Real Love Leaves no Survivors : Reassessing Love, Liebestod, and Nihilistic Love in Luhrman's Romeo + Juliet

Tembo, Kwasu (2022) Real Love Leaves no Survivors : Reassessing Love, Liebestod, and Nihilistic Love in Luhrman's Romeo + Juliet. Shakespeare en Devenir, 14. ISSN 1958-9476

Abstract

Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet has been subject to numerous film adaptations. When taken as a whole, the entire corpus testifies to a multitude of aesthetic and narrative devices having been brought to bear on the original source material in an attempt to keep the narrative and its themes relevant and exciting. Examples of film adaptations of the play are as numerous as they are diverse.1 While forbidden love represents some of the aspects of the sacrificial quality of love, namely its personal, political, and cultural costs, these adaptations overlook Shakespeare's more fundamental exploration of the radical imbalance produced by love, its catastrophism, and its total cost. In this sense, this paper is interested in theorizing the idea of the total cost of love Shakespeare explores: a will to real love is also a will to death. Since the turn of the 20th century, it can be argued that Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 adaptation and Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 adaptation are the two most influential on-screen adaptations of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to date.2 Substituting and modernizing swords and duels for pistols and gunfights, the melodrama unfolded in Luhrmann's Verona Beach, California encapsulates the frenetic chaos of young love portrayed through the auteur's equally admired and criticized kinetic visual storytelling. Referring to Luhrmann's take, this paper seeks to make a theoretical intervention into scholarship and criticism of both Luhrmann as an auteur and of his auteur’s choices that emerge in his adaptation of the play.