Margarita Matta Prompt #1

Garden gnomes and Shakespearean tragedy are certainly not two entities we normally associate with each other, yet somehow they come together as one in Disney’s animated movie Gnomeo & Juliet (2011). This unique blending of genres called for a change in characters, with each Shakespearean actor being replaced by a corresponding gnome. Some of them kept the same names in both stories, such as Juliet and Count Paris, but other names were changed entirely into more trivial, children-like versions of themselves, such as Shakespeare’s Lady Montague being renamed as Lady Bluebury. 

However, it wasn’t just the names that changed – as we shift from Shakespearean tragedy to Disney blockbuster, the audience changes, too. Instead of the more mature-intended audience that is appropriate for the violence, crudeness, and (if we are being honest) rather difficult to understand language we so often see in Shakespeare, Gnomeo & Juliet tends to a much more family friendly audience. In order to achieve this, however, some changes to the content of the play were extremely necessary. For example, the original ending of Romeo and Juliet where both lead characters die by suicide is not something you want to show a preschooler. Instead, Disney opted for a much happier ending, with both of the lead gnomes getting married and driving off happily on a lawnmower. Yes, the audiences between these two stories have changed, and so has some of the plot, but what does this mean? Why is this important?

To answer these questions, it is helpful to compare Disney’s Gnomeo & Juliet and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in the context of popular culture, specifically when discussing low and high culture. According to Storey (2009), “to be culturally worthwhile [something] has to be difficult. Being difficult ensures its exclusive status as high culture. Its very difficult literally excludes; it guarantees the exclusivity of its audience” (pg. 6). Thus, Storey would certainly view Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as an example of high culture – not only is it considered a privilege to pay to attend these plays at a theater, but the difficult nature of understanding Shakespeare assumes a level of education that can most likely only be attained by having a certain amount of wealth, excluding those who are uneducated and in lower economic classes. Storey goes on to explain that popular culture, or low culture by another name, “is the culture which is left over after we have decided what is high culture. Popular culture, in this definition, is a residual category” (pg. 6). In this definition of low culture, Gnomeo & Juliet certainly doesn’t make the cut as the exclusive, sought after high culture status we saw with Shakespeare’s work. Instead, it is the leftover culture, something that did not achieve exclusive status (and, I might argue, was certainly not trying to get to some sort of high class audience) and instead is meant for the consumption of the general public.

Now that we have established Gnomeo & Juliet’s role as low culture, what was the producer trying to establish by creating this movie? It is certainly a low culture interpretation of a high culture production, to put it into simple terms, but why was it created to begin with? Some would argue that this movie was created as a form of fan fiction created in response to Shakespeare’s original play, however, I slightly disagree with this interjection. According to Jenkins (1988), fanfiction occurs when “by translating…viewing into some type of cultural activity, by sharing thoughts about the program content with friends, by joining a community of other fans who share common interests” (pg. 88). Although Gnome & Juliet certainly spawned from Shakespeare’s work, and certainly paid homage to that in its own way, it doesn’t have this community aspect shared in Jenkins’ definition (which is perhaps the most important part of the concept of fanfiction). Jenkins sees fanfiction as more of an engagement by a community with a text outside of the capitalist marketplace, but this move is anything but that – it was a mainstream Hollywood adaptation, winning several awards and grossing quite a hefty sum of money. 

Perhaps instead of solely placing Gnomeo & Juliet under the label of fanfiction, we must also consider it within the environment it was created under: a capitalist economy. Adorno and Horkheimer (1944) bring into conversation the subject of the culture industry, explaining how “culture” created under commercialism has the same features of mass production, and how by this definition nothing is truly new – and to that point, we must remember that Gnomeo & Juliet isn’t new, or event remotely new – it’s based on a play from over 400 years ago (pg. 1). Therefore, Gnomeo & Juliet is simply yet another example of a cultural product that advertises itself as unique, but is in reality nothing more than the product of commercialist practice.

However, Instead of simply viewing this movie as simply one or the other, however, I would argue that it is an overlapping example of both of these terms, or how fan fiction can be practiced within the culture industry. It is paying homage to Shakespeare’s play (the fan fiction part, minus the community focus) while simultaneously earning a large profit over its success (the culture industry part). But once again, why is this important? 

Yes, it is undeniable that Gnomeo & Juliet was largely created in order to create a profit (as most things are). But there is also a deeper, more important value to the creation of this movie – it seeks to not only embed fanfiction within the culture industry, but also high culture within low culture. We can infer that Gnomeo & Juliet actively tried to create a digestible, easy to understand, low culture version of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The producer seeked to gain a meaningful, new way in which to adapt Shakespeare where the plot relations are obvious, but the story is still told in a unique and different way. In my opinion, Gnomeo & Juliet accomplishes just that – and does so while making a buck, too. 

Works Cited

 

Adorno, T. and Horkheimer, M. (1944). Dialect of Enlightenment, pp. 1-12.

Disney. (2011). Gnomeo & Juliet. 

Jenkins III, H. (1988). Star Trek rerun, reread, rewritten: Fan writing as textual poaching. 

Critical studies in Media communication, 5(2), 85-107.

Shakespeare, W., & Collins, A. (2017). Romeo and Juliet. Pearson Education Limited. 

Storey, J. (2009). Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. Pp. 1-16.