ABSTRACT
Exploring the effects of verisimilitude in theater and film, Walter Benjamin observes that the concept of “place” in the theater cannot, ultimately, be severed from the spectator’s location beyond the footlights, despite even the most powerful illusions of mise-en-scène. By contrast, cinema’s ability to efface its own location in time and space is the very condition of its scopic seduction. It is, according to Benjamin, a kind of representational oasis, “an orchid in the land of technology” capable of removing us from the trivium of “[o]ur taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories … burst[ing] this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling” (1992: 672). Benjamin’s cautiously euphoric description of the centrifugal potential of cinematic representation uncannily invokes a far more recent arrival, digital technology, which has not only changed the landscape of film production by making it widely affordable and accessible through digital distribution, but also revolutionized the act of reception as a mode of “production” in its own right. Indeed, the digital video disk (DVD) caters to the spectator’s implied longing for supplemental spaces beyond the purview of the camera – provisional and performative places that invite us to construct our own film from the remnants of discarded footage, photo gallery stills, press kits, censored scenes, and multilanguage menus. 1 Accordingly, although this often highly privatized experience of home theater invokes a return to the solitary, orchid-like splendor that Benjamin ascribes to the hypnotic pull of celluloid, I would suggest that the experience of cinema today is more firmly rooted in the contested province of the thistle – a cross between a lone flower and a menacing mass of weeds – and, of course, the symbol of one place in particular: Scotland. Indeed, I shall argue that Scotland, and, more specifically, the dislocated “Scotland” that figures so prominently in twentieth-century media adaptations of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, suggests a compelling metaphor for the transnational playground wherein the challenges and possibilities of globalization may be traversed.
