Hello readers,
A break from the Postcards and Audio Letters retrospective this morning to welcome Brittany Menjivar to the magazine. Britt’s watching adaptations for her new monthly column, Based On, If Any. First up is Rave Macbeth (2001). Come back next month for a flick based on a Gaitskill story.
🖤AV
Raving to the Grave: On Rave Macbeth (2001)
Upon learning of a 2001 film called Rave Macbeth, I was taken aback—not because a turn-of-the-millennium Thane of Cawdor was absurd, but because I was experiencing Déjà vu. In 2017—my first year of college—I rewrote the Scottish play, setting it in an American high school circa 1999. Duncan was the student body president. Banquo was the class clown. Macbeth was a school shooter. The title of this avant-garde production, supported by the Yale Drama Coalition, was McDeath.
I was a bleeding heart with a dream of a more peaceful nation and a permit to rent a foam handgun from the Undergraduate Production Prop Weapon Inventory. I wanted McDeath to be not just an artistic success, but a philanthropic one. As I debated whether it would be too on the nose to put the witches in trenchcoats, I organized a donation drive for a gun safety nonprofit. Yet the play caused a stir on campus—largely because the Parkland shooting came hot on the heels of audition season. The phrase “bad timing” was thrown around, although it’s hard to imagine “good timing” given the frequency of school massacres. Cast and crew members dropped out en masse. In the end, the show did go on—but only after I postponed it by a semester because I didn’t have enough people to make it happen.
The critics’ prevailing concern had been that centering a murderer as my protagonist might inadvertently glorify violence. “They don’t get it—I’m literally following the plot of Macbeth,” I remarked to my friends. Although I stand by the work today, I now see the flaw in my defense: the story was so visceral precisely because it was a Macbeth adaptation. Even all these centuries later, Shakespeare’s tragedy is so redolent of lust and bloodlust that it can shock more fragile sensibilities. Director Klaus Knoesel and writer Harry Ki were on the money when they decided to apply this classic tale to teens, for whom lust and bloodlust are bread and butter. Watching the film on Internet Archive late at night, I felt like I was returning to a recurring dream—or nightmare.
The question that looms large over any Shakespeare adaptation is, Will they use the original language? Rave Macbeth answers this question expeditiously. During a credits sequence featuring a series of abstract light shows that evoke the womb and birth canal (“none of woman born shall harm Macbeth,” anyone?), a heavily accented voice speaks over the pulsing house soundtrack:
“At a time when people didn’t dare to doubt the magic power of wizards and witches…”
Hold up, wizards? Also, is he talking about the early 2000s from an imagined future? Ok, go on…
“…Shakespeare immortalized the story of Macbeth,” the narrator continues in a surprisingly meta twist. As he speaks, identifying the tale as one of “power, madness, greed, and love,” the camera pans past a series of floating raver heads, presumably those of the leads. It’s almost like we’re being introduced to the cast of… a play.
The floating heads disappear. Before the womb-light emerges a long-haired, yet balding man in a swivel chair, smoking a cigarette. This is not a techno-pagan Shakespeare as I initially feared, but Greek deity Hecate. In the original text, Hecate is a Greek goddess of sorcery who leads the witches’ cult. In this version of the story, Hecate is a preternatural mob boss of sorts with one job: make sure Macbeth happens again and again. The “why” is unclear, but the “how” is soon to be explained.
“Today, we witches and warlocks still exist, but people don’t notice as much, perhaps due to the changes in the tools of our trade,” Hecate says. A movie screen appears behind him, upon which we see a montage of people punching each other. Just when I think he’s about to pronounce violence the new magic, he declares that modern witches use Ecstasy to cast spells—and we’re launched into the world of the club.
Let’s be clear: Macbeth is a difficult play to bring into the modern age. Not only does it necessitate a world in which magic and prophecy can exist; it requires a society with a distinct power structure and characters willing to commit murder in order to reach the upper echelon. (Thus, the story is often transposed into a gang war context, with adaptations taking place everywhere from South Central to New York City’s Mafia underworld.)
The rave is the perfect setting for this pandemonium. Amidst the pills, smoke, strobes, and pounding beats, all logic (visual, verbal, contextual) goes out the window, turning interactions into a series of sigils. Drug dealers rule the land; both sellers and buyers exist in a heightened state as they navigate a labyrinth of hedonism. Id is firmly in charge here: as illicit substances change hands, fingers grope and bodies grind; as liquor flows, fists fly. Sure, this might go against the ethos of PLUR (“Peace, Love, Unity, Respect”—the raver’s motto), but we’ve all been to a party that got out of control.
Although names and dialogue have been changed, the basic narrative structure is the same. Marcus (Macbeth) and Troy (Banquo), friends and fellow ravers, are invited to move up the ranks of kingpin Dean’s (Duncan’s) Ecstasy-dealing scheme. After three strange women (the witches) accost them with some cryptic comments, Marcus comes to believe that Troy will become the next “King of the Rave.” Suspicious, he sabotages him—by stabbing him to death. In the wake of this murder, he’s distraught, but coldhearted girlfriend Lidia (Lady Macbeth) tells him to keep his head up. Of course, neither of them makes it out alive.
There are times I wish Rave Macbeth leaned into satire a la Gregg Araki—for example, when Marcus responds to the witches’ prophecy by remarking, “All right, what the fuck was that?” A few well-placed, winking allusions to the film’s source text (a punny drink at the bar? a bad C-section joke?) would’ve drawn a chuckle from this reviewer. Still, the film’s self-seriousness is part of its charm. The atmospheric establishing shots between scenes—which showcase shirtless jugglers, people dressed in elaborate insect costumes, a flaming didgeridoo, and an opera singer—take on a cinema verite quality. The young actors have acting chops, too. Macbeth is ultimately about characters who succumb to their most base desires, and the teens on screen give into raw emotion so fully that it’s sometimes startling.
Rave Macbeth is distinctly more female-focused than the original: Lidia has been given a companion in Helena, Troy’s girlfriend (who could be considered a Fleance stand-in). The girls are primarily considered trophies for their boyfriends, turned into otherworldly fetish objects in their blue eyeshadow and glittery face paint. Sometimes this role is exciting for them, as when they giggle in the bathroom about their boyfriends’ promotions and the newfound clout they’ve received by association. Sometimes it causes trouble, as when Troy plants a kiss on Lidia and Marcus is filled with rage, ultimately contributing to his decision to kill him. This marks a notable deviation from Shakespeare’s play: while Macbeth’s murder of Banquo was partially motivated by paranoia that Banquo would find out he had murdered Duncan, the conflict between Marcus and Troy is solely about jealousy and competition. Is the film aware that Lidia has been objectified? Lidia herself certainly is: she repeatedly reminds herself that behind every great man is a powerful woman, wanting to have some hand in Marcus’ success instead of sitting on the sidelines. Her scenes are some of the most compelling—no surprise, given that she’s based on one of the most analyzed villains of all time.
Despite the Harry Potter-esque frame narrative, we don’t witness much witchcraft—Marcus hears Troy’s voice from beyond the grave, but there’s no floating dagger, no ghostly child. The prophecies themselves are lackluster: other than a prediction of “blood [raining] from heaven” fulfilled by what is basically a repeat of the sprinkler scene from Blade, they’re better described as cryptic adages (“Listen to those who you trust; that is life’s only ‘must’”). The real magic here is the editing. Once again: logic is eschewed in this film. The playful celebration of technology and SFX that was so rampant in the ’90s is on full display, conveying both the chaos of the rave and the supernatural evil lurking throughout the club. Translating this to concrete examples: a funhouse mirror effect distorts the screen when the boys meet the witches. Occasionally, when an important line is spoken, a robot voice will speak in tandem with the actor. Sometimes an echo effect is deployed. Fitting given that Rave Macbeth is sometimes cited as the first digital film—Y2K was all about glitches in the matrix.
Rave Macbeth ends the way it began. The cast stands against the backdrop of the lightshow, reanimated in the void, as if they’re about to take a bow. The blocking suggests that the story could be played out infinitely—resonant enough to transcend time and space, reinventing itself tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
BRITTANY MENJIVAR studied creative writing and film at Yale University. Now, she works and plays in the City of Angels. Britt’s a columnist for the Los Angeles Review of Books, the author of poetry and prose collection Parasocialite, the screenwriter behind award-winning thriller short “Fragile.com,” and the co-founder of literary reading series Car Crash Collective.