ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates this elitist reinscription using one of the most popular operas, Georges Bizet's Carmen, and examples of the Carmen narrative in cinema. Bizet's Carmen has itself always straddled the divide between high and low culture, acting as a sort of hybrid cultural artefact. The effects of this White cultural haunting can be perceived in Bizet's Gypsy song of Act II, which Hammerstein converted to the song 'Beat me dat rhythm on a drum'. Bizet's work becomes the version of Carmen against which knowing audiences compare the films and their music, detracting from and so marginalizing the immediacy of the cinematic experience. The filmed opera as cultural hybrid therefore facilitates the pleasure of elite reinscription. Regardless of our own contexts, we are invited to participate in echoes of elite ritual, to 'be in the know' about Bizet and how the Carmen story should really be done; in short, to reinscribe ourselves as part of the elite.
