Significação: Revista de Cultura Audiovisual (Jul 2020)
The transformation of the war body on screen in Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth
Abstract
This article discusses how the 2015 filmic adaptation of Macbeth by Justin Kurzel is embedded in the social and political context of the 21st century in which the wars of Afghanistan and Iraq reverberate in the physical and psychological state of the soldier. In the film, the war body is scarred by multiple violent experiences of battle and emerges as a damaged individual, one that carries the viscerally traumatic past into the present. I analyze how Macbeth’s military body undergoes a downward spiraling journey from collective leader to lone tyrant that takes roots in his past violent experiences of immersion into a context of corporeal mutilation and death.
