The Propaganda Imperative: Challenging Mass Media Representations in McKellen's Richard III

In 1995, director Richard Loncraine and actor Ian McKellen collaborated on a project to bring, like Laurence Olivier and others before them, Shakespeare's Richard III to film. In my analysis of McKellen's Richard III, I understand the film both as a continuance of and a reaction to Olivier's Shakespearean film tradition. In contrast to Olivier's stylized, theatrical film, McKellen abandons the Baroque aestheticism that elevated the film to the realm of "high culture." Instead, he assigns Shakespeare to a specific, though anachronistic, time period and appropriates one of the play's major themes—Richard's manipulation of the masses—to fit with a twentieth century recasting of the play, thus testing Shakespeare's timelessness. Furthermore, McKellen uses Shakespeare's play to comment on modern-day mass media's influence on contemporary culture. However, at the same time that McKellen issues a warning about the dangers of mass media in the hands of a tyrant, he subtly manipulates the viewer by taking advantage of the very media forms that he critiques, creating witty yet biting irony.