To Be or Not to Be

Each year, a new batch of Shakespeare adaptations opens at festivals across the country and, each year, Shakespeare turns fully 180 degrees in his grave. Today, the Shakespeare industry is run by revisionists. For years now, the adaptations which open each Summer’s season have been dominated by a parade of wholly predictable inversions: the past becomes the present, straight characters are turned into gay ones, whites into blacks, men into women. For every play, it seems, there’s somebody with a political ax to grind and the money to do it onstage. Indeed, the trend has gone so far that it sometimes seems as if Shakespeare’s plays continue to be produced solely for the pleasure to be had in systematically flouting a great author’s intentions.

Well and good, some will say. After all, Shakespeare was writing for a sixteenth-century audience with sixteenth-century concerns. Four hundred years have passed and a lot has changed. Who’s to say what sort of play he’d write if he were alive today? It’s an ultimately unanswerable question. Still, it’s interesting to note that, of all Shakespeare’s plays, one in particular seems to have stood the test of time: "Othello." While producers and directors keep themselves busy reworking "Hamlet," "Macbeth," and "Romeo and Juliet" (most recently, as a lesbian tragedy) to suit the tastes of contemporary audiences, they are content to leave the basic plot structure and character assignations of "Othello" intact.

Why do directors so consistently make an exception for "Othello"? Apparently, it’s because there’s nothing to be gained from changing it. Of all Shakespeare’s heroes, Othello вЂ" in the original, a Moorish mercenary employed by the regime of Renaissance Venice in its ongoing struggle against the Ottoman Turks вЂ" is the only one who is black (or, at any rate, not European). While I look forward to the revisionist production in which a white Othello is cast against an otherwise all-black cast, I’m not going to hold my breath. For many, "Othello" is the only play Shakespeare got right and this is because, unlike any other Shakespearean drama, "Othello" speaks to our contemporary political concerns, our bad conscience, our desire to overcome a history of racial injustice. For once, Shakespeare picked the right hero and, just as importantly, the right villain.

Which is why I was so eager to see O, Tim Blake Nelson’s up-to-date remake of the Othello story, released last Friday in theaters nationwide. It would, I hoped, tell me something about Hollywood’s contemporary fascination with race. In the event, I was not disappointed, though I was somewhat surprised. For while O cannot be understood except as a parable of contemporary race relations, its director, Nelson (perhaps best known as an actor for his role in such films as O Brother, Where Art Thou? and A Thin Red Line), seems to have made every effort to obscure this fact. The result is a movie slightly worse than it might have been: a timid, unimaginative, and strangely pretentious parable of contemporary race relations.

The plot of Nelson’s O differs from Shakespeare’s original in a number of minor ways. Whereas "Othello" was set in sixteenth-century Crete, O takes place in the present day at a boarding school in an affluent suburb of Charleston, South Carolina. In place of "Othello’s" eponymous hero, Nelson gives us "Odin" (Mekhi Phiffer), a promising black basketball player recruited for the school’s championship-winning team. The other characters are also lifted more or less directly from the original. Desdemona, Othello’s love interest, is now "Desi" (Julia Stiles, whose delicate pallor seems well on its way to winning her a career), the Dean’s charming and very popular daughter. Othello’s faithful lieutenant, Cassio, has become "Michael" (Andrew Keegan), and, finally, the infamous Iago, Othello’s treacherous confidant, has been reborn as "Hugo" (Josh Hartnett). The language has also been changed to satisfy contemporary audiences, which in Nelson’s hands means liberal doses of cursing in a sometimes stilted high-schoolese.

The story, however, remains basically the same. The film’s central character is Odin, at once the team’s star player and the school’s only black student. As the film opens, Odin seems to have everything going for him: an adoring girlfriend, Desi, athletic success, the promise of college scholarships, and wide popularity among the other students. Even the coach loves him вЂ" as much in fact as his own son (if not more so). And there’s the rub. The coach’s son, Hugo, is also on the team and burns with a fierce resentment of Odin, who seems to have everything that should be his own. Through a complex strategy of deception вЂ" playing on Odin’s social, sexual and racial insecurities вЂ" Hugo manages to convince Odin that Desi is in fact betraying him for Michael, Odin’s right-hand man on the team. Odin explodes in rage and, by film’s end, four students are dead, including our hero (which explains, by the way, the delay in the film’s release: originally completed in 1999, the studio decided not to release the film until now for fear that its depiction of high school violence would draw criticism in the aftermath of the Columbine and Jonesboro massacres) .

This is more or less what happens in the original as well. The difference between "Othello" and O is thus more a question of character than of plot. Part of Othello’s appeal has always been its ruthless depiction of social envy and natural hierarchy. In the original, Othello’s downfall, just as much as his power, derives from an innate nobility not shared by the other characters. His nobility is of the classical kind, a sort of fact of nature which makes him stronger, bolder and more direct than most men. But Othello’s nobility is also the source of his weakness and, ultimately, his downfall: having no need of deception, he is untrained in its ways and for that reason especially susceptible to the low cunning of Iago. Nelson’s Odin is also a noble character and, like Othello, stronger, bolder, and more direct than other men. The source of his nobility, however, is quite different from that of Othello. Where Othello’s nobility is of a metaphysical kind, Odin’s is cultural in nature. Odin,