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Page 171 the aggressiveness of Gertrude in her lewd sexual behavior directed at the castle guard and also in her sarcastic demand of the demanding (m)Other queen: “Where is the beauteous queen of Denmark?” (4.5.21). Through this affinity, Ophelia reverses the play of desire when, as Gertrude’s substitute, she functions as Hamlet’s object-in-desire through her death, thereby affirming Hamlet as desiring subject. As the object rather than a stand-in for the demanding (m)Other, Ophelia becomes more of a contrasting foil than a double to Gertrude. Ophelia’s transformation is effected visually through the filming of her drowning—a long shot view of a green landscape resembling a Pre-Raphaelite painting, Ophelia’s body only a small, distant object floating on the water. In this brief moment, Ophelia is transformed into an abstract, sublime object, which is further emphasized when her body, draped in white, is featured in the foreground of the funeral scene. Each of these films figures within multiple cultural contexts that intertextually frame their appropriations of psychoanalysis and Hamlet; psychoanalytic film theory provides a means by which these interactions can be read. From this perspective, argues Laura Mulvey, one can read the cinema as a “massive screen on which collective fantasy, anxiety, fear and their effects can be projected,” for visually “it speaks the blind-spots of a culture and finds forms that make manifest socially traumatic material, through distortion, defence and disguise” (Mulvey 1996:12). In this sense, the filmed Hamlets, through their appropriation of psychoanalytic theory, reveal much about the obsessions and anxieties of their particular cultural and historical moments. Olivier’s adaptation self-consciously responds to post-World War II existentialist thought, which was deeply enmeshed in psychoanalytic theory, especially in its depiction of the subject’s angst at facing the inner void or lack. Zeffirelli’s version, by contrast, could be read as a Hamlet that grew out of the 1980s–90s backlash against feminism common in many popular Hollywood films, which portray powerful female figures as either “bitches’’ or neurotics. Glenn Close’s physical presence in Hamlet derives significance from these contexts, through the “cinematic unconscious” —the intertextual meanings generated by Close’s other roles, in such films as Adrian Lyne’s Fatal Attraction, in which she plays a neurotic other woman who obsessively stalks her married ex-lover for revenge (Lupton and Reinhard 1993: 84–86). Close’s Fatal Attraction image as a “hysterical, violent female” contributes significantly to the cultural and ideological meanings of the maternal in Zeffirelli’s Hamlet. |
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