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Later in the 1990s, Branagh’s film continues in this conservative vein by further reinstating the Oedipal dynamic of desire. Through the representation of sexuality and the use of cinematic conventions that reinscribe dominant ideology, Branagh’s film reinforces puritanical attitudes of American (and, to a lesser extent, British) culture at the close of this decade. These cultural attitudes comprise the cultural contexts framing Branagh’s film in 1996 and also provide the “cultural unconscious” that informs its representational logic.

III Displaced desire in Branagh’s Hamlet

Although Branagh’s Hamlet emerges from the psychoanalytic tradition established by Olivier and modernized by ZeYrelli, Branagh attempts to distance it from that legacy. He avoids the problem of interpretation altogether in the “Introduction” to his screenplay, where he claims his take on Hamlet is “not an intellectual approach, but an intuitive one.’’ For, he continues, “I cannot explain Hamlet, or even perhaps my own interpretation of Hamlet” (Branagh 1996b:xv). Branagh’s anti-intellectual approach to the play underlies its lack of self-consciousness in appropriations of psychoanalytic interpretations in earlier Wlms. Oddly, though his Wlm is curiously and ostensibly positioned against its inherited psychoanalytic legacy (see Andrews 1996:53, 62, 66, 76), Branagh refers to it as “simply the passionate expression of a dream…that has preoccupied me for so many years,” one that “I cannot really explain” (Branagh 1996b:xv), strangely echoing and inviting a psychoanalytic reading of his production. If there is a concept at work in his Hamlet, Branagh implies, it resides in his own unconscious mind, inaccessible even to himself.

Although Branagh denies any intellectual frame or influence, his film ironically enacts the Freud/Jones Oedipal reading more closely than any previous adaptation, revealing in its avoidance of the unconscious and the maternal the workings of cultural repression and the effects of the paternal law. Branagh’s film is set in the late nineteenth century, correlating its period with that of Freud; moreover, through its iconography, it suggests figuratively the shift in Freud’s own writings on Hamlet. Branagh’s Hamlet represses the maternal (melancholy) to focus on the ambivalent identification with fathers (Oedipal), thereby duplicating the move made by Freud himself in his own reading of Shakespeare’s tragedy.

The look of Branagh’s Hamlet itself serves as a metaphor for its approach to maternal loss. Visually, its art direction suggests the

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