Medium Cruel: Hamlet in 2000‪.‬

As canonical masterpiece. Hamlet has been subjected to every systematic method of critical analysis. Initially such analyses focused on the "problem" of Hamlet; more recently the play has served as a test of analytic theories. Theatrical performance has ranged from a/tempts to "do" Hamlet to attempts to "undo" Hamlet. On the whole, mainstream film has tended until recently to be more conservative, justifying stylized language with period productions. The trend has shifted. Among the successes of the 90s, Loncraine's Richard III (1995), set in a fascist England of the 30s, and Luhrmann's postmodern William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (1996) successfully brought to mainstream cinema the kind of challenging dislocation of the text long familiar to the theater. Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (2000) continues the trend of creating challenging cultural juxtapositions. (1) This Hamlet is set in a contemporary urban culture in which the visual displaces the verbal. The traditional text is subordinated to an action in which characters are aware of themselves as images. For this Hamlet (Ethan Hawke), the video is both his mirror and his memory. Because the drama shifts the balance between hearing and seeing viewing, the listener becomes as significant as listening to the speaker. Hamlet's search lot meaning takes place not through the futile discourses of the text but through the fragmented video images he contemplates and manipulates. In contrast, the ineffectual Polonius is associated with the word: his speeches are long and unmediated. As a consequence of Hamlet's investment in the visual, the verbal text comes close to becoming marginalia, a marker for where we are in Hamlet's experience rather than the means whereby we negotiate it. In this intensely mediated contemporary setting, the scope of Hamlet is in one sense diminished: the late of Denmark (Corporation) rates a press conference and a USA Today headline, but little more. Even the ghost is upstaged by background images of televised violence of a larger scale than his own murder. But perhaps the epic scope of Hamlet's sources was left behind from the start: we have always been inclined to perceive the play as a domestic drama rather than as a dynastic struggle.