The Spirit of Spectacle

Résumé du livre

In the following chapters, I read the impulses of Jarman, Van Sant, and Cox's treatments of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Middleton as "punk." In my Jarman chapter, I read the often critically ignored pop promos that Jarman directed as a vital feature in his career-long interrogation of the Renaissance. In my analysis of Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho, I focus on the way Van Sant positions Shakespeare's Henriad alongside a variety of other paratexts (such as songs by the Pogues and B-52's and the hustler narratives of JT LeRoy) so that Shakespeare penetrates Van Sant's text, and not vice versa. Finally, using Tim Blake Nelson's O (a hip-hop revision of Othello) as a counterexample, I assess whether a twenty-first century example of the Punked Renaissance film like Cox's Revengers Tragedy can make the same claims of authenticity and spectacle as earlier example, focusing on Nelson and Cox's claims of prophecy and "realness" regarding the Columbine massacre and the attack on the World Trade Center