2281) [The] marriage of Romanticism and Freud which is film noir [...]

Geoffrey O'Brien
"The Ghost at the Feast" in
New York Review of Books (2/6/1997)

2282) Everyone who subscribes to cable television has had the experience of switching rapidly from channel to channel and hearing at every stop the same tones and inflections, the same vocabulary, the same messages: a language flattened and reduced to a shifting but never very large repertoire of catchphrases and slogans, a language into which advertisers have so successfully insinuated their strategies that the consumers themselves turn into walking commercials. It is a dialect of dead end and perpetual arbitrary switch-overs, intended always to sell but more fundamentally to fill time: a necessary substitute for dead air. Whether in movies or television dramas, talk shows or political speeches or "infotainment" specials hawking hair dyes and exercise machines, the homogenization of speech, the exclusion of anything resembling figurative language or rhetorical complexity or any remotely extravagant eloquence or wordplay or (it goes without saying) historical or literary allusions of any kind whatever, becomes so self-evident that the only defense is that winking tone of faux inanity of which the ineffable "whatever" seems to be an ironic acknowledgment. By contrast the dialogue in the old Hollywood movies unreeling randomly night and day - The Road to Rio or The Falcon in San Francisco or The File on Thelma Jordan - seems already to partake of some quite vanished classical age: how soon before it, too, needs footnotes?

Nothing leads from or to anything: the show rolls on because it isn't time for the next show yet. It is talk without any but the most short-term memory, as if language were not to be permitted its own past, a state of affairs which makes language in some senses impossible. In this context Shakespeare assumes an ever-stranger roles as he becomes the voice of a past increasingly less accessible and less tractable, the ghost at the fast-food feast. If in translation Shakespeare can remain our contemporary, in English he carries his own language with him, a language now almost accusatory in its richness when compared with the weirdly rootless and improvised speech of Medialand. "I learn immediately from any speaker," wrote Emerson, "how much he has already lived, through the poverty or splendor of his speech." But there is no telling what a four-hundred year-old man will be saying; the older he gets, the more it changes, and we no longer know if we really want to hear everything. It is like peering into a flowerpot full of twisted vines and splotched discolored lichen surviving improbably from some ancient plot.

It is absurd that Shakespeare alone should have to bear this burden, as if the whole of the European past rested on him alone, but that's only because nearly everyone else has already been consigned to the oblivion of the archives. We aren't likely to get (speaking only of the English tradition) the Geoffrey Chaucer movie, the Edmund Spencer movie, the John Webster movie, the John Milton movie, the William Congreve movie, the Laurence Stern movie, or even the Herman Melville movie; and the Bible movies, when they appear, owe more these days to the cadences of Xena: Warrior Princess than to those of King James. [...] Shakespeare has to stand, all by himself, for centuries of expressive language erased by common consent from the audio-visual universe which is our theatre and library and public square.

Geoffrey O'Brien
"The Ghost at the Feast" in
New York Review of Books (2/6/1997)
[review of Kenneth Branagh's film Hamlet,
and other Shakespeare films]