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Shakespeare After Columbine: Teen Violence in Tim Blake Nelson's "O"

Posted on: Friday, 28 October 2005, 03:00 CDT

By Semenza, Gregory M Coln

Although filming had been completed nearly two years earlier, Tim Blake Nelson's teen adaptation of Othello would not be released in theaters until late August of 2001. On the morning of April 20, 1999, while the film was less than two weeks into the edit, two teen- aged boys, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, entered Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado with a couple of sawed-off shotguns, a handgun, a semiautomatic rifle, and several homemade bombs. By the time they turned the weapons on themselves, just minutes later, thirteen students and teachers had been murdered and twenty-eight others critically wounded. While athletes and black students seem to have been singled out, prior to the shootings, as the primary targets, once inside the school the boys shot indiscriminately at anyone who crossed their path.1 Concerned that the bloody finale of "O"-which follows the Iago and Othello characters on a rampage through a campus dormitory-paralleled too closely the high school massacre at Columbine, and egged on by zealous Washington legislators (such as Democrat, Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut) intent on scapegoating Hollywood as an indirect cause of the shootings, the notoriously conservative distributing company, Miramax, decided against releasing the film.2 Only after Lion's Gate Films boldly interceded and purchased the rights from Miramax- nearly two years and several lawsuits later-could an audience view and judge Nelson's controversial film for itself.

The trauma caused by the Columbine massacre and the "copy-cat" shootings it inspired tends to erase our memory of the numerous school shootings that preceded it. In 1998 alone, five separate shootings resulted in the deaths of 13 students and teachers; many others were wounded. Three other major shootings were reported in 1996 and 1997.3 In other words, although the shootings at Columbine had not yet occurred when the filming and production of "O" began, Nelson had more than enough teen suffering to reference and draw upon, as he noted in Tiie NewYork Times:"There were five shootings in the year or so leading up to photography on "O", and the names of the schools' towns had become shorthand for what seemed an epidemic of teenage violence: Jonesboro, Pearl, Eugene, Springfield, Edinboro" (2001, 2.8). Since editors had just begun their work when the shootings at Columbine occurred, the film would inevitably reflect, and attempt to address, the pain and terror caused by the massacre. Ironically, but unsurprisingly, Miramax would move to cover up the very existence of a film that aims to understand such senseless tragedies, not to incite them.4 In doing so, the company adopted one of the American film industry's foundational premises: that readers of film, especially young ones, are not critically astute enough to understand what they are watching.5

The decision by Miramax officials to shelve the film is difficult to justify even in the immediate context of the Columbine shootings since violence in "O" is neither gratuitous nor sensational. This is not to deny that it is haunting and particularly relevant, however. The final shots of the film appropriate quite powerfully the stock imagery and symbolism of an increasingly familiar American scene: the realist, but highly performative "aftermath coverage" of countless high school shootings both before and after Columbine. In the chaotic whirl of sirens and flashing camera bulbs, grim-faced police officers and faceless EMT personnel move quickly in and out of each frame, directing the movements and actions of the other major characters: the seemingly indifferent juvenile offender who is escorted slowly to the back seat of a patrol car; the numerous television reporters and camera people who struggle to "make sense" of an "unspeakable" or "unthinkable" catastrophe; the grieving parents who wail and cry over the bodies of their dead children; and, most iconographically, the groups of huddled students weeping in each other's arms. Nelson acknowledged the influence of such news coverage on this particular sequence of shots, admitting that "it was these [high school] shootings that interested me in making this film" (2002).

In what follows, I consider how "O" appropriates Shakespeare as a lens through which to analyze teen violence in America, a project taken very seriously by its director: "This film is meant to be a true reflection of high school life now. . . . Othello and high school are words that, when you put them together, sound silly. We're in a place in America right now in which it's not silly; it's serious and it's believable" (Nelson 2002). I argue that Nelson deliberately constructs his film as a surrogate for the high school literature classroom where, ideally, the skill of critical reading is first inculcated in our youth. The Shakespeare "text" looms large in this imaginary space, transforming film audiences into endangered students-inseparable from those teens depicted in "O"-whose ability to read deeply, analyze, and apply to their own lives the lessons of Shakespearean tragedy can do nothing less than help them to stay alive. On the surface, at least, Nelson begins to look more like a parody of Matthew Arnold than an appropriator of William Shakespeare, suggesting rather naively that great literature is the most effective antidote to mass violence.

Looking more deeply, though, one discovers the complexity of Nelson's pedagogy, which privileges the process of critical reading over the inherent value of the reading text itself. He succeeds in stimulating such critical readings by structuring his film dialectically: multiple, contrary interpretations (theses and antitheses) of teenage violence demand that readers work actively to synthesize what the film refuses to simplify for them. By juxtaposing popular interpretations of adolescent criminality as the result either of a natural depravity in teens or a profound psychosocial immaturity, (characterized especially by their supposed vulnerability to every rap song and violent television show they encounter), the film explores how such problems as racism, family abuse, peer ostracism, and countless other factors combine to make the turn of the century such a terrible time for many American teenagers.

By refusing to impose a more heavy-handed conclusion, Nelson transfers to film-a famously controlling medium-the characteristic indeterminacy of the Shakespearean play text and makes a case for its social functionality. A second contention of this paper, therefore, is that the film's realism, as well as the respect it pays its primary audience, announces a notable break from previous teen-Shakespeare films, which should cause Shakespeare-and-film scholars to reconsider the ways that such films are conceived and marketed. Teen Shakespeare, I would argue, grows up rather quickly after the horrors of Columbine.

I

Odin James (the initials "O. J." are not coincidental)6 whose friends call him "O", is the only black student at a predominantly white southern prep school. A blue chip basketball star, Odin (Mekhi Phifer) is revered on campus as the savior who will bring Palmetto Grove its twentieth state basketball championship in the 115-year history of the school. Odin's love affair with Dean Brabble's daughter, Desi (Julia Stiles), is socially acceptable only because of his indispensable position as the captain of the basketball team. While several reviewers have ridiculed the film's translation of warfare-the "sport of kings"-into basketball, the racial politics of the modern sport, which features predominantly African American players led by white coaches before an audience composed mainly of white ticket holders, serves nicely as a vehicle for modernizing the complex social position of Othello in Early Modern Europe.

The Iago character, Hugo (Josh Hartnett), is bitterly envious of Odin's position on the court and in his father's affection. In one of the significant departures from the play text, a fiery Martin Sheen plays both Hugo's father and the head coach of the basketball team. The players refer to him as "Duke," an epithet not only intended to remind us of the Venetian ruler of Othello, but also of Bobby Knight, whose nickname is "The General," and of the most famous private "basketball university" in the south.7 When Odin passes up Hugo in naming Mike Casio his co-MVP, Hugo launches an intricate plot to destroy Odin, which culminates in a fast-paced final scene centering upon the violent deaths of Roger (the Roderigo character), Emily (the Emilia character), Mike, Desi, and Odin. While the language fortunately has been modernized,8 Brad Kaaya's screenplay and Nelson's film follow quite faithfully the basic plot structure of Shakespeare's play.9 One of Nelson's contributions to the Shakespeare film lexicon is to suggest what so many stage directors of Othello have long pointed out: that the play is as much the subject of Iago's fall as that of the titular hero's fall.10 Of course, the very decision to portray the Iago character as a teenager renders him a more sympathetic villain than we are used to, but Nelson goes to additional lengths to emphasize the pointthat Hugo is no vice figure or representative of absolute evil. One of the film's most disturbing reminders of the psychological profiles of the Columbine shooters is Hugo's final, revealing comment that "One of these days, everyone is going to pay attention to me." The bald admission of jealousy makes explicit what the film implies all along: that Hugo is driven to violence because he feels neglected, unloved, and underappreciated. As Hartnett remarks about the character, "he was an overly wounded person. . . . He's missing a lot of love" (Nelson 2002).

It would be quite easy to criticize Nelson for giving in to the temptation to spell out so obviously the cause of Hugo's suffering or to provide so simplistic a psychological motive to the villain; but I want to suggest that Hugo's final line systematically rewrites lago's refusal to explain his own evil deeds: "Demand me nothing; what you know, you know: / From this time forth I never will speak word" (5.2.303-04).11 While the Hugo character makes a similar declaration at the end of the film-"From here on out, I say nothing"- leaving Odin and the survivors uncertain about why he has acted so maliciously, the audience benefits from a final voice-over, which attempts to answer the question that readers of tragedies such as Othello and Columbine most want to know: why did this happen?

The explicit answer is crucial, even if it is reductive and, as we will see in a moment, inadequate, because it resists absolutist notions of good and evil (that is, it rejects the dangerous and unproductive notion that some teenagers commit evil deeds because they are intrinsically evil or naturally depraved), and forces the audience to consider the complex psycho-social factors that influence such horrific acts of violence. Furthermore, the film's pop-psychological diagnosis of Hugo's behavior is contrasted and, in turn, interrogated by the conclusions that the film draws about Odin's criminal behavior, which serve to undermine the validity of oversimplified psychological and sociological readings of teen behavior. By transforming Othello into a tale of two tragedies, Nelson can approach the subject of teen violence dialectically- acknowledging its complexity through multiple, alternative analyses of its possible causes.

II

Over the past few years, Shakespeare-and-film scholars led by Richard Burt have sought to theorize the recent spate of Shakespeare films geared toward teenagers. In the wake of Baz Luhrmann's wildly successful Romeo + Juliet (1996) have followed such popular teen films as Gil Junger's Ten Things T Hate about You (1999), Kaja Gosnell's Never Been Kissed (1999), and Billy Morrissette's Scotland, PA. (2001), to mention only a few. Burt's own coinage, "Teensploi," which he uses to describe these Shakespeare films, adequately reveals that such criticism is more often than not focused on exposing the manipulative tendencies of producers, screenwriters, and directors to cultivate and cash in on the shallowness and gullibility of modern American teenagers. As Burt claims in a recent analysis of late nineties "teensploi flicks,"

These films dumb down Shakespeare in fulfilling manufactured preteen fantasies about being popular (romantically successful) in high schools, which are divided into losers and hotties. (The central fantasy in all of the teensploi films is that one can cross over from being a nerd to a hottie and vice versa: cool guys may fall for nerd girls, nerd guys may get hot girls, and seemingly cool guys and girls may turn out to be losers). (Burt 2002a, 207)

While this fairly general statement reduces somewhat the complexity of the films Burt discusses, I believe it to be an essentially accurate description of the specific teen fantasy that tends to be packaged and sold by such films as Ten Things I Hate about You. Burt's scholarship usefully calls attention to the late twentieth-century appropriation of Shakespeare for unashamedly economic and exploitative-as opposed to educational or even productively political-ends.12

Whereas much recent Shakespeare-and-film scholarship is undoubtedly helpful in that it theorizes quite poignantly the manipulative marketing of Shakespeare to teens, it rarely makes any attempt to contextualize these marketing practices or, more importantly, the teen audience's willingness to buy the finished product. That is, although we seem comfortable identifying and articulating the particular fantasies that teens seem so eager to purchase, we have failed to ask why such fantasies happen to appeal to so many of them at this specific moment in time. Paradoxically, the unfortunate and unintended result is the very universalization and naturalization of the manufactured teen fantasies we wish to expose and critique.13 My guess is that most twenty-first-century intellectuals would reject any suggestion that such fantasies are either universal or natural. Even the implicit suggestion that they are anything other than historical constructions tends to prevent us from asking extremely important questions about why so many teenagers happen to feel so excluded, anxious, and even bitter about their place in society at this particular moment in American history.

Such negligence is fueled, I would argue, by the persistence in our culture of the myth of childhood innocence, which educational theorist Henry Giroux describes as an adult fantasy "constructed around the notion that both childhood and innocence reflect aspects of a natural state, one that is beyond the dictates of history, society, and politics" (2000, 2). Giroux has been one of the most vocal and eloquent critics of this notion, arguing that the myth not only serves the conscious and unconscious goals of an exploitative corporate marketplace, but also that it constructs performatively the children it claims merely to describe:

Childhood is not a natural state of innocence; it is a historical construction. It is also a cultural and political category that has very practical consequences for how adults "think about children"; and it has consequences for how children view themselves. . . . [T]he myth of childhood innocence . . . is a way for adults to shift attention away from the pressing problems of racism, sexism, family abuse, poverty, joblessness, industrial downsizing, and other social factors that make the end of the twentieth century such a dreadful time for many children. (Giroux 2000, 5-6)

One can confidently add that for teenagers, who are more often exposed than younger children to the temptations (and comforting pleasures) of drugs, unsafe sex, and violence, the myth of childhood innocence is nothing less than devastating, for it renders the susceptibility of our most vulnerable children to these and other social dangers the primary symptom of a pathological condition, as opposed to what it actually is: a logical and therefore, practical way of coping with what can seem like a rather hostile adult world.

There is only an apparent contradiction in the argument that adults construct children simultaneously as innocent creatures and as demons. Both claims emerge from the same basic tendency to figure children's behavior in archetypal, as opposed to historical, terms, and both extreme characterizations serve to describe children in relation to the social appropriateness of their actions: whereas a more thoroughly socialized child would seem to affirm the validity of the myth of innocence, violent or disturbed children often are depicted as unnatural. Note too that the myth of childhood innocence manages to accommodate the ascendancy of psychosocial behavioral science; that is, the myth of innocence fashions the child's mind as a tabula rasa-dangerously and helplessly impressionable to such social ills as television violence and profane rock music.

The myth of childhood innocence, then, tends to serve all parties- psychological behavioralists, sociological behavioralists, right- wing religious commentators, etc.-by allowing for absurd generalizations about teenage violence. As Mike A. Males has convincingly demonstrated,

Liberals and conservatives have joined in rampant escapism on "youth violence." The issue is not racial dysgenics and the debilitating effects of the welfare state, as conservatives claim, nor is it liberal scapegoats such as "media violence" and "gun availability." . . . Efforts to frame violence as a "teenage problem" . . . fail before the stark reality that race, class, gender, era, family background, and locality are far greater predictors of violence than young age. In fact, when such factors are fully accounted for, young age doesn't predict much of anything about violence. (Males 1996, 19-21)

In the end, Males's claim that "age doesn't predict much of anything" forces one to consider more seriously the local factors, such as poverty, that do predict something. Indeed, the move away from "youth" or "age" as an independent category for the analysis of violence depends upon and facilitates a rejection of the myth of childhood innocence. Furthermore, only through this sort of rejection can the so-called "teen experience" be de-naturalized and de-universalized to the point where useful analyses of the actual causes of violence might be conducted.

Unlike most Shakespeare teenpics, "O" works to complicate-rather than construct or exploit-the notion of a universal teen experience. The film refuses to conform to the mold established by "teensploi" Shakespeare films, which, as Burt points out, tend to "dumb down" Shakespeare in order to sell their usually shallow teen fantasies. Nelson himself assumed at first that "O" would operate on the same level as "teensploi": "In initially turning the project down, without reading it, I wondered when it would end, this ruining of classic texts by teening them down" (2001, 2.8). Influenced by his aversion to such a trend, Nelson offers in "O" what may be the best example of a teenpic th\at deliberately highlights the negative effects of both the dumbing down of teen Shakespeare and the propagation of the myth of teenage innocence.

Because it is such a young film at the time of this article's composition, the existence of "O" is just barely acknowledged in Shakespeare-and-film criticism.14 Part of what I work to prove below is that future writings on "O" should deal with the film on its own terms and avoid relegating it to the "teensploi" category used to describe such Shakespeare adaptations as Ten Things I Hate About You. In Burt's "Afterword" for Spectacular Shakespeare, he mentions "O" at the tail end of a long list of recent "teensploi" films, which may be a sign of what is to come (2002a, 205). Also likely is that "O" will be regarded as yet another attempt to socialize teens through a simple appropriation of Shakespeare. Sarah Neely, for example, claims that the purpose of "O" is merely to "enliven our understanding, or rather that of its teenage audience, of a canonically revered text" (2001, 83). This particular suggestion, that "O" serves simply as a vehicle for the conveyance of "cultural literacy" to teens, is perhaps the most reductive and inaccurate claim one can make about the film. While critics will certainly argue in the coming years about the degree to which "O" succeeds- either as a film or as an adaptation of Othello-its creators' goals, its general argument, and its particular reasons for appropriating Shakespeare set it off as a very different sort of film.

III

"O" begins with a beautiful series of medium and close-up shots of white doves enclosed within and, therefore, contained by a dome- like ceiling. The doves are contrasted with a black hawk-the school's team mascot-which soars freely above the gymnasium floor in the first shot of the film's second scene. The camera cuts directly from the image of the soaring hawk to Odin, who we see for the very first time. Whereas he is associated directly with the solitary hawk, Hugo is linked to the doves by virtue of the voice-over that introduces the film: "All my life I always wanted to fly; I always wanted to live like a hawk. I know you're not supposed to be jealous of anything or anyone, but to take flight, to soar above everything and everyone: now that's livin'" (Nelson 2002). The film is framed, then, by Hugo's acknowledgment and admission of his own jealousy and ambition, but the final voice-over, during the aftermath scene, offers a more extensive development of the avian metaphor:

But a hawk is no good around normal birds. It can't fit in. Even though all the other birds probably want to be hawks, they hate him for what they can't be. Proud, powerful, determined, dark. Odin is a hawk. He soars above us. He can fly. One of these days, everyone is going to pay attention to me . . . because I'm gonna fly too. (Nelson 2002)

Although the film establishes early on that, from Hugo's perspective, Odin is like a hawk, it also works to indict Hugo's analogy of the superior bird by reminding the audience that a single hawk cannot function in a space inhabited mainly by doves. To the degree that the association of Odin with the hawk actually holds in the film, the audience is constantly made aware that what Hugo considers superiority Odin considers difference and, in many cases, aloneness. Whereas Hugo strives to fly like a hawk, Odin struggles to "fit in" like a dove. Furthermore, after Hugo becoines a menace to society, he demonstrates in the final voice-over his failure to understand the complexity of the very metaphor he has invented: loved, accepted, and admired, Odin was actually nothing like the hawk envisioned by Hugo, except on the basketball court; despised by all and unable to fit in, Hugo oddly has become by the end the sort of creature he always wanted to be.

Hugo's misinterpretation of Odin's athletic prowess as a more general, natural superiority is one of the many misreadings of character and situation upon which Nelson's film is structured. This particular misreading also calls attention to the serious gap between the world of sporting events and the world of more typical social interactions between human beings. Without question, Hugo is jealous of Odin's superiority on the basketball court and the adulation the better athlete receives. As actor Mekhi Phifer remarked shortly after making the film: "We all can relate to athletes. We all went to school.We saw the type of attention they got" (Nelson 2002). But this is only a small part of the equation. Hugo's jealousy is exacerbated by and perhaps even emerges from his father's failure to recognize his successes both on and off the court.

During a pep-rally for the team, which is about to begin the state playoffs, Duke asks Odin to join him on the gymnasium floor and then explains that he is naming him the team's most valuable player:

As all of you know, I am a man of few words. .. . I'll get right to the point. By virtue of having won our division championship ... we will have home court advantage in the state championship, and one reason for that is this young man standing right next to me. And I want to tell you something else too, and I'm very proud to say this publicly: I love him like my own son. (Neslosn 2002)

As the students applaud, the camera focuses carefully on Hugo's wounded face. As Odin takes the microphone and begins to address the crowd, extolling the virtues of his soon-to-be named co-MVP, Hugo's rigid facial expression softens somewhat in anticipation that he will be called upon. His expression again darkens considerably when Odin names Mike Casio his co-MVP.15 While the public interactions of Odin and Hugo reflect mutual respect, if not warmth and closeness, the film establishes early on that what Hugo resents even more than Odin's success is the fact that his own vital role as a member of the team is constantly downplayed and overlooked by Odin, by Duke, and by the massive crowds that come to see them play. While Odin figures as the "shooter" in close game situations, Hugo is asked to serve as a "screen" or a "decoy," roles that expose his truly secondary position on the court.16 "I'm considered a utility man," he explains bitterly to Roger a few hours after the pep-rally. Hugo is just a normal bird, in other words.

The pep-rally is one of several key scenes designed, in part, to highlight how easily the impending bloodbath might have been averted. Like Othello in Shakespeare's play, Odin fails to read the Iago character sufficiently; he fails to empathize properly with his jealous subordinate's position-a failure that reflects, on a certain level, a flaw in the otherwise seemingly perfect leader. Tension is built upon the audience's awareness that either Odin's or Duke's public recognition of Hugo would have been enough to heal his wounded pride.17 In a later scene, Hugo enters his father's office and takes a seat at what appears to be a makeshift dinner table. The camera offers a somewhat paradoxical wide shot of a tightly closed and slightly claustrophobic space, with Hugo, who we see through an open doorway, at the far left of the frame. At the center and right of the frame is a blank wall, which prevents us from seeing Hugo's father who, we eventually learn, is sitting at the other end of the table. Although the camera adjusts to a medium shot over the course of the conversation between Hugo and Duke, the basic composition remains the same throughout, keeping us focused on Hugo and preventing us from seeing Duke through the wall. Hugo initiates the conversation: "It's been a while since you invited me in here for dinner." After a sigh, Duke asks,"What is going on with Odin."The audience can just barely make out Hugo's hurt expression. "I don't know," he responds, "I saw him in class today, and he seemed allright." Refocusing attention on himself, he continues: "By the way, I'm getting an A in English again." Duke shifts the conversation almost immediately back to Odin: "That's great, son. Congratulations. You know I don't ever have to worry about you, thank God.You've always done well and you always will. But Odin is different. He's all alone here. Hell, there's not even another black student in this whole damn place"18 (Nelson 2002). The camera successfully conveys the speaker's blindness by highlighting Hugo's aloneness-his distance from a father who is literally not in the picture. Like Odin, then, Duke is incapable of reading Hugo, and the film suggests that it is precisely this inability of the major characters-the teenagers and their parents-to read critically, which ultimately results in an entirely avoidable disaster. The claim is elaborated and accented at the exact midpoint of the film by a scene that, I would like to argue, constitutes the rhetorical as well as the structural center of "O".19

The "classroom" scene interrupts the lecture of an English literature teacher who is explaining to her students how Lady Macbeth uses "maternal imagery" to get her husband "into doing this dirty work" (i.e., the work of murder). In a playful move, Nelson cast his own wife to play the part of the teacher-again suggesting by extension his role as a modern Shakespeare "teacher." She reads from the play, "'I have given suck and know how tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me'."20 Written on the blackboard behind her is the scanned line beginning, "How tender'tis," emphasizing the class's focus on deep poetical analysis or, more specifically, on scansion. As the teacher explains one of the most sensual and sensational passages in Shakespearefrom another major tragedy about the costs of ambition, jealousy, and manipulation-Hugo and Odin are oblivious, focusing instead on the missing scarf that Odin gave to Desi. Whereas maternal imagery figures as the primary tool in Lady Macbeth's manipulation of her husband, the handkerchief in Othello and the scarf in "O" figure at the center of the respective villa\ins' manipulative plots. Interestingly, the scarf also is an image of maternal love, having been given to Odin by his mother while he was still a child.

There is again a slight tension here stemming from our realization that Odin might have discovered Hugo's plot by paying closer attention to the Shakespeare lesson. Though he seems intent on listening to his teacher, trying to read along in his Signet classic edition of Macbeth, he is hindered by Hugo, who uses the "maternal image" of the scarf to distract Odin from reading the situation/text in an adequately critical manner. When the annoyed teacher finally asks, "would either of you care to name one of Shakespeare's poems for me," Hugo obnoxiously responds, "I thought he wrote movies." The answer is wonderfully clever. The teacher's question implicitly conveys a common assumption in mainstream America about the cultural illiteracy of teens, challenging them to name even one poem written by the most prominent author in the Western canon. Hugo's response simultaneously confirms the validity of the assumption (he either cannot or will not name a poem) and proves it false by calling attention to the ascendancy of film and the decline of poetry in modern day America. The grade-"A" English student thinks critically about the teacher's question and offers an undeniably logical response. The teacher's final, frustrated observation that "perhaps you two should pay attention," will prove to be nothing less than prophetic, in that Hugo and Odin will be destroyed because of their failures to pay attention to and learn from Shakespearean tragedy. Hugo's meta-cinematic joke is also designed to remind the audience-primarily high school students-that they too should be paying closer attention to Shakespearean tragedy, which, in this case, is the film text "O. " In such a way, the film subtly argues that reading texts more critically-indeed, that reading this very film critically-might prevent disasters such as the shootings at Columbine High School.

The burden of responsibility is not placed solely on the shoulders of the students, however. The teacher not only calls for the title of one of the poet-playwright's "poems" during a discussion of the plays (would "#130" have been a correct answer?), but she also appears to be giving as much attention to metrical analysis as to a consideration of the play's argument and content. Furthermore, the idea that one's knowledge of a title alone proves something about one's knowledge of Shakespeare seems to suggest the American overinvestment in the cultural literacy model of education. If the "classroom" scene highlights the point that students are not paying adequate attention to Shakespeare, it also criticizes how Shakespeare is taught to our students. Hugo's claim that Shakespeare writes movies collapses not only play-texts and film texts but also calls attention to the fact that film Shakespeare may have more influence on teens than school Shakespeare. Indeed, in working her way to an eventual claim that "Hollywood [is] a surprisingly effective teacher," Elizabeth A. Deitchman recently asked the following, highly relevant question: "Does Hollywood teach Shakespeare any more effectively than high school teachers and university professors?" (2002, 183, 173).

On the one hand, the "classroom" scene emphasizes the ineffectiveness of Shakespeare as a teaching tool: no one hears the playwright's warnings about the costs of ambition; Hugo and Odin do not pay attention to their teacher, and their teacher-like their parents-fails to pay adequate attention to them. On the other hand, the scene celebrates the potential effectiveness of film itself as a teacher of Shakespeare's messages: the audience of teen viewers might learn about the costs of ambition from Tim Blake Nelson, screenwriter Kaaya, and the actors who play students, teachers, and Shakespearean characters. Rather than stressing the importance of the filmic equivalent of metrical analysis, though, the film implores its audience to read critically, to consider carefully the causes and the costs of teen violence.

IV

Reading critically in this case will mean reading in a largely dialectical manner, though synthesis is not likely to be the reward of our labors, at least not in the Hegelian sense of the word. If we think of synthesis in the sense of a "complex whole formed by combining," however, we'll be closer to understanding Nelson's purposes.21 Since "O" focuses equal time and attention on its two central characters, the audience is confronted by multiple, in some cases antagonistic, interpretations of the causes of teen violence. Whereas previous cinematic studies of teen violence are structured either by a deliberate ambiguity designed to horrify (Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures [1994] for example), or by strong conclusions designed to solve the problem once and for all (Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers [1994] or Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine [2002]),22 Nelson highlights multiplicity (i.e., a combination of inextricably linked social and psychological factors) in naming the causes of teen violence and makes his major subject the constructive value of analyzing the problem critically. In doing so, he seems deliberately to be challenging the popular discourses that tend to follow such events, which hinge invariably on the search for obvious causes and solutions. While his refusal to appoint a single cause of the cultural crisis he depicts might be criticized as something of a cop-out, Nelson's pedagogical aims require that, as director, he avoid playing god. In "O" three teen characters-Hugo, Odin, and Roger-commit violent acts for different reasons and, as always in such cases, the rest of us are left trying to explain why. Our conclusions will figure in multiple factors- such as race, social status, and materialism-that serve together to indict an American culture that is largely unresponsive to the needs of its youth.

As we have seen, Nelson's Hugo-unlike Shakespeare's Iago-has relatively clear motives. He is a teenage boy struggling desperately to be noticed and valued. When Mike Casio complains that his reputation will suffer as a result of his suspension from the basketball team for fighting with Roger, Hugo ironically encourages him not to be concerned about what others think: "Who gives a fuck about reputation? The only person you have to answer to is yourself. You make your own rules. The minute you figure that out, you're free" (Nelson 2002). His words convey the idea that an obsession with reputation is tantamount to self-imprisonment; a person who worries overly much about being loved is like a caged bird. Despite his advocacy of the religion of self-sufficiency, however, it is precisely Hugo's frustrated desire to "soar above everything and everyone" that causes his descent into barbarism. For Hugo, as for many teenagers (and adults), reputation is of foremost importance.23

Odin, of course, has no reason to be concerned about his reputation since he is no less than a celebrity at Palmetto Grove. He is haunted, though, by a profound self-consciousness about his own blackness-racism being a subject from which Nelson (and Kaaya) refuses to shy away. In the highly endearing early scenes featuring Odin and Desi together, the two lovers speak and joke openly about race, demonstrating their own comfortable willingness to confront the issue, even as the camera and the dialogue work to heighten the audience's awareness of racial difference. In a manner reminiscent of Oliver Parker's Othello (1995), the camera dwells beautifully on the sharp contrasts between Desi's pale skin and Odin's darker skin as they lie in bed together simply talking. At one point, Desi's hand lingers on a certain area of Odin's back before he inquires, "Are you asking me how I got that scar on my back?"When Desi replies that she loves to hear Odin's stories, he immediately becomes more serious:

ODIN. I was a c-section baby, and they cut too far. My mom couldn't afford a good doctor.

DESI. Are you serious?

ODIN. [Hc laughs] I fell off my skateboard. (Nelson 2002)

His laughter is directed, of course, at Desi and the gullible viewing audience, both of whom expect a "tale from the hood," but are treated, instead, with a rather banal story of a typical teenager in a completely familiar situation. Nelson not only generally refuses to exoticize the Othello character; he ridicules explicitly the very idea that he should do so.

As even Desi's inclination to exoticize Odin would suggest, though, characters within the film tend constantly to harp on Odin's blackness and his upbringing in the ghetto. After Roger and Hugo anonymously inform Dean Brabble (John Heard) that Odin has forced himself on Desi, the Dean refuses to accept Odin's vehement profession of innocence precisely because of his past:

BRABBLE. You mean to tell me you've never had any run-ins with the police?

ODIN. No, it means I didn't force myself on Desi.

BRABBLE. That's not what I just asked you.

ODIN. What are you trying to say? . . .What you're sayin is I'm not clean. Is that what you're sayin? 'Cause I'm not on that shit no more. . . .Test my ass! Test me! (Nelson 2002)

A few seconds later, Odin asks, "If you were so worried about me, how come this school busts its ass to get me here, huh?" The exchange centers on the hypocrisy of a Dean (and, indirectly, of an educational system) willing to exploit the poorest neighborhoods in an effort to win basketball games, but a Dean who is also quick to use the "hood" as evidence of Odin's intrinsic barbarism. In this case, even Odin's triumph over cocaine addiction serves merely as proof of an essentially immoral nature; surely, his struggle with drugs suggests that he is likely to rape Desi.

Importantly Nelson cuts almost directly to a scene in which the camera follows Hugo as he drives into the ghetto to buy drugs.Throughout the film, we see white k\ids buying, dealing, and taking drugs-ranging from anabolic steroids to cocaine and marijuana- but it is Odin's drug problem that serves as the symbolic reminder of both his troubled past and his tragic future. Shakespeare's Othello is, of course, a man deeply anxious about how he is perceived by others; his greatest fear is that he will become the barbarian that white Europeans believe him to be.24 Just as Othello's barbarism is the offspring of lago's manipulative plot against him and, more generally, of the racism of early modern European society, Odin's descent into violence is, in a sense, determined by the social construction of black male youth in modern American popular culture. As he begins to accept the cocaine Hugo offers him ("I'm gonna take care of you, man. This shit right here will help you make it through"), and as he begins to act increasingly violent and irrational, Odin is becoming what the majority of those around him expect and desire him to be. Giroux usefully appropriates Derrida's notion of the "performative interpretation"-"an interpretation that transforms the very thing it interprets" (Derrida 1994, 51)-to explain the effects of such cultural stereotypes and media myths on young kids and teenagers: '"performative interpretation suggests that how we understand and come to know ourselves and others cannot be separated from how we are represented and imagine ourselves" (Giroux 1997, 14). Othello, and the myriad adaptations it has spawned, serves as a remarkably poignant example of what happens when the socially oppressed and powerless surrender to the representations imposed by the majority; "O" is a particularly powerful adaptation of the play because it exposes the effects of such representations on society's most vulnerable population: kids.

Hugo's manipulative plot revolves largely around his exploitation of Odin's anxieties about racism. In an early scene together, Odin and Desi laugh about their very first encounter:

ODIN. I pulled you [i.e.,"picked you up"], didn't I?

DESI. You sure did. I don't know how, but you did it.

ODIN. What you mean, you don't know how? I pulled you 'cause I'm that kind of nigger. [Desi turns away angrily]. Uh-oh, don't be acting like that. You see, I can say "nigger" because I am a nigger. You can't because you ain't. Don't be jealous.

DESI. And why can't I say it? My people invented the word.

ODIN. You can't even think it. (Nelson 2002)

Later, after Hugo has infected Odin's mind with the image of Mike and Desi in bed together, he stresses the additional point that "they call you the nigger, man." Although Odin pretends to reject this idea ("Desi wouldn't say nothing like that"), Hugo's lies play into his worst fears, and he begins inwardly to seethe with anger and self-loathing. His descent into violence is gradual but rapid: he physically attacks Mike at basketball practice, repeatedly defies his coach's authority, begins to use drugs again, and abuses Desi both verbally and physically. In what may be the films most disturbing and controversial scene, Odin "hate-fucks" Desi in a deliberate foreshadowing of their final scene together, in which he strangles her on her bed.25 At an off-campus motel named "The Willows,"26 what begins as a gentle love making scene turns violent when Odin-catching a glimpse of himself in a mirror-imagines that he sees not himself but, rather, Mike on top of Desi. Despite her constant pleas for Odin to "stop," and despite her very obvious emotional and physical pain, Odin is completely transfixed by his own wrath. After he finally finishes, the scene fades to a brief shot of the white doves that appear in the film's opening- suggesting that Odin's previous association with the hawk is no longer valid-and then fades back to the motel as Odin and Desi silently prepare to return to campus. The scene marks the turning point in the film, the moment when Odin is no longer above his peers but, instead, has become a prisoner just like them. From another point of view, the shot confirms Hugo's claim that hawks cannot "fit in" or function in a society of doves; in such a scheme, the destructive bird of prey is deliberately set against the bird of peace.27

When Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly remarked, upon the film's release, that "O" is the story of "a young black man whose civilized faade is merely cover for an intrinsic and bottomless rage" (2002), he demonstrated an astonishing unwillingness to read the film on its own terms. Like Odin and Hugo during the Macbeth lecture, Gleiberman is not paying close enough attention to the actual text. Like Mike Casio, who declares near the end of the film that "the ghetto's come out of [Odin]," Gleiberman fails to recognize the most basic point that Odin's story conveys: that rage is never "natural." In the final moments of the film, just seconds before Odin takes his own life, he implores his audience-both the traumatized students within the film and the less traumatized students watching it-to read and interpret his story accurately:

Somebody needs to tell the goddamned truth. My life is over. But while all of you all are out here living yours, sittin' around talkin' about the nigger that lost it back in high school, you make sure you tell 'em I loved that girl, but I got played.... I ain't no different than none of you all. My mom ain't no crackhead. I wasn't no gang banger. It wasn't some hoodrat drug dealer that tripped me up. It was this white prep-school motherfucker standing right there.You tell 'em [that] where I'm from didn't make me do this [fires gun into his chest]. (Nelson 2002)

Whereas Hugo's final words critique the simplicity of absolutist definitions of evil, Odin's final words indict the tendency of social commentators to scrutinize the perpetrators of violent crimes through the rather blurry lenses of pop-sociology and psychology.28 Odin's susceptibility to manipulation and his descent into violence are not intrinsically related to the color of his skin, the film argues, anticipating that shallow readers of the film will blame the bloodshed on Odin's blackness or on black culture, just as they will blame Hugo's actions on the so-called excessive violence of so- called teen culture. Rather than reading critically the multiple, complex factors which contribute to teen violence of the sort perpetrated at Columbine, the problem, they will say, is drugs or gangs; the problem is rap music or video games; the problem, they will say, is Hollywood and its dangerous films.29 "O" suggests that perhaps they too should be paying closer attention.

V

Odin's final, Hamlet-like demand that his story be told accurately anticipates and counters whatToni Morrison defines as "race talk": "the explicit insertion into everyday life of racial signs and symbols that have no meaning other than pressing African Americans to the lowest level of the racial hierarchy" (1993, 57).30 Mike's assumption that the "ghetto's come out of [Odin]" demonstrates that the process of explaining away Odin's behavior in racial terms actually begins well before the final massacre and Odin's suicide. The more insidious, implicit suggestion is that Odin's race is also responsible for the destruction of the white students whose lives he touches. As Giroux has already noted, film critic Marcus Reeves articulates explicitly this function of "race talk" in relation to teen films such as Larry Clark's infamous Kids (1995):

Taken alongside the rights urgent moves to demonize and eliminate African American cultural influences in America . . . (especially hip-hop music, language, and fashion) Clark's unyielding and "vrit" focus on the summer-day transgressions of two hip-hop dressing/ street slang wielding/40 ounce-drinking/blunt-smoking/pussy conquering white teenage males ... provides a focus on what's making white American youth so crazy: Dey hanging out and acting like dem nasty, demoralizing niggas. (qtd. in Giroux 1997, 56)

Whereas "O" undeniably traces the activities of several hip-hop dressing/street slang-wielding/basketball playing/drug abusing white males, the film explicitly rejects the idea that "black culture" is responsible for the massacre; in fact, Odin's final words force the audience to recognize that "where I'm from didn't make me do this." His mother was not a crackhead. He was not a gang-banger. A black "hood-rat" drug dealer was not responsible for this catastrophe.

If Odin's highly astute analysis of the social perception and exploitation of black cultural influences complicates a convenient white racist reading of the causes of teen violence in "O," then his decision to point the finger at Hugo-"that white prep-school motherfucker"-falls prey to the very logic he indicts. It is not clear whether Odin wishes to imply that Hugo is intrinsically evil or that his evil deeds are the result of his race and class status. In either case, Odin's conclusion would be foolishly oversimplified, as we have already seen. Especially since Nelson ends the film with Hugo's voice over and his haunting final words-"One of these days, everyone is going to pay attention to me"-the audience is never allowed to forget that Hugo's wrath is the result of considerably more complex influences than either witchcraft or race.

In short, the dialectical set-up of the film, which poises in antagonism absolutist and psycho-social readings of each boy's tragic tale, serves in the end to blur, not to clarify, the audience's ability to answer the key question: why did this happen? Whereas the story of Hugo prevents reductionist readings of evil as an intrinsic characteristic of the perpetrator of violent crimes, the story of Odin suggests that reductionist sociological readings are no more reliable or accurate. Similar to that of a Shakespeare play, then, the moral of the film text "O" is functionally indeterminate enough to require serious, active contemplation on the part of the viewing audie\nce. In the end, the film's structurally central scene is also the film's rhetorical and thematic center: that is, the high school classroom scene, which not only implores young readers to pay closer attention to Shakespearean tragedy, but also hints that "O" counts as an updated version of one. Nelson argues that just as the misfortune of the teens within the film might have been prevented had their parents, teachers, and peers been reading more carefully, so too might future Columbines be prevented by strong readings of and, equally important, conversations about this very film.

As if the point were not clear enough (and the poor reading of "O "by Miramax officials suggests that it was not), the DVD packaging of "O"seems designed to make reading Othello a less formidable task for a young audience. The two-disk set includes not only the usual helpful DVD features, such as the "Directors Commentary" on each scene, but also cast interviews that seem directly geared toward teenagers and even a silent film version of the play. The interviews, while brief, introduce various platitudes about Shakespearean tragedy (Stiles: "What makes her [Desi] great is also her downfall" [Nelson 2002])31 but also make explicit the educational aims of the project, as Phifer's comments most effectively demonstrate:

I'm hoping that it will provoke discussion and understanding. I hope that it will have parents and their sons and daughters conversing about violence and how to curb it and, hopefully, it will raise discussions in schools between teachers and kids [about] anger management and how to not be manipulated into doing negative things. (Nelson 2002)

The master-stroke, though, is the inclusion on the DVD of Ben Blumenthal's restored 1922 silent Othello, directed by Dmitri Buchowetzki.The key, after all, is to encourage the reading of Shakespearean tragedy, and Nelson goes so far as to provide his audience with a modern "text."There would be no point in insisting that the DVD include an edition of the play text. Shakespeare, we should not forget, also wrote movies.32

In closing, I would like to emphasize that "teensploi" is a term that must be qualified significantly if it is to be used in analyses of Nelson's "O. "The film rejects clich representations of teenagers, and its primary aim clearly is not the exploitation of the massive American teenage consumer group that has proven so eager to purchase the often shallow products authorized by the word "Shakespeare."33 The film's overall attitude toward teens is respectful and, from beginning to end, characterized by a highly effective pathos appeal. Although the film begins and ends with Hugo's confessional voiceovers, the first and last words one actually hears in "O" are Desdemona's,34 as the ethereal "Ave Maria" from the final act of Verdi's Otello rings loudly in the background:

Pecga per chi adorando a tc si prostra,

prega nel peccator, per 1'innocente,

e pel debole oppresse e pel possente,

misero anch'esso, tua piet dimostra.

Prega per chi sotto l'oltraggio piega

la fronte e sotto la malvagia sorte.35 (Verdi 1998, 36)

[Pray for all who lie in prayer before thee,

pray for the sinner and the innocent,

and for the oppressed and their oppressors,

also to the wretched, show thy mercy.

Pray for those who bow their heads

beneath outrage and misfortune.]

These remarkable lyrics epitomize and affirm one of the film's basic arguments: that the human hunger for justice and punishment must be balanced by the human capacity for empathy and understanding.36

Nelson's quasi-Arnoldian emphasis on the power of reading and conversation is likely to seem quaint to our post-materialist sensibilities. While in his mind, "O"'s particular appropriation of Shakespeare has little to do with "edification," civilization, or the advancement of cultural literacy, his goals are no less grandiose; for the highly endangered teens he is depicting and addressing, Nelson believes that Shakespeare after Columbine has to do with survival. In a sense, the film's most admirable qualities- its respect for teenagers and the earnestness with which it confronts their unique predicaments-are offset by the rather nave claim that reading Shakespeare carefully might lead to the prevention of teen violence. Nonetheless, there is a certain constructive irony in the fact that most of us will simply reject outright Nelson's humanist or critical-pedagogical solutions for dealing with the problem of teen violence. Our skepticism, after all, is consistent with the spirit of "O," which ultimately is about simplistic and self-serving readings of teen behavior.

The article considers how Tim Blake Nelson's "O"-filmed in the shadow of Columbine and other American school shootings- appropriates Shakespeare as a lens through which to analyze teen violence in America. The argument is that Nelson deliberately constructs his film as a surrogate for the high school literature classroom where, ideally, the skill of critical reading is first inculcated in American youth. The Shakespeare "text" looms large in this imaginary space, transforming film audiences into endangered beings-inseparable from those teens depicted in "O"-whose ability to read deeply, analyze, and apply to their own lives the lessons of Shakespearean tragedy can do nothing less than help them to stay alive. The piece examines the filmic techniques by which Nelson advances this agenda, and it weighs the strengths and limitations of Nelson's vision of Shakespeare's usefulness in modern America.

Notes

I am especially thankful for the suggestions and encouragement of participants in a provocative 2002 MLA panel entitled "From Page to Screen," who were first to hear an earlier version of this article: Jennifer Brezina, Laura L. Knoppers, Anne Lundin, and especially the Chair, Naorni J. Miller. I would also like to thank Eric Lorentzen, Francesca Royster, Garrett Sullivan, and my UConn colleagues Gregory Kneidel and Jerry Phillips, who offered useful comments on an expanded version of the paper at a later date.

1 For basic, factual coverage of the events at Columbine, see Brooke (1999), Hasday (2002), and Brown and Merritt (2002).

2 The Disney company, Miramax, has been in the spotlight several times since 1995 when its controversial film, Priest, was released to the wrath of conservative religious groups, which called immediately for bans on all Disney products. As a result, the Disney Corporation was less than supportive of Miramax in 1998 when it announced its plans to issue Dogma, Kevin Smith's irreverent, satirical exploration of Roman Catholic theology. In the end, Miramax owner, Harvey Weinstein, decided not to release Dogma but, as a compromise, agreed to sell the film to Lion's Gate, the same distributing company that would eventually buy and issue Nelson's "O." According to Nelson, Miramax officials felt that "O" was problematic because too "real": "Speaking for everyone who worked on the film, we stand proudly accused" (2001,2.8).

3 ee the "Juvenile Violence Timeline" in The Washington Post Online, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/ juvmurders/timeline.html. Accessed 20 December 2002.

4 Nelson remarked on the eve of the film's release that "I found myself in the odd position of defending my own ethics as a filmmaker who strives to examine violence, not encourage it" (2001, 2.8).

5 The inaccuracy of such assumptions was demonstrated clearly by various chat room conversations about the film immediately after its release. Postings revealed a thoughtful and moved audience of young viewers: "This was probably the best modernized Shakespeare story I've ever seen. . . . And it touched some issues that need touching, which were beyond Shakespeare's day. Bigots will hate it and some conservative parents/groups." Unfortunately most of the original chat rooms are no longer available online, as one angry contributor notes: "Yahoo has decided to remove the first message board for this movie. It has lively discussions about racism, culturalism, southerners, northerners, God, the 911 attack, and . . . the movie O'" (http://messages.yahoo.com/).

6 For the best critical analysis of the O. J. Simpson/Othello analogy, see Hodgdon (1997).

7 The allusion is reinforced by the "Duke" pennants plastered all over Desi's dormitory walls.

8 I admit to being confused by Burt's suggestion that, because they "leave the language of the plays almost entirely behind,""late nineties Shakesploi flicks . . . dumb down Shakespeare" (2002a, 207). Such an argument implies that there is no difference between cinematic "presentations" and "adaptations" of Shakespeare's plays (to borrow Jack J. Jorgens ever useful terms [1977, 12]). In the modern, hiphop-influenced teen culture so seriously portrayed in "O", Shakespeare's language would be merely awkward and unbelievable.

9 Since this paper focuses mainly on Nelson's exploitation of visual techniques that work to contextualize his film in relation to various school shootings, I tend to refer to "O" herein as Nelson's project, not Kaaya's. Kaaya's screenplay is actually the source of much of the film's complexity, of course, and the slighting of Kaaya is not intentional.The screenwriter, who grew up as the single black student in an all-white school, has spoken of his direct identification with Odin, suggesting another layer of realism in this adaptation that is certainly worthy of its own article-length analysis. But whereas the screenplay tends to center rather firmly on the American problems of racism and social status, Nelson uses it in order to engage the related problem of teenage violence in American schools.

10 If anything, this move marks a departure from the general trend in cinematic and televisual presentations of Othello, which, according to Marguerite Hailey Rippy, increasingly tend to eliminate Iago as an external being and, instead, transform him into "an internalized version of Othe\llo himself" (2002, 28). Rippy claims that George Cukor's A Double Life (1947) is merely the best example of a modern Othello that turns blackness into "psychosis within the white man" (27).

11 All quotations of Shakespeare are from The Riverside edition (1997).

12 Like Burt, Douglas M. Lanier argues that the recent proliferation of teen Shakespeare films can only be understood in the context of the capitalization of Shakespeare: "The unlikely assimilation of Shakespeare to the generic contours of the high school comedy and angst-ridden teen drama speaks to the financial logic of the film industry, eager . . . to extend film adapatation of Shakespeare to the lucrative youth market and equally eager to use its putative educational value to turn classrooms into additional marketing venues" (2002, 163).

13 One result is that "teens" continue to be universally constructed, even in Shakespeare criticism, as the same passive, mindless, and hyper-materialistic rabble toward which Hollywood directs its products. Even film reviewers who are willing to critique cultural stereotypes about American teenagers tend to fall prey to those very stereotypes: "It's simply impossible to accept that these are high school kids. That's particularly true of Hugo: His skill at reading the psychology of his pawns and his ability to delay . . . bespeak a level of experience and self-control beyond that of any adolescent" (Taubin 2002, http://www.villagevoice.com/ issues/ 0135/ taubin.php).

14 Other than the few mentionings of "O" discussed above, there is, understandably, little else to record in the way of a bibliography: in a recent article in Shakespeare Quarterly on Shakespeare, race, and film, where some discussion of "O" would have been appropriate, Burt mentions the film only in passing (2002b, 206]). In their "Introduction" to Retrovisions, Deborah Cartmell and I. Q. Hunter offer just one sentence about the film:" O/ the teenpic version of Othello, even more blatantly closes down the radical potential of its source" (2001, 4). This sentence is somewhat baffling because neither explained nor supported by any attempt on the part of the authors to read the film.

15 The fact that Mike Casio is only a sophomore especially irritates Hugo (who, like Odin, is a senior), and his irritation parallels lago's bitter response to Othello's appointment of the militarily inexperienced Cassio to the position of lieutenant: "One Michael Cassio, a Florentine I... I That never set a squadron in the field, / Nor the division of a battle knows / More than a spinster" (1.1.20-24).

16 They are also terms that reflect the largely seamless nature of the film's transformation of warfare into sport-a transformation, I would suggest, that would have been perfectly familiar to Shakespeare. I have argued elsewhere that sport and warfare are inextricably linked in Shakespeare's imagination: see Semenza (2001, 1251-72).

17 As Nelson acknowledges, "[Hugo] wants the adulation of everyone and yes, specifically, he wants the love of his father" (2002).

18 Here and elsewhere in the film, Nelson would appear to be appropriating and mocking the conservative myth of the "forgotten white male."

19 The seventy-five second scene begins at minute 46 of the film- the literal center-which officially runs at an hour and thirty-four minutes long (after credits).

20 From 1.7.54-55 of Macbeth.

21 See "synthesis" in Webster's Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language.

22 Whereas Stone scapegoats television and film as the major influences on youth violence, Moore offers the relatively complex argument that violence is a reaction to the "culture of fear" propagated by a variety of sources, including the media, the federal government, and the education system.

23 Hugo's regular use of anabolic steroids throughout the film serves not only to complicate stereotypical associations of drugs with blackness, but also as the symbolic reminder of his limitless desire to excel or, as he would put it, to "fly."

24 For instance, after breaking up the drunken brawl between Cassio and Roderigo, Othello revealingly asks "Are we turn'd Turks" (2.3.170), the Turk representing for Othello the uncivilized barbarian. His final speech famously demonstrates both his desperate attempt to separate himself from the Turk and his tragic realization that he has, in fact, descended into barbarism: "Set you down this; / And say besides, that in Aleppo once, / Where a malignant and a turban'd Turk / Beat a Venetian and traduc'd the state, / I took by th' throat the circumcised dog, / And smote him-thus" (5.2.351- 56).The lines are followed, of course, by the stage direction, "He stabs himself (my emphasis). The best critical account of the social construction of Othello is Adelman (1997, 125-44).

25 In her description of the scene, Amy Taubin uses "hate fuck," a slang term for vicious sex between consenting parties, instead of "date rape" or "rape" (2002, http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/ 0135/ taubin.php). The terminology is a problem in all three cases. "Hate fuck" ignores the fact that Desi eventually pleads Odin to "stop.""Date rape" and "rape" ignore the fact that the sex is consentual until the very last moment.

26 Desdemona's ballad of disappointed love, the "Willow" song, appears in 4.3.27-57.

27 The doves take on an additional meaning in the context of the Columbine shootings since they are a member of the family Columbidae (the word "columbine" actually means "dove-like" or "dove- colored").

28 Nelson himself has paraphrased the speech as saying "I'm not a clich" (2002).

29 Males sums up the trend in characteristically blunt terms:

The popular social-science and media explanation, undressed of its academic nomenclature, for why teenagers act as they do is simple: Because they're stupid. They kill because Metallica puts the word on an album cover.They have sex because Madonna flaunts it. They smoke because a cartoon camel tells them to. They slash their wrists because a band calls itself "Suicidal Tendencies." (1996, 33)

30 I

Source: College Literature

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