Session #187: High Stakes/Lowbrow: Early Modern Texts and Medieval Fantasies in Pop Culture and Film
Craig Dionne (Editor, Journal of Narrative Theory), Presider
Trying to teach Shakespeare through genre or period, over the years, has become almost an intellectual dead-end, and has certainly never been a successful "come on" for attracting students to Shakespeare, although many courses are still designed under rubrics such as, "Shakespeare: Comedies" or "Shakespeare: Tragedies" or "Shakespeare: The Early Plays," etc. What I will offer here is a rumination upon rethinking the teaching of genre as a vehicle for ethical thought in the classroom, in relation to Billy Morrisey's hysterical "low comic" adaptation of Macbeth--Scotland, PA--an adaptation which, through its setting in a white trash trailer park town in the middle of Nowheresville, America completely subverts the "high seriousness" and "high stakes" of the original play while at the same time using the genre of low comedy (including slapstick and "stoner" jokes) to lay bare the original's tragic vision of what happens when murder becomes "ordinary." I will conclude with a (preposterous) consideration of Woody Allen as modernity's chief philosopher of comedy and tragedy.
As a number of critics in 2004 observed, Paul McGuignan’s The Reckoning, a film in which a troupe of medieval actors exposes the crimes of a nobleman and the institutional corruption that facilitates his offenses, invites its audience to consider the role of the artist in society. Released not long after American poets were turned away from the White House for fear they might advocate dissent towards governmental policy, this film dramatizes the human costs of a state where religion plays the bawd to politics, and ostensibly offers the dramatic arts as the first line of popular defense. The aesthetic and moral transformation that endows the artist with such power in this film lies in the painfully familiar trope of renaissance enlightenment: only when the actors shift from miming the ontological platitudes of medieval Corpus Christi pageants to exploring epistemological uncertainties of drama centered on human experience does the hero acquire the “forensic” power to challenge the system. Ironically, it is the film’s failure that recommends it pedagogically. For, through the familiar narrative conventions of the ripped-from-the-headlines crime drama that render this film, in the words of one critic, “an above-average 1970s TV pilot,” the myth of progress, both political and aesthetic, can be debunked—forcing us to acknowledge the potential for both complicity and resistance, not just in all forms of art, but also in audiences.
I want to look at several silent era films of Shakespeare's plays and consider what happens aesthetically to the experience of watching the plays "in dumbshow" and what this experience suggests about Shakespeare's position in the popular imagination at the turn of the century. Specifically, I am interested in the role "spectacle" or aura plays in these films, namely since Theodore Adorno warns that watching an actor on film, or watching a Shakespeare play specifically, distances both the actors and the spectators from the theatrical experience Shakespeare intended. Perhaps this is true, but I think that considering the role of spectacle in the context of Shakespeare's developing "highbrow" status in a "lowbrow" (to use Lawrence Levin's terms) medium will be revealing both theoretically and pedagogically.
Dan Brown’s Grail quest novel, The Da Vinci Code, is based on a loose conflation of theories involving conspiracies among such groups as the Knights Templar, the Priory of Sion, the Rosicrucians, the Illuminati, the Masons, and the Roman Catholic Church. In order to create his fast-paced, if indifferently written, novel, Brown had to take the wildly complex “higher paranoid scholarship” of conspiracy theory and make it accessible to a popular audience. His corner cutting has exposed a popular audience, previously oblivious to conspiracy theory, to its implications. Ron Howard’s film version of The Da Vinci Code, which simplifies Brown’s novel, has created a cultural firestorm. Brown’s book and, more especially, Howard’s film open up avenues for educators to consider the history of the Holy Grail story and the ways it has been used. The Da Vinci Code presents us with opportunities to consider the relationship between the Holy Grail and conspiracy theory, to examine how and why the Holy Grail has fallen into this realm of discourse.