![]() ![]() Titus Andronicus is an Evil Dead-style splatter comedy. “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them” is a dick joke. I don’t really believe in high and low culture, but if I did, Shakespeare wouldn’t be in the high category. That, inevitably, creates a gap, but treating Shakespeare with this absurd degree of seriousness widens the gap even more for no reason at all. The reason they are difficult now is because they’re very, very old, and language has changed so much in the meantime. He wrote plays for mass appeal, to be enjoyed by all classes of society. Because Shakespeare is funny and silly and great.I saw the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Cymbeline broadcast in the cinema, and a man glared at me because I laughed at all the jokes. ![]() This is obviously in part because of the backwards way Shakespeare is taught in schools – where you have to read the play line-by-line before you’re allowed watch a film of it – but also because people who like Shakespeare are snobs who want to maintain the image of Shakespeare as this difficult, high-culture, nigh-impenetrable thing. Shakespeare becomes this difficult, serious, high-culture, nigh-impenetrable thing, that bears little resemblance to the actual works of Shakespeare. We tend to talk about Shakespeare in this weird, abstracted and academic way.It’s kind of heartbreaking, when a film stacks the deck so in favour of me loving it, as if it was made with me in mind, but fucks it up so badly that I think “it’s basically fine, I guess, I don’t know, it has some problems.” It might be targeted at a very specific niche of which I am a part: Mary Magdalene was described as not appealing to Christians because it’s such a different take on the Gospel story, and not appealing to non-Christians because it’s so religious, but I’m a feminist Christian whose favourite film is The Last Temptation of Christ, king of unorthodox Gospel films. It might tick a bunch of boxes of things I reliably enjoy, like Hell or High Water, a neo-western about the Great Recession featuring comedic bank robberies and a great performance from Jeff Bridges, one of my favourite actors. Sometimes a film is so set up for me to like it that nothing speaks to its failure like my thinking it’s only okay. This article is part of the Notes on Failure series, which discusses interesting cinematic failures. ![]()
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