Nobody goes to see Romeo and Juliet hoping that the lovers will be saved. You can, no matter how many times you see Hamlet, rue the impetuous and mistaken murder of Polonious from which calamity flows. And I can’t imagine ever sitting through Othello without being devastated that that great, heroic man can be done in by his jealousy and his puffed-up sense of himself. But if Romeo had known Juliet was faking her death and arrived at the tomb in time to bear her away to Mantua and live happily ever after, we’d all go home feeling empty handed.
The grandest of all misunderstood-teen dramas, which was added to the Criterion Collection on Valentine’s Day, offers us a chance to wallow in the cosmic unfairness of it all, and, as with all misunderstood-teen dramas, to blame the grown-ups for letting things come to such a tragic pass: Capulet and Montague for not controlling the feuding hotheads under their command; the Prince for allowing the public brawls to continue without consequence; Friar Laurence, fearing for his own skin and fleeing the tomb, for allowing the lovers to kill themselves.
I must have been about eight when I first read the story of Romeo and Juliet in a 16 Magazine fotonovela that ran to go along with the release of Franco Zeferrelli’s 1968 film. I couldn’t believe it. It was the most awful and tragic and thrilling thing I could imagine. It took five years before I’d get to see the movie. Its 1973 rerelease was the occasion for a junior-high class field trip. I was thirteen and the optimum age to see it. Getting on the bus to go back to school afterward, a lot of the girls had red, teary eyes, and even if they didn’t show it, at least some of the boys felt the same way. I know I did. The movie was as lush and stirring and crushing as I’d imagined. What none of us could have articulated was how much it flattered its teen audience. Teenagers love to associate themselves with tragedy and this picture had everything a teenager could want—a chance not just to see your own feelings of being persecuted and misunderstood by your parents raised to classical heights but the opportunity to feel horny and high-minded at the same time. From thirteen to sixteen (and often beyond) teenagers are prone to thinking of horniness and romance as the same thing, investing every make-out session with the most grandiose consequences. Think of the great moment in John Waters’ original Hairspray when the heroine’s best friend Penny is making out with her Black boyfriend Seaweed: he calls her “my little white lily” and tells her their love is taboo. Her response? “Go to second! Go to second!”
That spirit is represented in Romeo and Juliet’s morning-after-the-wedding-night scene when the camera finds the now-betrothed lovers nude and cuddled up in bed. Of course Romeo’s bare butt got hoots from the junior-high crowd. (We didn’t see the brief flash of Juliet’s nipples which had been edited out in 1973 to secure the movie a PG rating.) But if your chances for any kind of sexual encounters are necking in the back row of the movies, or a few minutes alone with your honey in the family den, one ear cocked for an approaching parent, the chance of getting to spend the entire night together felt unimaginable. Even more than the balcony scene, this is what secured Romeo and Juliet the distinction of being the most high-toned make-out movie of all time.
It’s also what may now drag its distributor, Paramount, into court. Just before the end of last year, the movie’s stars, Leonard Whiting, now 72, and Olivia Hussey, now 71, embracing a California law temporarily suspending the statute of limitations in child-abuse lawsuits, filed suit in Santa Monica, California seeking more than $500 million in damages charging that Zeffirelli had sexually exploited them during the filming of Romeo and Juliet. The pair claim that after telling them they would perform the scene in body stockings, the director pressured them to perform the scene in the nude, telling them the movie would fail otherwise. They further claim that he told them the camera would be positioned so as not to show their nudity. Whiting and Hussey were 17 and 15 at the time and now claim the scene led to decades of mental anguish and impaired their careers.
Only three people know the truth of the matter and one of them, Zeffirelli, who died in 2019, can’t say. And it’s certainly not outside the bounds of credibility to believe a director pressured two novices into getting what he wanted, and if he did it was a breach of the trust between filmmaker and performer.
But it’s hard to reconcile the claim of those decades of mental anguish with fifty-years of the actors’ associations with Zeffirelli—Hussey worked with him again in 1975 on Jesus of Nazareth and the director wrote the foreword to her 2018 memoir; Whiting attended the director’s funeral—and their own fond and frequent public memories of making the movie, which included defending the nude scene. One is even included on the new Criterion disc, a 2017 interview with Hussey and Whiting on stage at the Aero theater in Santa Monica after a screening of the film, during which Hussey laughingly—and, it seems, fondly—remembers Whiting walking around the set starkers and unashamed while he smiles, confirming her memory and says he wouldn’t have minded rehearsing the scene even more.
If Zeffirelli did trick them he broke the trust that should exist between directors and actors. But even if his methods were manipulative, the director’s instinct about the scene’s nudity was right. The lawsuit can be summed up by one of the actors’ lawyers, Solomon Gresen, who said, “These were very young naive children in the ’60s who had no understanding of what was about to hit them.” In Gresen’s words you can hear all of the terrified and hypocritical ways in which we deal with teen sex.
Teenagers sure aren’t adults, but can we drop this façade that they are children? Or, if we are doing so, can we at least be consistent? In a 1986 piece on teen sex, modeled on Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” the great feminist cultural critic Ellen Willis wrote that if teen sex equals child abuse, then it follows that any teenager who has sex with another teenager has committed child abuse and should be prosecuted for it; schools should be sex-segregated and, to cover all bases, homosexuals should be branded with a G on their forehead; the chastity belt should be brought back and the death penalty meted out to anyone who sells contraceptives to minors. The piece is of course designed to provoke, just as its model was. But it’s not outrageous to suggest that if teenagers are children, then logic dictates they are clearly too young to be given information on sex, or access to contraception or abortion, and they are clearly too young to come out or to change their gender.
It’s dispiriting to see Romeo and Juliet drawn into the prim, disapproving attitudes the movie rebelled against, into the current attitude which joins the repressiveness of the right and, as Willis said so often, liberals who are so ready to recast that repressiveness as narratives of safety and responsibility.
And if we are to be consistent in insisting that all teen sex is evil, then the people who think so should step forward and say we need to get rid of Romeo and Juliet period, in any form, no matter how the material is presented—with nudity or none of all. In fact, they should insist it not even be read in classrooms where, in America at least, it’s usually the first Shakespeare students are assigned. She is 14, after all, and he is 15, and the message from both right and left is that we should not be enraptured by a story that features teen sex. This, then, means that West Side Story gets thrown on the scrapheap too. But so what? It’s the safety of children that’s at stake.
The cultural ramifications of this are already obvious. There are the legal challenges that have unsuccessfully brought against the photographers Sally Mann and Jock Sturges.
And just a few years back a pair of ninnies—one with an NYU education that apparently didn’t take--launched what Julia Friedman in The New Criterion called “an exquisitely passive-aggressive online petition” to pressure the Metropolitan Museum of Art to remove Balthus’ painting “Therese Dreaming” because it dared give a glimpse of a prepubescent girl’s undies. The Met told these aspiring little Comstocks to go chase themselves, though, unfortunately, the museum did wind up placing a cautionary note at the entrance to the exhibit.
Reading online discussion boards following the filing of the lawsuit, it was common to hear, “They were children,” often from people who admitted to seeing and enjoying the film when they were teenagers but feel differently now that they’re parents. Is there anything more depressing than parents who believe their offspring are incapable of watching the movies and reading the books that they did as teens, with no apparent ill effects? But then, this is the spirit of the censor who is always—always—convinced he or she is mature enough to handle whatever there is to consume, but that others—teenagers or the lower classes or, not so long ago, women and Black people—need their superior guidance. These concerned parents who thrilled to the movie as teenagers got it right the first time.
The argument I’m trying to make here is that, in life or art, to think of any form of teen sexual expression or sexual experimentation as inherently damaging is, as Ellen Willis realized, to align yourself with the repressive right. When safety becomes the predominant cultural value, we’re barred from having the experiences, even the potentially painful ones, that give us our knowledge of life. And when conveying a morally instructive point of view becomes the most treasured value in art, there’s no room for artists to express—or audiences to experience—the thorny, often unresolvable situations art (and life) presents us with.
I’ll stand up for Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet as a shared part of teenage experience for several generations. I’d have a harder time standing up for it as a good movie. Despite the hubbub flying back and forth in front of the camera, whether it’s a street fight or the heavy-breathing that punctuates all of the Whiting-Hussey canoodling, the movie often feels static. People remember it as distinctly livelier than many of the Shakespearean films that preceded it (that depends on which ones you’re talking about), but Zeffirelli often seems to have no clue where to place the camera. When Romeo first spies Juliet at the Capulet ball, Hussey, diminutive to begin with, is almost lost among the other dancers.
And for the lovers’ first kiss, Zeffirelli leaves us looking at the back of Whiting’s head. And while it gives me no pleasure to say it, it’s not the nude scene that kept Whiting and Hussey from having substantial acting careers. They are pretty, even charming in their swoony, lovestruck way but when you put their performances up against the glowing-from-within beauty—and acting chops of Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Dane in the Baz Luhrmann version (a genuinely exciting and moving piece of filmmaking), you can see how they fall short.
It may simply be that Zeffirelli never learned to do on screen what he could do on stage. His production of Puccini’s La Bohème has been in the repertory of New York’s Metropolitan Opera since 1982 and it’s a joy to behold.
And there is still something remarkable about Zeffirelli having had the simple inspiration of foreswearing generations of too-old Romeos and Juliets by casting actors close to the lovers’ actual age. Because part of the legacy of Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, and one that can’t be taken from it, is that, in America at least, it has probably done more to make Shakespeare pleasurable to young audiences than any other movie, even much better ones.
Robin Williams’ parody of Shakespearean acting in Dead Poets Society isn’t far off from what many people who’ve never seen Shakespeare expect it is: desiccated actors cluttering the air with “prithee’s” and “ho there”s. Pauline Kael, who hated the Zeffirelli film, complained in her review that when the verse was delivered the way the young lovers do here it became “a funny way of speaking that’s hard to understand.” But whether you’re listening to Leonard Whiting or Olivier, that’s exactly what Shakespeare is to most people encountering it for the first time. Probably more students have been defeated from the start by teachers who go on and on about the glory of Shakespeare’s verse without first making it comprehensible as speech. In the last five years, I taught Hamlet to a high-school baccalaureate class and Othello to a class of college freshmen, and I can tell you that, especially for the first few acts, teaching often consisted of translating what the characters were saying into colloquial language, sometimes line by line. It’s only then that my students were able to pick up on the poetry, the metaphors, the jokes. Or even to realize that as revered an artifact of high culture as Shakespeare can have jokes.
By putting a pair of teen lovers on the screen, by making the movie, bad camerawork and all, as physical as he could, by not pretending that the movie isn’t about the melodramatic glory of teen romance and sex (the fact that the boys in the movie wear striped tights with tasseled codpieces attest to the rockets in their 14th-century pockets), Zeffirelli, whatever faults in his filmmaking, made Shakespeare live for its young audience. For once, a field trip wasn’t just a few hours away from school to see something you were supposed to be interested in, but close to an acknowledgment of your own bursting hormones. In other words, something that mattered to your life. And isn’t that what we want Shakespeare to be?
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