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Shakespeare, Cinema and Queer Adolescents: Unhappy Endings and Heartfelt Conclusions

2013; Routledge; Volume: 10; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17450918.2013.807297

1745-0926

Catherine Silverstone,

African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues

AbstractThis article considers films focussed on adolescents with same-sex desires that utilise Shakespeare (text, plot device, cultural icon) as material for adaptation and appropriation. These films are of critical interest for several reasons, as the analysis of Léa Pool's Lost and Delirious (2001) and Tom Gustafson's Were the World Mine (2008) demonstrates. They show variously how "Shakespeare" offers fantasies both of otherness (alternative worlds and textual templates) and sameness (desire is the same, regardless of object choice) for articulating same-sex desires and subjectivities variously named as gay, lesbian, queer, bisexual, or disavowed as such. These fantasies are, however, circumscribed: alternative worlds are time-limited, texts can encode loss, death, and a demand for heteronormative resolution, and expressions of "universal" emotion tend to reward subjects who are able to attach their desires to heteroerotic object choices. The films' uses of Shakespeare also work to reinforce clichés about the supposed universality of emotion, associations between "gayness", "queerness", and Shakespeare, and historically anachronistic accounts of Shakespeare's sexuality. Importantly, as their narratives unfold, the films' engagement with Shakespeare and adolescence throws into relief some key issues that emerge in representations of queers, especially with respect to affirmative images, melancholy, loss, unhappiness, and relationships to heteronormativity, which the article explores with a particular focus on the films' endings. The films show that queer adolescents help to facilitate the smooth running of heteronormativity; they also offer fantasies of otherness and difference that might, briefly or provisionally, trouble normative structures. The article extends work on Shakespeare, cinema and same-sex desires through its focus on adolescence, an area that has received comparatively little critical attention. It also contributes to work on cinematic representations of queer adolescence and to debates about gay, lesbian, and queer cinema and cultural production more broadly.Keywords: gaylesbianadolescenceLéa PoolLost and DeliriousTom GustafsonWere the World Mine AcknowledgementsI am grateful for the helpful feedback I received on earlier versions of this article presented at the London Theatre Seminar (December 2011) and at research seminars at the Department of English at Keele University (February 2012), and the Department of Drama at the University of Hull (May 2012). This article has also benefitted significantly from the perceptive readings of Julia Cort, Jen Harvie, Dominic Johnson (who also suggested the subtitle), Kim Solga, Fintan Walsh, Lois Weaver, and the two anonymous reviewers for Shakespeare. My thanks are also due to Charlotte Bell for sourcing reviews and festival programmes.Notes1. Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho (1991) focuses on late adolescence/early adulthood and appropriates aspects of the Henry IV plays in its narrative of two young hustlers in Portland, Oregon. Its use of Shakespeare is primarily in relation to Scott's (Keanu Reeves) paternal "Shakespearean" family narrative, as Susan Wiseman notes in her account of the film, which I have drawn on here. The film's other central narrative focuses on Scott's friend Mike (River Phoenix), who is identified as gay (Scott appears to be straight but turns tricks with men). Mike's narrative and his sense of identity are not, however, primarily developed in relation to Shakespeare and, if anything, Mike is excluded from Shakespeare as cultural capital. Idaho does invite reading of queer youths in terms of melancholy, loss and unhappiness of the kind I have proposed in this article, but "Shakespeare" is not positioned as central to this figuration, as it is in other films in this group. A related example to the group of films I have identified is Samuel Park's short film Shakespeare's Sonnets (2005), set in 1948 at Harvard, which focuses on young men rather than adolescents.2. Examples include Hettie Macdonald's Beautiful Thing (1996), Simon Shore's Get Real (1998), Lukas Moodysson's Show Me Love (Fucking Åmål) (1998), David Moreton's Edge of Seventeen (1998), and Jamie Babbit's But I'm a Cheerleader (1999). There is a brief reference to Romeo and Juliet in Get Real as Steven reads the play (upside down) as he cruises outside a public toilet. Gregg Araki's "Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy", especially Totally F***ed Up (1993) and Nowhere (1997), offers an alternative to the positive images offered by "coming out" films.3. Kate Chedgzoy's and Anthony Guy Patricia's analyses are indicative of this critical trend. I engage with the work of critics who have considered adolescence below.4. See, for example, Bronski, Fouz-Hernández, Jennings, Pramaggiore (70–73), Pullen (174–85), Shary (238–46), and Tinkcom. Russo considers some earlier films with adolescent characters (260–61, 273–74).5. See Butler (132–50) for an analysis of "gender as a kind of melancholy, or as one of melancholy's effects" (132), which produces what she describes as both heterosexual and gay melancholy (146–50).6. Burt considers visible or legible gay representations elsewhere, including his consideration of gay and lesbian adaptations of Romeo and Juliet ("No Holes") and adaptations by Greenaway, Van Sant, and Jarman ("Baroque Down").7. Although Paulie is shown to be frustrated by the limitations of stereotypes of femininity, the film suggests that she is driven less by a desire to be masculine as Klett suggests than by a desire to be reunited with the object of her desire, Tori. Swan's novel is more concerned with Paulie's negotiation of her gendered identity.8. Burt ("Te(e)n Things"), Elizabeth A. Dietchman, and Klett, among others, have critiqued the conservative feminist and heteronormative limits of these films.9. In The Ego and the Id, Freud revised his position on melancholy such that "the painful disorder of melancholia" in which "an object which was lost has been set up inside the ego" is more "common" and "typical" than he first thought. Further, he suggested that this process "has a great share in determining the form taken by the ego and that it makes an essential contribution towards building up what is called its 'character'" (28). Here melancholia is located as constitutive in the development of the subject rather than a sign of a pathological subject.10. Krueckeberg is the film's co-writer, designer, producer and mastermind behind the adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream (he adapted the lyrics that were set to music by Jessica Fogle).11. Bronski praises films such as Edge of Seventeen (25) and Show Me Love (26), which he argues offer "emotionally and psychologically complicated narratives about what it means to be a gay or lesbian person" (26).12. Kozusko's article was published in November 2012, the same month that this article was submitted for publication.13. These anxieties recall Stephen Orgel's autobiographical opening to Impersonations where he remembers the shift in his all-boys school in the USA in the 1940s from all male to male and female casts, which his teacher later attributed to a fear that playing women "was turning the boys into pansies" (xiv).14. I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers for drawing this point to my attention.