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containment of the mother, the desire to “box her up” as in Freud’s dream, to internalize her presence as absence until her very memory has been consumed by the conflict of Oedipal rivalry. Freud thus “figures maternal absence through a projective displacement; maternal loss, however, returns as the ghostly father and his law of lack” (Lupton and Reinhard 1993:28), the law based on division and separation. Once mourned, the maternal can only be viewed through the lens of paternal law, for, as Lupton and Reinhard explain, “the screen memory [or internalized image] of maternal loss already takes place in the court of paternal law; pre-Oedipal catastrophe is both imagined and effaced from the symbolic retrospection of the Oedipal triangle” (19). In other words, once the maternal image is mourned and imagined as lost, the subject has already rejected the pre-Oedipal stage, when its being was merged with that of the mother. In the Oedipal stage, the child severs that earlier bond and effectively obliterates its existence from conscious memory to enter into the Symbolic order, in accordance with the laws and ideology that constitute human social identity (ego or moi). This same maneuver can be seen in Branagh’s Hamlet, in which the maternal is effaced in favor of the paternal “and his law of lack.” Unlike Olivier’s intense, carefully crafted, black-and-white version of Hamlet —reminiscent of German Expressionist cinema with its dark, brooding atmosphere, winding staircases, empty rooms and chairs—Branagh’s adaptation is the epitome of Hollywood excess. It features bright, white, expansive exteriors; lavish, lush-colored and decorated interiors, filled with crowds of extras; elaborate costumes; sweeping cameras; melodramatic flashbacks; extreme special effects (particularly with the Ghost); a ubiquitous and obtrusive soundtrack; and an all-star cast. These features—along with the film’s claim to the ‘‘complete text” —seem to fulfill a compensatory need to fill in a lack, to deflect from what is missing in this full-length Hamlet.

From this perspective, this missing element in Branagh’s film is the maternal, whose loss is deflected through this excess, a move that reveals an “aesthetic of disavowal,” in Mulvey’s terms, which “can easily provide a formal basis for a displacement which moves signification considerably further away from the problem of reference” (Mulvey 1996:13). In this case, the problem of reference resides in the maternal/melancholic reading of Hamlet, the trace remainder of the Freud/Jones Oedipal reading. The frigid, stark whiteness of the film’s landscape and the expansive, clinically bright interiors of the palace, draped with blood red fabrics, all suggest a

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