White Trash Shakespeare: Taste, Morality, and the Dark Side of the American Dream in Billy Morrissette's Scotland, PA
2006; Salisbury University; Volume: 34; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0090-4260
Autores Tópico(s)South Asian Cinema and Culture
ResumoDespite the democratic language ostensibly guaranteeing all Americans the equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, social inequality is actually woven into the country's ideological fabric in patterns of class, race, and gender. One of the country's most cherished myths, the American Dream-a fantasy of social mobility enabled by America's putative rejection of the aristocratic hierarchy structuring the Old World societies of our ancestors-has actually served the more pernicious purpose of glossing over the inequalities and social hierarchies structuring the country's real but invisible class system. Because the Dream places both the burden of success and the blame for failure squarely on the individual American, it invites an understanding of the rich as morally superior (as long as they adhere to the American Dream's rules) and the poor as morally flawed. In twenty-first-century America the growing gap between the wealthy and the poor has become harder to ignore, making the preservation of the American Dream's central mythology crucial to continuing the illusion of equal opportunity in an increasingly unequal society. Billy Morrissette's Scotland, PA, an adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth, examines America's growing class divide by translating the play's central question concerning the role we play in determining our own fate into question about the role we play in establishing our place in America's social order. With fast food empire at the heart of the film's action, taste through its connection to morality plays central role in mapping out the film's social landscape, landscape populated by small business owners and their employees. By analyzing how Morrissette figures social class through mise en scene laden with white-trash and Carnival imagery, argue that in its adherence to Macbeth's plot, the film links social class directly to morality, vilifying the white-trash McBeths actually trapped in their class category and veiling the dark side of the American Dream. Morrissette transplants Shakespeare's tale of internecine struggle from the castles and heaths of Scotland to the working-class world of Scotland, Pennsylvania, rural American, working-class town where Pat (Maura Tierney) and Joe McBeth (James LeGros), along with Mac's friend Anthony Banko Banconi (Kevin Corrigan), work for Norman Duncan (James Rebhorn) in his fast food restaurant, Duncan's Cafe. Whereas Shakespeare's Macbeth murders King Duncan for the throne of Scotland, Pat and Mac murder Duncan-somewhat accidentally-in order to gain ownership of his restaurant. After transforming the homey Duncan's into plastic and Formicafilled McBeth's, the couple seems to be on their way up the social ladder. But their success is cut short by the investigation of Ernie McDuff (Christopher Walken), detective from outside of Scotland who, despite the ineptitude of Scotland's only police officer, solves the murder of Duncan and takes over the restaurant, replacing the big McBeth with garden burger. Transforming Shakespeare's Scottish kings and thanes into American business owners and their employees effectively raises the specter of America's buried social class inequalities. While Shakespeare's characters all occupy the Scottish ruling class, Morrissette's characters are divided along class lines into the middle and lower class, translating the Macbeths' vaulting ambition into the McBeths' class aspiration. Yet in their recognition of Scotland's socio-economic landscape, the film's critics articulate monolithic view of the film's world. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Ron Weiskind, for instance, calls the film a trailer-trash version of 'Macbeth' (14), while Marguerite Rippy dubs it tasty low-class fun (B 16). Even the director notes the film's specific class references: I tried to keep it just pure white trash, with touch of Shakespeare' (quoted in Fracassini 3). The film's various class resonances with critics-seeming to conflate working class and lower class with white trash-demonstrate how the poor in America are understood as morally undeserving within the American Dream framework. …
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