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Zeffirelli’s literal rendering of the Oedipal scenario resembles Lacan’s interpretation of Hamlet as a play about the workings of desire and its relationship to mourning and lack (Lupton and Reinhard 1993:82–84). Lacan’s Hamlet has “lost the way of his [own] desire” (Lacan 1993:12), as he is enmeshed in the desire of the (m)Other.8 For Lacan,

This desire, of the mother, is essentially manifested in the fact that, confronted on one hand with an eminent, idealized, exalted object—his father—and on the other with the degraded, despicable object Claudius, the criminal and adulterous brother, Hamlet does not choose.

(12)

Existing only in the “time of the other” and for the fulfillment of the other’s desire, this Hamlet ‘‘just doesn’t know what he wants” (26). He is unable to act on his own desires, as they have become subsumed within that of his (m)Other. Within this matrix of desire, argues Lacan, Ophelia plays a key role. When she dies, Ophelia becomes an impossible “object-in-desire” for Hamlet—an object that exists for the subject only in or through desire itself. In other words, Ophelia takes on value for the subject, Hamlet, only when she is unattainable, beyond reach. According to Lacan, it is not until Ophelia becomes Hamlet’s “object-in-desire” through death that he can mourn, sense his own lack and the “hole in the real,” or the nothingness which the subject seeks to fill in with the “totality of the signifier,” defined as the promise of transcendent meaning, or presence-in-being, that language fails to deliver (37–38).

In Zeffirelli’s film, Glenn Close as Gertrude, rather than action-hero star Mel Gibson as Hamlet, dominates the screen, her force as “demanding mother” clearly registered by Hamlet and the other characters. Gibson’s Hamlet appears revolted by his mother’s zealous attentions and open sexuality (Lupton and Reinhard 1993:83), and when he tops her in a violent act of mock-rape in the closet scene, the prince seems to be venting his anger and frustration in a vain attempt to dominate and control his mother’s desire. Claudius also watches his wife anxiously, directing jealous glares at Gertrude as she dotes excessively on her son, clearly unable to command or satisfy his wife’s desire. Ophelia as well feels the queen’s domineering presence. Helena Bonham-Carter, as Ophelia, looks admiringly at the queen, who returns her gaze across the banquet table, forming a bond between the two. In her madness, Ophelia almost parodies

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