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Article Excerpt
Although filming had been completed nearly two years earlier, Tim Blake Nelson's teen adaptation of Othello would not be released in theaters until late August of 2001. On the morning of April 20, 1999, while the film was less than two weeks into the edit, two teen-aged boys, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, entered Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado with a couple of sawed-off shotguns, a handgun, a semiautomatic rifle, and several homemade bombs. By the time they turned the weapons on themselves, just minutes later, thirteen students and teachers had been murdered and twenty-eight others critically wounded. While athletes and black students seem to have been singled out, prior to the shootings, as the primary targets, once inside the school the boys shot indiscriminately at anyone who crossed their path. (1) Concerned that the bloody finale of "O"--which follows the Iago and Othello characters on a rampage through a campus dormitory--paralleled too closely the high school massacre at Columbine, and egged on by zealous Washington legislators (such as Democrat, Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut) intent on scapegoating Hollywood as an indirect cause of the shootings, the notoriously conservative distributing company, Miramax, decided against releasing the film. (2) Only after Lion's Gate Films boldly interceded and purchased the rights from Miramax--nearly two years and several lawsuits later--could an audience view and judge Nelson's controversial film for itself.
The trauma caused by the Columbine massacre and the "copy-cat" shootings it inspired tends to erase our memory of the numerous school shootings that preceded it. In 1998 alone, five separate shootings resulted in the deaths of 13 students and teachers; many others were wounded. Three other major shootings were reported in 1996 and 1997. (3) In other words, although the shootings at Columbine had not yet occurred when
the filming and production of "O" began, Nelson had more than enough teen suffering to reference and draw upon, as he noted in The New Times:"There were five shootings in the year or so leading up to photography on "O", and the names of the schools' towns had become shorthand for what seemed an epidemic of teenage violence: Jonesboro, Pearl, Eugene, Springfield, Edinboro" (2001, 2.8). Since editors had just begun their work when the shootings at Columbine occurred, the film would inevitably reflect, and attempt to address, the pain and terror caused by the massacre. Ironically, but unsurprisingly, Miramax would move to cover up the very existence of a film that aims to understand such senseless tragedies, not to incite them. (4) In doing so, the company adopted one of the American film industry's foundational premises: that readers of film, especially young ones, are not critically astute enough to understand what they are watching. (5)
The decision by Miramax officials to shelve the film is difficult to justify even in the immediate context of the Columbine shootings since violence in "O" is neither gratuitous nor sensational. This is not to deny that it is haunting and particularly relevant, however. The final shots of the film appropriate quite powerfully the stock imagery and symbolism of an increasingly familiar American scene: the realist, but highly performative "aftermath coverage" of countless high school shootings both before and after Columbine. In the chaotic whirl of sirens and flashing camera bulbs, grim-faced police officers and faceless EMT personnel move quickly in and out of each frame, directing the movements and actions of the other major characters: the seemingly indifferent juvenile offender who is escorted slowly to the back seat of a patrol car; the numerous television reporters and camera people who struggle to "make sense" of an "unspeakable" or "unthinkable" catastrophe; the grieving parents who wail and cry over the bodies of their dead children; and, most iconographically, the groups of huddled students weeping in each other's arms. Nelson acknowledged the influence of such news coverage on this particular sequence of shots, admitting that "it was these [high school] shootings that interested me in making this film" (2002).
In what follows, I consider how "O" appropriates Shakespeare as a lens through which to analyze teen violence in America, a project taken very seriously by its director: "This film is meant to be a true reflection of high school life now.... Othello and high school are words that, when you put them together, sound silly. We're in a place in America right now in which it's not silly; it's serious and it's believable" (Nelson 2002). I argue that Nelson deliberately constructs his film as a surrogate for the high school literature classroom where, ideally, the skill of critical reading is first inculcated in our youth. The Shakespeare "text" looms large in this imaginary space, transforming film audiences into endangered students--inseparable from those teens depicted in "O"--whose ability to read deeply, analyze, and apply to their own lives the lessons of Shakespearean tragedy can do nothing less than help them to stay alive. On the surface, at least, Nelson begins to look more like a parody of Matthew Arnold than an appropriator of William Shakespeare, suggesting rather naively that great literature is the most effective antidote to mass violence.
Looking more deeply, though, one discovers the complexity of Nelson's pedagogy, which privileges the process of critical reading over the inherent value of the reading text itself. He succeeds in stimulating such critical readings by structuring his film dialectically: multiple, contrary interpretations (theses and antitheses) of teenage violence demand that readers work actively to synthesize what the film refuses to simplify for them. By juxtaposing popular interpretations of adolescent criminality as the result either of a natural depravity in teens or a profound psychosocial immaturity, (characterized especially by their supposed vulnerability to every rap song and violent television show they encounter), the film explores how such problems as racism, family abuse, peer ostracism, and countless other factors combine to make the turn of the century such a terrible time for many American teenagers.
By refusing to impose a more heavy-handed conclusion, Nelson transfers to film--a famously controlling medium--the characteristic indeterminacy of the Shakespearean play text and makes a case for its social functionality. A second contention of this paper, therefore, is that the film's realism, as well as the respect it pays its primary audience, announces a notable break from previous teen-Shakespeare films, which should cause Shakespeare-and-film scholars to reconsider the ways that such films are conceived and marketed. Teen Shakespeare, I would argue, grows up rather quickly after the horrors of Columbine.
I
Odin James (the initials "O.J." are not coincidental) (6) whose friends call him "O", is the only black student at a predominantly white southern prep school. A blue chip basketball star, Odin (Mekhi Phifer) is revered on campus as the savior who will bring Palmetto Grove its twentieth state basketball championship in the 115-year history of the school. Odin's love affair with Dean Brabble's daughter, Desi (Julia Stiles), is socially acceptable only because of his indispensable position as the captain of the basketball team. While several reviewers have ridiculed the film's translation of warfare--the "sport of kings"--into basketball, the racial politics of the modern sport, which features predominantly African American players led by white coaches before an audience composed mainly of white ticket holders, serves nicely as a vehicle for modernizing the complex social position of Othello in Early Modern Europe.
The Iago character, Hugo (Josh Hartnett), is bitterly envious of Odin's position on the court and in his father's affection. In one of the significant departures from the play text, a fiery Martin Sheen plays both Hugo's father and the head coach of the basketball team. The players refer to him as "Duke," an epithet not only intended to remind us of the Venetian ruler of Othello, but also of Bobby Knight, whose nickname is "The General," and of the most famous private "basketball university" in the south. (7) When Odin passes up Hugo in naming Mike Casio his co-MVP, Hugo launches an intricate plot to destroy Odin, which culminates in a fast-paced final scene centering upon the violent deaths of Roger (the Roderigo character), Emily (the Emilia character), Mike, Desi, and Odin. While the language fortunately has been modernized, (8) Brad Kaaya's screenplay and Nelson's film follow quite faithfully the basic plot structure of Shakespeare's play. (9) One of Nelson's contributions to the Shakespeare film lexicon is to suggest what so many stage directors of Othello have long pointed out: that the play is as much the subject of Iago's fall as that of the titular hero's fall. (10) Of course, the very decision to portray the Iago character as a teenager renders him a more sympathetic villain than we are used to, but Nelson goes to additional lengths to emphasize the point that Hugo is no vice figure or representative of absolute evil. One of the film's most disturbing reminders of the psychological profiles of the Columbine shooters is Hugo's final, revealing comment that "One of these days, everyone is going to pay attention to me." The bald admission of jealousy makes explicit what the film implies all along: that Hugo is driven to violence because he feels neglected, unloved, and under-appreciated. As Hartnett remarks about the character, "he was an overly wounded person.... He's missing a lot of love" (Nelson 2002).
It would be quite easy to criticize Nelson for giving in to the temptation to spell out so obviously the cause of Hugo's suffering or to provide so simplistic a psychological motive to the villain; but I want to suggest that Hugo's final line systematically rewrites Iago's refusal to explain his own evil deeds: "Demand me nothing; what you know, you know: / From this time forth I never will speak word" (5.2.303-04). (11) While the Hugo character makes a similar declaration at the end of the film--"From here on out, I say nothing"--leaving Odin and the survivors uncertain about why he has acted so maliciously, the audience benefits from a final voice-over, which attempts to answer the question that readers of tragedies such as Othello and Columbine most want to know: why did this happen?
The explicit answer is crucial, even if it is reductive and, as we will see in a moment, inadequate, because it resists absolutist notions of good and evil (that is, it rejects the dangerous and unproductive notion that some teenagers commit evil deeds because they are intrinsically evil or naturally depraved), and forces the audience to consider the complex psycho-social factors that influence such horrific acts of...
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