetrius], with [Aaron] the Moor at one door. Enter at the other door Bassianus and Lavinia with [Lucius, Quintus, and Martius]12

On screen, however, Taymor develops this single beat into a multi-shot sequence which dramatizes the act of watching. During a hedonistic party at the palace, Tamora (Jessica Lange) slips away to find Aaron (Harry Lennix) on a balcony, and the two begin to spy on the Andronicus family in the piazza below: [TAMORA] moves to him and just as she’s about to speak he shushes her and with his head gestures for her to look at the figures below.13

Then, as the conversation between Saturninus, Bassianus, and Titus continues, various party-goers descend marble stairs to watch from the background: [TITUS] kneels formally to SATURNINUS with head bowed. BASSIANUS can’t believe it. LAVINIA tries to calm him. TAMORA appears on the steps behind SATURNINUS. By this time some of the party goers, DEMETRIUS and CHIRON have come out on the steps to see what’s going on.14

Taymor’s screenplay transforms Shakespeare’s large group entrance into an orchestrated choreography centered on the act of watching. Indeed, throughout the film, minimal stage directions provide the director with various opportunities to amplify and interpolate the material so that the acts of performing and witnessing remain at the forefront of the audience’s gaze. When messengers (the Clown and a young girl) arrive with the heads of Martius and Quintus, for example, they provide chairs for the Andronicus family and motion for them to sit. Though the play itself includes only the stage directions, “Enter a Messenger with two heads and a hand” (1.1.232sd), Taymor’s screenplay calls for: four stools in front of a mini-stage .  .  . the YOUNG GIRL and the CLOWN suddenly raise the red metal shutter door of the sideshow wagon revealing the mini-stage. There is an assault of silence at the sight.15

The heads are revealed on the mini-stage cart, complete with proscenium red curtain fringe, as a wide establishing shot presents the family seated as an audience, viewing the callous and grotesque exhibition. Thomas Cartelli and Katherine Rowe note that, as the mise-en-abîme continues, the film “jarringly resumes dialogue directly drawn from the playtext.”16 It is, however, the jarring nature of the dialogue—the punctuated line deliveries in tandem with the

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punctuated rising from seats—which reifies the reflexivity of the screenplay. Rather than an interaction “out of keeping with the pace, panache, and black humor of the interpolated material,”17 the histrionic transition underlines the non-diegetic presence of the audience and foregrounds their awareness of themselves as coexisting observers. This heightened consciousness of watching and being watched, as if in an early modern playhouse or theater-in-the-round, culminates in the final spectacle of violence at the banquet. As Titus draws back a red curtain, he reveals himself in a costume before performing two acts of murder in front of his seated guests. As Saturninus leaps to attack Titus, he stabs the general in the middle of the dining table: the central point of viewing for those gathered in the room. When Lucius grabs the emperor and drags him down to the head of the table (a position of display) Young Lucius follows alongside the table, tracking his father’s path to see the act more clearly. Taymor then freezes the action as a “time slice” and digitally revolves the camera to capture the boy’s view of his father.18 Young Lucius moves his head, reacting to and tracking his father’s actions, and the audience sees Lucius resume his movement to complete the murder with a final pistol shot. Then, just as the film cuts from Lucius’s violent act of gunfire, Taymor instantly transports her audience back to the coliseum. With an abrupt wide shot, the banquet table and corpses appear framed in the center of the arena. The surviving actors walk off of the central playing space while the dead bodies remain “on stage” (as they would in a playhouse), and audience members slowly appear in contemporary dress, seated alongside Roman senators. At this point, the correlation between filmwatchers, play-goers and play makers becomes explicit. The film’s viewers are now a part of the “sad-faced men” whom Marcus (Colm Feore) addresses at the microphone (5.3.66). One of the most theatrical practices of early modern drama that Taymor adopts for her film, however, is the use of direct address (or breaking the fourth wall). As part of the communal acknowledgment of visible attendants in the playhouses in Shakespeare’s England, moments of address eclipse the uncomfortable complicity and dramatic irony of witnessing or eavesdropping because they are moments which allow characters to convey their thoughts, plans, and ulterior motives directly to the audience. As the influential director and teacher John Barton observes, Shakespeare’s characters do not simply stop exchanging information about themselves when all other characters exit the stage; just as a character shares their thoughts with other characters in a scene, “so that process of sharing has to go on” when the character finds themselves “alone on stage” or, in this case, on screen.19 Rather than use the camera’s distant, omniscient gaze to create private interior soliloquies or asides in Titus, Taymor activates her spectators by adopting a more theatrical convention of audience interaction.

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The first instance occurs when Tamora pleads for Alarbus’s life in the mausoleum as the Queen of the Goths attempts to persuade Titus to be merciful. In a beat not delineated in the published screenplay, Jessica Lange’s eyes shift from a focal point slightly off-camera to a mark directly in-camera when she delivers the final line: “spare my first born son.”20 Later, when Tamora convinces Saturninus to make peace with Titus, Lange pivots between public and private speech before she again directs her lines into the camera and promises vengeance: I’ll find a day to massacre them all, And raze their faction and their family, The cruel father and his traitorous sons To whom I sued for my dear son’s life, And make them know what ’tis to let a queen Kneel in the streets and beg for grace in vain.21

This single beat accomplishes two objectives: first, it casts the viewers as accomplices in Tamora’s plans for vengeance, and second, it subtly prompts the film’s audience to recognize that the characters on screen are aware they are being watched—that the “play” of the opening arena is ongoing—and that each character may have ulterior motives behind what they say to each other. As a cinematic analogue for early modern direct address, this break in the film’s fourth wall is an incontrovertible acknowledgment of the audience’s presence beyond the boundaries of the frame. Moreover, it pulls Taymor’s viewers toward a new, subjective viewpoint at odds with that of Young Lucius. Soon after this incredible acknowledgment from Tamora, the character of Aaron steps in to dominate the film’s most prominent connection to its early modern and theatrical roots. Just as Young Lucius draws the audience closer into the machinations of the Andronicus family in the early stages of the film, so Aaron, from this point forward, becomes a new conduit through which the audience experiences the stratagems of Tamora’s confederates. Aaron’s first speech on screen begins as a disembodied voice, but as the camera pulls back from a shot of the morning sky, the film reveals that Aaron is standing on the balcony and speaking. As he turns toward the camera and continues to speak, the audience discovers that he has been talking directly to them. This dynamic, confrontational quality instantly supersedes that of the quiet Young Lucius. Aaron not only demonstrates where viewers should look but also acknowledges their presence and actively seeks to explain his thoughts. He draws the audience in, as Taymor notes, by introducing himself and establishing a friendly relationship.22 His direct address activates the audience’s innate, voyeuristic condition and embraces each viewer as an accomplice in the forthcoming violence.

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The meta-theatrical functions of Aaron (a conspirator and eavesdropper aligned with the Goths) and Young Lucius (an eavesdropper aligned with the Andronici) eventually converge at the Andronicus home when Aaron comes to obtain Titus’s hand for the emperor. When he arrives, he spies the boy watching him from a window above and the two exchange a look before Aaron continues inside. As before, Taymor composes a moment which does not exist in the text in order to bring two contrasting factions of the central conflict together and thrust the act of watching to the forefront: AARON I go, Andronicus and for thy hand Look by and by to have thy sons with thee. He bows to everyone, then turns to exit through the door behind which hides YOUNG LUCIUS. He frightens the boy as he strides past him, speaking directly to the tracking camera. INT. AND EXT. TITUS’ HOUSE—LATE DAY AARON (continuing) Their heads, I mean.23

Taymor’s decision to bring the characters of Aaron and Young Lucius in proximity to each other juxtaposes their subjective viewpoints and compels the audience to juggle two unreliable narrators at the same time. This kind of dramatic composition mirrors the complex relationship between character and spectator typical of early modern drama. Within such theatrical exchanges, we see the kind of orchestration that Howard observes in the text of Shakespeare’s The Tempest: the audience is prevented from passively adopting the perspective of either stage party. Instead, the spectator must develop a more complicated and comprehensive point of view, one indirectly shaped by the way in which, through its contrapuntal orchestration, the scene progressively defines and undermines the two limited perspectives it brings into such sharp juxtaposition.24

At this point, as if Aaron has passed a figurative baton of audience interaction to the boy hiding behind the door, Young Lucius’s involvement in the story escalates, and before long, he, too, addresses the camera. These increased looks to the camera and dialogues through the fourth wall begin to fracture the audience’s sense of the cinematic frame as a story separate from themselves. And though this cinematic analogue to direct address can provide spectators with unique access to some characters’ motives, not every character in the film connects with the audience through the same reflective practice; their inner mindsets remain elusive.

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As a way of further clarifying these “inner landscapes” of the characters’ minds, Taymor drew inspiration from the Penny Arcade Nightmares (PANs) of her production at Theater for a New Audience in which several tableaux vivants, framed in “floating gold” and “revealed by the drawing of tattered red velvet curtains,” served to counterpoint the “realistic events” of the plot in a “dreamlike, surreal, and mythic manner.”25 The screen version, of course, does not adopt the proscenium presentation of the PANs; there are no frames on the exterior borders of the screen, and there are no digital or overlaid curtains to “draw” for the audience. Nevertheless, Taymor’s decision to modify the stylized PANs, rather than cut them entirely, speaks to the film’s indebtedness to its theatrical legacy. It also speaks to Taymor’s willingness to break the action of Titus in order to present vivid, surreal displays which resemble the stagecraft of dumb shows or masques in early modern theater. Though often considered an archaic convention of the theater, dumb shows provide spaces of invention in early modern drama which rely on gesture or movement to create a fissure in the play’s ongoing mode of aural-verbal storytelling.26 Similarly, in Titus, Taymor’s PAN tableaux shift the film, abruptly, from a language-based transmission of plot and reimagine the pageantry or sudden silence of choreographed pantomimicks within a new, visual vocabulary. In the absence of language, these scenes arrest the cinematic action to stimulate the audience’s abstract, interpretive, and imaginative ways of thinking. Such interpolated pauses in the dialogue of the film imitate the kind of stylistic breaks in Shakespeare’s stage action for a celebratory masque or dumb show. They create textually and theatrically-inspired compositions of silence, symbolism, surrealism, and spectacle wherein “verbal motifs become visual ones” on screen.27 At the time of the film’s release, Taymor said that she viewed these visual breaks as necessary for translating verse-heavy dialogue to film: “I would never rewrite Shakespeare, but I fill it out visually. You have to because you also have to cleanse your palate of the language. You can’t have a battery of dialogue, dialogue, dialogue in a movie.”28 This conscientious intention to ‘fill out’ the text of Titus Andronicus with striking visuals and ideographs remains an essential part of the director’s overall metaphoric take on performing Shakespeare, whether on stage or screen.

EMBRACING A CINEMATIC VIEW IN THE TEMPEST Despite Taymor’s assertion that she would “never rewrite Shakespeare,” however, her screen adaptation of The Tempest incorporates multiple instances of revision, rearrangement, and recontextualization. In view of these striking adaptive strategies, the dramatic differences in style between Titus and The Tempest indicate Taymor’s observable movement away from

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theatrical underpinnings toward unfettered cinematic imagery. Whereas the set design in Titus uses tactile, hand-built sound stages with fractured marble and dilapidated somatic props, The Tempest relies on digital technology to paint the island skies and visualize the magical events that Shakespeare’s text only describes. In fact, it is Taymor’s treatment of the fantastical elements of the play which most pointedly underlines her displacement of theatricality for a cinematic, if simulated, reality. Like her adaptation of Titus Andronicus, Taymor had previously directed The Tempest for the stage at Theatre for a New Audience before adapting the play for the screen. In keeping with her affinity for highly stylized forms of representation and gesture, the 1986 production incorporated various masks, color, and gesture taxonomies, shifting light designs and recurring ideographic depictions of “nature conquering nurture.”29 Her 2010 film adaptation of Shakespeare’s text, however, reflects an interest in translating metaphor and motif through more traditional cinematic methods. Rather than continue to reinvent the intrinsic practices of early modern theater in her second film, Taymor eschews potential analogues of theatricality or moments of audience interaction in favor of digital effects and postmodern expressions of interiority. At the beginning of the film, Taymor abandons any kind of induction device and pivots instead to direct the viewer’s eyes to the visual emblem of a sand castle (a “symbol of civilization”) crumbling in the rain.30 The camera pulls back to reveal the hand of Miranda (Felicity Jones) and pans to her reaction before cutting to a point-of-view shot of a ship caught in a storm off the coast: EXT. SHIP AT SEA—STORM—DAY The KING’S ship is enveloped by a full-scale storm—thunder, lighting, and mammoth swells crashing over the decks. The SHIPMASTER, BOATSWAIN, and MARINERS try in vain to sail the ship as fire ignites the sails and the main mast splinters. The action will intercut between the top deck, the crow’s nest, and the cabins below. We are on the ship.31

This opening moment of the film instantly asserts an overtly cinematic experience of Shakespeare’s play. As demonstrated by Taymor’s note, “We are on the ship,” the first sequence functions as the audience’s central point of view and establishes the extent of their engagement. Rather than address observers through the screen directly or provide a framing character to align with, the camera’s position aboard the ship—the filmic ability to shift instantly from one location on land to another at sea—dictates the audience’s immersion in the events. Instead of cultivating theatricality or focusing on a self-reflexive

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response, Taymor’s screenplay restrains and excises much of the artifice of Shakespeare’s first scene in favor of the cacophonous realism of the storm, supplanting stylized tableaux with the spectacle of roaring waters and pummeling rains.32 It is a sequence which declares at once its visual primacy and the thematic prominence of nature. As the storm rages on, the opening montage introduces emendations from the play text, which focuses less on rendering verbal motifs into visuals and concentrate, instead, on clarifying the story. Miranda and Prospera (Helen Mirren) are injected into the events of act 1, scene 1 through parallel editing as the ship’s crew and passengers flee the vessel to save their lives. As the film cross-cuts Prospera’s conjuring of the storm with the sinking ship and Miranda’s race toward her mother, the new narrative structure makes clear that Prospera’s magic is the source of the storm (rather than, as Shakespeare does, wait until the next scene to explain the context of the opening shipwreck). This adjustment allows Taymor to rework the timeline, as well as clarify the key players and their relationship to the main events.33 Her focus on narrative clarity in The Tempest, however, also reveals a new preoccupation with cinematic verisimilitude. In Ariel’s recounting of the ship’s demise, for example, the spirit (Ben Whishaw) remarks that Ferdinand (Reeve Carney) leaped into the waters as he cried out, “Hell is empty,/And all the devils are here!”34 The screenplay takes pains to depict this beat where Shakespeare did not: INT. KING’S CABIN—DAY FERDINAND kneels before the large flaming cross, which crashes to the floor, catching fire to all it touches. FERDINAND Hell is empty and all the devils here! An explosion of water bursts through the cabin window, swallowing the room.35

By creating this moment of dialogue, which corroborates a line only reported in the text, Taymor signals her intention to reframe this cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare into a space of tautological, rather than allusive, reality. As a result of this shift toward a dramaturgically consistent cinematic vision, Taymor also employs the use of flashbacks and newly inserted text in The Tempest. In order to effectively regender the magician Prospero as the sorceress Prospera, for example, Taymor’s screenplay creates a back-story to help the audience understand the protagonist’s origins.36 Through gauzy, superimposed vignettes and atextual dialogue, the director takes advantage of the visual medium to look backward in time before the main action when Prospera indulged in alchemical studies.37 Her Prospera loses the Duchy of

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Milan because of misogynistic opportunism and suspicions of witchcraft instead of neglectful study: PROSPERA Perverting my Upstanding studies, now his slandering And bile-dipped brush did paint a faithless portrait— His sister, a practicer of black arts!; A demon; not a woman, nay—a witch! And he full-knowing others of my sex Have burned for no less! The flames now fanned, My counselors turned against me— Dost thou hear?38

This tie to witchcraft, of course, does not appear in Shakespeare’s text. The revision, however, further underlines Taymor’s interest in crafting an internally consistent realism rather than the kind of symbolic imagery and medley of costuming styles she instilled in Titus.39 Her frequent use of flashback, in combination with her commitment to a diegetic consistency, results in an adaptation preoccupied with explicitly showing events which Shakespeare’s play would require the audience to imagine: as Ariel retells the story of the shipwreck, graphic splashes of multiple, flaming-haired Ariels appear in slow motion accompanied by Elliot Goldenthal’s electric guitar;40 Ariel relives the trauma of Sycorax’s imprisonment while the screen fills with virtual tree trunks and the spirit’s translucent body contorts while Prospera speaks; Trinculo (Russell Brand) points to a lone dark cloud in an otherwise calm blue sky and exclaims that he must hide because “there is no other shelter hereabout” on the wide expanse of sand around him (2.2.36); Prospera claims that she has “bedimmed/The noontide sun” and the event becomes on-screen reality when day-for-night effects create the unearthly illumination of a solar eclipse (5.1.41-42). These computer-generated creations, therefore, emphasize a kind of postmodern pleasure in the spectacle itself; that is, finally seeing on screen those moments which theater audiences could only picture in their minds. Furthermore, Taymor does not attempt to activate the audience’s imagination with extensions of the film’s frame as she did in Titus, preferring instead to affirm the pure visuality of the film and illustrate the on-screen veracity of anything stated in the dialogue. Taymor’s second Shakespeare film adaptation, then, becomes what Linda Hutcheon calls a “re-mediation,” which seeks to translate the original, imaginative sign system of the early modern play text into a new hypervisual, iconophilic sign system of twenty-first-century cinema.41

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In translating such early modern imaginative systems toward a modern visual aesthetic, Taymor removes textual moments of antiquated theatricality to insert new contemporary modes of spectacle. Thus, when Ferdinand and Miranda join in marriage, the screenplay eliminates the pageantry of the masque in act 4, scene 1.42 Instead of filming a play-within-the-play or creating a stylized emblematic pause in the action, Taymor draws from her previous directorial experience with Across the Universe (2007) and uses the translative potential of a song to ‘fill out’ the romance of the lovers. She interpolates a serenade from Ferdinand to Miranda using lyrics from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night before returning to the film’s themes of nature with a brief kaleidoscope of constellations and tantric images. Prospera’s powers are projected as bright DaVinci-like diagrams in the sky and overlaid across the actors’ faces: A thrilling spectacle of sea creatures and constellations dance together and explode like fireworks before the eyes of the young couple, melding sky and ocean in an animated alchemical chart.43

While the visual effects arrest the action and incorporate a spectacular, silent display (much in the way the textually prescribed masque might break into the scene as a choreographed interlude), the “masque” on screen underscores Taymor’s focus on observing Prospera’s magic as a reality in a way that theater productions cannot replicate. She seeks to cinematically demonstrate Prospera’s powers of illusion rather than engage, once again, with the paradoxically illusory nature of the film itself. Viewers are prompted to marvel at a frame filled with light and symbols rather than examine themselves as an acknowledged audience taking part in Prospera’s display.44 By avoiding the sticky problem of the presentational masque, Taymor affirms her interest in crafting a Shakespearean film with a cinematic eye and a contemporary, realistic style. Her Tempest adaptation abandons the contrapuntal power of metaphoric interludes like the PANs in Titus, which disrupt the rhythm of heightened dialogue, in favor of digital creations which disrupt the natural world of the mise-en-scene. The traditionally ‘spectacular’ elements of The Tempest on stage (the shipwreck, the wedding masque, the harpy) are so because they require physical solutions to magic performed within a tangible playing space. Taymor’s cinematic adaptation refrains, however, from drawing too directly from previous experiences staging Shakespeare’s text. She pivots instead toward crafting moments of wonder which prioritize visual depictions and recalibrates her attention as a filmmaker on Prospera’s supernatural magic juxtaposed against the natural environment.45 As the main source of inspiration for the film’s aesthetic, the natural environment and variable topographies across the island of Lanai in Hawaii become a central metaphor and focus of the film. Taymor’s handheld shots

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emphasize the myriad locations, backgrounds, and geographies by tracking groups across disparate spaces before the story’s conclusion. Viewers follow the survivors from the court of Milan as they traverse rocky cliffs, grasslands, gnarled trees, and seaside volcanic crags. They follow the clowns across sands, through trees, into water, and down rocky cliffs. The director’s dispersion of the story across the island creates a diegetic understanding of distance in which several groups of characters can experience distinct, mystical events and never meet until they are brought together by Prospera’s magic. Here again, Taymor carefully demonstrates the reality of the island landscape for the screen rather than adapt a more theatrical experience in which audiences fantasize that a single shared space can become many spaces. Instead of signaling the characters’ travels by having the actors enter in medias res, as one might do on stage, Taymor’s film underlines the vastness of their natural surroundings by extending their treks via walk-and-talk dialogue exchanges and tracking them through varying locales. The camera lingers on wide panoramas composed of rock, tree, and sky, wherein single characters are the only moving object. And though these wide vistas recall somewhat Taymor’s theatrical staging of the island, where she once used a dramatically colored cyclorama,46 her Tempest as a screen adaptation attempts to break past the text’s theatricality by infusing the film with moments of business centered on the island’s topography: a handheld camera tilts to examine the flat ground where Trinculo’s foot tripped upon the sand, a low shot captures clustered treetops just before Sebastian (Alan Cumming) and Antonio (Chris Cooper) clutch at tree trunks while they conspire, and the camera closely tracks along with Prospera’s staff as it inscribes a magic circle into the loose sand. The specificity of these moments heightens the audience’s awareness of the natural space and brings the island itself to the foreground as a character in the action. The Tempest’s most dramatic shift away from any staging influences, however, is the displacing of direct address for interior, reflective dialogues. As a fundamental aspect of early modern drama and one of the most blatantly theatrical aspects of Taymor’s adaptation of Titus Andronicus, its absence from The Tempest creates a new relationship between the filmmaker’s audience and the screen. The lens becomes an objective, distancing vantage point rather than a medium through which the audience is drawn toward conduits of complicity.47 Certainly, Taymor circumvents every opportunity for such an address throughout the adapted text. Ferdinand bemoans his wood-gathering labors only to himself as he crosses large swathes of sand with a bundle of logs. Trinculo exclaims from beneath Caliban’s gabardine, to no one in particular, that he recognizes Stephano’s voice. Caliban (Djimon Hounsou) mutters to himself on the open landscape and later eschews any connection with the audience during his notable “the isle is full of noises” speech, focusing

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his gaze, instead, on a skyward glance to the treetops (3.2.130–138). Furthermore, Taymor’s Prospera—arguably the audience’s most natural avenue of collaboration—directs all potentially externalized thoughts internally to herself. “It goes on, I see, /As my soul prompts it,” she muses aloud to the air when Miranda marvels at Ferdinand’s appearance (1.2.423–424). She remains equally private and aloof when she confesses her motive for creating conflict between the lovers: “I must uneasy make, lest too light winning/Make the prize light” (1.2.455–456). In these moments, which present a stark contrast to Taymor’s previous treatment of Shakespeare in Titus, the omniscient camera separates the audience from the protagonist. Viewers do not play a part in the events except as passive appreciators of Prospera’s illusion and the film’s simulated artifice. The director intentionally avoids direct address because, as V.F. Perkins points out, even an “actor’s occasional acknowledgment of the camera cannot be without effect.”48 This time, observers are not invited into the world of the story. They do not collaborate in, nor rebuke, Prospera’s revenge plot or the counterplots of Antonio, Sebastian, Caliban, and the clowns. In the place of complicity, judgment, or discomfort, Prospera’s quiet self-reflection rejects any similarity to early modern performance. Instead of eliciting self-consciousness and self-reflexivity from the audience, as demonstrated by Young Lucius and Aaron in Titus, Prospera turns inward to herself and rebuffs any perceived connection from across the screen.49 Within Taymor’s cinematic corpus, her film adaptations of Titus and The Tempest represent a stark, and perhaps unexpected, contrast. Although both films were preceded by the director’s work with the production on stage, the texts as source material inspired divergent artistic responses and produced distinct interpretations. While Titus draws from the inherent elements of the play’s early modern conventions in order to interrogate the performative nature of violent spectacle using framing devices, anxious relationships to observation, disruptive Penny Arcade Nightmares, and direct address, The Tempest displaces those elements and redirects the audience toward internally consistent dialogue, actors and actresses composited with green screen, computergenerated illusions juxtaposed against the natural topography of the play’s setting, and an undisturbed fourth wall. Taken together, the two films demonstrate a perceptible transformation in Julie Taymor’s creative objectives as a filmmaker in which the wonders of theatricality are supplanted by the wonders of modern technology in Shakespeare’s cinematic treatment on screen.

NOTES 1. See Eileen Blumenthal and Julie Taymor, Julie Taymor: Playing with Fire: Theater, Opera, Film (Abrams, NY: Abrams, 2007), 182–95.

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2. Ibid., 122–23. 3. Rebecca Yearling, Ben Jonson, John Marston and Early Modern Drama: Satire and the Audience (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 21. 4. Thomas Cartelli and Katherine Rowe, New Wave Shakespeare on Screen (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 74. 5. Julie Taymor, Titus: The Illustrated Screenplay (New York: Newmarket Press, 2000), 24. 6. Jean E. Howard, Shakespeare’s Art of Orchestration: Stage Technique and Audience Response (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 57. Though Howard is specifically addressing Troilus and Cressida here, her observations apply throughout early modern drama. 7. At one point, when Titus reflects quietly in the mausoleum, the camera trucks to reveal the boy watching from the background. 8. Howard, Shakespeare’s Art, 116. 9. In fact, this moment is not prescribed in the screenplay. The original directions call for Lucius and Mutius to purify their swords in the flame (Taymor, Titus, 25). 10. Howard, Shakespeare’s Art, 6. 11. Tiffany Stern, Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page (New York: Routledge, 2004), 26. 12. William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, in The Norton Shakespeare, eds. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 1997), 1.1.395sd. Future citations are from this edition and will be noted parenthetically in the text. 13. Taymor, Titus, 57. 14. Ibid., 61. 15. Ibid., 107. 16. Cartelli and Rowe, New Wave, 81. 17. Ibid. 18. Julie Taymor, “Director’s Commentary,” Titus, directed by Julie Taymor (1999; Beverly Hills: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2000), DVD. 19. John Barton, Playing Shakespeare (New York: Methuen, 1984), 96. 20. Taymor, Titus, 28. 21. Ibid., 62. 22. Taymor, “Director’s Commentary.” 23. Taymor, Titus, 105. 24. Howard, Shakespeare’s Art, 57. 25. Blumenthal, Julie Taymor, 186. 26. Stephen Orgel argues that the presentational nature of masques and dumb shows are “probably a better index to the complex nature of Renaissance theater than drama is” in part because dealing with them “constantly reminds us of how much in these quintessentially Renaissance forms—and by implication in all artistic forms of the period—is lost to us: spectacle, music, choreography, complex symbolism.” Stephen Orgel, “Reading Occasions,” Renaissance Drama, New Series, 34 (2005): 37. 27. Blumenthal, Julie Taymor, 184.

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28. Julie Taymor, November 1999, quoted in Miranda Johnson-Haddad, “A Time for ‘Titus’: An Interview with Julie Taymor,” Shakespeare Bulletin 18, no. 4 (2000): 35. 29. Blumenthal, Julie Taymor, 118. 30. Julie Taymor, “Director Commentary,” The Tempest, directed by Julie Taymor (2010; Burbank: Touchstone Home Entertainment, 2011), DVD. 31. Julie Taymor, The Tempest (New York, London: Abrams, 2010), 27. 32. In particular, Taymor notes: “It was about saying ‘this is a movie’ . . . and obviously the title is The Tempest so you’d better show the tempest” (Taymor, “Director Commentary,” The Tempest). 33. Though Anthony Guy Patricia is correct, in a general sense, that the opening follows Shakespeare’s text “fairly closely” (“Screening Shakespearean Fantasy and Romance in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest,” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Screen, ed. Russell Jackson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 143), the film’s first scene has been radically revised and restructured from the first two of the play. Patricia, however, works to draw a distinction between Taymor’s adaptation and the text’s earlier treatment by directors like Derek Jarman. 34. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, in The Norton Shakespeare, eds. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 1997), 1.2.215–216. Future citations are from this edition and will be noted parenthetically in the text. 35. Taymor, The Tempest, 31. 36. With verse crafted by Glen Berger for Taymor’s screenplay (Taymor, Tempest, 14). 37. Though Taymor often emphasizes in her writing and audio commentary that the film’s modified costume design uses “a modern twist of zipper instead of lace” on European clothing to consciously blend time periods, and that the island location itself provides no “time” for the events, she nevertheless situates Prospera’s origin story in a world consistent with early modern historical contexts (Taymor, Tempest, 20). Instead of avoiding discrete properties of any particular time period, the antiquated silhouettes and ruffs of the Milanese court, the patriarchal perils of Prospera’s back-story, and the metrical language itself, solidly establish the audience’s impression of the Tempest cinematic world as being coherently early modern-adjacent. 38. Taymor, Tempest, 39. 39. Taymor is also newly conscientious of pacing differences between theater and film. In her commentary for The Tempest, she asserts that it is “critical” to break apart Prospera’s long exposition with flashback vignettes, not only to make the language more understandable but also to make the scene, literally, “more cinematic” (Taymor, “Director Commentary,” The Tempest). 40. These graphic intercuts complemented by aggressive music suggest the kinds of imagery reminiscent of a modern rock music video. A similar music video motif occurs when Ariel appears in the film as an ethereal overlay, singing gently while Ferdinand walks across beaches and tide pools. 41. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2013), 16.

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42. Gone, as well, is Prospero’s instruction for Ariel to “bring the rabble” of lesser spirits for the masque performance (4.1.37). Taymor maintains the line, however, presumably meaning that Prospera references the clowns and Caliban. 43. Taymor, Tempest, 137. 44. Replacing the masque with Prospera’s magical projections, however, somewhat destabilizes one of the most self-conscious passages of Shakespeare’s text. After Prospero angrily disperses the wedding masque, in act 4, scene 1, he immediately draws attention to the mise-en-abîme by employing allusions to theatricality. In Taymor’s film adaptation, Prospera has no performance to point toward, so her words become private meditations. 45. Taymor, “Director Commentary,” The Tempest. 46. Blumenthal, Julie Taymor, 120–21. 47. Although the opening sequence of the film includes a direct in-camera shot of Prospera’s wide eyes while she conjures the storm, the sorceress’s overall focus remains on the ship across the sea (which Taymor demonstrates through a wide shot). Since the audience receives no further direct eye contact from her character, the moment arguably depicts an omniscient view of Prospera’s rage rather than a perpendicular gaze from a theater seat. 48. V.F. Perkins, “Where is the world? The horizon of events in movie fiction,” in Style and Meaning: Studies in the detailed analysis of film, eds. John Gibbs and Douglas Pye (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 40n6. 49. Shakespeare’s text calls for the magician/actor Prospero to ask the audience to release him from the island via the approving applause of their hands (Epilogue 1–20). At the conclusion of Taymor’s film, however, Prospera hurls her staff over the island’s edge toward the water and shatters it upon the rocks. The epilogue appears only in the lyrics of a mournful song over the credits as Prospera’s books sink into the water. The film does not engage with meta-theatrical aesthetics or liminal relationships but leans, one final time, on the realism of the mise-en-scène.

REFERENCES Barton, John. Playing Shakespeare. New York: Methuen, 1984. Blumenthal, Eileen and Julie Taymor. Julie Taymor: Playing with Fire: Theater, Opera, Film. Abrams, NY: Abrams, 2007. Cartelli, Thomas and Katherine Rowe. New Wave Shakespeare on Screen. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. Howard, Jean E. Shakespeare’s Art of Orchestration: Stage Technique and Audience Response. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2013. Orgel, Stephen. “Reading Occasions.” Renaissance Drama, New Series, 34 (2005): 37. Patricia, Anthony Guy. “Screening Shakespearean Fantasy and Romance in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest.” In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Screen, edited by Russell Jackson, 134–45. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

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Perkins, V.F. “Where is the world? The horizon of events in movie fiction.” In Style and Meaning: Studies in the detailed analysis of film, edited by John Gibbs and Douglas Pye, 16–41. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005. Shakespeare, William. “The Tempest.” In The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: Norton, 1997. ———. “Titus Andronicus.” In The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: Norton, 1997. Stern, Tiffany. Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page. New York: Routledge, 2004. Taymor, Julie. “Director Commentary.” The Tempest, directed by Julie Taymor. 2010; Burbank: Touchstone Home Entertainment, 2011, DVD. ———. “Director’s Commentary.” Titus, directed by Julie Taymor. 1999; Beverly Hills: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2000, DVD. ———. Quoted in Miranda Johnson-Haddad. “A Time for ‘Titus’: An Interview with Julie Taymor.” Shakespeare Bulletin 18, no. 4 (2000): 35. ———. Titus: The Illustrated Screenplay. New York: Newmarket Press, 2000. The Tempest. Directed by Julie Taymor. New York; London: Abrams, 2010. Yearling, Rebecca. Ben Jonson, John Marston and Early Modern Drama: Satire and the Audience. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

Chapter 12

Hybridity and Self-Reflexivity in Julie Taymor’s Film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream Elizabeth Klett

In Act 4, Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the four Athenian lovers wake up in the forest the morning after a wild night of mischief, folly, and confusion and try to make sense of their experiences. Hermia reflects, “Methinks I see these things with parted eye, / When everything seems double.”1 Her words suggest the larger double vision at work in Shakespeare’s play, which juxtaposes seemingly opposing concepts, such as light/dark, humor/seriousness, day/night, civilization/wilderness, and awake/ asleep. Much as Hermia’s unfocused gaze allows her to see double, the play challenges readers and viewers to hold these oppositional ideas within their vision simultaneously. While directors might choose to emphasize one set of concepts over the other when interpreting the play in performance, there are those who embrace the play’s thematic and stylistic hybridity. As Stephen Mead has noted, the play is “a dramatic construction that not only takes place in ancient Athens with characters from classical myth, English folklore, Italian Renaissance, and Elizabethan London, but also calls out to Saint Paul and Ovid.”2 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, therefore, feels like a perfect vehicle for the talents of director Julie Taymor, whose visually spectacular style revels in working with hybridity and juxtaposition. As Douglas Lanier has noted, “By regularly including elements of self-reflexivity and ‘double performance’ in her productions, Taymor encourages a sophisticated engagement with issues of spectatorship and theatricality.”3 Her 2014 film version of The Dream, adapted from her 2013 stage production created for New York’s Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA), epitomizes Taymor’s hybridity, blending the theatrical and the cinematic in its form, content, and

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style. Further, as this chapter will show, the film is a self-referential production, incorporating themes, motifs, and techniques from across her film and theatrical career. Like her previous Shakespearean film adaptations, Titus (1999) and The Tempest (2010), Taymor’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream began its life onstage at TFANA in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.4 Unlike those films, however, her Dream was composed of footage of the theatrical production captured over the course of four performances in front of a live audience, as well as additional footage shot on the TFANA stage itself. While Taymor filmed Titus at various locations in and around Rome, and The Tempest on a private island in Hawaii, “TFANA’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center … is the de facto setting for Dream,” as Kade Ivy has noted.5 The hybrid nature of Shakespeare’s play is therefore reflected in the film itself, which is “a new medium” in Taymor’s own words,6 incorporating elements of a feature film and also of a live capture or broadcast version of a stage production. In the taxonomy of “live” theater broadcast versions of Shakespeare developed by Pascale Aebischer and Suzanne Greenhalgh, Taymor’s film is closest to the category they call “recorded theatre or ‘edited theatrical film’” since it is “captured live, in more than one performance, [and] mixed in post-production”; such broadcasts are “an intrinsically hybrid art form.”7 Taymor’s film does not fit neatly into this category, however, since she not only filmed at four different live performances but also had separate filming sessions where she took the cameras onstage to capture close-ups. Although she brought in an audience for these sessions to provide background continuity with the live performance footage, these sessions were not live in the same way since the actors were not performing the entire play from beginning to end. Taymor also noted that she directed the actors differently for the close-up sessions, encouraging them to tone down their performances for film rather than retaining the larger-scale emotions appropriate to theater acting. As she told Sami Emory in an interview, “I could go up to Oberon and say, ‘you don’t have to project to the back of the house, it’s an inner monologue, make it quiet.’ Like, when he says, ‘I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,’ we had a steadicam and the steadicam is moving around him without an edit.”8 Similarly, her cameras were able to capture shots that were only possible on film, such as the viewpoint directly below Kathryn Hunter’s Puck as she descended on a wire toward the stage for her Act 2, Scene 1 entrance. Due to these additional filming sessions to obtain close-ups and additional angles on the performance that could not have been seen from a theater seat, Taymor’s film diverges from the concept of the live capture or theatrical broadcast film, bringing her Dream closer to—though still distinct from—a traditional feature film. Erin Sullivan, in her study of Shakespeare broadcasts by British companies like the Royal Shakespeare Company and National

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Theatre Live, notes that “the creative direction and pitch of the acting are supposedly not meant to change . . . This emphasis on sameness, and on honoring the integrity of the theatrical production, has been adopted in subsequent initiatives . . . the emphasis in most large-scale broadcasting projects so far has been on quiet transparency.”9 Taymor, as director, intervenes in her material more overtly than directors of stage-to-screen productions have traditionally done. In fact, as Ivy points out, her Dream is singular within this tradition in that she directed both the stage production and its film adaptation: “Taymor’s influence is all over what we see onstage and how we see it onscreen, making this case unique in the realm of live captures. There is . . . no other Shakespeare director working within the live broadcast phenomenon who has taken responsibility for directing the live capture of their own theater production.”10 Further, composer Elliot Goldenthal, who created the music for the stage production, worked with the director in post-production on the film version, adding a significant amount of additional music and sound effects to enhance the finished product. Taymor noted that “he was able to score the emotions and support the dialogue and actors’ performances, which . . . adds much more emotional depth.”11 The film is, therefore, much more than simply “a record of the stage production,” or “filmed theatre,” as Geoffrey O’Brien calls it.12 Taymor claimed that she liked the resulting film “better than the live [performance],” noting that the film audience “get to be in all the best seats in the house,” rather than the singular perspective offered by attending one particular theatrical performance.13 While the film’s own genre is a new hybrid form that combines cinematic and theatrical conventions, the choices that Taymor makes in staging Shakespeare’s play likewise suggest the hybridity that is central to her methodology. As she told Rebecca Gross in a 2011 interview, “I love to blend forms, so my cinema is very theatrical, my theater is very cinematic.”14 The collision between theatrical and filmic techniques can be seen in the production’s use of seemingly disparate elements. On the one hand, Taymor uses puppets and prosthetics to depict moments of metamorphosis and transition, which are highly theatrical techniques that eschew realism. On the other hand, she uses projections to suggest the lush imagery associated with the fairy forest, alluding to filmmaking techniques within the staged performance. Further, the eclectic costume design for her Dream reveals her characteristic approach of juxtaposing divergent periods and aesthetics. The hybridity of Shakespeare’s play is beautifully served by Taymor’s amalgamation approach to the visual aspects of the film. The most striking uses of puppets and prosthetics in the film are seen in Bottom’s transformation and the staging of Theseus’s hunting dogs pursuing the deer. In Act 3, Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s play, Puck transforms Bottom into an ass as part of Oberon’s plot to engineer the humiliation of Titania.

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Once Bottom enters, as the stage directions note, “with the ass head [on],” his human companions run away, leaving him alone near Titania’s “flowery bed” (3.1.107). When she wakes up, she falls instantly in love with him, despite his hybrid human/donkey form: “So is mine eye enthralled to thy shape, / And thy fair virtue’s force perforce doth move me / On the first view to say, to swear, I love thee” (3.1.116–118). Titania’s words, like Hermia’s, emphasize the importance of the eye and sight in the play’s construction of desire; although this is her first glimpse of the “translated” Bottom (3.1.98), her eyes find him enthralling. Taymor takes her cue from the ways in which the text plays with visual elements; her Bottom (Max Casella) wears a large mask-like ass head that covers his own head while still revealing his eyes and echoing his human form by reproducing his mustache on the snout. Otherwise, his body looks the same, still clad in a flannel shirt with rolled-up sleeves, jeans, and work boots. The ass head is as much a puppet as a mask; the mouth on the ass head can open and close as Bottom speaks with Titania (Tina Benko), and Casella manipulates the mouth himself by squeezing a pair of jumper cables which are attached to the back of the head. Rather than hiding his manipulation of the mouth, Taymor highlights it by revealing to the audience that it is controlled by the actor. This is typical of her work with puppetry, which tends to “juxtapos[e] performer and prosthetic. She often allows . . . the face or body of the actor to be seen beneath the mask or puppet, thereby enabling a simultaneously double performance.”15 Although Casella initially dons the ass head when Bottom is offstage, it is removed onstage by Puck later in the film. When she takes it off as Bottom lies dozing in Titania’s bower, she reveals it fully to the audience, exposing its constructed nature as both mask and puppet. Taymor does not allow the spectator to forget the theatrical aspects of Bottom’s transformation. She uses puppetry and masks again in her staging of the hunting scene in Act 4, Scene 1. As a transition between the exit of Oberon (David Harewood), Titania and Puck and the succeeding entrance of Theseus (Roger Clark), Hippolyta (Okwui Okpokwasili), and Egeus (Robert Langdon Lloyd), Taymor has three actors enter the scene playing deer. They wear deer masks on top of their heads so that their faces are fully visible. They wear pointe shoes, balancing on their toes like ballet dancers to suggest the deer’s delicate steps and lean forward on long sticks to provide the impression of four-legged creatures. They are cautious, looking around apprehensively for predators, and dip their heads down, miming eating leaves or drinking water. Once Theseus and his companions intrude upon them, the Duke immediately unleashes his dogs to hunt them: “My love shall hear the music of my hounds. / Uncouple in the western valley; let them go: / Dispatch, I say” (4.1.103–105). Child actors respond to his commands, entering on all fours wearing large dog masks with snarling mouths and bared teeth over their heads, barking, growling,

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leaping, and chasing the three deer offstage. As with Bottom’s ass head, the children playing dogs are clearly wearing masks and are thus not realistically portrayed. The actors playing deer are even more visually distinctive since Taymor does not hide their faces and uses the long poles to prosthetically indicate the deer’s bodies without creating a realistic facsimile. Although simpler in design, the concept for the deer echoes Taymor’s elaborate giraffe costumes for her 1997 Broadway production of The Lion King.16 The poles used for the deer’s legs are reiterated by Taymor’s use of similar long bamboo poles to stand in for the forest, another technique that is theatrical rather than realistic. This device appears for the first time in Act 2, Scene 1, in a conversation between Helena (Mandi Masden) and Demetrius (Zach Appelman). Child actors—designated as Rude Elementals in the film’s closing credits—wearing black clothing enter carrying tall sticks that they manipulate continually throughout the scene. The actors kneel around the stage and point their sticks toward Demetrius, who enters from the audience. As he climbs up onto the stage, he knocks aside the poles and grunts in frustration as though pushing his way through tree branches. Helena follows suit, although the actors impede her way less vigorously, suggesting sympathy with her position. The sticks cluster between them for the first part of their argument, dividing them physically from each other, but as the scene continues, the actors’ positions and manipulations of the poles work to increase Helena’s advantage. They block Demetrius’s way again, more forcefully this time, crossing the sticks in front of him so that it is harder for him to push them aside. The actors circle around the two characters as Helena declares, “[E]ven for that do I love you the more” (2.1.202), and definitively prevent Demetrius from leaving the space. Helena’s words prompt the poles’ movement after this point, indicating that the forest (and eventually Oberon) wants her to succeed in her quest to gain Demetrius’s love. Although the bamboo poles are not puppets or masks in the same ways that Bottom’s ass head or the deer costumes are, they are nonetheless prosthetics: extensions of the actors’ bodies that they manipulate to create different visual patterns in the stage space. Taymor’s technique here recalls her use of Bunraku puppetry in her 1986 TFANA production of The Tempest, in which an actor dressed entirely in black manipulated a mask that represented the spirit character of Ariel.17 In each case, the audience is aware of the black-clad actors’ presence onstage. Even though Taymor’s cinematography in this scene often uses close-ups to focus more tightly on Helena and Demetrius as they argue with each other, she consistently cuts to wider shots that reveal the bodies of the child actors as they actively manipulate the space in which the two characters interact. While the use of prosthetics to represent the fairy forest is consistent throughout the film, Taymor combines this theatrical device with a more filmic one: the use of projections to represent the natural aspects of the wood.

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She uses this device to frame the fairies’ first collective entrance. Puck, who has been suspended out of sight behind a sheet above the stage since the opening moments of the play, emerges upside-down from a hole in the center of the sheet and descends toward the stage. Her entrance is signaled by a film projection of black and white branches that creep out of the hole and extend across the sheet. Once she touches down on the stage and the child fairies begin to sing, Taymor projects black and white fluttering moths onto the stage. Much larger than the actors, these moths appear and disappear, the graceful motions of their wings mimicked by the fairies’ manipulation of waving sheets of fabric, some of which are worn on their bodies and some of which flutter at the back of the stage. The choice of moth imagery is unique since it does not correspond to the words of the fairies’ song describing the activities they perform for the Fairy Queen: The cowslips tall her pensioners be; In their gold coats spots you see— Those be rubies, fairy favours, In those freckles live their savours. I must go seek some dewdrops here, And hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear. (2.1.9–15)

It is possible that the moths anticipate the character of Moth, one of Titania’s attendant fairies, who enters the story in Act 3, Scene 2. The black, white, and gray projections of moths, however, correspond to the aesthetic of Puck and the child fairies, who wear white makeup on their faces and are clothed in white and gray gauze-like clothing. The flower imagery contained in the fairies’ 2.1 song, as well as the ensuing descriptions of the “love-in-idleness” flower that Oberon will use to enchant Titania’s eyes, characterizes the next uses of film projections (2.1.168). When Oberon describes the flower to Puck, a huge projection of a gorgeous tropical flower blooms behind him, unfurling its petals, growing bigger and changing from white to purple to mimic his words: “a little western flower, / Before, milk-white; now purple with love’s wound” (166–167). The sensuality of the flower, which induces desire, is reiterated once Titania is under its influence and compels the transformed Bottom to her bower. Her sexual passion is conveyed through flower projections; seated astride the draped sheet that forms her “flowery bed” (3.1.107), Titania spreads her legs and swoons backward as the flower is projected over her entire body. It blooms and re-blooms, metamorphosing from one kind of flower to another: red, purple, yellow, and pink petals bursting open and eventually obliterating Titania’s body, suggesting a literal climax for the conclusion of the scene. Taymor characterizes all of the projections as “handmade images,” which have “a very cinematic nature . . .

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with a very theatrical style.”18 Earlier in her career she had derided the use of film projections in stage productions; as she said in reference to the scene in The Lion King that depicts a rising sun, “I wanted to do what the theatre does best, which is to put an object in front of you that you know is insubstantial . . . and as it is raised, you see the sun rise. That is thrilling—the sensation of life being breathed into an object by the addition of human imagination.”19 She clearly decided to go a different way in The Dream; yet it is important to emphasize that in every scene in which she uses the film projections, she juxtaposes them with overtly theatrical elements. The natural imagery of the fairy forest is suggested by the use of fluttering sheets and bamboo poles as much as by the projections of moths and flowers. Just as the scenic design for the enchanted wood brings together theatrical and cinematic elements, the costume design similarly revels in juxtapositions. This is characteristic of her previous work on both Titus and The Tempest films; Niamh O’Leary writes that “in the mixed medley of costumes . . . Taymor rejects coherence in favor of variety, allowing characters to embody individually appropriate cultural references.”20 She takes a comparable approach to The Dream, giving the different groups of characters distinctive looks that nonetheless blend together into an eclectic whole. The Athenian characters—Theseus, Egeus, and the four lovers—wear costumes that incorporate Elizabethan design elements such as ruffs, doublets, and elaborate sleeves. For example, Hermia (Lilly Englert) initially appears in a purple dress with puffed upper sleeves, a white neck ruff, and a low-cut bodice. Egeus likewise wears a white ruff and cuffs that peek out of the neck and sleeves of his black doublet-like jacket. Helena’s blue dress incorporates a corset-like bodice with a modestly gauzy collar. While all of these costumes allude to the Elizabethan era, none are accurate to the period. Zippers are clearly visible on a number of the costumes (such as Theseus’s doublet), and the women’s skirts are too short to comply with early modern decorum. Hippolyta initially enters dressed in clothing that marks her out as culturally different from Theseus, as befits her status as former Queen of the Amazons: she wears a more classically inspired ensemble of a draped halter dress with a head covering. After she weds Theseus, however, she appears in a pale gold dress with a ruff and corseted bodice, indicating her absorption into Athenian society, albeit with a contemporary touch that suggests her identity as a warrior queen: a pair of tight gold trousers visible beneath the deep slit of her skirt. The costume design for the fairies and mechanicals is similarly eclectic, incorporating a variety of references. The mechanicals are decidedly contemporary to the point of specificity, each of their outfits suggesting a different occupation and locating them adamantly within Brooklyn, as the Nets cap worn by Flute (Zachary Infante) indicates. Snout (Jacob Ming-Trent) wears paint-splattered overalls and a painter’s cap; Starveling, the tailor

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(William  Youmans), sports a tape measure around his neck; Bottom, the construction worker, has a yellow hard hat and tool belt; and Snug (Brendan Averett) wears gray workman’s coveralls and a flat cap. Their highly intelligible contemporary look is offset by the otherworldly nature of the fairies, particularly Oberon and Titania, who represent paradoxical and contrasting visions of sun/moon and darkness/light. On the one hand, Oberon is a golden sun god with a gorgeous, gilded collar that encircles his face, matched with a gleaming belt and painted gold accents on his wrists and torso. He contrasts with the pale moon-like Titania, who is clothed in a flowing white gown that matches her skin and platinum blonde hair. On the other hand, despite his clear associations with the sun, Oberon also suggests darkness; played by Black actor David Harewood,21 his skin is tinged a deep blue-black, and his dark blue trousers are his only clothing once he removes his golden collar. Similarly, Titania is explicitly associated with light stronger than the pale glow of the moon; her costume incorporates a large translucent collar that wraps around her shoulders and includes two pinpoints of light that illuminate her face. The conventional associations of daylight with the sun and nighttime with the moon are both invoked and disrupted in their costumes, indicating the complex blending of visual meanings released by Taymor’s hybrid practices. The melding of light and dark that Oberon and Titania imply through their costumes is reflected thematically in Taymor’s take on the play, which emphasizes both the danger and delight of the human world and the fairy forest. As Lanier writes, one of Taymor’s major interests in her Shakespearean films is exploring “the relationship between civilization and the darker impulses—especially monstrosity and violence—that underlie or threaten it . . . Taymor characteristically handles these themes with a degree of aesthetic stylization, even grotesque beauty.”22 Although Athens, with its buttoned-up courtiers and white marble columns, appears to be “civilized,” Taymor subtly suggests the violence that begins the play with Theseus’s conquest of Hippolyta. Theseus’s words to his captured fiancée represent the collision of light and dark within the play: Hippolyta, I wooed thee with my sword, And won thy love doing thee injuries; But I will wed thee in another key, With pomp, with triumph, and with revelling. (1.1.16–19)

In Taymor’s film, Hippolyta is physically distant from Theseus in this opening scene, repudiating his advances toward her with a swift gesture, responding with nonverbal disapproval to his treatment of Hermia, and exiting the stage before him, prompting his line, “what cheer, my love?” (1.1.122).23 The violent undertones of their pairing are replicated in Oberon’s domination and

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humiliation of Titania once the scene shifts to the enchanted wood and further echoed in the four Athenian lovers’ entanglements in the same setting. For example, as O’Brien notes, Taymor suggests a “threatened rape” in Hermia’s Act 3, Scene 2 encounter with “ominous frat boy” Demetrius.24 She kneels in front of him to plead for information about her missing fiancé Lysander: “I pray thee, tell me then that he is well” (3.2.77). Demetrius loads his reply with obvious sexual overtones, angling his crotch toward her face: “And if I could, what should I get therefore?” (3.2.78). Although Hermia slaps him and avoids the threat of assault, the idea of the men taking advantage of the women and doing them “mischief in the wood” hangs over their interactions once they have left Athens (2.1.237).25 Unlike in Titus, which portrays the rape and mutilation of Lavinia at the hands of two men in a wilderness setting, Taymor does not fully explore the connections between the fairy forest and sexual violence in her Dream. Although she alludes to male violence against women, she ultimately defuses the threat in her portrayal of the four lovers’ extended conflict, which devolves into a pillow fight, with white fluffy cushions thrown onto the stage by watching Rude Elementals, who briefly and joyfully pummel each other once the Athenians have exited. The inclusion of children in the scene, and a resolution involving a child’s game, recalls the ending of Titus, in which Young Lucius rescues Aaron’s baby from Rome, and which provides an optimistic conclusion to a dark and ruthless narrative.26 As Kim Fedderson and J. Michael Richardson argue about the earlier film, “there is the promise of an easy recovery from apocalypse . . . If, like Disney, we put our trust in the latent uncorrupted goodness of children . . . all will be well . . . she is able to ‘graft’ a happy ending worthy of Walt Disney onto a brutal revenge tragedy worthy of Quentin Tarantino.”27 Taymor’s use of children in Titus and The Dream suggests that, despite her interest in exploring the juxtaposition of light and dark, she ultimately takes a view that is more redemptive. The Rude Elementals, played by seventeen children between the ages of seven and sixteen, are “representations of raw, natural energy,” in ways that sometimes feel menacing but in the end are merely playful.28 In addition to their appearance as hunting dogs who chase the deer, the children who use poles to represent the forest can often seem threatening. When Hermia wakes up alone, for example, “quak[ing] with fear” from her dream about the “crawling serpent” (2.2.152, 154), the Rude Elementals surround her with their bamboo poles, pounding them rhythmically on the ground to torment her. They also mock her vocally, mimicking her cries of “Lysander!” (2.2.157). Taymor resolves these threats, however, by having the children appear as wedding guests in Act 5, Scene 1. Despite the Elizabethan-inspired garb of the Athenian couples, the children wear decidedly contemporary clothing: white frilly dresses, ankle socks, and patent-leather shoes for the girls and black

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suits, white shirts, and ties for the boys. Three of them hide under the long table that has the wedding cake on top of it and playfully burst out from the bottom to join in the general mayhem that the children create, running around the stage. They calm down once it becomes clear that they will receive slices of wedding cake and disperse around the playing area to quietly consume it. The general tone they bring to the scene is joyful; as Steve Mentz observes in his review of the stage production, “These child-actors were great fun to watch, and when they returned during the wedding scene to receive slices of cake, I was pleased that they were being rewarded.”29 The children join in the “Bergomask dance” performed by the entire company at the conclusion of the mechanicals’ play (5.1.334) and contribute to the festive atmosphere. As everyone disperses at the conclusion of the dance, Taymor adds one more disquieting moment involving one of the children: a little girl who stands centerstage wearing one of the hunting dog masks from Act 4 Scene 1. The music slows down, and the lights fade to blue as she sways slightly, turning her head slowly to gaze out at the audience from beneath the mask. She is a “hybrid creature,”30 both a girl and a dog with bared teeth, and her wordless contemplation of the spectators is unsettling, possibly threatening. But again, Taymor defuses the danger as a male servant approaches the girl and takes off the mask to reveal her sleepy face and long blonde hair. She holds her arms out to him, and he gently sweeps her up and carries her offstage. As with Bottom’s transformation from man to ass and back again, the child metamorphoses back into a girl and is safely tucked into bed. The only potentially threatening figure that Taymor does not mitigate is Puck, who remains a hybrid character from beginning to end. She embodies contradiction, as she is both old and young, male and female, malicious and mischievous, awake and asleep. In deciding to have Puck played by a woman, Taymor recalls her film The Tempest, which cast Helen Mirren in the leading male role, regendering the character as “Prospera.”31 As Judith Buchanan reminds us, “acts of cross-casting . . . can reinvigorate an audience’s sense of the gender-political landscape of a play through the anatomical fact of the actor’s body inflecting the reading of character.”32 This is true of Taymor’s Dream, as it is of her previous Shakespearean film. Kathryn Hunter is a singular actress renowned for her protean ability to play male, female, androgynous, childlike, and elderly roles.33 She is not only a shape-shifter but also a contortionist, able to perform gymnastic feats and bend her arms and legs at seemingly impossible angles. Taymor draws on all of Hunter’s gifts in casting the actress as Puck since the staging demands that Puck dangle upside down, perform mid-air somersaults, and twist her body to imitate a “roasted crab” and a “threefoot stool” (2.1.48, 52). Puck and the Rude Elementals often operate as a group, aligning Puck with the literal children who play the fairies throughout the action. Hunter stands about five feet tall, making her

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a similar size to many of the children onstage. She also emphasizes Puck’s childlike excitement at many of the antics she performs, rolling on the floor with laughter as she describes the ways she entertains Oberon (2.1.42–57). Yet, Hunter was 56 when she played Puck and, as such, was visibly much older than the Rude Elementals. Further, Taymor double-casts Hunter in the role of Philostrate, Theseus’s Master of the Revels, in Act 5, Scene 1, who Hunter plays as a very old man with an exceedingly correct accent, huge glasses, a bowler hat, and a hunched back. O’Brien describes the way that Hunter’s performance blends “restless infant ferocity and the ancient wisdom of a primeval urchin,” revealing how her presence juxtaposes youth and age, innocence and experience.34 She relates to Oberon in ways that suggest both concepts as well. When Oberon calls her to him for the first time, he lifts her up in his arms like a child, and she pops her legs playfully around his waist. Later, however, when he demands the flower, she initially fools him by impersonating a doddering and forgetful old person, saying querulously, “Flower? What flower?” (2.1.254). Her appearance is also completely androgynous, neither definitively male nor female. She wears white clown makeup on her face and a gray suit with suspenders over a white button-down shirt underneath. Her short, spiky, bright red hair perhaps alludes to how Puck can impersonate “a fire” when necessary (3.1.91). Hunter’s voice is a throaty rasp, again occupying a nebulous region between masculine and feminine. Puck’s hybridity further suggests the character’s dual nature as both good and bad and as inhabiting both the dreaming and waking worlds. The ambiguous characterization of the fairies, and Puck in particular, is embedded in the text. Shakespeare makes it clear that his fairies are different from the “damned spirits” that can only come out at night; Oberon tells Puck that “we are spirits of another sort” (3.2.382, 388). This characterization indicates that his fairies are primarily benevolent rather than evil. Yet Puck also notes that he is “feared in field and town” (3.2.398), and toward the end of the play revels in the fact that “we fairies . . . run / . . . From the presence of the sun, / Following darkness like a dream” (5.1.361–362, 364). It is also evident that Puck enjoys causing mischief and interfering with the mortals’ lives: “those things do best please me / That befall prepost’rously” (3.2.120–121). Hunter emphasizes both aspects of Puck’s nature in her performance. After transforming Bottom into an ass, Puck takes great delight in confusing and tormenting the rest of the mechanicals with nightmarish visions. Taymor uses a series of low-angle close-ups on Puck during this sequence, captured through handheld camera work, revealing the manic glee on her face and her dominance over the mortal characters. In her final speech, however, addressed to the audience, Puck appears somewhat humbled. Alone in a single spotlight, Hunter asks for the spectators’ applause and indulgence deferentially, finally taking off her bowler hat to credit their role in creating

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the spectacle they have witnessed. This speech dispenses with stage artifice to openly acknowledge that they have been watching a play, but also creates an analogy between the theatrical event and a dream: “Think . . . / That you have but slumbered here / While these visions did appear” (5.1.403–404). Taymor shows that Puck is the only character who can inhabit both the dreaming and waking worlds since she is the one who begins and ends the film. The opening image is a small white, childlike bed. Puck walks over to it, looks out at the audience, takes off her hat, lies down, and falls asleep, suggesting that the ensuing action is her dream. Although the bed is absent for her final speech, she nonetheless returns to the motif of dreaming to expand this idea, raising the possibility that “it is the audience’s [dream]: yours and mine.”35 The question of who is having the dream that makes up the substance of Taymor’s film and Shakespeare’s play is placed alongside a pertinent question raised by Demetrius about the very nature of sleeping and waking: “Are you sure / That we are awake? It seems to me / That yet we sleep, we dream” (4.1.189–191). Taymor, like Shakespeare, prefers to leave the question ambiguous: the final image of her film is a low-angle shot of Puck from behind, her face obscured by the bright spotlight that illuminates her. We see the shock of her bright red hair as she removes her hat and gestures expansively at the unseen audience. We hear the audience applaud as the shot fades to black. This ending re-invokes Taymor’s juxtaposition of theatrical and filmic techniques, providing us with a camera angle that would be impossible to achieve when sitting in the theater watching the production but also ensuring that the final image (the spotlight) and the final sound (the applause) are associated indelibly with the theater. Through the new medium of this unique film, Taymor revels in the hybridity that characterizes much of her work. She also uses the film as an opportunity to engage in a self-reflexive contemplation of her career. The use of puppets, masks, and prosthetics alludes to her previous theatrical productions of Shakespeare, as well as her career-defining blockbuster The Lion King. The use of children as Rude Elementals, playing everything from fairies to animals to wedding guests, references her privileging of the child’s perspective in Titus, as does her exploration of the play’s conflicted uses of both light and dark elements. Finally, her casting of Hunter as Puck recalls the cross-gender casting of Mirren as Prospera but also extends the production’s hybridity. Hunter’s Puck takes joy in embodying contradictions between male and female, old and young, good and evil. Her appearance as Philostrate, the Master of the Revels who orchestrates the final spectacle of the mechanicals’ play, aligns her irresistibly with the director. Taymor’s vision is—like Hermia’s—delightfully multifaceted, at once theatrical and cinematic, looking forward and backward, embracing the light while not quite turning off the dark.

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NOTES 1. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 4.1.186–187. All quotations from the play are from the New Cambridge Shakespeare edition and are hereafter cited in the text. 2. Stephen Mead, “Theater as Vision in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Renascence 74, no. 1 (2022): 25. 3. Douglas Lanier, “Julie Taymor,” in The Routledge Companion to Directors’ Shakespeare, ed. John Russell Brown (London: Routledge, 2008), 471. 4. Taymor’s 1994 production of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus for TFANA provided the basis of her 1999 film version. Numerous critics have discussed the relationship between the stage and film versions. David McCandless’ essay, for example, provides a close reading of how the stage and film productions compare in their depictions of revenge and violence, arguing that the stage production “succeeds to a far greater degree in staging trauma and deconstructing violence” (“A Tale of Two Tituses,” 489). There is a less direct connection, however, between her 2010 Tempest and the version she directed for TFANA in 1986. Kade Ivy argues that The Tempest film is “more purely cinematic. With the specificity of on-location shooting, combined with its bountiful visual effects .  .  . [it is] the most conventionally movie-like of Taymor’s three Shakespeare films” (“Tracing Julie Taymor’s ‘Rough Magic’,” 122). 5. Kade Ivy, “Tracing Julie Taymor’s ‘Rough Magic’ in Her Three Screen Shakespeares,” Shakespeare Bulletin 40, no. 1 (2022): 131. 6. “Julie Taymor on A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” TIFF Originals, September 15, 2014, video, https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=E3bGaAbGA0U. Accessed on Dec. 28, 2022. 7. Pascale Aebischer and Suzanne Greenhalgh, “Introduction,” Shakespeare and the “Live” Theatre Broadcast Experience (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 5–6. 8. Sami Emory, “Behind-the-Scenes: Julie Taymor Adapts ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’” Vice, June 23, 2015, https://www​.vice​.com​/en​/article​/pgqzez​/behind​-the​ -scenes​-julie​-taymor​-adapts​-a​-midsummer​-nights​-dream. Accessed on Dec. 29, 2022. 9. Erin Sullivan, “The Forms of Things Unknown: Shakespeare and the Rise of the Live Broadcast,” Shakespeare Bulletin 35, no. 4 (2017): 631–32. 10. Ivy, “Tracing Julie Taymor’s ‘Rough Magic’,” 130. The appendix of Shakespeare and the “Live” Theatre Broadcast Experience erroneously lists Rodrigo Prieto as the director of the film version of Taymor’s Dream. Ivy is correct; Taymor is the director, while Prieto served as her director of photography. 11. Taymor, quoted in Emory, “Behind-the-Scenes.” 12. Geoffrey O’Brien, “Shakespeare’s Unfilmable Dream,” New York Review of Books, June 25, 2015, https://www​.nybooks​.com​/online​/2015​/06​/25​/shakespeare​ -taymor​-unfilmable​-dream/. 13. Taymor, quoted in Emory, “Behind-the-Scenes.” 14. Rebecca Gross, “Julie Taymor,” American Artscape Magazine 4, 2011, https:// www​.arts​.gov​/stories​/magazine​/2011​/4​/what​-innovation​/julie​-taymor. Accessed on Dec. 20, 2022.

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15. Lanier, “Julie Taymor,” 458. 16. This Broadway World video shows actor Ray Mercer getting into the complex giraffe costume for The Lion King, which is fourteen feet tall when assembled and incorporates a giraffe head that balances on top of Mercer’s head, stilts for his feet, and poles to create the front legs: https://www​ .broadwayworld​ .com​ /videoplay​/VIDEO​-See​-How​-THE​-LION​-KINGs​-Giraffe​-Is​-Brought​-To​-Life​-20200116. Accessed on Dec. 30, 2022. Taymor won a Tony Award for Best Costume Design for the production. 17. Blumenthal and Taymor’s collection Playing with Fire describes this in some detail in their section on the TFANA Tempest, pp. 114–25. 18. Taymor, quoted in Emory, “Behind-the-Scenes.” 19. Anne Nicholson Weber, Upstaged: Making Theatre in the Media Age (London: Routledge, 2006), 44. 20. Niamh J. O’Leary, “Julie Taymor,” Shakespeare Bulletin 34, no. 3 (2016): 507. 21. Taymor’s mixed-race cast (which also includes Black actors Okpokwasili and Masden and Latino actor Infante, as well as a variety of ethnicities among the Rude Elementals) is typical of productions of the play since the 1960s, as R.A. Foakes has noted, p. 41. Steve Mentz writes in his review of the stage production that despite the multi-ethnic casting, Taymor overall “seemed strangely uninterested in the social meanings of skin color” (309). 22. Lanier, “Julie Taymor,” 458. 23. Although Taymor’s Hippolyta is chilly toward Theseus in Act 1, Scene 1, their relationship is not as violent and oppressive as in some more recent depictions. In David Kerr’s 2016 BBC television film, for instance, fascist dictator Theseus puts Hippolyta in a straitjacket, while in Nicholas Hytner’s 2019 Bridge Theatre production, Hippolyta was imprisoned in a transparent box. 24. O’Brien, “Shakespeare’s Unfilmable Dream.” 25. Demetrius earlier threatens Helena with rape, noting the connection between the nighttime “wilderness” setting and sexual violence: “You do impeach your modesty too much, / To leave the city and commit yourself / Into the hands of one that loves you not; / To trust the opportunity of night, / And the ill counsel of a desert place, / With the rich worth of your virginity” (2.1.214–219). 26. Taymor describes the character arc of Young Lucius over the course of her film as “the journey of the young boy from childhood innocence to passive witness and finally to knowledge, wisdom, compassion and choice” (“Director’s Notes,” 185). 27. Kim Fedderson and J. Michael Richardson, “Liberty’s Taken, or How ‘captive women may be cleansed and used’: Julie Taymor’s Titus and 9/11,” in Apocalyptic Shakespeare: Essays on Visions of Chaos and Revelation in Recent Film Adaptations, eds. Melissa Croteau and Carolyn Jess-Cook (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), 71. McCandless’ essay similarly dismisses the ending of Titus as “a wish-fulfillment fantasy, a denouement uncomfortably comparable to a Hollywood Happy Ending” (“A Tale of Two Tituses,” 510). 28. Susan Dominus, “After the Dark, the Dream,” The New York Times, October 17, 2013, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2013​/10​/20​/theater​/after​-the​-dark​-the​-dream​ .html. Accessed on Dec. 30, 2022.

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29. Steve Mentz, “Review of A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Shakespeare Bulletin 32, no. 2 (2014): 310. 30. This is Philippa Sheppard’s description of Young Lucius at the beginning of Titus, who is “a boy with a paper bag for a head;” Devouring Time: Nostalgia in Contemporary Shakespearean Screen Adaptations (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017), 204. I see a deliberate echo of her earlier film in Taymor’s use of the dog mask here. 31. Puck is technically male, although female actors sometimes play the role. Gary Jay Williams notes that casting “an adult woman as Puck was not uncommon in the nineteenth century”; Our Moonlight Revels: A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Theater (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997), 299, although it has become less common in twentieth- and twenty-first century productions. 32. Judith Buchanan, “Not Sycorax,” in Women Making Shakespeare: Text, Reception, Performance, eds. Gordon McMullan, Lena Cowan Orlin and Virginia Mason Vaughan (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 342. Critical responses to Taymor’s casting of Mirren as Prospera were mixed as far as how it affected the gender dynamics of the play. While Virginia Mason Vaughan finds that “Taymor’s Tempest offers a feminist critique of patriarchal power,” Magdalena Cieslak argues that Prospera “ends up replicating the patterns of male dominance” and is ultimately “trapped in the limitations imposed by men on women.” See Virginia Mason Vaughan, “‘Miranda, where’s your mother?’: Female Prosperos and What They Tell Us,” in Women Making Shakespeare: Text, Reception, Performance, eds. Gordon McMullan, Lena Cowan Orlin and Virginia Mason Vaughan, 347–56 (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 350; and Magdalena Cieslak, Screening Gender in Shakespeare’s Comedies: Film and Television Adaptations in the Twenty-First Century (Lanham: Lexington, 2019), 125–26. 33. See, for example, my 2009 book Cross-Gender Shakespeare and English National Identity, which provides extended analyses of her 1997 performance as King Lear (which she re-created at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in the summer of 2022) and her 2003 performance as Richard III. Hunter has also played Timon of Athens in Simon Godwin’s 2018 Royal Shakespeare Company production, and most recently all three Witches as aged, crow-like figures in Joel Coen’s 2021 film The Tragedy of Macbeth. 34. O’Brien, “Shakespeare’s Unfilmable Dream.” 35. Tom Ue, “Review of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Shakespeare 13, no. 1 (2017): 99.

REFERENCES Aebischer, Pascale and Suzanne Greenhalgh. “Introduction.” In Shakespeare and the “Live” Theatre Broadcast Experience, edited by Pascale Aebischer, Suzanne Greenhalgh and Laurie E. Osborne, 1–16. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Directed by Julie Taymor. New York: BOND/360, 2014. Streaming video.

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Blumenthal, Judith and Julie Taymor. Julie Taymor: Playing with Fire. New York: Abrams, 1999. Buchanan, Judith. “Not Sycorax.” In Women Making Shakespeare: Text, Reception, Performance, edited by Gordon McMullan, Lena Cowan Orlin and Virginia Mason Vaughan, 335–46. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Cieslak, Magdalena. Screening Gender in Shakespeare’s Comedies: Film and Television Adaptations in the Twenty-First Century. Lanham: Lexington, 2019. Dominus, Susan. “After the Dark, the Dream.” The New York Times, October 17, 2013, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2013​/10​/20​/theater​/after​-the​-dark​-the​-dream​ .html. Emory, Sami. “Behind-the-Scenes: Julie Taymor Adapts ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’” Vice, June 23, 2015, https://www​.vice​.com​/en​/article​/pgqzez​/behind​-the​ -scenes​-julie​-taymor​-adapts​-a​-midsummer​-nights​-dream. Fedderson, Kim and J. Michael Richardson. “Liberty’s Taken, or How ‘captive women may be cleansed and used’: Julie Taymor’s Titus and 9/11.” In Apocalyptic Shakespeare: Essays on Visions of Chaos and Revelation in Recent Film Adaptations, edited by Melissa Croteau and Carolyn Jess-Cook, 70–89. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009. Foakes, R.A. “Introduction.” In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, edited by R.A. Foakes, 1–48. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Gross, Rebecca. “Julie Taymor.” American Artscape Magazine 4 (2011), https://www​ .arts​.gov​/stories​/magazine​/2011​/4​/what​-innovation​/julie​-taymor. Ivy, Kade. “Tracing Julie Taymor’s ‘Rough Magic’ in Her Three Screen Shakespeares.” Shakespeare Bulletin 40, no. 1 (2022): 115–38. “Julie Taymor on A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” TIFF Originals. September 15, 2014. Video, https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=E3bGaAbGA0U. Klett, Elizabeth. Cross-Gender Shakespeare and English National Identity: Wearing the Codpiece. New York: Palgrave, 2009. Lanier, Douglas. “Julie Taymor.” In The Routledge Companion to Directors’ Shakespeare, edited by John Russell Brown, 773–800. London: Routledge, 2008. McCandless, David. “A Tale of Two Tituses: Julie Taymor’s Vision on Stage and Screen.” Shakespeare Quarterly 53, no. 4 (2002): 487–511. Mead, Stephen. “Theater as Vision in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Renascence 74, no. 1 (2022): 23–44. Mentz, Steve. “Review of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Shakespeare Bulletin 32, no. 2 (2014): 307–10. O’Brien, Geoffrey. “Shakespeare’s Unfilmable Dream.” New York Review of Books, June 25, 2015, https://www​.nybooks​.com​/online​/2015​/06​/25​/shakespeare​-taymor​ -unfilmable​-dream/. O’Leary, Niamh J. “Julie Taymor.” Shakespeare Bulletin 34, no. 3 (2016): 504–09. “See How THE LION KING’s Giraffe is Brought to Life.” Broadway World. January 16, 2020 Video, https://www​.broadwayworld​.com​/videoplay​/VIDEO​-See​-How​ -THE​-LION​-KINGs​-Giraffe​-Is​-Brought​-To​-Life​-20200116. Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, edited by R.A. Foakes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

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Sheppard, Philippa. Devouring Time: Nostalgia in Contemporary Shakespearean Screen Adaptations. Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017. Sullivan, Erin. “The Forms of Things Unknown: Shakespeare and the Rise of the Live Broadcast.” Shakespeare Bulletin 35, no. 4 (2017): 627–62. Taymor, Julie. “Director’s Notes.” In Titus: The Illustrated Screenplay, 174–85. New York: Newmarket Press, 2000. Ue, Tom. “Review of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Shakespeare 13, no. 1 (2017): 99–100. Vaughan, Virginia Mason. “‘Miranda, where’s your mother?’: Female Prosperos and What They Tell Us.” In Women Making Shakespeare: Text, Reception, Performance, edited by Gordon McMullan, Lena Cowan Orlin and Virginia Mason Vaughan, 347–56. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Weber, Anne Nicholson. Upstaged: Making Theatre in the Media Age. London: Routledge, 2006. Williams, Gary Jay. Our Moonlight Revels: A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Theater. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997.

Chapter 13

Compulsive Symbolizations Scenes of Power, Figuration, and Ob/Scenity in Titus Louis Breitsohl

BEYOND PASTICHE AND CLICHÉ Shortly after 9/11, American journalist Bill Moyers asked Broadway and film director Julie Taymor whether her incredible imagination could have foreseen the horrors of the terrorist attacks. Taymor answers by stressing that she had seen that kind of image before, thereby classifying the depicted violence in a mediated culture of violence-as-spectacle or violence-as-entertainment.1 Furthermore, her answer points to a certain quality of the produced and highly mediated images of the crashing, burning, and collapsing twin towers that exposed them as a staged event and seduced composer Karlheinz Stockhausen to regard them as “the greatest work of art, that has ever existed in the cosmos.”2 It is no coincidence that Taymor is being interviewed in this context, for her film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus situates itself in the same ambivalent relationship to violence and theatricality. Taymor’s Titus (1999) is the culmination point of three millennium trends in US media culture: an advancing appropriation of Shakespeare and other classical authors by the mainstream, mass culture, and culture industry,3 a rare and short moment in time when big corporates like Disney pushed cooperations with artists like Taymor who have an artistic background in the Avantgarde,4 and a time where media representations of violence and actual crimes repeatedly intersected, and the public began to understand the performativity and productivity of media representations of violence.5 The question of what to expect from Taymor’s film and her statements— art or commerce, cliché, or vision—is not always easy to answer; often, both extremes are only nuances apart from each other. Taking a closer look at the extreme violence inherent in her adaptation of Shakespeare’s most brutal 233

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play, Taymor referred to several genocides and atrocities, including the Holocaust, claiming the “over the top” quality of the violence would match in each event.6 It is absurd to isolate the events from their cultural and historical background to subsume them under the label “2000 years of violence”7 or on a shared raking list of over-the-top horror. Furthermore, it is highly problematic to conclude that Titus’s murder of Lavinia is comparable to honor killings in Bosnia,8 relegating the Muslim Bosnians to a period of 2000 years before the modern time of Western “now”; feminism and racist-eurocentric time constructions merge here. These claims, however, are distinct from arguments that suggest shared genealogies of violence, such as the continuous retrojection of European kingdoms like The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation or states like Mussolini’s fascist Italia onto the specter of ancient Rome. Or a theoretical thinking that explores the use of cultural techniques to present and stage violence in a way that the symbolic, unconscious, and theatrical dimensions become inseparable from the quality of violence itself as a means to evoke power and authority. These latter arguments are implicit in Taymor’s visionary and groundbreaking aesthetics.9 This chapter argues that the filmmaker’s adaptation of Titus Andronicus stresses a certain tendency to symbolize violence that is already at the core of Shakespeare’s play and develops its own political meta-reflection on the theatrical nature of violence. In this context, symbolization means a depthpsychological condensation of an unconscious field of latent meanings and relations that form a scenic assemblage directed at a witnessing subject. Violence is symbolized, staged, and framed in scenes; the success of counterviolence persists mainly in the appropriation of the unconscious material of the scene. Taymor asserts a politic of difference in this meta-reflection, which rewrites the partly sexist and racist coloring of characters, such as Aaron and Tamora, to portray them embedded in an all-encompassing nihilistic and Machiavellian struggle for power while asking what else there is to see in the dawn of possibility.

A THEATER OF CRUELTY From the investiture of high clerical and aristocratic leaders in selected cloth and regalia of power, the performative self-creation of diagnosed identities (like king, pope, etc.) in ceremonial speech acts, to the projection of a portrait of freshly selected US president Donald Trump on the veneer of the Empire State Building, theatricality has been at the core of the performative constructions of power and authority for centuries. The ostentatious exhibition of authority as a form of power practice finds its culmination point in the ritualized forms of public spectacle circling around the superior’s decision of

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who has the right to live and who has to die, as Michel Foucault argues.10 It is no coincidence the Colosseum—or the original “theatre of violence [. . . and] cruelty,” as Taymor puts it11—is the central metaphorical locus of the director’s adaptation. Used as a stage for fights between convicts, gladiators, and wild animals alike, it is one of the most well-known examples of an institutionalized use of violence-as-entertainment situated in a complex architecture that arranges gazes and visibilities in an ecology of power. Taymor’s film starts with a close-up of the passively fixedly looking eyes lurking from beneath a cut-out paper bag.12 Accompanied by a flickering lightning design and a soundstage of electric noises that evoke video or arcade games, the camera tracks backward. The next shots establish the context of the scene: a young kid is having lunch alone at a richly but unhealthy set table in a ’50s-style kitchen. Ketchup becomes blood, powdered sugar, a weapon in chemical warfare. While eating, he plays war with his robotic toy soldiers, tanks and helicopters that uncannily move under their automatic animation. The lunch table becomes a place of unhealthy consumption, not only of junk food but also of an unhealthy amount of violence—violence, the film seems to imply, that stems from a neglect of parents’ responsibilities and supervision duties. While the ’50s-style kitchen and the flickering lightning hint at the time of the medial implantation of television in the middle-class homes of the Western world, robotic toys, junk food, and the absence of a parental figure evoke a more recent time. It is not far-fetched to remind of the fundamental impact Martha Rosler’s photo collages ‘House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home’(1967–1972; 2004–2008) had, in which she layered footage of the Vietnam War with pictures from living magazine—pointing to the radical compatibility of both spheres and exposing the private family home as the political, indoctrinate, and violent space it always has been. But the childish imagination carries the kid away: the camera work becomes handheld and shaky; the walls start to tremble; sirens and explosions enter the scene, and with them, fear and trauma. The repression of the bottom side of violence is only temporary. Taken by a heralded figure, the kid enters the Colosseum and crosses the borders of reality and fiction, a timespan of 2000 years, the distance between the USA and the Roman Empire, and the borders of subjectivity for he has become the grandchild of Titus, Young Lucius. The story of the film begins. Appearing not only at the beginning but also at the end, the Colosseum frames the narrative entry and exit of the story like the covers of a book. After Lucius puts an end to the bloody dinner party by killing Saturninus with a spoon, the scene splits and doubles itself. Using the cinematic device of bullet time, the action is frozen, and the camera rotates around the scene. Lucius and the kid become animated and released from the freezing just so the Young Lucius can witness how his father spits on the dead body of Saturninus and

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shoots a bullet in the body. Starting as a close-up of Titus’s dead body on the dinner table, the camera zooms back to an extreme close-up of the scene. The camera view is situated in a high row of an empty amphitheater; the depicted scene is reinscribed as a re-enactment of the event.13 The execution of Saturninus might suggest that the circle of violence has now finally been broken, and Rome has found a capable leader again. However, the restaging of the scene as a theatrical performance embeds the event in the realm of national storytelling and a self-mythological, auto-fictional practice of proving the justness of Lucian’s sovereignty and natural or predestined authority. The circle of violence continues with another leading head; the Colosseum finds its audience, and the theatrical performance glides into political propaganda, including the public execution and symbolic desecration of the former enemies of white, patriarchal, and fascist Rome: Tamora, the former woman on top, and Aaron, a black man who did not know his place.

STAGING VIOLENCE: UNCONSCIOUS SCENES AS POWER ECOLOGIES OF IN/VISIBILITY Besides the theatrical violence embedded in the tradition of power demonstration and performative constructions of authority, Titus portrays a different kind of violence that is much harder to read and comprehend and uncannier in its effects. The mysterious power originating from the visual presentation of this violence follows a different logic than mere idealization or performative construction of something that does not exist as-it-is but represents more an insignia given by an installed symbolic order (to put it in Lacanian terms). Rather, Taymor’s aesthetics draw its powers from the unconscious and the complex interplay of visibility and invisibility, exhibition and concealment. Freud conceptualized our mind in his first topic model as a psychic apparatus consisting of multiple systems with different functions and governing principles that are strictly separated but in continuous communication. It is important to note that these psychic loci were not thought of as anatomical or physical brain areas but more regions of the psychic realm.14 Contemplating the ways in which our mind manages to inscribe memory traces of events while being constantly able to perceive and record new traces, Freud recognizes that our psyche accomplishes what no other inscription system like paper or chalkboards could. The only medial exception that parallels this benefit is a freshly developed writing tablet called the “Wunderblock.” Analyzing the technical construction of the device, he concludes that the possibility of inscription and the simultaneous endurance of these inscriptions can only be archived through the separation of two different systems divided by a protective shield. He concludes:

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Nevertheless, it doesn’t seem too daring to me now, to equate the cover sheet made of celluloid and wax paper with the system W-Bw and its stimulus protection, the wax tablet with the unconscious behind it, the writing becoming visible and its disappearance with the illumination and disappearance of consciousness in perception.15

The division into different systems is necessary because both areas have different functions that require different governing principles of work. The unconscious system is deeply entwined with the primary process, which distinguishes itself by the high mobility of the cathexis energies that are influenced by the operating psychic drives. The drives attach their energies to psychic representations that orient them in the direction of a potential discharge of these energies in accordance with the pleasure principle and wish fulfillment. They base their attachments on memory traces that are inscribed in the unconscious realm and produce an instinctual representative of the drive that consists of an ideational representative and an affective representative that carries the sticky energy of the drive.16 Because of the high mobility of the cathexis energies, attachments and detachments are easily accomplished, causing the well-known expressions of the unconscious: displacement, in which the libidinal energies from one representation are transferred to another; and condensation, in which one representation signifies by substitution a whole network of different meanings and contexts through memory and associative connection—one could argue a scene. In the primary process of the unconscious, there is no negation, coordination, doubt, security, or time, for all those elements are only part of the secondary process that negotiates the relationship between the preconscious and conscious realm.17 In the secondary process, energies are more bound, fixed, and less mobile. There is consciousness, a perception of time and knowledge about the requirements of reality, while the processes are structured by the signification of logic and language. The representations of the primary processes are put in relation to each other by the secondary process, resulting in a coordination and active meaning construction that embeds the former traces of memory in scripts of narrativization and symbolization and, as a result, also temporalizes the events and the ego.18 Pursuing the question of how to explain the precarious status of a memory or an idea that becomes conscious and its onto-epistemological implications for the understanding of the psychic apparatus, Freud argues against a topical or functional understanding and explains: Both are neither different inscriptions of the same content in different psychic locations nor different functional cathexis states at the same place, as we have stated before. Rather the conscious representation encompasses the thing representation and the corresponding word representation, while the unconscious

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only consists of the thing representation alone. The System Ubw contains the thing representations of the objects; the system Vbw emerges through the overcharging of the thing representations by connecting them with the corresponding word representations.19

While the thing representation—a constantly reworked and reactualized distillate of inscribed memory traces—is associated with a mental image and, therefore, with visuality, the word representation is more closely associated with sound, language, and notational iconicity. This division follows the principles of the primary and secondary processes. If a drive representant, an image, or a wish that follows the pleasure principle gets in conflict with the requirements of the outer world or the reality principle, the former lust is threatened to turn into negative and unpleasant affects. It is likely that the primal impulse is going to be the object of a kind of defense or repression. Repression, Freud argues, works most of the time by pushing the word representation back and thereby withdrawing it from the conscious.20 Because Freud thinks of the psychic apparatus as an economic system in which the libidinal drive energy has to be discharged, in conclusion, the effect results in: [The] effects of repression . . . is . . . that the drive representation grows more undisturbed and powerful when it is withdrawn from conscious influence by repression. It then proliferates in the dark, so to speak, and finds extreme forms of expression, which . . . not only have to appear strange to the conscious, but also frighten it by pretending to have an extraordinary and dangerous drive strength. This deceptive drive strength is the result of an uninhibited development in the imagination and the damming up as a result of failed satisfaction.21

In this understanding, the unconscious harbors enormous quantities of drive energies that form a continuous pressure against the conscious system and pose the need for an outbalancing by an ongoing exertion of counterforces. As a libidinal economic compromise, the unconscious will try to discharge drive energies from the primary processes by transferring them to other ideational representations by the known workings of displacement, inversion, or condensation. In these disfigured forms, they will no longer be recognizable for the conscious ego and the wishes, impulses, or fixations they pose remain powerful but hidden and obscured. Subsuming the Freudian concept of symbolization, Jean Laplanche argues that the field of symbolization is narrowly defined and only consists of bodies, relatives, birth, death, nudity, and sexuality.22 However, in his own famous critique of the Freudian understanding of the unconscious, he develops a different model that allows an understanding of the unconscious production in a less universal and more historical, relational, and wider way. Laplanche argues that the unconscious is not a hereditary factor of human existence

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that is coincident with the Id, but states that the sexual, psychic apparatus is emerging from interpersonal relationships between the infant and adults.23 The adult–infant relationship triggers the adult’s unconsciousness, distorts the sent messages, and turns them into conscious–unconscious compromises, mysterious messages that carry a multitude of different latent meanings and cannot be fully deciphered. The Id develops out of these unconscious messages that inscribe themselves in the mind of the infant: they become implanted without being comprehended. It is no coincidence that Laplanche writes in this context that these inscriptions are “under the thin layer of consciousness or under the skin.”24 Looking back at the figure of the “Wunderblock”: the thin membrane of the wax layer may be seen as the censoring barrier that regulates the systems of the unconscious and preconscious–conscious. In this analogy, the untranslatable element slides under the membrane during inscription and persists as a foreign body, an inner alterity out of which the unconscious emerges. The foreign, untranslatable elements lead a shadow existence in latency until the day they become re-actualized. However, Laplanche argues that it is precisely the repressed unconscious material that forms the basis of the emerging drives. This point is also stressed by Teresa Di Lauretis, who investigates the political and queer-feminist potential of the drive in Laplanche’s reading. She writes: “[A]ll of sexuality—the drives in all its forms and vicissitudes—is the psychic inscription of what was first and foremost an implantation in the body, the overdetermined internalization of an external imposition by means of practices both discursive and material.”25 The Freudian drive has to be regarded as a border concept that maps the intersections of bodies, history, power relations, and the processes of psychic incorporation of life-worldly experiences. What predestines the drive to be regarded as inherently queer is his particular dynamic of attaching and detaching energies, fixating itself on certain images, scenes, and representations while also embodying the potential to abandon these fixations in the process of becoming. His impalpable and fluid nature fissures fixed dichotomies and layers different temporalities through latency, reactualizations, and the cyclicality of traumatic experiences. Di Lauretis writes: [The drive] takes me to a queer, non-binary place—a dis-place—in which categorial oppositions between the psychic and the biological, between the order of the signifier and the materiality of the body, or between the organic and the inorganic no longer hold. This is a figural space inhabited by Freud’s drive, a non-homogenous, heterotopic space of passage, of transit and transformation “between the mental and the somatic,” where between does not stand for the binary logic of exclusion but figures the movement of a passing.

In this reading, the field of meaning in unconscious forms of symbolization can be understood in a much wider sense than some alleged universal, anthropological truth because it is opened up by the messages of the other.

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Following the depth-psychological elaborations of Freud and Laplanche, how could a theory of the unconscious scene look like? As a preliminary definition, one can say that the scene is an aesthetic figuration that oscillates between exhibition and concealment and negotiates latent, hidden meanings through manifest, symbolic substitutes that follow the unconscious principles of distortion and displacement on a primary visual level. It is important to note that the scene only presents its meanings in an indirect, ambiguous, and transferred mode and gains through the mobilization of unconscious drive energies an enormous amount of affective power. The visibility of the scene has to be understood in this regard in a dialectical relation to something that, by definition, cannot be represented directly: the obscene—which, according to etymology, refers to the off/scene. Something in the image becomes too powerful and complex, causing withdrawal of some of its integral parts to the off of the scene in a deterritorializing movement. Moreover, the scene is directed at a witnessing subject; it poses a mysterious message from the other. Heavily overloaded with palimpsest-like overwriting, overlapping meanings, and associative nodal points, the scene has to be understood in a relational way that takes discourse as much into consideration as the aesthetic realm of presentation. THE SCENES OF SHAKESPEARE: PASTICHE, SYNECDOCHE, AND OFF SPACE Following Freud’s and Laplanche’s theories of the unconscious and the theory of the scene as an aesthetic figuration that negotiates visibility and invisibility, latent and manifest meanings, the violence in Taymor’s Titus becomes clearer. But how do the medial differences between the written word, theatrical setting, and film adaptation affect the construction of the scenes? There are a lot of similarities between the works of Shakespeare and Taymor. They both share a proximity to theater, a tendency to compulsive symbolization, especially in their treatments of Titus, gestures of self-reflexivity and—as Virginia Vaughan argues—a resembling pastiche: in Shakespeare’s case, an early-modern form, in Taymor’s case, a postmodern variant.26 Quoting Miola, Weber even evokes the hyperlink to suggest a comparable form of literacy in the Elizabethan audience: In Shakespeare’s Reading, Robert S. Miola compares the early modern passion for a variety of sources to the modern day practice of clicking on hyperlinks to move rapidly from one text to another: Elizabethan readers generally valued abundance, or copia, over accuracy, individual texts and pieces of texts over contexts, multiplicity over coherence. They read analogically, i.e., across texts as well as logically.27

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In a similar eclecticist manner to Taymor, the young playwright drew heavily from the works of Seneca, Livy, and Ovid, creating the characters and conflicts mainly by fusing the stories of several myths and underlying models. For example, Lavinia condenses elements of Daphne, Io, Lucrecia, and Philomela and also, in a strangely inverted form, the fate of Actaeon—elements that are directly alluded to in the play and, in the case of Lucrecia and Philomela, take on a fundamental role in the symbolization and interpretation of the violent scenes.28 It is precisely by recognizing that the violence done to her originated from the myth of Philomela that Lavinia is not only enabled to bear witness and reveal the names of her rapists but is also able to use the myth as an instruction on how to turn the symbolic violence around in her revenge. Weber makes an interesting argument about the ways Lavinia and Marcus differ in their appropriation of allusions: while Marcus uses the meaning allusion provides to shield himself against a “situation that threatens to annihilate life and discourse alike”29 (which is the function Lacan ascribes to the symbolic) but fails to “penetrate deeper than the surface or to extend outward beyond a single point of imitative similarity.”30 There is a remarkable confusion going on in the play, for language and meaning seem less to describe violence but inflict it; far from being a neutral medium of storytelling, allusions structure, frame, and anticipate the following events. Or as Weber puts it: Just as each reciprocal act of vengeance must pay back the former with an additional facet of hate, each reimagining of a source text carries with it an amplification of meaning that distorts and perverts the original message. Simply retelling an earlier story is insufficient: imitation must go along with exaggeration.31

This elaboration already indicates how language and reality lose their defined borders and intersect in an uncanny way; uncanny because it draws us to a place where reality seems to unravel: like Titus’s implied descent into madness, we enter a realm that is structured like a psychic reality with a ghostly life of complex temporalities. Albert Tricomi points out that Shakespeare’s figurative language circles around the head and the hand as frequently repeated metaphors in a way that these metaphors “take on a dramatic life” of their own, become “images in action whose significance we experience visually and not merely verbally, in abstraction. [. . . T]he most profound impulse in Titus is to make the word become flesh.”32 Hands and heads circulate through the scenes like spoken words. They become dismembered and fragmented like Alarbus’s sacrificed body that has lost its head and its limbs shortly before Marcus offers Titus the throne with the words “And help to set a head on headless Rome.” Titus offers the position as head of Rome to Saturninus, who will decapitate two of Titus’s sons.

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The immense uses of synecdoche and metonymy are structuring the circulation and exchange circles of words, body parts, and meaning: the promised return of Titus’s sons realizes itself in the arrival as their heads; the violence inflicted on the Andronici and Lavinia, in particular, represents the rape and defilement of the corrupted Rome that is reigned by the wrong head.33 Referencing the works of Lacan and Jacobson, film semiotic Christian Metz has pointed out that metaphor and metonymy can be compared to the unconscious mechanisms of displacement and condensation and that both principles are particularly prone to visual and filmic representations because both are governed by the same principle of visual presentability that channels the unconscious expression in dreams. But what is the underlying unconscious meaning of these scenes? The loss of heads and hands circles around the loss of agency, respectability, and masculine subjectivity. Violence inscribes itself in the bodies by making them disabled, forcing them to carry the signs of their social and corporeal humiliation in all visibility. This is deeply gendered and sexualized. While the loss of heads and hands implies the idea of mutilation and castration and, thereby, the loss of the phallus as a regalia of power, the wound is deeply feminized. David Frederic argues that femininity further becomes associated in the play with a tomb as a “womb, malignant and devouring” and the pit that trapped Titus’s sons and links these images of feminine abjection with discourses of Roman decadence and nonconforming appetites.34 While the masculine realm is associated with order, wholeness, and safety, the feminine represents an energy of excess that transgresses boundaries and threatens to lead to the annihilating chaos of death and decay. This implied monstrosity of the female is in line with patriarchal fears and constructions of womanhood that pose a heavy burden to inherit from a present-day perspective.35 There is also another scenic dimension in place in the case of the theatrical production: Tricomi points out that the violence is not enacted on stage but only suggested to take place off stage. In a media reflexive turn, the trap door of the Elizabethan stage is being used as the pit that swallows Titus’s sons, becoming both “symbol of the demonic power [. . . and] a theatrical embodiment of it [.  .  . :] by virtue of its visibility and concreteness as a device of theatre [. . . it becomes] a powerful and synthesizing poetic image of the horrible fecundity of evil.”36 Shifting between the evocation of violence in the off space and the self-referential resources of concealment and technical trickery, the censoring dimension of the stage proves to be productive: the technical, architectural, and dispositive limitations of the stage are at the same time repressive and performative. Their gesture of pointing to themselves and their own mediality invokes the very violence they conceal, opening the scene to unconscious overwritings, disfigurements and complex condensations of several interfering meanings. Negation works here in a way that makes the suggestions and mental images even more convincing.

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TAYMOR’S SCENES: IDEOGRAPHS, LAYERS, AND THE POSTMODERN UNCONSCIOUS Taymor’s approach to the scenes of violence is less defined by Sigmund Freud and the work of psychoanalysis than by the influential work and ideas of Herbert Blau and the Kraken theater group he established at Oberlin College in 1972.37 Due to its origin in the world of theater, the concept of the ideograph was primarily established as a technique for acting and the development of complex corporealities and gestures—as a way of “getting at psychology through physicality.”38 Garfinkle affirms: The ideograph [. . .] was an actor’s whole body gestus distilled to represent the essence of a character. In contrast to the Brechtian gestus with its formal economic historicism, the Blauian ideograph was based on the expressive gestural configuration of the body’s plasticity, as a figurative idea of the character’s essential experience.39

The ideograph represents a complex movement of oscillation between something that is at the same time easily understandable and concrete and incorporates the essence of a story in an abstract way. Taymor described the ideograph in an interview with Richard Schechner as an essence, an abstraction . . . boiling [an idea] right down to the most essential two, three brush strokes . . . familiar enough to an audience that they’ll believe it. It can operate in a naturalistic world, but heighten that naturalism to the point where it adds another layer.40

The intended effect is a method of finding and tracing a multiplicity of new meanings that add new layers to the performance that are allowed to contradict other meanings and subtexts in an approach that “resists predetermination and circumscription, and does not aspire to fantasies of definitive answers, totalization, or universality.”41 The method of the ideographs works in a similar fashion as Blau’s concept of “ghostings” that involve work[ing] our way through every facet and refraction of Shakespeare’s text, playing sequences over and over, so there [a]re simultaneously present multiple figurations, or ‘ghostings,’ not only of character—shadows, doubles, allusions, quotes . . . but of themes, images, phrases, even interpretations, of which in a passing moment there might be several going at once42

and produce a complex, ghostly temporality. The way meaning is produced in these approaches evokes some of the principles governing the unconscious: the missing of contradiction and negation in a field where meanings exist in juxtaposition, the condensation of a concept or idea in a nonlinguistic visual

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essence that is expressible and generates a powerful moment of presence, and the palimpsest-like layering of multiple inscriptions and re-actualizations. The concept of the ideograph becomes particularly evident in the staging of Lavinia’s rape, so this scene will be the focus of an exemplary, thorough analysis.43 An extreme wide shot of some burned-down woodlands bordering on a swamp creates the illusion of an establishing shot. Our viewing position is too distant to identify the action and the involved characters until the following medium shots and close-ups reveal the scene to us: Chiron and Demetrius are skipping and laughing around Lavinia standing defensively on a tree stump with branches replacing her cut-off hands.44 The exposure on a pedestal-like platform has a certain cruelty to it—because it puts the events in quotation marks by making the violence perceptible as a scene that is directed at a witnessing subject: Lavinia, Marcus, and, by extension, Titus. While a steady cam records the highly mobile movements of the brother and amplifies them through swish pans, Lavinia nearly stands still. She only moves her head, that is shown from an extreme low-angle close-up. In a following long shot, her portrayal as a back figure facilitates processes of identification for the spectators and conceals the extent of Lavinia’s mutilation that is only alluded to in her ripped lip. There is strange delay and discordance of the visual presentation of the act of violence and the verbal anticipation of Lavinia’s mutilations through the brothers’ continuous evocation in their derisions focusing on Lavinia’s loss of agency and her inability to call for help or hang herself. This disconnect between meaning that is produced through speech and meaning that follows visual-unconscious modes of meaning production recalls the distinction Freud made between primary and secondary processes. The iconographic shock we experience when we first see that Lavinia’s arms have been replaced by tree branches or the river of blood that runs from her mouth as she is trying to speak carries a different quality of affective involvement than the mere evocation by words. This effect is further amplified by the irresolvable contradictions embodied in the ideograph of Lavinia’s corporeality: there is a dissonance between Lavinia’s severe mutilations and her apparent cleanliness and physical integrity, which is stained in the following gesture of opening her mouth. Furthermore, Lavinia’s white dress, her stillness, and her beauty evoke reminiscences of an antique statue, while the branches in her arms cite the iconography and narrative surplus of the Daphne mythos, itself a figuration of rape. What is striking about Lavinia’s presentation is a certain sexualization of her defilement. The pale skin and her glowing red lips—both resulting from the rape—evoke, in combination with her black hair, the sexualized ideal of women Snow White represents. Lavinia even performs some swan-like ballet movements on the tree stump as Marcus approaches and observes her. In close-ups of her lying in Marcus’s arms, her nipples are revealed through the see-through material

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of her white dress, shortly after her silent scream is dubbed with a combination of snake-sizzling and spherical music that glides in the following score and creates the audiovisual association of a siren.45 Later, Lavinia will modulate this unconscious material in a Penny Arcade Nightmare—Taymor’s name for the short, highly symbolic scenes that are shaped by expressive CGI animations—that is narratively aligned with the re-experiencing of her rape during testimony. Her resistance against her perpetrators will persist in the ways she appropriates the unconscious material of the crime scene in her own vision of the event. The tree stump that served as an exposing pedestal becomes a Greek pillar; her white dress becomes a tutu that is blown up by the wind in a clear allusion to Marilyn Monroe’s most iconic star image. The stiff, splayed-out fingers of Demetrius’s hand that used to mock Lavinia’s replaced hands are reinscribed as a tiger’s paw. The branches of the trees that were placed in the wounds of her cut hands seam the background as black shadows. They are extended in the image of the wooden stick with which Lavinia is writing her testimony into the ground, as well as in the furrows she inscribes into the ground that visually resemble the branches. In the analogies with animals (Lavinia is presented as a dear, her rapists as tigers) that Taymor extracts from Shakespeare’s original play (that itself condenses the animal metaphors of several antique myths and stories), the characters become once again palimpsests of different meanings that are inscribed on them. This technique of layering and overscribing different meanings also expresses itself in the use of special effects in the Penny Arcade Nightmares: Kyle Cooper of the imaginary forces team of Titus explained in a video essay that the animations of the Penny Arcade Nightmares consist of multiple images that were shot individually in front of a blue-screen and later cut together in a layered montage.46 Since Lavinia’s act of witnessing is cross cut with a Penny Arcade Nightmare inspired by her rape, it was assumed that the images are simply “reflecting [… her] inner life and hallucinations”47 or as an expression of “posttraumatic visions.”48 However, these explanations tend to re-territorialize and re-subjectivize the unconscious scenes the Nightmares represent. The unconscious material at work, like the contemporary Marilyn Monroe reference, makes it clear that the Nightmares are not embedded in a subjectivity resident in Lavinia’s time; anachronistic allusions permeate the visions like the rest of the film. The constant transformations and renegotiations of Lavinia’s body boundaries suggest a more radical approach to the unconscious—like the one of Deleuze and Guattari that describe the unconscious as a merging of different flows of the world that introduce the potential of becoming different.49 Taymor’s definition of the Penny Arcade Nightmares proves to be much more nuanced and in line with Deleuze and Guattari’s radical understanding:

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[The Nightmares] portray the inner landscapes of the mind as affected by the external actions. These stylized, haiku-like images appear at various points throughout the film counterpoising the realistic events in a dreamlike, and mythic manner. They depict, in abstract collages, fragments of memory, the unfathomable layers of a violent event, the metamorphic flux of the human, animal, and the divine. By the last of these surreal sequences the line between illusion and substance becomes blurred. The nightmare takes over . . . madness becomes clarity and the unimaginable is realized.50

But what is the underlying meaning of the scene? The branch hands that desperately try to keep the dress from lifting, are a powerful example of an obscenity that can only appear through exhibiting concealment. As a classic example of a scene that negotiates the patriarchal fantasies of horrors of sexual difference and female “castration,” the directedness of the scene to Titus accounts for a metatheoretical potential embodied in the unconscious meaning production. The violence inflicted on Titus is primarily negotiated over the bodies of Lavinia (and to a different extent on his sons) and focuses on castration as a form of feminization and male domination over another in the political sphere. Marti writes: lternations of praise and blame in the representations of [.  .  . heads and hands] closely coalesce with the modulations of Titus’s identity as his masculinity or masculine attributes (reason, courage, honor, virtue, and virtus . . . ) are ruthlessly assaulted from all sides. The whole interest or purpose of anatomical blazons residing mainly in . . . the deconstruction of Titus’s praise and masculine gendering.51

It is important to note that castration only signifies the fantasy of losing the phallus and is not reduced to actual body organs or a fixed biological-essentialist sex identity. Since the phallus is a regalia of power instated by the symbolic order, its value is historic and contingent. Everything can serve as a phallus or can be symbolized in such a way: in Titus, the circulating heads and hands become signs of ever-circulating phalluses, while Lavinia is castrated by losing the societal fiction of virginity as an insignia that regulates her power and worth—a worth, that is, however, redistributed to the realm of men: her father and potential husband.52 Far from being reduced to some universal, anthropological symbols, the scene of Lavinia’s rape exposes the unconscious as interwoven by historicity and the addresses and demands of the others of society. THE DAWN OF HUMANKIND Most of the academic discussion around Titus circles around the question of how successful the film is in regard to its political representations of

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difference—mainly gender and race—and the idealized ending in which Young Lucius carries Aaron’s baby in a glaring sunset. It is apparent that all characters in the play—in particular, the most marginalized ones—strive for power and have a kind of nihilistic and Machiavellian attitude toward their ways of success. Vaughan writes: The horrific acts of violence in Shakespeare’s tragedy are performed not just by one warring nation against another, but also by black against white, white against black, men against women, women against men, and family against family. From any subject position in the play, one can find a bevy of “others”—outsiders from one’s own group who become objects of derision, hatred, vengeance, lust, violence and intrigue.53

Taymor treats the characters with sympathy and a nonjudgmental indifference, sometimes even expressing clear sympathies in the staging of the play and the characterization of the characters. For example, Taymor allows Tamora more eligibility and justification for her pain and revenge than Shakespeare does. Courtney Lehmann even argues that Tamora represents a figuration of the cyborg conceptualized in Donna Haraway’s new materialist thinking: a character that is not interested in fixed identities and innocence but embraces the disruption of certain orders and a constant entering into new alliances. Lehmann demonstrates that Taymor’s sympathies are way more with Tamora than with Lavinia, who represents her negative image.54 At the same time, this dynamic of playing off the female characters is not unproblematic, especially since they seem to reinforce a division between perverse sexual promiscuity and frigid virginity55—a fact that proves that there are certain differences brought into the film by the audiovisual inheritance of certain image traditions, genealogies, and discriminatory histories that make a representational critique indispensable. However, a representational critique is troubled by the entangled contamination of adaptation and source text from which most—but not all—problematic and successful aspects of Taymor’s adaptation derive. One aspect that was Taymor’s interpretative decision alone is the problematic representation of sexual nonconformities—as already implied in the analysis of the brothers in Lavinia’s rape scene. In particular, Saturninus is presented in a highly effeminate fashion: performing hysterical gestures and an effeminate corporality that is underlined by the creative decision to wear extravagant clothes and the expressive Cabaret makeup from his awardwinning Broadway performance. Suggesting that there is an association or analogy between the fascism and terror reign embodied in his second body as emperor and its alleged relation to homosexuality, perversion, and decadence in his private, sensuous body draws from a long film historical tradition.56 While the underlying message might be understood as a commentary saying that the only gender a patriarchal society really loves and desires is

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masculinity, Burt is absolutely right in asserting that these images originate first and foremost from a fascist film aesthetic—an aesthetic Taymor originally wanted to criticize but reinscribes.57 And because of the close connection between femininity and homosexuality-as-effemination, sexism also returns. Saturninus is depicted as a little kid who seems to disappear beside Tamora, who assumes a motherly relationship with him and not only takes over control of sexuality but also in governing the business, reigning, and decision-making. As a woman on top, she blends sexual and political fears of female domination and superiority while her motivations always derive from an emotional concernment with men. The characterization of the Black man Aaron and the centrality he plays in Shakespeare’s play must be regarded as an extreme advancement; even his roguishness can be read in the context of his outsider position and experiences of exclusion and racism. Like Tamora, Taymor portrays him with a certain sympathy, for he incorporates a certain Machiavellian will to power and is by far the most sophisticated and anticipatory character of the play. Taymor even situates Aaron’s actions in an interview in his life’s worldly experiences of discrimination and racism.58 In her adaptation, he is the only character who breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience, inaugurating us in his plot and creating a strange intimacy and complicity. However, as McCandless points out, Taymor’s staging of Aaron falls back on the combination of several stereotypes like “the supercool hipster [. . .], the sexual athlete [. . .], and the nihilistic gangster”59 while his original characterization allegedly stirs “fears of genocidal rage [. . . for] he presents the image of the seemingly assimilable (if marginally), highly intelligent black man whose secret ambition is to sleep with white women and destroy white men.”60 Taymor’s most apparent alteration of the original play is the aesthetic decision she derives from Jane Howell’s BBC adaptation (1985) to make Young Lucius a focal point of the play and center the events around him as a witnessing subject. Through this decision, the violent events become re-centered around a witnessing entity and the seen violence situated in an agent of perception—an agent that is also read along cultural constructions of childhood. At the same time, the child witness poses an ongoing self-reflexive commentary about our own act of watching, co-figuring our place as spectators in the scenes, and confronting us with our own look and the spectacle of violence-as-entertainment. McCandell reads Titus as an artifact of posttraumatic culture in which our relation to visual depictions of violence is defined by dissociation and numbness61 and argues that Taymor’s adaptation tries to release us from the trauma by a therapeutic reexperiencing of trauma in a safe environment.62 But maybe McCandell poses the wrong question here, and Taymor’s film deals not so much with questions of trauma management and release but interrogates the conditions of learning how to perceive and

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understand violence in relation to theatricality. The PTSD reading of McCandall proves to be completely inadequate because it attributes an explosive, berzerking quality to the depicted violence that completely misconceives the precise symbolic and unconscious structuration of the scenes and Taymor’s metatheoretical reflection on the theatralicity of violence. Like the figure of the child who is puzzled by the mysterious, unconscious messages of the other in Laplanche’s theory, Young Lucius (and by extension the spectators that are associated and sutured with him in the filmic text) becomes the focal point of the director’s hopes of a different future. Young Lucius is therefore depicted in an androgynous way, as a queer mixture of male and female characteristics.63 In his coming-of-age story, he will “differentiate himself from the patriarchal mold of his grandfather and father alike [… and develop] a very different form of agency, one that involves the deliberate choice and effort to move outside the frame of [. . . violence].”64 In this process, Young Lucius becomes first a healer for Lavinia and then a mother for the baby65 who carries the burden of difference: mixed-race, orphaned, and illegitimate. While the approach of coming to terms with the other in its alterity is commendable, one has to argue in accordance with poststructuralist thinking that there is no outside of the discourses and practices of othering: the idea of an embodiment of alterity erases the mark of foreignness through incorporation, while discourse produces new forms of exclusion, power, and violence that just displace the targets. While Young Lucius represents a figure of becoming, becoming-other, and becoming-the-other, the newborn child in the white boy’s hands can be read as the burden and responsibility of (black) alterity and vulnerability. Does Taymor’s aesthetic remain in the constraints of modernist humanism and its ideal of learning, education, and rationality that enabled, on the downside, the very histories of oppression like slavery that are criticized in the film? Placing the agency and responsibility for a shared future once again in the hands of an enlightened white person, while repeating the colonial gesture of symbolizing Black people as children, indicates that Taymor’s critique might not go to the roots of the violence she wants to criticize but instead reproduces. However, once again, Taymor’s images prove to be more complex and too ambiguous for a simple representational critique—a fact that becomes particularly visible in the final scene where Young Lucius is carrying the child out of the Colosseum into a wide sunset. While Burt criticized the ending as a “reinstallation at the end of the film of a Fascist romanticization of the child in a closing shot straight out of Stephen Spielberg’s E.T. (1982),”66 some critics have offered convincing counter-arguments that situate the blue-screen-created sunset in the realm of Avantgarde aesthetics and as a quotation of Taymor’s theater production of The Lion King.67 Anderson argues correctly that the “digital sunrise offers a glimpse of hope for the future that the scene’s formal and technical properties

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simultaneously negate. Through this act of negation, Taymor’s avant-garde aesthetic supersedes the film’s Disneyland fantasy of redemption.”68 What is troubling about this figuration is that the social construction of “children” is not contested. Far from being a natural or universal category, childhood and our images of children are discursively and affectively highly charged sets of meanings and fantasies. These fantasies are deeply commodified and embedded in a capitalist production sphere that regards the children’s needs and identities it actively produces as a potential market—in particular, Disney “which inserts its consumers into powerful narratives that continually redefine a child’s identity in order to create markets for its ever-expanding stable.”69 Furthermore, the final shot of Titus is so heavily charged with political meaning that it seamlessly fits into Lee Edelman’s famous queer theorist critique on children as embodiments of political futurity. If both left and right politics are fundamentally defined in relation to the child as the bearer of the heteronormative fantasy of reproductive futurity and the principal weapon for state governance, these images have a bitter aftertaste. Edelman writes: For politics, however radical the means by which specific constituencies attempt to produce a more desirable social order, remains, at its core, conservative insofar as it works to affirm a structure, to authenticate social order, which it then intends to transmit to the future in the form of its inner Child. The Child remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention.70

Taymor’s imagination, which produced complex scenes and assemblages of meaning in other contexts, seems to fail in the attempt to figure out the future in images other than the child. Expressing her desire for change and a different future, Taymor interprets the ending as the dawn of potentiality and contingency: [Young Lucius walks] into this bleak but open landscape that has water, which means there’s possibility for fruition, of cleansing, of forgiveness. It’s also a movement towards the sunrise, which is the next generation or the next one hundred years or the next millennium. But it freezes on that image, just that slice of the sun coming up. It’s not a full sunrise. It’s about possibility and hope but it’s not about solution.

Taymor’s position in her film aligns with the quest for an Elsewhere, a utopian place of pure potentiality, often referred to as a messianic promise of justice. This position is close to another significant queer theoretical approach of the last few decades, which juxtaposes the ideas of Edelman without contradiction. Muñoz elevates the search for hope and difference to the central purpose of queerness:

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Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we might feel it as the warm illumination of the horizon imbued with potentiality.  .  .  . Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility of another world.71

Ironically, both Muñoz and Taymor evoke the image of the horizon: a mere physical phenomenon with no fixed location or substance that contrasts the spectacularism of violence-as-entertainment with the sublime apparition of a horizon that transforms into a vast space through the spreading colors of a setting sun. Perhaps we must accept the contradictions between the visionary and reactionary elements in Julie Taymor’s film and continue to gaze at the horizon of possibilities.72 NOTES 1. See https://billmoyers​.com​/content​/moyers​-conversation​-bill​-t​-jones​-julie​-taymor/. Accessed on Dec. 1, 2022. 2. Loose translation by the author, original quote: “the greatest work of art, that has ever existed in the cosmos.” See Ute Vorkoeper: Nach dem Bildersturm (1009). https:// www​.zeit​.de​/feuilleton​/kunst​_naechste​_generation​/terror​_5. Accessed on Dec. 1, 2022. 3. Lanier describes the ongoing appropriation of Shakespeare in neoliberal consumption cultures that can be traced by artifacts like manuals teaching strategic and profitable conduct via Shakespeare. Douglas M. Lanier, “Shakescorp ‘Noir’,” Shakespeare Quarterly 53, no. 2 (2002): 157. 4. Thomas P Anderson, “‘Titus’, Broadway, and Disney’s Magic Capitalism; or, the Wonderful World of Julie Taymor,” College Literature 40, no. 1 (2013): 67. 5. Burt situates Taymor’s adaptation in the discussions around the effects of medial representations of violence and its effects on copycat murders (in the case of Stone’s Natural Born Killers) or school rampages. Richard Burt, “Shakespeare and the Holocaust: Julie Taymor’s Titus Is Beautiful, or Shakesploi Meets Camp,” Colby Quarterly 37, no.1 (2001): 88. 6. Maria De Luca et al., “Mayhem, Madness, Method: An Interview with Julie Taymor,” Cinéaste 25, no. 3 (2000): 28. 7. Thomas Cartelli, “Taymor’s ‘Titus’ in Time and Space: Surrogation and Interpolation,” Renaissance Drama 34 (2005): 163–84. 8. De Luca et al., “Mayhem, Madness, Method,” 28. 9. Taymor’s statements often imply indiscriminate modern assumptions about universality, cross-cultural applicability of historical events and master narratives which contradict her postmodern aesthetic consisting of stylistic eclecticism, selfreflexivity, and playful allusiveness. 10. Michel Foucault, “Recht über den Tod und Macht zum Leben,” Biopolitik—ein Reader, eds. Andreas Folkers and Thomas Lemke (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2014), 65–88.

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11. De Luca et al, “Mayhem, Madness, Method,” 29. 12. Titus, dir. Julie Taymor (USA, UK, Italy: Overseas Filmgroup, Clear Blue Sky Productions, 2000). 13. David McCandless reinforces the primary food-violence-consumption metaphor in his discussion of the theatrical staging of Titus that, however, has no visual corresponding scene in the actual film: “After Titus kills Lavinia, the guest/witnesses slowly raise their drinking glasses in an eerily synchronized, robotic toast, a gesture they repeat after Lucius’s shooting of Saturninus ends the hugger-mugger succession of killings. Explicitly identified as consumers, these soulless figures exhibit an automatonic, culturally conditioned, vacant aesthetic appreciation for violent spectacle.” David McCandless, “A Tale of Two Tituses: Julie Taymor’s Vision on Stage and Screen,” Shakespeare Quarterly 53, no. 4 (2002): 500. 14. Sigmund Freud, “Das Unbewusste,” Freuds Gesammelte Werke 1890-1939, Online Collection of Works, 11. 15. Sigmund Freud, “Der Wunderblock,” Freuds Gesammelte Werke 1890-1939, Online Collection of Works, 1068. Loose translation by the author; original quote: “Immerhin erscheint es mir jetzt nicht allzu gewagt, das aus Zelluloid und Wachspapier bestehende Deckblatt mit dem System W-Bw und seinem Reizschutz, die Wachstafel mit dem Unbewußten dahinter, das Sichtbarwerden der Schrift und ihr Verschwinden mit dem Aufleuchten und Vergehen des Bewußtseins bei der Wahrnehmung gleichzustellen.” 16. Sigmund Freud, “Die Verdrängung,” Freuds Gesammelte Werke 18901939, 955. 17. Freud, “Das Unbewusste,” 18. 18. Ibid., 19. 19. Ibid., 25. Loose translation by the author, original quote: “Die beiden sind nicht, wie wir gemeint haben, verschiedene Niederschriften desselben Inhaltes an verschiedenen psychischen Orten, auch nicht verschiedene funktionelle Besetzungszustände an demselben Orte, sondern die bewußte Vorstellung umfaßt die Sachvorstellung plus der zugehörigen Wortvorstellung, die unbewußte ist die Sachvorstellung allein. Das System Ubw enthält die Sachbesetzungen der Objekte, die ersten und eigentlichen Objektbesetzungen; das System Vbw entsteht, indem diese Sachvorstellung durch die Verknüpfung mit den ihr entsprechenden Wortvorstellungen überbesetzt wird.” 20. Ibid. An exception presents the case of schizophrenia in which word representation is not repressed but charged with the libidinal energies of the thing representation, causing an alteration of the use of language that now follows the principles of the primary process. Freud, “Das Unbewusste,” 26. 21. Freud, “Die Verdrängung,” 954. Loose translation by the author, original quote: “[. . . Die] Wirkungen der Verdrängung . . . ist . . . , daß die Triebrepräsentanz sich ungestörter und reichhaltiger entwickelt, wenn sie durch die Verdrängung dem bewußten Einfluß entzogen ist. Sie wuchert dann sozusagen im Dunkeln und findet extreme Ausdrucksformen, welche .  .  . ihm nicht nur fremd erscheinen müssen, sondern ihn auch durch die Vorspiegelung einer außerordentlichen und gefährlichen Triebstärke schrecken. Diese täuschende Triebstärke ist das Ergebnis einer

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ungehemmten Entfaltung in der Phantasie und der Aufstauung infolge versagter Befriedigung.” 22. Jean Laplanche and Jean Bertrant Pontalis, Das Vokabular der Psychoanalyse (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2019), 485. 23. Jean Laplanche, “Die rätselhaften Botschaften des Anderen und ihre Konsequenzen für den Begriff des ‘Unbewußten’ im Rahmen der Allgemeinen Verführungstheorie,” Psyche 58, nos. 9–10 (2004): 901. 24. Ibid., 902. Loose translation by the author, original quote: “‘unter der dünnen Schicht des Bewußtseins’ oder ‚unter der Haut’.” 25. Teresa De Lauretis, Freud’s Drive: Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2008), 57. 26. Virginia Mason Vaughan, “Looking at the ‘Other’ in Julie Taymor’s ‘Titus’,” Shakespeare Bulletin 21, no. 3 (2003): 71. 27. William W. Weber, “‘Worse Than Philomel’: Violence, Revenge, and MetaAllusion in ‘Titus Andronicus’,” Studies in Philology 112, no. 4 (2015): 705. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 709. 30. Ibid., 715. 31. Ibid., 717. 32. Albert H. Tricomi, “The Aesthetics of Mutilation in ‘Titus Andronicus’,” in Shakespeare and Language, ed. Catherine M.S. Alexander (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 230. 33. Ibid., 232. 34. David Frederick, “Titus Androgynous: Foul Mouth and Troubled Masculinity,” Arethusa 41, no. 1 (2008), 208. 35. For a precise feminist discussion of the way the play Titus participates in a patriarchal culture that nourishes the fears of femininity and constructs it as monstrous and abject; and an analysis of the ways Taymor resists and rewrites the conflicts of the play in a more feminist way, see Lisa Starks, “Cinema of Cruelty: Powers of Horror in Julie Taymor’s Titus,” in The Reel Shakespeare: Alternative Cinema and Theory, eds. Courtney Lehmann and Lisa Starks, 121–42 (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002). 36. Tricomi, “Aesthetics of Mutilation,” 236. 37. Anderson, “Magic Capitalism,” 82. 38. Bryan Reynolds et al. (eds.), “‘For such a sight will blind a father’s eye’: The Spectacle of Suffering in Taymor’s Titus,” in Performing Transversally Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 220. 39. David U. Garfinkle, “Julie Taymor, Sony’s Digital Dream Kids, and the Marxist Labor Theory of Value,” The European Legacy 20, no. 8 (2015): 833. 40. Kristijan Stakor, “Julie Taymor’s Ideographs in her Adaptations of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and The Tempest,” Anafora 4, no. 2 (2017): 337. 41. Reynolds, “For such a sight,” 207. 42. Ibid., 240. 43. Another exemplary scenic figuration is the inversion of Tamora’s mother role as an oral care-giver and loving mother who would defend her children with her life

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in the dinner table scene. By feeding the unaware mother her children, Titus queers traditional gender relations of nurturing and caring in a cruel fashion that blurrs body boundaries and the symbolic positions inside the family structures. The mother’s body, usually the place of birth and the creation of new life, becomes a place of death and annihilation. McCandless makes a similar point. McCandless, “A Tale of Two Tituses,” 491. 44. While a lot of articles situated the imagery of the film in the realm of Bachtin’s theory of carnival because the production depicts several grotesque bodies and stresses the orifices and transgressive fusions between animal, nature, and human (see, for example, Cecile Marti, “Julie Taymor’s ‘Titus’: Deciding Not to Cut,” Literature/Film Quarterly 32, no. 2 (2004); 122–25; or Vaughan, “Looking at the ‘Other’,” 73), these articles forget about the social function of the carnival. Bachtin argues that the carnival has a ritualized function for society and enables the existing power structures by offering a limited timeframe where the structures and positions are inverted. Michail Bachtin, Rabelais und seine Welt—Volkskultur und Gegenkultur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987). However, the chaos and transgression of the order in Titus are not of an unthreatening, ritualized kind. Therefore, the opening of the bodies is caused by the unconscious deterritorializing movements that transgress every fixed identity in the gliding of signifiers through condensation and displacement. 45. The men who rape Lavinia are portrayed on multiple levels as perverse homosexuals: Demetrius exposes his naked butt and moves in a feminine fashion, later his brother Chiron jumps on him from behind to evoke a notion of anal sexuality. The aggressive humor of mockery and cynicism is also an element associated with anality in psychoanalytic theory, that inscribes itself in the scenic figuration. 46. https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=oWj2tk3WmdI. Accessed on Dec. 1, 2022.) 47. Marti, “Deciding not to cut,” 124. 48. McCandless, “A Tale of Two Tituses,” 502. 49. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Ödipus—Kapitalismus und Schizophrenie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2019), 20. 50. De Luca et al, “Mayhem, Madness, Method,” 28. 51. Marti, “Deciding not to cut,” 124. 52. For a precise analysis that sutures the theories of Levi-Strauss, Freud, Lacan, and Marx to gain insight in the ways sex, gender, and sexuality are produced by the interweaving of kinship structures, the oedipal construction of sexual difference and desire, and the economic separation of work following the gender line, see the groundbreaking article: Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157–210. 53. Vaughan. “Looking at the ‘Other,” 74. 54. Courtney Lehmann, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Agenda: How Shakespeare and the Renaissance Are Taking the Rage out of Feminism,” Shakespeare Quarterly 53, no. 2 (2002): 260–79, 175–76. 55. Vaughn, “Looking at the ‘Other’,” 76. 56. Cartelli, “Taymor’s Titus in Time and Space,” 181.

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57. Burt, “Shakespeare and the Holocaust,” 97. 58. Quoted in McCandless, “A Tale of Two Tituses,” 494. 59. Ibid., 484. 60. Ibid., 494. 61. McCandless, “A Tale of Two Tituses,” 488. 62. Ibid., 510. 63. Vaughan, “Looking at the ‘Other’,” 78. 64. Cartelli, “Taymor’s Titus in Time and Space,” 177. 65. Reynolds, “For such a sight,” 236. 66. Burt, “Shakespeare and the Holocaust,”83. 67. Anderson, “Magical Capitalism,” 69 and 85. 68. Ibid., 85. 69. Ibid.,73. 70. Lee Edelman, No Future—Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004), 2f. 71. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia—The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 1. 72. I would like to thank Matthew Hodge for the opportunity to write this article and be part of this amazing book. Furthermore, I want to express my deep gratitude to Isabel Barth, who proofread the article.

REFERENCES Anderson, Thomas P. “‘Titus’, Broadway, and Disney’s Magic Capitalism; or, the Wonderful World of Julie Taymor.” College Literature 40, no. 1 (2013): 66–95. Bachtin, Michail. Rabelais und seine Welt—Volkskultur und Gegenkultur. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987. Burt, Richard. “Shakespeare and the Holocaust: Julie Taymor’s Titus is Beautiful, or Shakesploi Meets Camp.” Colby Quarterly 37, no. 1 (2001): 78–106. Cartelli, Thomas. “Taymor’s Titus in Time and Space: Surrogation and Interpolation.” Renaissance Drama 34 (2005): 163–84. De Lauretis, Teresa. Freud’s Drive: Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Anti-Ödipus—Kapitalismus und Schizophrenie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2019. De Luca, Maria et al. “Mayhem, Madness, Method: An Interview with Julie Taymor.” Cinéaste 25, no. 3 (2000): 28–31. Edelman, Lee. No Future—Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004. Foucault, Michel. “Recht über den Tod und Macht zum Leben.” Biopolitik—ein Reader, edited by Andreas Folkers and Thomas Lemke, 65–88. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2014. Frederick, David. “Titus Androgynous: Foul Mouth and Troubled Masculinity.” Arethusa 41, no 1 (2008): 205–33.

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Freud, Sigmund. “Das Unbewusste.” Freuds Gesammelte Werke 1890-1939, Online Collection of Works. https://freud​-online​.de/. ———. “Die Verdrängung.” Freuds Gesammelte Werke 1890-1939, Online Collection of Works. https://freud​-online​.de/. ———. “Der Wunderblock.” Freuds Gesammelte Werke 1890-1939, Online Collection of Works. https://freud​-online​.de/. Garfinkle, David U. “Julie Taymor, Sony’s Digital Dream Kids, and the Marxist Labor Theory of Value.” The European Legacy 20, no. 8 (2015): 827–43. Lanier, Douglas M. “Shakescorp ‘Noir’.” Shakespeare Quarterly 53, no. 2 (2002): 157–80. Laplanche, Jean. “Die rätselhaften Botschaften des Anderen und ihre Konsequenzen für den Begriff des‚ Unbewußten‘ im Rahmen der Allgemeinen Verführungstheorie.” Psyche 58, nos. 9–10 (2004): 898–913. Laplanche, Jean and Jean Bertrant Pontalis. Das Vokabular der Psychoanalyse. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2019. Lehmann, Courtney. “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Agenda: How Shakespeare and the Renaissance Are Taking the Rage out of Feminism.” Shakespeare Quarterly 53, no. 2 (2002): 260–79. Marti, Cecile. “Julie Taymor’s ‘Titus’: Deciding Not to Cut.” Literature/Film Quarterly 32, no. 2 (2004): 122–25. McCandless, David. “A Tale of Two Tituses: Julie Taymor’s Vision on Stage and Screen.” Shakespeare Quarterly 53, no. 4 (2002): 487–511. Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia—The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Reynolds, Bryan et al. “‘For such a sight will blind a father’s eye’: The Spectacle of Suffering in Taymor’s Titus.” In Performing Transversally Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future, edited by Reynolds, Brian et al., 215–43. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” Toward an Anthropology of Women, edited by Rayna R. Reiter, 157–210. New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1975. Stakor, Kristijan. “Julie Taymor’s Ideographs in her Adaptations of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and The Tempest.” Anafora 4, no. 2 (2017): 333–48. Starks, Lisa. “Cinema of Cruelty: Powers of Horror in Julie Taymor’s Titus.” In The Reel Shakespeare: Alternative Cinema and Theory, edited by Courtney Lehmann and Lisa Starks, 121–42. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002. Titus. Directed by Julie Taymor. USA, UK, Italy: Overseas Filmgroup, Clear Blue Sky Productions, 2000. Tricomi, Albert H. “The Aesthetics of Mutilation in ‘Titus Andronicus’.” Shakespeare and Language, edited by Catherine M.S. Alexander. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 226–39. Vaughan, Virginia Mason. “Looking at the ‘Other’ in Julie Taymor’s ‘Titus’.” Shakespeare Bulletin 21, no. 3 (2003): 71–80. Weber, William W. “‘Worse Than Philomel’: Violence, Revenge, and Meta-Allusion in ‘Titus Andronicus’.” Studies in Philology 112, no. 4 (2015): 698–717.

Index

9/11, 78, 84–90, 233 Aaron, 5, 59, 62–63, 66, 69, 160, 165, 166, 169–72, 184–85, 199–200, 202– 3, 210, 223, 234, 236, 247, 248 abortion, 20, 118–19, 134–35, 149–50 Academy Award, 2, 6, 7, 81, 82, 129, 189 Across the Universe (2007), 1, 3, 6, 8, 31–48, 77–90, 97, 101–8, 191, 208 adaptation, 4–6, 9, 16, 33, 35, 47, 59, 65, 70–72, 78, 80, 83, 91n5, 97–103, 106, 108n9, 159–61, 164, 165, 168, 169, 170, 179–80, 182, 191n5, 195–96, 198–99, 204–10, 212n33, 213n44, 215–17, 233–35, 240, 247, 248, 251n5 adolescence, 5, 7, 64, 89–90, 119, 132, 133, 159, 160, 165–68 Adorno, Theodor W., 70–71 Altman, Rick, 36–37 animation, 16, 21, 26, 34, 44, 50n45, 129, 133, 208, 245 Ariel, 6, 188–89, 195, 206–7, 212n40, 213n42, 219 Aristotle, 57, 144–45, 147 art, 2–5, 7–9, 15–27, 27n5, 28nn21, 26, 29nn28, 34, 31, 32, 34, 35, 37, 38, 42, 46, 47, 78, 79, 82–85, 89–90,

92n23, 97, 98, 100–5, 107, 116, 121, 129–39, 196, 210, 211n26, 216, 233 Asia, 3, 9, 99, 143, 180. See also India authenticity, 9, 15–17, 35, 71, 100, 103, 107, 134 authorship, 31–48, 57, 136, 191n6 Bataille, Georges, 104 Battersby, Christine, 20–21, 29n28 The Beatles, 6, 33–48, 78–80, 83, 87, 89, 90, 91n3, 100–2, 108 biographical films, 5, 7, 15–25, 27nn5, 9, 28nn12, 26, 29n34, 78, 82, 100, 111–13, 129–30, 139, 143, 155 Bloom, Harold, 56, 64, 72n5, 160 Blumenthal, Eileen, 7, 98, 228n17 Butler, Judith, 152–53 Caliban, 7, 63, 188–90, 195, 209, 210, 213n42 children, 3, 9, 19, 20, 25, 26, 63, 69, 113–16, 119, 131, 133–38, 149, 152, 159–72, 185, 186, 198, 199, 218–20, 223–26, 228n26, 235, 248–50, 253n43 cliché, 28n21, 31, 233 colors, 17, 19, 22, 26, 107, 119, 120, 180, 195, 204, 205, 209, 222, 251

257

258

Index

comedy, 6, 55–57, 62, 64, 66–68, 71, 73n19, 81, 83, 163, 170, 180 costumes, 1, 5–7, 16–18, 22–23, 25, 26, 59, 63, 81, 97–99, 111, 117, 119–22, 166, 170, 181, 185, 186, 188, 192n19, 197, 201, 212n37, 217, 219–24, 228n16, 244–47 creativity, 1, 3, 8, 15–27, 28n26, 29n28, 32–48, 102–3, 130–31, 136, 161, 195, 210 death, 5, 6, 24–27n4, 33, 62, 63, 66, 68, 87, 115, 121, 130, 136, 137, 150, 169, 171, 182, 184, 186, 190, 197, 199, 235–36, 238, 242, 254 de Beauvoir, Simone, 151 Deleuze and Guattari, 245–46 desire, 8, 9, 34, 37, 42, 46, 56, 87–89, 97–108, 131, 135, 137–39, 160–69, 179, 187, 190, 218, 220, 247, 250, 254n52 disability, 5, 8, 26, 28n20, 130–31, 139, 147, 242 dreams, 17, 21, 26, 42, 78, 83, 85, 90, 100, 164, 192n19, 204, 223, 225–26, 242, 246 Ebert, Roger, 77, 81–83, 104 education, 115, 148, 152, 170, 249 ethnography, 115–23 experimentation, 2, 3, 5, 8, 97–98, 100, 103 fear, 15, 40, 42, 57, 87, 88, 105–7, 134, 162, 183, 190, 223, 225, 235, 242, 248, 253n35 Fellini, Federico, 67, 68, 164 feminism, 7, 8, 15, 21, 26, 27n4, 123, 130, 143–55, 187, 191, 229n32, 234, 239, 253n35 fidelity, 8, 31–32, 38–43, 60, 154, 180, 191n5 Film maudit, 32 Fool’s Fire (1992), 1, 4, 5, 99, 179–82, 190 Foucault, Michel, 104, 235

fragmentation, 16, 17, 24–27, 166, 246 Fremaux, Stephanie, 34, 37, 45 Freud, Sigmund, 236–40, 243–44, 252n20, 254n52 Frida (2002), 1–3, 5–8, 15–27, 28n26, 29n34, 34, 77, 82, 100, 129–39 gender, 6, 8, 9, 15–24, 29n28, 46, 64, 82–84, 108n9, 114, 117–23, 143–55, 164, 165, 206, 224, 226, 229n32, 242, 246, 247, 253n43, 254n52 genre, 2, 15–16, 18, 32, 36–39, 42, 44–45, 47, 55, 78, 79, 100, 103, 105, 116, 131, 166, 217 The Glorias (2020), 1, 3, 7–9, 111–23, 143–55, 191 Goldenthal, Elliot, 2, 4, 6, 41, 43, 45, 65, 69, 73n22, 207, 217 historical accuracy, 88–90, 221 hybridity, 9, 56, 100, 106, 215–18, 222, 224–26 hyperrealism, 39, 40, 50n42 identity, 6, 8, 16, 17, 26, 32, 97, 98, 102, 103, 106, 111, 112, 115, 121, 153, 159, 180, 196, 197, 221, 234, 246, 247, 250, 254n44 ideograph, 3, 204–5, 243–44 India, 3, 112–17, 120–21, 146, 149 induction character, 195–98, 205 isolation, 42, 86–87, 98, 102, 132 The Jew of Malta (1589–90), 57, 63, 182 journalism, 7, 8, 114, 118, 120, 123 Laplanche, Jean, 238–40, 249 Lavinia, 5, 59, 62–69, 71–72, 108n9, 159, 165, 166, 168, 170–71, 184–86, 191n6, 200, 223, 234, 241–47, 249, 252n13, 254n45 Lewis, C. S., 145, 148 The Lion King (1997), 1, 2, 4, 7, 10n2, 34, 60, 61, 77, 98, 99, 160, 219, 221, 226, 228n16, 249

Index

love, 6, 28n26, 29n34, 33, 42, 58, 79, 81, 86–89, 100–2, 107, 108, 134, 139, 208, 218–20, 222, 228n25 madness, 55, 56, 58, 61, 63, 64, 161, 170, 185, 188, 241, 246 magical realism, 43, 99, 100 Mamma Mia! (2006), 37, 38 marriage, 5, 118, 121, 134, 137, 144, 149, 150, 165, 184, 208 Marx, Karl, 132, 137, 149–50, 152, 154, 254n52 masculinity, 21, 98, 101, 102, 108n9, 113, 121, 123, 143–45, 148, 151–53, 159, 161, 164, 165, 225, 242, 246, 248 #MeToo, 8, 130, 138 A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2014), 1, 9, 212n33, 215–26, 229n31 mirrors, 17, 19, 21–22, 24–26 misogyny, 19–21, 46, 207 Moulin Rouge! (2001), 37, 45 multiplication, 17, 24–27, 207 music, 2, 3, 6, 8, 31–48, 61, 77–80, 81, 83, 87, 89, 90, 91n4, 98, 99, 101, 102, 108, 150, 166, 167, 171, 186, 211n26, 212n40, 217, 218, 224, 245 musicals, 4, 6, 8, 10n2, 31–48, 67, 78–81, 83, 91n5, 97, 100, 107 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 61 Nochimson, Martha, 163 nostalgia, 23, 31, 35, 46, 89–90 objects/things, 17, 24, 69, 104, 111–12, 116, 119, 122, 126n63, 144, 221, 238 obscene, 9, 233, 240, 246 pain. See suffering past (depiction of the), 35, 87–89, 100, 107, 164, 171 pastiche, 98, 164, 165, 233, 240 Penny Arcade Nightmares, 68, 204, 210, 245 pietas, 62, 69, 70, 72

259

Piper, John, 145, 148 Plato, 144–45, 147, 154 political themes, 6–8, 17–18, 23–24, 33, 34, 44, 46, 55, 56, 58, 59, 63, 69, 80–90, 92nn23, 31, 101, 102, 105, 107, 112, 130–32, 137–38, 143, 149, 154, 161, 171, 224, 234–36, 239, 246, 248, 250 postmodernism, 25, 45, 55–72, 98–99, 164, 205, 207, 240, 243, 251n9 power, 5–7, 18, 56, 58, 62, 71, 88, 90, 99, 104, 106, 108, 108n9, 117, 122, 138, 139, 147, 152, 153, 160, 165, 167, 168, 181, 183, 187–89, 191, 208, 229n32, 233–51, 254n44 projections, 195, 208, 213n44, 217, 219–21 Prospera, 6, 7, 108n9, 187–91, 206–10, 212nn37, 39, 213nn42, 44, 45, 49, 224, 226, 229n32 puppetry, 1, 4, 5, 34, 44, 60, 65, 67, 68, 98–100, 133, 180, 181, 217–19, 226 queer theory, 8, 9, 42, 102, 152–53, 161–69, 171–72, 239, 250–51, 253n43 race, 33, 59, 69, 70, 119, 146, 147, 152, 154, 228n21, 234, 247, 249 rape, 5, 28n26, 57, 59, 62, 63, 66–67, 71, 72, 159–61, 166, 183, 185, 191n6, 223, 228n25, 242, 244–47, 254n45 realism, 23, 59, 78, 83, 88, 92n31, 197, 206, 207, 213n49, 217 reception (of a film), 5, 6, 31–32, 38, 46, 47, 80–86, 99, 130, 143, 229n32 recovery, 19, 130–31, 139, 223 revenge, 4, 5, 7, 9, 55–58, 60, 62–63, 66, 99, 159–61, 163, 167, 168, 170, 179–91, 192n9, 210, 223, 227n4, 241, 247 revenge tragedies, 55–56, 60, 70, 72, 99, 160, 182, 192n9, 223

260

Index

Rivera, Diego, 5, 17–18, 20, 22–26, 28n26, 29n34, 129–32, 134, 137, 138 Shakespeare, William, 4–7, 9, 56–72, 83, 99–100, 108n9, 159–62, 164, 168–70, 172, 173n11, 180, 182, 185, 187, 190, 191, 191n6, 195–210, 212n33, 213nn44, 49, 215–17, 225– 26, 233, 234, 240, 241, 243, 245–48, 251n3 shame, 63, 66, 183, 185, 186, 190, 192n21 sociology, 8, 111, 112 Sontag, Susan, 64, 73n19 Spanish Tragedy (1586), 55, 182 special effects, 34, 99, 107, 195, 205, 208, 227n4, 245 Stuart Mill, John, 147–48 suffering, 5, 8, 15, 16, 18–19, 23, 24, 26, 28nn20–21, 55–58, 100, 115, 130–32, 135–39, 179, 181, 183, 185, 186, 247 surreal sequences, 3, 5–7, 16, 21–24, 68, 99, 100, 105–7, 122, 133, 192n19, 204, 246 symbolism, 17, 18, 20, 23–25, 29n34, 59, 60, 64, 65, 68, 98, 115, 122, 123, 135, 161, 181, 188, 193n23, 204–8, 211n26, 233–51, 254n43 symbolization. See symbolism tableaux vivants, 16, 17, 21, 65, 129, 197, 204, 206 Taymor, Julie (as stage director), 1, 5, 7–9, 60, 65, 77, 82, 97–99, 195, 197, 205, 215–26, 227n4 The Tempest (2010), 1, 3, 6, 7, 9, 108n9, 180, 182, 187–91, 191n5, 195, 196, 203, 204–10, 212n32, 212n37, 212n39, 216, 221, 224, 227n4, 229n32; theatrical play (1986), 4, 193n28, 195, 205, 219, 227n4, 228n17

Titus (1999), 5, 8, 9, 34, 55–72, 73n22, 99–100, 108n9, 159–72, 180, 182–87, 188, 190, 191n5, 192n19, 193n23, 195–204, 205, 207, 208, 209, 210, 216, 221, 223, 226, 227n4, 229n30, 233–51, 253nn43–44; Theatrical play (1994), 4, 59, 170, 192n19, 195, 227n4, 252n13 tragedy, 55–72, 73n19, 99, 159–61, 168, 182, 186, 187, 190, 223, 247 tragicomedy, 61, 64, 65, 70–72, 187 transgression, 56, 57, 97–108, 167, 254n44 trauma, 6, 8, 20, 28n26, 39, 55, 59, 67, 105, 108n9, 129–31, 134–39, 183, 197, 207, 227n4, 235, 239, 245, 248 traveling, 1, 3, 6, 33, 101, 112–15, 117, 123, 124n12, 209 vehicles, 3, 5, 7, 19, 112–21, 123, 124n12, 130, 132, 155 Vietnam war, 6, 33, 39, 44, 79, 86–88, 100, 101, 107, 235 violence, 5, 6, 28n26, 55–60, 64–69, 87, 88, 105, 107, 108, 117, 161, 163–72, 179, 182–87, 191n6, 193n23, 195, 196, 198, 201, 202, 210, 222, 223, 227n4, 228nn23, 25, 233–36, 240– 51, 251n5, 252n13 watching (act of), 5, 45, 58, 165, 169, 171, 181, 193n24, 196–203, 211n7, 226, 248 women (representation of), 7, 15, 19– 21, 26, 28n21, 29nn28, 34, 82, 83, 102, 108, 113–23, 129–39, 143–55, 184, 207, 223, 229n32, 242, 244, 247 Young Lucius, 59, 61, 64–66, 68–70, 72, 99, 159–61, 164–72, 173nn11, 33, 197–203, 210, 211n7, 223, 224, 226, 228n26, 229n30, 235, 247–50 youth, 35, 107, 108, 119, 120, 132, 159, 161, 163–69, 225

About the Contributors

Anna Baccanti studied comparative literature and philosophy at Free University of Berlin and Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. She completed her doctoral degree at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where she was a member of the Junior Research Group Creativity and Genius and an associate member of the MIMESIS Doctoral Program for Literature and the Arts. Her research fields include (auto)biographical narratives and intergenerational family histories in film and literature, representations of gender in historical fiction, and the conceptual history of creativity. Her dissertation Screening the Creative Process. Genius, Gender, and the Contemporary Biopic is published by Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Adam Barkman (PhD, Free University of Amsterdam) is a professor of philosophy at Redeemer University and, with Antonio Sanna, is the editor of the Lexington Books series “Critical Companions to Contemporary Directors.” He is the author of five books, including Making Sense of Islamic Art & Architecture (Thames & Hudson, 2015), and the coeditor of seven books, including, with Antonio Sanna, A Critical Companion to Steven Spielberg (Lexington, 2019). Barkman is internationally recognized for his work on C.S. Lewis, world philosophies, and popular culture and film. Louis Breitsohl is a published film scholar and filmmaker who worked as a mentor and tutor at the Faculty of Film Studies at Freie Universität in Berlin, Germany. Louis studied media and cultural studies in Düsseldorf (BA) and film studies in Berlin (MA). At the center of Louis’s artistic and scientific research are politics of queer-feminist and intersectional resistance, relational thinking, and depth-psychological embodiments and stagings of life-worldly experience. Louis’s recent publications include the edited volume chapter 261

262

About the Contributors

“The West and the Rest. Antirassistische Arbeit als kontinuierliche Praxis des Befragens, Zuhörens und Ansprechens (in) der Filmwissenschaft” and the conference presentation transcript from A Therapy of Things? Materiality and Psychoanalysis in Literature and the Visual Arts. Andrew Grossman is the editor of the anthology Queer Asian Cinema: Shadows in the Shade (Harrington Park Press), an editor of and contributor to Bright Lights Film Journal, and a columnist for Popmatters. He has written chapters for numerous anthologies, including New Korean Cinema (University of Edinburgh Press), Movies in the Age of Obama (Rowman-Littlefield), Chinese Connections: Film, Identity, and Diaspora (Temple University Press), Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives (Routledge), Moving Image: Documents of Contemporary Art (MIT Press), Hong Kong Horror Cinema (University of Edinburgh Press), A Critical Companion to Terry Gilliam (Lexington), Grief and Horror Cinema (Lexington), and East Asian Film Remakes (University of Edinburgh Press). Matthew Hodge is an associate professor at William Peace University in Raleigh, North Carolina. His degrees include an MFA, an MA, and a BA (all related to the performing arts). He is an award-winning scholar who specializes in the intersections of the arts and popular culture. His recent books include Cool Cats and a Hot Mouse: A History of Jazz of Disney (Theme Park Press) and Gotham City Sounds: The Music of Batman Villains (Pulp Hero Press). He is also the coeditor of Exploring the Macabre, Malevolent, and Mysterious: Multidisciplinary Perspectives (Cambridge Scholars Publishing), a consultant and preliminary editor for the upcoming Powers of Pop: Cross-Cultural Influences Between Japanese and American Pop Cultures (Cambridge Scholars Publishing), and a contributor for The Psychosocial Implications of Disney Movies (MDPI), Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Media Fandom (IGI Global), Aestheticization of Violence, Horror, and Power (IGI Global), “A Hero Will Endure”: Essays at the 20th Anniversary of Gladiator (Vernon Press), and the upcoming Mythological Equines in Film and Television (Vernon Press). Additionally, he is a frequent presenter at international conferences and featured in multiple academic journals and magazines as an author, reviewer, and Topics Board Editor. Claire Kimball is a theater practitioner and independent scholar of early modern drama. She has served as the resident dramaturg for Brave Spirits Theatre, a production dramaturg for the American Shakespeare Center, and previously taught high school theater arts. Her recent credits include dramaturgy and additional directing for the Shakespeare’s Histories audio project (Brave Spirits Theatre), as well as directing virtual productions of

About the Contributors

263

Mucedorus, The Spanish Tragedy, and Dido, Queen of Carthage (Sweet Tea Shakespeare). Her practice-based research explores movement, gesture, and the actor/body relationship in the performance of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Claire earned her M.Litt. in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature in Performance at Mary Baldwin University. Her work on developing a rehearsal method for staging dismemberment in early modern drama appears in Renaissance Papers 2008. Elizabeth Klett is a professor of literature at the University of Houston— Clear Lake. She is the author of two books on Shakespeare and adaptation: Cross-Gender Shakespeare and English National Identity (Palgrave, 2009) and Choreographing Shakespeare: Dance Adaptations of the Plays and Poems (Routledge, 2020). She has published book chapters and journal articles on adaptations of Shakespeare in film, dance, television, audio, and theater, most recently in Memorializing Shakespeare (Palgrave, 2021), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance (2019), Shakespeare’s Hamlet in an Era of Textual Exhaustion (Routledge, 2018), Borrowers and Lenders (2017), Textshop Experiments (2017), and Shakespeare Bulletin (2016). Dominique Angela M. Juntado is an associate professorial lecturer from the Department of Sociology & Behavioral Sciences at De La Salle University Manila, Philippines. She has two degrees in political science and a doctorate in social and cultural anthropology from the University of the Philippines Diliman. Her research interests include Cultural Studies, Political Thought & Culture and Heritage, while her research passions involve exploring and experimentating with interactive educational entertainment and video games. Her previous works have been published in The International Journal of Social Science, Humanities Diliman, ALAYA The Kapampangan Research Journal, TALA: An Online Journal of History, and Asian Journal on Perspectives in Education. Sony Jalarajan Raj is an assistant professor at the Department of Communication at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Canada. Raj is a professional journalist turned academic who has worked in different demanding positions as a reporter, special correspondent, and producer in several news media channels like BBC, NDTV, Doordarshan, AIR, and Asianet News. Raj served as the graduate coordinator and assistant professor of communication arts at the Institute for Communication, Entertainment and Media at St. Thomas University Florida, USA. He was a full-time faculty member in journalism, mass communication, and media studies at Monash University, Australia, Curtin University, Mahatma Gandhi University, and the University of Kerala. He is a three-time winner of the Monash University PVC Award

264

About the Contributors

for excellence in teaching and learning. Raj has been on the editorial board of five major international research journals, and he edits the Journal of Media Watch. Raj was the recipient of the Reuters Fellowship and is a Thomson Foundation (UK) Fellow in Television Studies with the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association Scholarship. Antonio Sanna completed his PhD at the University of Westminster in London in 2008. His main research areas are English literature, gothic literature, horror films and TV series, epic and historical films, superhero films, and cinematic adaptations. In the past fifteen years, he has published over100 articles and reviews in international journals. Antonio is the editor of the Lexington Books’ series the coeditor of Critical Companions to Contemporary Directors. The latter includes his volumes on Tim Burton, James Cameron, Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, and Mel Gibson. He has also edited the books Pirates in History and Popular Culture (McFarland), Critical Essays on Twin Peaks: The Return (Palgrave), Arthur Machen: Critical Essays (Lexington), and Alice in Wonderland in Film and Popular Culture (Palgrave). Antonio has been appointed as a teaching assistant at the University of Sassari and is now employed as a teacher of English literature in Sassari. Gabrielle Stecher is an associate director of undergraduate teaching and a lecturer in the Department of English at Indiana University Bloomington. She earned her PhD in English from the University of Georgia in 2022. Her interdisciplinary research and teaching interests include the stories we tell about women artists (including painters, photographers, sculptors, and actors) across genres. Adith K. Suresh is currently associating as a research assistant at the Department of Communication at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Adith holds a Master’s Degree in English Language and Literature from Mahatma Gandhi University. His research interests include film studies, literary criticism, and South Asian cultural studies. Jeff Turner is a professor and the chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance at Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where he teaches theater history, performance theory, dramatic literature, and film studies. Additionally, he has worked as a production dramaturg with the North Carolina Shakespeare Festival, the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, as well as Walking Shadow Theatre Company, Theater Latté Da, and Minneapolis Musical Theatre in Minnesota. He has published on theatrical representations of childhood and youth during the Great Depression, cinematic representations of boyhood at the turn of the millennium, and the musicals of Stephen

About the Contributors

265

Sondheim. His scholarly interests include queer studies, representations of childhood and youth on stage and screen, and the American musical theater. Samuel Vandeputte is a graduate student in European Policies and Public Administration at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, where he previously completed an MS in International Politics. He holds a BA in International Relations and Philosophy from Redeemer University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Samuel has a broad interest in the intersection of culture and philosophy. Leanne Weston is an associate teaching fellow at the University of Warwick. Her doctoral thesis explored music programming, memory, and materiality in postbroadcast screen culture. Her research interests include the use of popular music in film and television and film and television aesthetics, and her work typically explores the interactions between the two. She has published work in Velvet Light Trap on televised music histories and has coedited a special dossier for Critical Studies in Television on BBC Four. Leanne is also a contributor to edited collections on Watership Down (Bloomsbury Academic, forthcoming) and the films of Jane Campion (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming), writing on the function and meaning of film scoring. Shawn H. Williams is the lead professor of political science and director of the Kentucky Heartland Institute on Public Policy at Campbellsville University in Campbellsville, Kentucky. His primary research areas include political development, particularly the impact of conflict on the formation of political ideas and institutions, and the use of high-impact practices in higher education pedagogy. A native Texan, he has lived in Central Kentucky for thirteen years with his wife, Azucena. He received his Master’s Degree in International Studies from Angelo State University in 1999 and was awarded a PhD in Political Science from the University of Texas, Dallas, in 2010.