Queer Slackers in Billy Morrissette’s Scotland, PA Jarred Wiehe After the weird sisters hail Macbeth and Banquo on the heath, they vanish, leaving Banquo asking, “Were such things here as we do speak about? / Or have we eaten on the insane root / That takes the reason prisoner?” (1.3.83–85). The sisters present a crisis of categorization—both in terms of sexed bodies and ways of ordering knowledge—and Banquo, in essence, asks the early modern equivalent of “Macbeth, what are we smoking?” For Billy Morrissette’s three stoned, prophesying hippies in Scotland, PA (2001), the answer is “wacky tabacky, Macky.” Ultimately, Morrissette’s adaptation reshapes Shakespeare’s tragedy into a wild battle for control over Norm Duncan’s restaurant and future fast food empire in rural 1970s Pennsylvania. In the process, Morrissette’s adaptation dramatizes the failures in ordering the world around conflations of compulsory heterosexuality and capital accumulation.1 For Norm, Mac, and Pat, financial success, upward class mobility, and heterosexual desire lead to tragic deaths. But for Morrissette’s stoned losers, who work within and outside such constrictive ideologies, the main tragic trajectories become sites of humor and play. Morrissette’s film uses the stoner hippies to open up and expose alternatives to the oppressive heteronormative and capital-driven worldviews being made in the film’s 1970s diegetic world. That is to say, the logics of heteronormativity and capitalism are not already inherent in the film; rather, Scotland, PA demonstrates how these drives are made, and by dramatizing these drives as a process—with laughable tragic effects—the film reveals the queer alternatives embedded within heteronormative capitalism. Morrissette’s three stoned hippies make visible queer alternatives to the oppressive hetero-capitalism, which fuels the tragedy of Scotland, PA. While critics often note that one aspect of Morrissette’s adaptation of Macbeth is turning the weird sisters into “chemically-enduced [sic] [End Page 575] prophesying” hippies, they do not fully consider the queer work the hippies do in the film (Hoefer 155). For most, the “witches” are pinned down solely as icons of “slacker culture” (Pittman 77). Jennifer Drouin, however, recognizes the homoerotic possibilities of the hippies, but she ultimately sees Morrissette’s film as producing a closeting and repressive effect, claiming that, “Queer sexuality is evoked but quashed before it happens” (356).2 Whereas Drouin reads Scotland, PA as a mechanism for erasing, marginalizing, and expunging queer histories and Lady Macbeth’s queer early modern life, I see liberatory possibilities that emerge when we move the hippies from the margins and into the center of Morrissette’s adaptation. What might the hippies’ prophesying reveal about the alternatives for a heterosexuality driven by imperatives of production and reproduction embedded in class mobility? Instead of marginalizing Morrissette’s stoners as simply by-products of 1970s “loser culture” (Deitchman 142), I interrogate how the three hippies’ positions as losers provide alternatives to the otherwise constricting representations of conservative, heteronormative forms of sociality in Scotland, PA. Even though Donald, the young, gay instantiation of Shakespeare’s Donalbain, allows audiences to see the fault lines in Duncan’s heteronormative household, it is the hippies who carve out queer spaces that put pressure against heterosexual, capitalistic desires.3 Simultaneously, as an adaptation, Morrissette’s film highlights the elements of gender-bending and anti-reproductive desire that are already embedded in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. In theorizing Scotland, PA as an adaptation that makes visible both the queerness in slacker culture and in Macbeth, I draw on work by Lee Edelman, Elizabeth Freeman, and Judith Halberstam. Their work informs my own understanding of “queer” as that which stands against a way of thinking that values reproduction, longevity, safety, and teleology. Using the concept of loser culture as a starting point to explore how Scotland, PA functions as a queer text, I argue that Morrissette’s film speaks to the queerness of loser culture in the late 1990s and early 2000s through the weird sisters’ transformation into drugged-out hippies in an apparently bisexual, open relationship. Through humor, Morrissette’s film asks the audience to take pleasure in the constrictive influence of heterosexuality, capital accumulation, and patrilineality. Concomitantly, Morrissette’s film represents the potential...
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Mar 1, 2023
Elizabeth Rivlin 
Open Access