Uneasy lies the heart that wears a badge: James Gray’s We Own the Night as a Gen-X Henriad

Abstract

This article analyses James Gray’s We Own the Night (2007) as a cinematic retelling of Shakespeare’s Henriad that presents Hal’s story not as the chivalric redemption of a national hero but as a tragic fall from happiness. Through close comparative reading of these texts, I explore how We Own the Night rewrites Hal’s story as a (post)modern tragedy which addresses the concerns of the so-called Generation X. Hal’s liminal position—caught between opposing social worlds of crime and law—presents the narrative’s major conflict, which itself echoes Jan Kott’s tragic vision of Shakespeare’s play.