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Ophelia is arguably the most identifiable and resonant of all Shakespeare's heroines. Her iconic status is evidenced in the proliferation of Ophelia images found in the visual, literary, and performing arts worlds. The ideological function performed by Ophelia representation has been the focus of various studies seeking to explain the persistent fascination with this character that has seen her somehow transcend the original play-script. Yet while Ophelia has commonly been critiqued as a cultural signifier, changing according to cultural and historical contexts of production and reception, there appears to be a surprisingly strong and enduring thematic consistency of representation extending to a number of more contemporary enactments of this character. Although numerous radical and decidedly disruptive stagings of Ophelia have been performed in theater productions over the last half-century or more, renderings of Ophelia in modern film, by contrast, seem distinctively less subversive in nature. Popular films such as those directed by Laurence Olivier (1947), Franco Zeffirelli (1990), and Kenneth Branagh (1996) perpetuate what Kaara Peterson refers to as the "visual cliché" of Ophelia (1), an image inevitably accompanying characterizations of this character that focus on her beauty, innocence, eroticized madness, and victim status. Martha C. Ronk deconstructs the iconic image of Ophelia perpetuated in such films:
... her wild hair depicts madness or the victim of rape; her blank white dress stands in contrast to Hamlet's inky and scholarly black; the emblematic flowers which she gives away and which surround her at death signal her participation in deflowering; her snatches of song suggest fragmentation of character. (22)
Richard Paul Knowles has illuminated the implications of these "artful and aesthetically beautiful appropriations of Ophelia," highlighting the significance of their alignment with the "'high' cultural authority of Shakespeare and of old-world culture with romanticized validations of feminine passivity, victimization, and service to masculinist artistic, cultural, and social goals" (23). Certainly, the majority of modern filmic renditions of Ophelia expose the enduring influence of the ideological alignment among femininity, docility, weakness, and hysteria that underpins far earlier representations of this character. I argue, however, that a far more progressive and innovative interpretation of the play in terms of Ophelia representation can be found in the most recent film adaptation, Hamlet (2000), directed by Michael Almereyda. Here, Hollywood...