"O"

You know what's funny? Shakespearean tragedy modernized into a tale of basketball. Coleridge sagely wrote that the character of Iago represents for us a "motiveless malignity. . . now assigning one, and then another, and again a third, motive for his conduct, all alike the mere fictions of his own restless nature, distempered by a keen sense of his intellectual superiority, and haunted by the love of exerting power, on those especially who are his superiors in practical and moral excellence." From where or to what satisfaction this defect evolves remains unclear, and we respond to its villainy with a skeptical and hermeneutic horror. We find him fascinating precisely because he presents an inconstant evil; his treachery is so technical and baroque, his work so methodical, and his reason so inaccessible that we can't help but marvel at Iago's will and intelligence even as we strain, as he does, to explain conveniently their true justification.

Hugo--er, Iago--looks pathetic and fatuous rather than primordial as a hateful basketball veteran and coach's son who feels dispossessed of his family and fame. In him we get no explanatory waffling or rationalization, no gothic, purposeless ambition, none of that quintessential motiveless malignity Coleridge described as the key to Iago's character, and, through him, the nexus of the play's dramatic energy and quality. Josh Hartnett just wants his daddy to love and respect him. Mekhi Phifer just likes to play ball and date white girls. Julia Stiles is there just to be mistrusted.

Shakespeare's comedies work well when adapted for contemporary teenage life; if we ignore their uncanny metaphysical and theological complexes, the comedies offer plenty of frivolous lust and confusion appropriate to any historical moment. But bathos, not pathos, comes with our efforts to do likewise with tragedy. High school is already a melodramatic and theatrical forum. Its students do not need to speak lines like "put out the light" while carrying cell phones and lifting weights in the gym.