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Popular Culture Review
madman, embodying, as Rippy argues, a failed white male sexuality which
comes close to Othello’s stereotypical black male sexuality, an incongruous
combination of innocence and potential for violence. Andy as Othello, even
without blackface, is a representation of what Karen Newman has called
Othello’s “monstrous desire.”16 Andy is then, in many ways, like Othello in the
more racist depictions that Aebischer describes: the savage who hides behind the
mask of civility until his sexual identity is threatened, when the savage comes to
the forefront. In this way, then, it once again mimics the Miller version. In
Anthony Hopkins’ performance, race is deemphasized, but more abstract signs
of the “savage” come out, from his lion’s mane hairdo to the campy growl he
lets out at the climax of the murder scene.
In this seemingly innocuous and forgotten-about 23 minutes of television,
there is actually a microcosm of the problems that confront modem performers,
audiences, and scholars when they approach Othello. Though there have been
noble attempts to strip the play of its racism so that it may remain in the canon,
the racist associations represented by the Uncontrollable-Othello narrative have
permeated the cultural memory. While many of Shakespeare’s greatest
characters commit murder, only Othello has such a clear association with
murder in the popular consciousness. This is no doubt due to the fact that
Othello’s crime carries with it such powerful racial signifiers, and Othello as a
character represents the black man as stand-in for the white male id. That this
powerful symbol of what one hopes is an outdated racial consciousness carries
with it the ultimate stamp of cultural authority, that of Shakespeare, makes it
almost impossible to reconcile.
Early in the episode, in justifying her enterprise to Sam, Diane says that
“Anyone who loves the theatre loves mankind.” To Diane, Andy’s love for the
arts outweighs his murderous tendencies. She is following in the liberal tradition
of using Shakespeare as a civilizing influence. However, she makes an error in
her choice of text. By choosing Othello, she unwittingly chooses the one
character in Shakespeare that cannot be controlled. The question becomes: how
much of the responsibility is put on the character and how much is put on the
actor? Would Andy have been uncontrollable in another role, such as Hamlet?
Performing the scene between Hamlet and Gertrude in the bedroom would have
made sense, since his murderous tendencies are blamed on his oedipal
relationship with his mother (as he is pulled off of Diane, he screams, “I’ll clean
up my room, Mommy!”). Even the episode’s title, “Homicidal Ham,” seems to
hint at Hamlet more than Othello. But Hamlet is not the text performed.
Reviewing how Hamlet and Othello have been woven into the fragmentary
cultural memory, it is not hard to see why. The more well-known character of
Hamlet would not work in this scenario because he is not seen as capable of
eliciting the visceral reaction in both actors and audiences that Othello does, and
it is not hard to see that this visceral reaction is inextricably tied to both
Hamlet’s whiteness and Othello’s blackness.