Othello, Race, and Cultural Memory on Cheers
Shakespeare occupies an ambiguous and anxiety-ridden place in the mass
American consciousness, representing Americans’ general ambivalence to the
position of high culture. Despite this ambivalence (or maybe because of it),
Shakespeare is often employed as a medium through which high culture is both
marketed within, and lampooned by, popular culture. Pop culture citations of
Shakespeare, like those within sitcoms, often rely on the fact that the audience is
familiar with Shakespeare—the historical figure, the set of canonical plays, the
cultural history of those plays, etc.—but not too familiar. Thus, Shakespeare
may play a large role in our cultural memory, but that cultural memory is only
fragmentary. This essay explores the ways the 1980s sitcom Cheers relies on
equal parts memory and forgetting when citing Shakespeare and dealing with
the troublesome issue of Othello and race.
The episode under consideration here, “Homicidal Ham,” represents the
essential conundrum for late 20th-century middlebrow liberalism in its
encounters with Shakespeare in general and Othello in particular. It attempts to
erase the unsettling racial issues of the play by inscribing the idea of
fragmentary cultural memory while simultaneously exploiting the racialized
elements that drive the play’s drama. The episode’s performance of Othello
institutes the idea that modem audiences have only a fragmentary knowledge of
Shakespeare and then, through its exclusion, consigns race as one of the
elements that needs to be forgotten. It hopes to point toward a colorblind future
in which Othello is no longer a play about race. But even as it is attempting to
erase race, it simultaneously engages in a particularly racist line of Othello
citation, which I have dubbed the “Uncontrollable-Othello narrative,” which
draws its power specifically from the most racialized elements of the play.
The Uncontrollable-Othello narrative is a bizarre line of Shakespearean
citation that involves an actor playing Othello who becomes consumed with the
character’s jealous rage and attempts a real-life murder. The legend of the
intertwining of life and art in the performance of Othello stretches back to at
least the 19th century. Edmund Kean, known for his emotionally charged and
frightening performances of the character, seems to be an impetus for the story.1
In the 20th century, the idea of the murderous Othello actor has proven to be a
surprisingly durable trope for filmmakers of all types. The UncontrollableOthello narrative was first used in film in the 1911 Danish silent film
Desdemona, in which a jealous actor murders his wife onstage during a
performance of Othello. This plot was used in two other silent films as well as
an obscure 1936 British thriller, Men Are Not Gods. A variation on the
Uncontrollable-Othello narrative also makes an appearance in the acclaimed
1945 French film Les Enfants du Paradis. However, the most well-known