Beyond appropriation

Unlike North American classroom standards such as She’s The Man or 10 Things I Hate About You, which make deliberate, sustained use of Shakespeare, the two films considered in this chapter – Rowdy Herrington’s Road House (1989) and Wolfgang Petersen’s Air Force One (1997) – are marked by accidental echoes and parallels. Because the connections I suggest between Shakespeare and contemporary film are generally not deliberate, the challenges of defining, mapping, and assessing appropriations can largely be sidestepped here. ¹ My object is not to argue for a film’s status as an appropriation but to make use of accidental echoes in order to offer introductory students a foothold on the sheer face of the Shakespearean text. Indeed, at the level of structural analysis, as discussed below, the notion of narrative homologies linking Shakespeare to contemporary film is the starting point of an argument, not its end. Nor is the idea of an accidental appropriation new, since inquiry into Shakespeare and film has always recognized submerged parallels like those I pursue here. For example, Tony Howard has pointed out both the inadvertent and deliberate echoes of King Lear in The Godfather and The Godfather Part III (Howard 2000: 299), and Douglas Lanier has traced echoes of Hamlet in his account of the 1945 film Strange Illusion (Lanier 2014: 32). Somewhat further afield, Christy Desmet discusses the notion of “accidental appropriation” in the appearance in a Shakespeare troupe’s costumes of Seminole Indians at a peace talk with their opponents (Desmet 2014: 53). ² What separates my account here of accidental appropriations is the provisional, manufactured, and even strained status of the Shakespeare connections. My suggestion is that found analogs in contemporary films can be useful in teaching Shakespeare to introductory students. I offer two examples. The first is Road House, in which an itinerant bouncer advocates nonviolence as an approach to the troubles that come with being a “cooler” at a rowdy bar. The film reproduces characters and scenarios from Hamlet and is useful for introducing students to the notion of character function or characters as actants. The second is Air Force One, in which characters’ private, personal desires come into conflict with public duty, allowing for a reading of Romeo and Juliet focused on character motivation and character consistency. The analogs in the second case are far more tenuous, and the comparison suggests ways of finding Shakespearean echoes in films in which parallels are not easily discovered. For both examples, sketching narrative homologies involves looking at actions or events and at the characters or agents who enact them. This chapter thus involves an 218overview of some basic concepts and movements in twentieth-century structuralism and narrative theory. I close by suggesting that accidental appropriation can both demystify Shakespeare’s artistry and help celebrate its complexity.