Card 4.
If "detournement" is one mode of resistance to media, Another is called "la derive," goalless and spontaneous walking in the city. The urban radical's equivalent to geomancy, the cultivation of sensitivity to energies and traces of an urban experience prior to or resistant to the regime of the spectacle. To apply Baudrillard's metaphor, one might think of this practice as the search for the tattered map of the real in the hyperreal urban grid that has all but effaced it. In Luhrmann's film, Romeo's "derive" is associated with the ruined theater on the beach, where he withdraws and is first seen looking at the sea and writing lines of verse in a small notebook with a pen. While this is, literally, a cinema palace, its ruin evokes the passing of theater as well, while"The Globe Theater" in this film is merely the name of a pool hall.
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The ruined arch provides a hint of history at odds with the countermyth of televisual origins. The arch was in fact an alternative point of origin in the making of the film, for it was imagined and built as a model two years before shooting began.
At night, the meditative space of the theater becomes an alternative space for drag performance.
Some U.S. reviewers questioned the propriety of the drag scenes, but they have precedent. Romeo first appears in literature in Da Porto's novella in 1531 and attends the Capulet ball dressed as a nymph.
One may wonder exactly how a nymph might have been dressed.
Though Shakespeare did not know Da Porto, intermediate texts -- Bandello, Boiaistuau, Painter, Brooke -- retain traces of Da Porto's design, emphasizing Romeo's beauty. Bellini's concert opera I Capelleti e i Montecchi is still performed with a female Romeo in man's dress.
Drag is used here, coupled with fireworks and a common psychedelic style, to connect Mercutio's performance with that taking place at the Capulet mansion and to blur boundaries. Mercutio's grand entrance inserts countercultural "drag" style at the center of the ball.
But Luhrmann intended this to be understood as at least part hallucination -- The moment is prepared for by an earlier, similarly blocked sequence in which the half-dressed Lady Capulet searches for Juliet.
Further, the thin line between femininity as masquerade and as reality was considered so fragile that the opening credits were added in part to identify Juliet's mother so she wouldn't be mistaken for a man when she enters in underwear and shower cap.
While Olivier's triumphalist media allegory blends boy player and "real" actress, here femininity is doubly constructed, and drag, with its own kind of "realness" takes precedence over its supposed original.
These sequences also link the film to recent Australian films such as Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and invoke the changes status of drag in Australian culture as a whole.