‘These are modern times’: Nostalgia and the adaptation of history in Billy Morrissette’s Scotland, PA

Abstract

Set in America in the 1970s, Billy Morrissette’s 2001 adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Scotland, PA, waivers between nostalgia and critique. In order to understand the film’s conflicting attitudes towards the era in which it is set and to appreciate how adaptations, generally, often feel ambivalent about their past(s), this essay begins by discussing Scotland, PA’s construction of the 1970s. In an effort to answer Lynne Bradley’s call for ‘a new model’ of modern adaptation, seeing it as ‘a complex double gesture’, the essay discusses how although Scotland, PA appears to illustrate many of the qualities of what Fredric Jameson has called the nostalgia film, this categorization of the adaptation neither accounts for its use of irony nor for the inherently complex nature of nostalgia. Ultimately, Scotland, PA’s ambivalence about history, the essay proposes, encourages us to conceive of the relationship between source/past and adaptation/present as a site of complex, dynamic negotiations rather than a static dichotomy that obliges us to choose between an adaptation’s acceptance or rejection of its forebears.