Interpreting Racial Imagery in O

It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul.
Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars!
It is the cause. Yet I'll not shed her blood,
Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow
And smooth as monumental alabaster -
Yet she must die, else she betray more men.
Put out the light, and then put out the light…
- Othello, Act V, scene ii

The lights come up, actually, and the movie begins. Once again, William Shakespeare's tale of racial otherness has been redone. The film O is an adaptation of Othello produced by Miramax Films in 1999 and delayed from general audience release until 2001.

The movie has transplanted the play's characters and situations from late 16th century Venice to late 20th century Charleston, South Carolina. The kingdom has become a private high school. Othello the Moor and military general has become Odin James the African-American teenager. Odin's battlefield is the basketball court. In turn, Mekhi Phifer plays the protagonist with the eyebrow-raising initials. His white girlfriend is Desi (Julia Stiles); Iago has become Hugo (Josh Hartnett).

In this paper, I wish to investigate the effect of adaptation to this modern-day setting on Shakespeare's script, with special attention paid to the character and symbolism of Odin himself. Odin, as is frequently mentioned in critical review, is the sole African-American student at Palmetto Grove High. This puts him into fortuitous position in terms of analysis, for Odin's otherness and visibility are blatantly displayed, constantly pointing out his unique status.

Basketball in Black and White

O opens with a shot of huddling, cooing pure white doves. The background is devoid of feature; save for the curved support on which they perch, they appear to exist in empty space. Quiet incidental music plays. A quite unfortunate voiceover from Hugo has him explaining that he has "always wanted to be a hawk." He goes on to talk about his envy of James and his position on the team and in the school, saying "I know you're not supposed to be jealous..." This monologue betrays early some of the questionable choices made regarding the Hugo character and his desire to crush his adversary. The score plays on for a moment longer.

The doves are replaced by a predatory-looking black hawk, which in turn cuts to a shot of Odin, sweating profusely, breathing heavily. The first cut on O's rap soundtrack booms.

Although James M. Welsh takes director Tim Blake Nelson and his crew to task for bringing the antagonist of Shakespeare's script from the lofty heights of military general to the lowly position of basketball star [Welsh], perhaps he is underestimated the stature such a performer holds in our culture. As Matthew P. Brown explains in the course of examining a pair of basketball-themed films,

"In such a realm, basketball is more than a sport; it is a cultural practice, and in contemporary America, its symbols and myths are deeply racialized. Images of basketball become a site for understanding relations between the black and white races … The pleasure has a politics."

Cut to the game. We watch the competition at first through an impossible angle, a bird's eye view perhaps, that allows us to view every player on the court. The astute observer will immediately notice (indeed, given today's culture of near-instinctive racial marking, can't help but immediately notice) that Odin is not merely the only African-American player on his Palmetto Grove Hawks, but on the entire floor.

He proceeds to distinguish himself in "combat" by making the key play, laying the ball in as time expires and giving Palmetto Grove the conference championship. The hometown crowd floods the floor, surrounding Odin the hero. There is a showy shot of Hugo looking on, staring at Odin. The dizzying angle returns and we see Odin in the center of a maelstrom of blue T-shirted humanity.

With these early images does the film emphasize Odin's otherness, a feature for which Shakespeare's early colonial-era play is known, right along with The Tempest. And Odin James, like Shakespeare's prototype, is fated to be "a man who can never ground his identity in a white society." [Lim] How the interpretation of Othello the protagonist is carried off - for it seems clear that the principles of the Moor's otherness are inherent in the work - is deeply influenced by the setting in which a given production features.

So what of this white society of O? The transference of this story from Venice to present-day America provides a nice looking glass through which we may glean information about the black man's status in America today.

Othello's white society of Venice can be conceived of as a warning for the 16th-century Briton. At the time of Shakespeare's play, the city-state was thought to be a culture of mixed race, a threat to whiteness. Arthur J. Little, Jr. uses the adjective "multicultural" to describe Venetian society of the time, and explains:

"...Venice was a more productive example for England's national-imperial purposes. In short, Venice figures as an imperfect picture of England, the inheritor of classical Rome's imperial self-fashioning but not its cultural and racial purity ... its cultural and racial whiteness."

Little, Jr. also cites Murray J. Levith, who wrote that:

"Venice was the hub of Italy for Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Once could love it as the locus of excitement and progressive culture ... or hate it as the seat of excess and decadence, a Catholic Sodom and Gomorrah. Most English undoubtedly saw it as a bit of each."

A discussion regarding a comparison of modern-day America to Levith's "Sodom and Gomorrah" will not be undertaken here, but O's portrayal of our country's cultural and racial "impurity" needs to be kept in mind. The film delivers twin messages on the racial level: America is a land of integration; America is a land of segregation. Little, Jr. notes a similar phenomenon in Othello, wherein

"This city-empire tries to reconcile its pull in two directions: on the one hand, it draws cultural outsiders into the ambit of its powerful gaze, exploring and consuming their materials and their laboring bodies; on the other hand, it deports, expelling or erasing, cultural outsiders from the inner sanctums of Venetian culture."

The link between the gaze and dominant American film culture has been well-documented. In O, Odin James is constantly put into and reminded of his status of outsider even when, we are told, he is idolized among his peers. The exploring and consuming of the youthful characters saturating the film is obvious in the private-school milieu; the opening shots make clear that these spry bodies are at high-school society's beck and call.

The Only Black Kid in the School

In approximately the Act III area of O, Odin's jealousy regarding Desi erupts and once again, he resorts to brutal violence. At a practice, he takes down friend-cum-rival Michael Cassio and takes out an assistant coach in his blind rage. He storms from the gym swinging his arms madly, kicking doors open. Coach Duke (Martin Sheen) calls after him.

Cut to a shot outside Duke's office. Through an open doorway, we see a forlorn Hugo sitting, "sealed away from the rest of the world a little too neatly," [Walters] listening to his unseen father lament about Odin. "Odin's different," Coach says. "He's all alone out here. There's not another black student in this whole damn place."

Thus is Odin's position as object of the white gaze pointed out. If Shakespeare's play is indeed, as Little, Jr. contends, about society's urge to drive out the other - a viewpoint echoed by Director Nelson himself before the 2001 release of the film [Winter] - here is proof. Odin is completely isolated within the white world.

The way in which the semiotics of Odin James himself make use of the character's inherent otherness is strange indeed, and a most bizarre form of doublethink takes over viewers. (Or at least those that are paid to write about their viewing experience.) Most mainstream reviews of O make mention of Odin James' singular nature. Yet there is clear visual contradiction of this seeming fact in the film, a handful of scenes which make on wonder why Sheen's statement has been taken as gospel truth by the press.

Every basketball scene takes place on Palmetto Grove's home court (a fortuitous schedule indeed), giving ample opportunity to display crowds excitedly cheering for the team. These crowds are of the sort typical in contemporary American mass-media, which is to say, of mixed ethnicity. Many of the non-white crowd members wear clothing embroidered with or sporting Palmetto Grove logos. An observer could simply conclude that these people of color are fans only, but this conclusion does seem a bit cynical within the setting of a state in which over thirty percent of residents are non-white, not to mention flying in the face of "land of equality and opportunity" mythos the film supports.

Regardless of the educational status of Odin's African-American fans, there are other more compelling scenes to offer visual contradiction of Odin's stated uniqueness. Before a pep rally preceding a playoff game, black teens are seen entering the school; all right, perhaps they aren't students, either, and the private school holds public pep rallies. Another scene has Odin awarded the team most valuable player award before an assembly of the student body. At least one African-American girl is obvious in the quick crowd shot. Other crowd shots at the school and at outside parties, feature high school-aged African-American kids, yet somehow the visual evidence is countermanded by sheer belief in Odin's solitude. He is the shining exception, carried by his basketball skills in service of his culture, to the rule of dominant whiteness.

Because the producers of O appear to be, quite frankly, using African-Americans as adornment (not withstanding Dell the drug dealer, who will be touched upon shortly) only, another conspicuous and insidious absence results: Odin's apparent utter lack of parents. Situations demanding parental attention are rife in O, from emergency-room visits (Odin is injured during a game and mother and father are nowhere to be found?) to disciplinary conferences. The only time Odin's parents are mentioned is within the context of a joke between he and Desi. So where are they? Their visible and invisible presence has been erased in favor of strong emphasis on Odin's visibility.

The Jameses have been replaced by the coach, who acts as surrogate in both roles as Odin works his way through the minefield of the story. This role replacement is a bit confusing in terms of message, however, because Duke only fulfills the role of parent superficially. He is a control taker, a delegator of responsibility, but offers Odin no support or moral guidance. The suggestion here is that his physical presence, his visibility, is enough to substitute in the maturation of this outsider.
Other marked characters dot the supporting cast of O, and another uneasy facet of O emerges.

First there is Michael Cassio (Andrew Ceegan), the young man who will be the trigger for Odin James' destruction. He is a swarthy-looking young man with Mediterranean features, and his Italian family name - the sole moniker left intact from Othello - underscores this fact. This script choice is an interesting one, particularly when considered in light of Little, Jr.'s contention that Shakespeare's Cassio is a "near fantastical figure of whiteness."

Meanwhile, Shakespeare's Roderigo has been rechristened Roger Rodriguez for unknown reasons, and is played by a distinctly Anglo actor (Elden Henson). The fact that this pair of characters is marked becomes significant later when the sequence of violence leading up to and within the film's climax is examined.

Finally, there is the African-American drug dealer Dell (A.J. Johnson). This character, for whom there is no real equivalent in Othello, merely serves as a plot device in the segregated-America bits of the world O shows. To get his supply of steroids, Hugo must travel to what he's called "the 'hood" of Charleston. Rap music fills the soundtrack. This sequence in general seems spurious, and the likelihood of a dealer supplying anabolic steroids and cocaine is probably pretty low. Here, the unsegregated America bubbles up, a country in which white and black can meet, talk basketball, wax philosophical, and do business together.

The N-Word and the Bedroom

Then there is the question of language. In further contrast with the society immediately around him, O's protagonist has a tendency to lapse into an English loaded with slang, terminology and pronunciation far removed from the proper language and diction exhibited at Palmetto Grove High. Odin conspicuously dips into this alternative argot at moments of anger at several points in the film, losing his standard white English along with his temper.

The first such outburst occurs in a closed-door conference with the dean (the equivalent of Shakespeare's Brabantino) and Coach Duke-as-parent. The dean confronts Odin with the robbing of his daughter. First, Odin is put on the defensive, facing unfair accusations. He is at a loss for words as he tries to deflect a charge. "You mean you've never had any run-ins with the police," levels the Dean. "No," answers Odin, "It means I didn't force myself on Desi." Odin, like his Elizabethan counterpart, claims confusion with language; as the Moor put it, "Rude am I in speech." However, while Othello's claim comes off as modesty, Odin's is purely sincere.

And he proves himself rude in another sense quickly. The dean accuses him of drug use. Odin responds, "Whatcha sayin'? That I'm not clean? Is that what you're sayin'? 'Cause I'm not on that shit no more ... Test my ass ... I mean, this is fucked up."
The examples of Odin's lapses are myriad and, as the character's jealousy and paranoia grow, become intrinsically linked as the film progresses. As Desi and her roommate Emily (Rain Phoenix) discuss whether Odin actually raped Desi in their last sexual liaison, Odin enters their room. He assails her with, "Hey, Dee, umm, you'd never give out no love behind my back now, would you? ... Maybe I'm not enough for you, especially with you bein' all hot and shit..." Here, "hot" refers not to attractiveness, but rather libidinousness. Desi protests. Odin counters with, "Yeah, okay, but check this. If you were a virgin like you said you were, how come when we doin' it, you actin' all freaky and shit?" Odin becomes violent with his words, attacking the object of his frustration with the scary language of R-rated hip hop.

The principle of Odin's otherness through language and its connection with Odin and Desi's sex life meet in a particularly jarring scene (significantly having no equivalent in the Shakespeare play) in which James and Desi are in bed and he discusses the word "nigger," self-depricatingly referring to himself in that fashion. While in bed and warming up a discussion about winning her love, he says, "I pulled you 'cause I'm that kind of nigger."

Desi rolls over, offended. "See I can say 'nigger' because I am a nigger. You can't 'cause you ain't." She responds with a complaint at the unfairness of it: "Why can't I say it? My people invented the word." He answers, "You can't even think it." Of course, having brought the subject up, he must realizes that she (and the audience, really) is thinking exactly that.

Sex, naturally, is always at the heart of discourse about Othello; everyone's feelings about miscegenation are bound to come to the forefront when confronted with this general of "sooty bosom" and his fair bride. The high-school setting of O would seem to ratchet this feature up a bit.

Many have argued that the bed on which the Act V murder occurs is a displaced object, a sort of non-visual motif, the image of Othello and Desdemona coupling "constantly dangled in front of us and snatched away." The bed is key, these authors assert, not only because the murder of Desdemona takes place there but because the unseen coupling is the most significant event of the play until Act V. The bed is constantly "danced around."

In the R-rated movieland of O, sex scenes are not danced around. On the other hand, the metaphorical devices employed by Iago as he compares Othello and Desdemona's coupling to bestiality with talk of rams "tupping" ewes and to homosexuality with his tale of fevered somnolent fooling around with Cassio. Such dialogue does not exist in the film, and the audience is instead made privy to the bedroom.

There are three bedroom scenes in the film, two added to that of the climax killing. The first was described above, a scene in which the two discuss the word "nigger." The second deals with Odin's violent sexuality.

Cue rap music, low. This scene begins slowly, Desi spilling romantic dialogue all over the staring Odin: "I want you to be able to do anything ... I want you to have me however you want. Don't hold back." The two begin making love and yet all we are given are parts of their bodies, a choice that Sight and Sound Walters makes conspicuous note of at the very end of his review, finding the cinematic tone "almost abstract." The lovers have become objectified in classic fashion, through their reduction into component parts.

Soon something begins to overcome Odin; we've become accustomed to the warning signal of that look. They change positions and Odin finds himself face-to-face with a mirror above the bed. In the mirror, he sees Cassio in his place, atop Desi who is, again, reduced to writhing parts. The fact that Odin imagines himself as Cassio implies feelings of duality within him, evidence that his identity is ungrounded.

The rap music increases in volume and tempo. She pleads for him to stop, but he doesn't. He doesn't hold back as she wished, it is implied, and in doing what he wants, he rapes the white girl. And the movie audience need not simply imagine the horror of this miscegenation, but instead are offered visual proof of the sole black kid's dangerous sexuality.

The Violence

Here some of the latent attitudes inherent in our culture come to the fore. O is punctuated by scenes of violence ranging from fisticuffs to gunplay. What is important to note is that nearly all such acts - most of which are embellishments or additions to Shakespeare's plot - are perpetuated by Odin. With the exception of a single gunshot fired by Hugo, those violent acts that Odin is not responsible for or involved in are committed instead by the other marked characters, Cassio and Rodriguez.
A few examples include Odin punching Rodriguez in the stomach while the latter is held down by Cassio; Odin's blow-up at practice; Odin destroying the rim on a slam dunk in a completely preposterous scene; Cassio picking on Rodriguez while taunting him with calls of "faggot." And of course, the final scene in which Odin, Cassio and Rodriguez are all shot and Desi dies.

Thanks to character choices made by the filmmakers, Hugo, unlike his scruple-free counterpart Iago, has been given a motivation to destroy Odin: he is jealous of Odin's success and of the attention he receives from Duke. Hugo is portrayed, if not in a sympathetic light, at least in a far more human one than that typically achieved in Iago portrayals. Odin's rage, on the other hand, manifests itself in these scenes of extreme violence, with his character coming off as much more animal-like.

The Columbine Connection

No discussion of O is complete without touching upon the controversy surrounding the film's release. Originally slated for a fall 1999 release, the film would see a switch in distributors and seven cancelled premiere dates due to the events of 20 April 1999.

On that day, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, two seniors at Columbine High School outside of Denver, Colo., came to school with semi-automatics. The armed pair terrorized, threatened, held hostage, and/or shot their teachers and schoolmates over the course of several hours. By day's end, Klebold and Harris would each commit suicide, and a town would be forever marked.

Mainstream media swallowed whole the claim that the connection between the events of O and the real-life events of the high-school shooting that grabbed headlines in 1999 was cogent, despite obvious and innumerable differences. To cite a few: Palmetto Grove is a private institution, Columbine was a public school. Columbine did not involve a love triangle, jealousy for a father's love, or basketball. There are exactly three gunshots fired in O; Klebold and Harris fired some nine hundred rounds. Including Desi, three people die in O and a fourth is injured; thirteen were killed in the Columbine shootings and dozens more took bullets. The list goes on and on, covering nearly all details minor and major right down to the time of day on which the key events unfold.

This acceptance of the similarity of film and life is more than off; it is insidious, really. How can O be so readily compared to Columbine and concomitant issues of modern public high schools? Is the presentation of teens with guns enough to elicit discussion about Columbine? And, most importantly and most germane for this paper, what does the Columbine connection shape perception of the race issues implicit in O? Seemingly despite the fact that O's reviewers are over-aware of the racial-issue coloring of the film, most if not all have ignored it in the face of real-life tragedy.

It may be argued that Miramax was showing sympathy for the members of the community devastated by Columbine - indeed, wrong-minded though the studio's decision may have been, the Hollywood folks demonstrated a lot more sensitivity than Charlton Heston and his NRA pals did when they held a massive convention in Denver a few days after the crisis. This perceived link to the real-life incident does O and its viewers a disservice, however, and ultimately reflects badly on the current state of race relations in contemporary culture.

One other film is more notoriously connected with Klebold and Harris and their victims: Michael Moore's Academy Award and César-winning Bowling for Columbine, which frames the events within the larger context of modern American society. In his trademark fashion, explores the grander issues of social atmosphere and arrives at the contention that there is an inextricable link between American racism and gun ownership.

Beginning from the scintillating theories presented in the animated segment "A Brief History of the U.S.A.," Moore points the finger at violent acts such as Columbine on white America's fear of the other, mainly embodied here by Native Americans and African-Americans. The result of today's prevailing profound racism is the overwhelming trend to publicize violence perpetrated by what Barry Glassner, author of The Culture of Fear, calls "dangerous black guys" in Bowling for Columbine.
The movie O and its subsequent delayed release clearly bears out many of Moore's ideas. The story of a black man manipulated into violent acts that, until his suicide, do not involve a firearm, becomes synonymous with the random violence of a couple of white kids in Colorado through the intermediary of fear. The Marilyn Manson music that some claimed drove Klebold and Harris to violence has become booming rap in film, a microcosm of the way race issues in O and in the real-life tragedy were completely reversed. (In fact, one eyewitness shown in Bowling for Columbine says that her captor killed people before her: "...And he shot the black kid because he was black.") With the connection firm in the public's imagination, though, Odin's visibility becomes overwhelming, subsuming the real-life violence as another crime of the black man in America.

A cynic might say that precious little has changed from the Bard's time in terms of race relations, though this Moor has traveled 400 years in time and across an ocean; indeed, it makes an interesting microcosm of the fate of the other through those centuries.

Bibliography

Boose, Lynda. "Othello's Handkerchief: 'The Recognizance and Pledge of Love'."
English Literary Renaissance 5 (1975). 360-374.

Brown, Matthew P. "Basketball, Rodney King, Simi Valley."
Whiteness: A Critical Reader. Ed. Mike Hill New York: New York University Press, 1997. 102-116.

Chambers, Ross. "The Unexamined."
Whiteness: A Critical Reader. Ed. Mike Hill New York: New York University Press, 1997. 187-203.

Ebert, Roger. Untitled film review.
Chicago Sun-Times, 31 August 2001.

LaSalle, Mick. "High School Othello: Compelling Drama recasts Shakespeare's Tragedy on a basketball court."
San Francisco Chronicle, 31 August 2001.

Levith, Murray J. Shakespeare's Italian Settings and Plays.
Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989.

Lim, Walter S.H. The Arts of Empire.
Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998.

Little, Jr., Arthur J. Shakespeare Jungle Fever.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.

Moore, Michael (director). Bowling for Columbine.
Dog Eat Dog Productions, 2002.

Neill, Michael. "Unproper Beds: Race Adultery and the Hideous in Othello."
Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989). 383-412.

Nelson, Tim Blake (director). O.
Lion Gate Films, 2001.

Puig, Claudia. "O is for Othello and ought to see."
USA Today, 30 August 2001.

Shakespeare, William. Othello.
Eds. Alice Walker and John Dover Wilson. London: Cambridge University Press, 1957.

Taubin, Amy. "Character Flaws."
Village Voice, 29 August 2001.

Walters, Ben. Untitled film review.
Sight and Sound 12, no. 12 (2002). 56-57.

Welsh, James M. "Classic Demolition: Why Shakespeare is Not Exactly 'Our Contemporary,' or 'Dude, Where's My Hankie?'"
Literature/Film Quarterly 30, no. 3 (2002). 223-227.

Winter, Jessica. "Scenes from the Classroom Struggle: 'O' Emerges from the Post-Columbine Teenage Wasteland."
Village Voice 46, no. 33 (2001). 43-47.