Alessandro Abbate

The Text within the Text, the Screen within the Screen: Multi- Layered Representations in Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet and Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet

Two of the most controversial films produced during the last decade of the twentieth century, a time of huge revival of Shakespeare on screen, are Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 Romeo + Juliet and Michael Almereyda’s 2000 Hamlet. Both directors present a Shakespeare for the young gener- ation, adopting a mise-en-scène abundant in references to pop culture and mass media and play- ing with various intertextual practices of postmodernism. Although radically different in style, the two films share a similar intention to incorporate different layers of representation, so that the Shakespearean device of the play within the play becomes the film, the rock video, the advertise- ment, the television news within the film, and, more generally, the screen within the screen.

Almereyda reads Hamlet as a contemporary tragedy of technological and media-driven solipsism, in which ‘life has become a matter of negotiation between essence and simulation; where reality and façade, being and per- forming, have blurred into one; and where human relationships have become a disembodied dial-up network.’1 Hamlet is a young filmmaker addicted to video technology. It is not sur- prise, therefore, that The Mousetrap, the thing wherein he will catch the con- science of the king, becomes a film within the film. The way in which Ham- let prepares his video exemplifies the state of solitude and isolation in which he lives, one related to the vanishing of embodied persons: alone in his room, surrounded by monitors, speakers, and a variety of electronic recording de- vices, Hamlet sits silently editing, mesmerized by the flickering lights on the various screens. As one reviewer has put it, Almereyda’s hero ‘is not a col- laborative artist and has no such love of community projects.’2 Shakespeare’s hero has an authentic passion for the theatre, one he enjoys sharing with the strolling players who come to Elsinore. Indeed, the players, it seems, are the

1 Alessandro Abbate, ‘”To Be or Inter-Be”: Almereyda’s end-of-millennium Hamlet’, Lit- erature/Film Quarterly, 32 (2004), 82-89 (p. 82). 2 Jaime N. Christley, ‘Hamlet (2000) and Hamlet (1996)’, Film Written Magazine, 11 June 2000 (accessed 24 June 2001). 378 Alessandro Abbate only human beings Hamlet trusts, the only ones he considers worthy of respect. There is none of this in the film: Shakespeare’s players become no more than video files and film clips to be assembled on Hamlet’s PC. Tech- nological progress has made live performance obsolete, and these ‘abstract and brief chronicles of the time’ are merely downloaded into a hard-drive memory.3 The shift from theatrical ‘in person’ to cinematic ‘by a camera’ perfor- mance illustrates Walter Benjamin’s thoughts on the mechanical reproduc- ibility of art.4 As John Storey argues, the loss of the aura ‘opens to a plurality of reinterpretation; freeing [cultural text or practice] to be used in other con- texts, for other purposes.’5 In Almereyda’s film, when Hamlet edits his non- aural version of The Mousetrap as a multimedia short film, John Gielgud appears on the monitor, playing the Prince in the graveyard scene [Figure 1].

Figure 1. John Gielgud on the screen.

The image of Gielgud is not only a decontextualized sign of ironic self-refer- ential, inter- and hyper-textuality (as we have one filmic Hamlet looking at another one); Gielgud’s performance also alludes to the pulverization of Ben- jamin’s aural authenticity, authority and distance into seemingly unrelated excerpts – something typical of postmodern linguistic collation. This is the language Almereyda’s Hamlet uses in The Mousetrap, as it is one of ‘the rigorously non-fictive languages of video’.6 It is an all-recycling, anti-linear, non-representational syntax of the kind that Fredric Jameson discusses in his essay ‘Reading without Interpretation: Postmodernism and the Video-Text’, and which he understands as paradigmatic of the postmodern dismissal of

3 Hamlet, II. 2. 545-46, in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, ed. by W.J. Craig (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 884. Further quotations from Shakespeare’s plays are from this edition. 4 See ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt (London: Fontana, 1970), pp. 211-44. 5 An Introductory Guide to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), p. 108. 6 Fredric Jameson, ‘Reading without Interpretation: Postmodernism and the Video-Text’, in The Linguistic of Writing: Arguments Between Language and Literature, ed. by Derek Attridge and others (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), p. 206.