Rupert Goold’s Macbeth (2010): Surveillance society and society of control

Abstract

This article deals with Rupert Goold’s film version of Macbeth (2010). Based on a stage production, this film is set in an unspecified Soviet country. I will analyze Goold’s creation of a stage-to-screen hybrid recording framed as a surveillance film. Relying on Michel Foucault’s and Gilles Deleuze’s works as well as various contributions made by Cultural Materialist and New Historicist critics, I intend to explore the power relations in this surveillance film. I will also examine how the surveillance film conventions deployed by Goold turn the narrative into a meta-filmic event. This allows the viewer to perceive surveillance as part of the subject matter of the story and as inseparable from its narrative structure. Eventually, this will serve to explore how surveillance entirely transforms the filmscape. What begins as a film set in a surveillance society ends up as an environment dominated by a society of control.