When I was growing up in Muncie, Ind., there was a restaurant called the Dairy Dream. Unlike its more famous regal counterpart, Dairy Dream was staffed and owned by the locals. It was mediocre ice cream with mediocre service, but everybody there knew everyone else, and it became the favored hangout for restless teens and working stiffs. Essentially, it was the Dairy Dream Deferred, a place that posed the question: What happens when people with too much time on their hands get together too often until they know each other too well? The answer was almost always: trouble. Such is the land of Scotland, PA., a film that mixes an American malaise worthy of Langston Hughes’s “Dream Deferred” with Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
In a culture where “first family” often refers not to the Bushes but to the co-hosts of the Today show, where aspiration and ambition tend to center on quick money and fame, it makes sense that the fast-food industry might spawn a Lady Macbeth. Maura Tierney, an actress who specializes in portraying smart, frustrated women on popular television shows like ER and NewsRadio, and her husband, the director and writer Billy Morrissette, give us a wry and witty reincarnation of the Macbeths as the McBeths -- with Tierney as Pat and James LeGros as Joe (Mac), who both work at Duncan’s, the local hamburger joint owned by a penny-pinching widower with two sons.
Shakespeare traditionalists will undoubtedly find this movie not to their taste. But if you’re interested in cultural interpretations of the Bard adapted for film, Morrissette has cooked up a tart one. We find the spirit of Macbeth in the film’s overall themes and relationships -- including the interesting suggestion that British primogeniture survives intact in American capitalism -- along with a raft of modern puns reminiscent of Shakespearean comedy.
Most previous directors who have adapted Shakespeare to film have used one of two methods. The first is to remain true to the text, trying to capture the feel of a stage production; the second is to play with the text for purposes of popular adaptation. Into the former category fall many BBC and Royal Shakespeare Company films, including the Macbeth that featured Judi Dench’s outstanding performance. Into the latter fall adaptations like the 19th-century minstrel shows of “Dars-de-Money” and “Bones Plays O’Fellar,” and Orson Welles’s high-quality Falstaff cycle, Chimes at Midnight. American movies in particular use adaptation to pull in audiences, as in 10 Things I Hate About You (a remake of The Taming of the Shrew) and the artsy Baz Luhrmann’s big-budget Hollywood Romeo + Juliet.
However, some recent adaptations have blurred the boundaries between those two approaches. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s Trevor Nunn brought cinematic editing and camera work to a screenplay that kept much of Shakespeare’s original language in his 1996 Twelfth Night, starring Helena Bonham Carter and Ben Kingsley. And although Luhrmann aimed his film directly at teen audiences, he also kept much of the original language.
Scotland, PA. draws a bead on a potential middle-class audience, distancing its social satire only by placing it in the 1970s. But the characters are familiar to survivors of small-town America: ambitious parents with wayward, slacker children; closeted high-school thespians; unsophisticated yet loyal friends; and couples crazy in love, crazy bored, crazy frustrated.
Morrissette’s film falls squarely into the mode of mass cultural adaptation, but does so with a difference. First, the director didn’t adapt his text to the fast-food world to lure in mass audiences or teens. His is not, after all, a big-budget production, but rather an art-house film shot in a month. Most audiences will have to strain to see it, and see it quickly, before it moves on (or wait and rent it). You can hardly say it meets Shakespeare’s text halfway, with Lady Macbeth slaving over a deadly deep fry. Nonetheless, the script retains Macbeth’s themes of ancestral ambition and thwarted desire, as well as the ambiguous relationship between the witches and Mac’s fate, although it translates them into an American capitalist setting.
Shakespeare is in vogue these days, but not straight Shakespeare -- rather, Shakespeare in drag. Transformed in terms of race, gender, or class, Shakespeare’s texts provide thinly veiled social commentary made more respectable by textual association. We had Whoopi Goldberg as Queen Elizabeth playing host to the Oscars in 1999, introducing the various awards for Shakespeare in Love, Tom Stoppard’s gender-bending Shakespearean collage starring Gwyneth Paltrow. A decade ago, we had Senator Alan K. Simpson’s infamous confusion of Iago and Othello at the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings. In 1997, the Shakespeare Theatre, in Washington, presented a photo-negative rendition of Othello, starring Patrick Stewart as Othello with an otherwise all-black cast. Morrissette now offers a film that often connects with Shakespeare’s text, but marks those connections with class distinctions.
Scotland, PA. is primarily a cautionary tale of class ambition, or perhaps an indictment of the social structures fated to stifle that ambition. Tierney’s Pat McBeth outclasses everyone who surrounds her. We first see her trying for the 13th time to perfect her ice-cream-cone twisting to satisfy her slow-witted, thieving manager, who tells her to use her pretty little wrist more before asking her husband to come get a look at his wife’s beautiful cones. The vitality of the McBeths -- frustrated desire barely suppressed -- contrasts with their bland surroundings. Despite Tierney’s journey from sultry temptress to guilt-haunted murderer, she remains superior to her surroundings throughout.
Her only competition in intellect or acting comes from Christopher Walken’s Lt. Ernie McDuff, and he’s far too syrupy sweet for us to be willing to transfer our allegiance from Tierney. A vegetarian suspicious of the McBeths’ fast-food lifestyle, he parallels another ‘70s Americana classic, McCloud, whose tenacious simplicity is an evocative match.
The film’s opening credits feature a black-and-white scene from the detective television series, showing McCloud chasing and catching his man. Later in the film, at the Scotland jailhouse, McDuff’s hapless deputy is shown appreciating the same scene. McCloud, McDuff, McBeth: Our American McAnybodys are duking it out over the most popular power structure around, the small business.
Just like McCloud, McDuff triumphs in the end, but he also inherits the fast-food dream that he covets throughout his investigation of Duncan’s murder. Unlike Pat and Mac, he seems numb instead of angry when faced with his thwarted American ambitions. McDuff even plays the numbing “tomorrow” speech as a motivational tape in his car while investigating the McBeths.
The McBeths don’t stand a chance against the patient pursuit of McDuff and, more important, against time and fate. Their dreams don’t match their universe: Pat wants Mac to get recognition for his invention of chicken tenders with multiple dipping sauces, but Mac’s innovative ideas go only so far. He needs the witches -- three hilarious hippies -- to give him the idea for an intercom for a drive-thru concept that he steals from Duncan. Mac’s single act of heroism, showing his kingly potential, is to eject the perpetrators of a food fight from Duncan’s restaurant.
A simple man, Mac plots the murder of his good friend (and coworker) Banco over a Pabst Blue Ribbon tallboy, and challenges his wife: “You think I’m stupid, don’t you?” To which she responds, “That question is stupid.” When Mac is impaled by his low-class taste, we are reminded that he’s a victim of fate, as well as the tragic nature of immoderate appetites -- sex, greed, and ambition. The witches provoke his crimes and then laugh at his pain. But Tierney’s demise is far more tragic. She seems entitled to her frustrated ambition. She wants so little, really.
At the height of her success, before McDuff sniffs out their trail, we see her close up, blissfully floating in a pool with a drink in her hand. The camera pans back to reveal that the pool is above ground, a symbol of the ranch-house existence that we now realize represents their dream. Trapped in Scotland, PA., she is as isolated as if she were in the original Scotland. Nature is filled with trickery and deceit (witches, friends who would like to shoot you), and civilization is no better. No wonder the burn mark on her hand, suffered when she and Mac accidentally on purpose turn Duncan into immortal lard, seems to be growing worse to her: It’s not just guilt, it’s boredom. When she removes the spot, she gives us a smile of relief, not pain.
The final vista is bleak: nothing but McDuff in front of his veggie-burger version of the fast-food chain, gazing at an empty parking lot -- which, when the restaurant was McBeth’s, had been crowded with happy, entertained townspeople. A streaker (played by the film’s producer, Richard Shepard) waving an American flag rounds the bend from the vacant drive-thru lane, and we know that McDuff’s will never be better than McBeth’s. It may be better for us -- but McBeth’s was more fun. We miss the muddling ambition of vapid American culture at its best -- swimming pools, tallboys, and all. Like the Dairy Dream, this film is tasty low-class fun.
Marguerite Rippy is an assistant professor of literature and languages at Marymount University in Arlington, Va., and a contributor to Spectacular Shakespeare: Critical Theory and Popular Cinema, edited by Courtney Lehmann and Lisa S. Starks (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002).
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