by IDA LODOMEL TVEDT
Steve Bannon PHOTO/Pete Marovich/Bloomberg/Getty Images
On Steve Bannon’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s bloodiest play.
The empire suspects its heyday may be over. There are no obvious scapegoats, just a general sense of weirdness and rot. The city walls are porous, everyone is sleeping with everyone, and alliances are betrayed with the flutter of a fake eyelash. The barbarian Goths are not only at the gates, but embedded throughout Rome.
The Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus is perhaps Shakespeare’s least admired work, a revenge play that, unlike Hamlet and King Lear, doesn’t reflect on revenge, merely stages and exhausts it. While the play is often read as a parody of a low-brow genre that trended among Shakespeare’s contemporaries, Julie Taymor’s 1999 movie adaptation is earnest. It starts with a somewhat democratic election and ends in a slapstick bloodbath: Titus tricks the queen of the Goths to eat her own sons by baking them into pies, then he murders his daughter.
The film was co-produced by Steve Bannon, the former preppy Goldman Sachs banker who now poses in shabby shorts on a leather couch, inviting photographers into a home that looks like the set for a low-budget rococo porn. “Darkness is good,” he says, branding himself, like he branded Breitbart, with the motto “Honey badger don’t give a shit.” He plays the part of the renegade contrarian who appears to have an ironic relationship to his own will to power, calling his office in the West Wing “the war room” and saying that as Chief White House Strategist his mission is to “deconstruct the administrative state.” As theater, it’s brilliant.
In Titus, as in so many other Hollywood productions, America mirrors itself in the Roman Empire. Only this time it is not about glory, but about a spectacular fall. The empire drowns in self-indulgent outrage. It’s a terrific movie. Psychedelic and flamboyant. The furs are fake and the lipstick cheap, the costumes as self-referential as the film itself, insisting that everything is theater and that nothing hinges on authenticity. Tamora, queen of the Goths and the story’s main MILF, matriarch, and mistress, wears Medusa cornrows and golden armor that doubles as a push-up bra. With clumsy makeup and tired, un-airbrushed skin, she is the object of everyone’s desires—for vengeance, love, and servility. The emperor lies wrapped around her with his girlish behind exposed to the camera, his hand cupping one of her breasts, his head nestled on the other. She is reclined and smug, her hand resting maternally on his forehead. The emperor is the queen’s fascist puppet, as malleable in her tattooed arms as the two hooligan sons that she suckles like the she-wolf of the Roman origin myth. The boys run around as if in the prime of MTV, with bleached hair, moon boots, silver pantsuits, and shoulder pads, dancing and dry humping to their own hardcore soundtrack, and raping Titus’ daughter at their mother’s request.
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