ROMEO+JULIET (1996) — I defy you, Dopamine!!!

Cinema of Cruelty (Movies for Masochists)

On this week’s annotated deep dive, The Cultists present Baz Luhrmann’s 90s frenetic teen angst extravaganza, Romeo + Juliet (1996). Known for his kinetic color-fueled explosions of images and sound, Luhrmann's second offering in his “red curtain trilogy” put him on the film world’s map as an Auteur with a distinct and immediately recognizable style. Bright, brash, and unforgiving to anyone who prefers a more minimal Mise-en-scène, Luhrmann’s penchant for decadence was ripe for a world of high octane emotions, brawls, masquerades, and the lush arc of an epic demise. However Luhrmann’s vision of bringing the dusty pages of the oft produced Shakespearean play into the hearts and minds of the notoriously apathetic 90s teenage market was a rather unprecedented and hard sell for commercial studios at the time. Particularly when Luhrmann insisted that not only would he win over a teen audience, he would do it all without altering a single syllable of the original Shakespearean language of the play. And he would use a cast of mostly young people to do it. Luhrmann’s vision succeeded, jumpstarting a subsequent decade stuffed with Shakespearean film adaptations for teens, and yet, ‘R+J’ remains distinct among them all. A burning strange indefinable star that shall not be defied.

Deep dives include: The film’s production history, editing and cinematography; the lineage of the Romeo and Juliet literature cycle that lead to Shakespeare’s 1596 adaptation of the tale; the 1996 film’s comparisons with the exactly 400 years older play; the historical roots of the warring Guelph vs. Ghibelline factionalism that led to such constant civil brawls; how amazing it is that Romeo spends a full third of the play desperately and despondently in love with someone else; why the developing teenage mind lacks impulse control; and why even Dante personally hated the Montagues and Capulets enough to write them into his levels of Hell two centuries before Shakespeare was even born.

Episode Safe Word(s): “impulse control”