After seeing Ralph Fiennes’ new film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, a filmmaker friend aired her various grievances with the film over drinks: the narrative lacked energy and momentum, the characters lacked depth, and the filmmakers didn’t seem to have sufficiently thought out the implications of adapting this play for film in the first place. On reflection, I’m happy to concede the first two points. In fact, Coriolanus’ refusal to gratify the early 21st century’s post-Romantic expectations about character and narrative structure is exactly what makes it so suited for film adaptation, and a needed revision of the canon of Shakespearean film.
The history of Shakespeare on film reflects many of our culture’s most common – and misguided – assumptions about Shakespeare’s work. Filmmakers have been particularly fond of revisiting Hamlet. Like theater directors (and, until the twentieth century, most scholars), they almost always depict the titular hero as a paragon of modern Western subjectivity, the individual who carries within him a transcendent, inexpressible essence, “that within which passeth show” (see Kenneth Branagh’s film version for a particularly affecting take on this scene). Hamlet couldn’t more explicitly invite readers and viewers to solve what psychoanalyst Ernst Jones termed the “mystery” of its hero’s interiority. But the very proliferation of interpretations – scholarly, theatrical, filmic – suggests that such a project might be something of a wild goose chase. After four centuries, there’s still no consensus about Hamlet’s overarching motivations or desires, yet we continue to insist on treating this character like a “real” person, as if solving the mystery of his identity will somehow allow us some insight into our own.
The persistence of this futile project makes Fiennes’ Coriolanus a much-needed intervention. A Roman war hero up for the position of consul, Coriolanus is eventually exiled from the city for his refusal to pander to the plebeian populace. A politics of spectacle defines this contemporary “Rome” — news cameras track Coriolanus’ every move, and his friends and enemies alike spend a great deal of time sitting rapt in front of television screens watching his political downfall unfold. Insistently postmodern in this respect, Fiennes’ Coriolanus is first and foremost a meta-film, a film about the way in which representation constitutes reality as much as it reflects it. Though the film blandly glosses over what I see as the play’s most pivotal event, in which Coriolanus refuses to partake in the tradition of revealing his battle wounds in the public forum, Fiennes nevertheless makes it clear that Coriolanus fails as a politician because he refuses to partake in the politics of spectacle, “would you have me false to my nature?”
Modern responses to Hamlet tend to want to figure out what exactly lies beneath “the trappings and the suits of woe,” while Coriolanus often gets sidelined as a one-note political drama with a flat, psychically vacant protagonist. Yet the two Shakespearean heroes (I use the term loosely with respect to Coriolanus) have a great deal in common: like Hamlet, Coriolanus rejects the public performance of affect as inherently inauthentic. The capricious and unsympathetic Coriolanus simply forces us to consider the possibility that there may not be any unified inner essence behind the performance. Perhaps this is why late modernity has been less than fond of Coriolanus. Invested as we are in the notion of individual identity, perhaps we can’t help but squirm a little at the idea that, in Gertrude Stein’s words, “there is no there there.”
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