CARD 3b.
The image of the cross plays a role in the artistic and political strategy Debord called detournement, the appropriation of the motifs of the spectacle by its adversaries. The "plus" in Romeo plus Juliet is such a detournement, marking the appropriation of classic text by youth culture, rendering Shakespeare title as graffiti.
But the same symbol also serves to mark that appropriation with the violence of the feud. The sequence begins with the cross hairs of a pistol, the falling body forms another cross, the red Gothic one a third. This cross itself is marked -- the fallen youth becomes the ampersand in its center, and the trace of the crucified body that marks the copula or coupling of deathmarked lovers.
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Similarly, the cruciform "t" suggest punk and heavy metal typography, and Pete Postlethwaite's reading "take their life," makes Shakespeare's text conflate birth and suicide.
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Tybalt reveals his pistols, but also an image of the sacred heart; or, more exactly, an image of Jesus displaying the sacred heart; the one ostentatio or unveiling mirroring the other.
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These complexities create a spiraling of reference. Cross and sacred heart are at once signs of the domination of the spectacle, appropriations of its tokens by the youth culture, and also retain their force as images of fidelity, compassion, charity and seriousness. The Friar's vision of the heart is folly, but it also conveys what the director considered the film's central message-- one of compassion and tolerance in the face of the domination of "brand names from the dark ages" labeling differing religions, ethnic groups, and sexual communities as enemies. The sacred heart is in one sense, prominent among those Medieval trademarks; in another sense it stands for values the film affirms.
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