<윌리엄 셰익스피어의 로미오+줄리엣>의 미디어와 소비문화

Abstract

Baz Luhrmann’s radical film William Shakespeare’s Romeo+Juliet (1996) offers a stunning contemporary vision of Shakespearean play text. Luhrmann uses a variety of media forms and images from consumer culture to create very popular filmic productions, addressed t o an up-to-date modern mass audience.William Shakespeare’s Romeo+Juliet seems like a good example of post-modern pastiche, which puts together a plethora of allusions, copies, and intertextuality (the western movie, the gangster movie, the kung-fu pic, the urban thriller, crime-thriller, the action comedy, MTV, etc). He borrows the characteristics of many genres and styles and re-works these elements through his signature “Bazmark” style to make postmodern pastiche, in which the distinction between high and low art is collapsed and everything has equal value. In Luhrmann’s film, Shakespeare’s language becomes the source of advertising copy and a brand name. And the film, where sacred and profane exist in a dynamic balance, is so saturated with religious symbolism, that is intimately mingled with consumer culture. The mockery of a religion plays a clashing role in Luhrmann’s mise-en-scène, for the giant statues of Christ, Mary, and various saints compose a powerless group of silent onlookers to the violence in Verona, and for the film portrays religion as a media icon or a brand name or a just another commodity in post-modern consumer culture. To mix popular culture with elements of high culture, Luhrmann opens his film with a television news report that functions as the classical chorus, followed by the hasty progression of newspaper headlines concerning the “new mutiny” and “ancient grudge” between Capulets and Montagues. But Jean Baudrillard claimed that everything today is composed of simulacra of previously existing things. According to Baudrillard’s theory, the news on television is the hyperreal, though it seems to refer to something real; the news is a simulation designed to hold the attention of the viewer. In the circular frame where everything begins and ends with television news, the whole tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is presented as an event within the TV news. Luhrmann’s film can be read as a canonical example of iconoclasm, for it challenges to the Shakespearean canon and timeless, eternal values he represents. Though Luhrmann may try to make Shakespeare relevant to today’s society from a new contemporary innovative viewpoint, the practice of this film consequently seems to cast a doubt on Shakespearean icon of literary value and to destabilize the previously unshakeable stability of his authority. Luhrmann’s flamboyant cinematographic style, “Bazmark,” has positioned him as an innovative, creative auteur competing with High Culture Shakespeare within the domain of contemporary cultural milieu.