“Fear No More”: Gender Politics and the “Hell” of New Media Technologies in Michael Almereyda’s Cymbeline (2014)

Abstract

The paper focuses on Michael Almereyda’s Cymbeline (2014), a modernized re-telling of Shakespeare’s play in which the Briton motorcycle gang, led by drug kingpin Cymbeline, comes into conflict with the Rome police force, led by Caius Lucius. In the film, which has been defined as “Shakespeare in the Instagram age,” sustained attention to media practices and technologies competes with the incorporation of textual material. In particular, the film displays a conflict between old media, including Shakespearean textual inscriptions (e.g. the “Fear No More” woodcut that Posthumus makes and sends to Imogen as a gift), and new media technologies, pervasively associated with perverse visualization and the “spreadability” of rumour and untruth. The paper shows that the media consciousness of the film is inextricably linked with its politics of gender and, more specifically, that the processes of remediation that it repeatedly activates fundamentally contribute to the fashioning, rearticulation, and questioning of notions of masculinity and male bonding.