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The economic and cultural practice of producing films that target a specific youth audience is not particularly new, and while this trend began as early as 1955, the 1990s and early 2000s marked an "explosion" of teenpics (Doherty 1998, Dixon 1990, and Neale 1999).1 The 1990s and early 2000s witnessed, as well, a flood of films adapted from Shakespeare's comedies and tragedies, including Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (1996b); Gil Junger's 10 Things I Hate About You (1999); Tim Blake Nelson's O (2001); and Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (2000). Over the past decade, largely due to a continuing interest in cultural studies, the teenpic genre has emerged as one warranting serious analysis. Timothy Shary, who offers one of the most recent, in-depth contributions to this field, seeks to "demonstrate not only that youth films comprise a legitimate genre worthy of study on their own terms, but that they are imbued with unique cultural significance: they question our evolving identities from youth to adulthood while simultaneously shaping and maintaining those identities" (Shary 2002, 11). In his study, Shary categorizes the teenpic into sub-genres, but does not include Shakespearean teen films as a genre and mentions Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (1996b) - the cult film that captivated an international teen audience and the first example of what I am calling the "Shakesteen" genre - only once. Responding to this oversight, I understand Luhrmann's film as kick-starting its own sub-genre of Shakespearean adaptations, marketed at a specifically teen audience, and investigate the ways in which this film, imbued with the cultural authority of "Shakespeare," resonates with female teen viewers and perhaps helps them to shape their adolescent identities. Rather than conceive of this engagement as one that is located wholly within the filmic narrative, I am interested in how a rhetorically constructed relationship between the teen female star (in this case Claire Danes as Juliet) and her fans (through fan practices) has the capacity to supersede the constraints of the filmic text. I argue that the relationship of mutually dialectical exchange produced through star/fan relations elicits alternative representations of femininity that circulate within contemporary teen culture.
The "Teening" of Shakespeare: The Appropriation of Romeo and Juliet as Cult Teen Text
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