Popular Culture Review Vol. 21, No. 1, Winter 2010 | Page 15

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