Breaking news: Television in Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet

Abstract

The story of film’s relationship with television is long and fraught, a story of close alliances and indeed desired assimilation (of films on the small screen, or of studios owning stations), as well as of bitter rivalries (for viewers) with disastrous consequences (like Mankiewicz’s dispendious and Shakespeare-inspired Cleopatra (1963) and its effect on Fox studios): a tale, in short, not entirely dissimilar to the legendary Romeo and Juliet. As such, viewers perhaps should not have been surprised that Baz Luhrmann, whose work has been largely characterized by surprising associations, would have begun his rendition of the classic tale with the image of a television set automatically turning on and revealing a newscaster whose “news” is the play’s prologue. In so doing, Luhrmann makes the news not the story itself, but rather the way it is conveyed – “the medium is the message”, as McLuhan would say, and the well-known tale is made new through mingling these media. From this perspective, the television becomes a defining characteristic of this film’s rendition of Luhrmann’s Red Curtain aesthetic. By bookending the film with a camera dollying first towards and finally away from the television set, the director foregrounds television, first as object, and then as aesthetic, in this performance of Shakespeare’s classic tale. Though television may seem peripheral (both literally and thematically) in the film, I argue that Luhrmann’s use of television and its multiplicity of genres and tropes are actually central to its politics of adaptation.