New, improved Tragedy Lite:
Tastes great, less cathartic

i know it's Shakespeare and everything, but the print ads for the new movie of "Romeo and Juliet" make it look incredibly stupid. A bunch of good-looking but angry young people of indeterminate ethnicity on one side of the ad (Montagues?) point guns at a bunch of good-looking but angry young people of indeterminate ethnicity on the other side of the ad (Capulets?). They're all yelling too, in blank verse, I suppose. I guess it's meant to be some kind of hip-hop/affirmative action/Benetton/Quentin Tarantino update of the Bard, yet another representation of the approach to the classics that was called "relevant" in the '60s. Without a snazzy approach to the material, young people of indeterminate ethnicity might get bored in its presence. Can't have that now, can we? I have nothing against upgrades of the classics, as such. The classics should be subject to the same ruthless, mindless scrutiny that we give the lives of movie stars and politicians; in fact, they DESERVE the same attention. If something's wrong with a classic, fix it. I have no problem with that. Yesterday's drag comedy in blank verse must become today's humorous study of gender confusion in blank verse. Cigarettes must be erased from the lips of deceased movie stars; nicotine not only stains our lungs, it tarnishes their memory. When in doubt, colorize, expurgate, reduce, remove, decorate with modern flourishes. If not now, when? This era is a golden era. In this time, information is not only holy, it's subject to any alteration we see fit to apply to it. And, lest we forget, we are the wisest of beings who ever trod the globe. We know everything. We are never wrong. (Or if we are, errors are quickly corrected through the judicious application of focus groups.) If we needed justification (which we don't, particularly, for anything we do), let's remind ourselves that quaint old Shakespeare himself plundered the classics of his time shamelessly. On the other hand, he's Shakespeare and we're not. He was smarter than all other people who ever lived put together. He probably wrote "Romeo and Juliet" in one afternoon with his left hand, for money, and it's still a better play than, say, "Cats," which took much longer to create, and made its creators (T.S. Eliot excepted) a lot more money. Not to rain on our parade or anything, but in reality we're a bunch of couch potatoes who need a jolt with a cattle prod (or a job) just to leave the house. If we're going to mess with the classics or blank verse, we should at least pretend to be a genius, and by genius, I don't mean a hotshot film director who treats his audience like illiterate morons with a jones for flash. But then Hollywood is not alone in its trendy revisionism. The Sunday New York Times has a feature in its Arts section, called TAKING THE CHILDREN, which rates movies for the kids. Its rating for "Romeo and Juliet" concludes: "But be warned that the story glorifies teen-age suicide." Well, gee, that's one way to look at it. I suppose teenagers could possibly see this movie and entertain morbid notions. Parents should be alarmed, I guess, if their kids choose to see an MTV version of "Romeo and Juliet." Kids in the 1990s are just time bombs waiting to go off at the hint of awkwardly spoken blank verse in the midst of gunfire. I wonder if Queen Elizabeth had similar qualms about the original production. Somehow I doubt it. While we're on the subject of classics, much has been made of the O.J. saga as somehow being a subject worthy of Shakespeare. "Othello," I believe, is the trope most frequently employed to make that sordid tale something more than another L.A. vignette that left two people dead, a former football great despised, and too many lawyers on the best-seller lists. Well, now the saga is being played out again, in a civil trial, a Cliff's Notes version of the "tragedy" that occupied our attention for the greater part of last year. All the same ingredients are there, but our bards (i.e. the media) just don't have the same fire in the belly. Their prose styles are faltering. Even the mighty Johnnie Cochran in his many recent television appearances seems to be as dull as, well, Shakespeare. And the new judge is not tolerating the stylistic (i.e. Shakespearean) excesses of the first trial. The wonderful E! Network ("Entertainment Tonight," 24 hours a day!), barred like the rest of us from the courtroom itself, has taken to doing actors' reenactments of the daily doings. I haven't caught this virtual soap opera yet, but I wonder if this could give rise to a new dramatic art form: trope opera. In "Romeo and Juliet," Shakespeare put English in the mouths of Italians; for its version, Hollywood stripped English from the mouths of American actors (and English actors pretending to be American) and made them not Italians, but denizens of a Southern California beach. A judge is now an editor, a ghostwriter a lawyer's voice, a football star a star-crossed killer, television a Greek chorus, a neverwas a moment's shining star — all can make their brief piles, or lose them. But we must make sure teenagers are not exposed to this. If they learned the truth about modern culture, they'd probably kill themselves. We can't encourage that, now can we? We must be careful. We're all psycho. Anything can set us off. Even blank verse. Exterminate it! Exterminate all the brutes!

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