Gen-X Hamlets: Imitating the Dane to Find a Personal American Masculinity

After being long considered box-office poison, 1990s Hollywood embraced Shakespeare, in direct adaptations of his plays—from Henry V (1989) to William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (1996)—and refashionings of his works—from the silly 10 Things I Hate About You (1999) to the controversial O (2001). However this acknowledgment of Shakespeare's popularity reached critical mass with 1990s adaptations, revisionings and references to his longest and most complex play, Hamlet. An intriguing subset of popularized Hamlets featured and targeted twentysomethings—these films wove Shakespeare's play into their narrative as a shorthand for the search for a genuine American masculinity, a masculinity that would serve both men and women.

Hamlet has been pressed into cultural service in the United States before. Lawrence Levine writes that in nineteenth-century America, Hamlet was a favorite foundation of burlesques and parodies (13). More recently, the 1960s musical Hair used Hamlet to resist patriarchal mandates:

What a piece of work is manHow noble in reasonHow dare they try to end this beauty?How dare they try to end this beauty?Walking in spaceWe find the purpose of peace The beauty of lifeYou can no longer hideOur eyes are openOur eyes are openOur eyes are openOur eyes are openWide wide wide!¹

Hamlet is an important touchstone for the musical Hair: The American Tribal Love Rock Musical, written by Gerome Ragni and James Rado in 1966. This relationship is most obvious in the above song "What a Piece of Work is Man," but the play is also quoted, likewise unattributed, as dialogue and in the final number. Most of these references are associated with Claude (a young Claudius?) Bukowski, while he is contemplating whether he will respond to his draft notice, whether he will follow the patriarchal command to become a warrior. The struggle of the male characters in Hair to find a path that is more moral and heartfelt than the path of their fathers finds resonance with the introspection of Prince Hamlet.

Though generational conflict may have become more subtle, Hamlet reappeared as the referent of choice in American films of the 1990s to voice the angst and personal crises of male protagonists, as evidenced by the boom in Hamlet on film and on stage. Both Franco Zeffirelli's and Kenneth Branagh's films of Hamlet (1990; 1996) featured handsome and active leading actors close to Hamlet's chronological age (Mel Gibson; Kenneth Branagh), as well as younger Ophelias (Helena Bonham-Carter; Kate Winslet) that were highly attractive. Widely distributed television productions also bookmarked the decade with Kevin Kline in 1990 and Campbell Scott in 2000, while Keanu Reeves's turn as the Dane in Manitoba received wide press attention. With these productions deliberately presenting a Hamlet and an Ophelia that young adults could identify with, it is not surprising that Hamlet-associated protagonists appeared soon after in youth-oriented films: True Romance (1993); Clueless (1995); Beautiful Girls (1996); Grosse Pointe Blank (1997); Two Girls and a Guy (1997); and Best Men (1997). These Hamlet-quoting films were then capped by a complete American Gen-X production, Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (2000) with Ethan Hawke and Julia Stiles.

These Gen-X films follow Hair's strategy of treating their references to Hamlet with wit, weaving them into the text in an offhand way, seamlessly mixing Shakespeare's lines with contemporary dialogue-signaling more significant parallels between the construction of the two texts, similar to the intertextual relationship between Hair and Hamlet. The song "What a Piece of Work is Man" begins with its slight reordering of Hamlet's rumination to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (2.2.303-317), before moving gracefully into a quotation (reprise) of "Walking in Space," a reflective song about the inter-connectedness of God, life and beauty. Likewise, the ending stanza of Hair's finale "Flesh Failures" quotes the dying words of both Romeo and Hamlet, before moving into "Let the Sunshine In." Hamlet is not the final authority for Hair's protagonists, but the inspiration, their moral foundation...