Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet: The nauseous art of adaptation

The aim here is to show not simply how Shakespeare's plot functions according to the same basic principles as existentialism, or indeed merely how Luhrmann's film highlights this aspect of the play, but rather how the interconnectedness of William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet and Nausea allows us to revisit Sartre's novel of 1938 in the way that it, too, 'actively promote[s] audience participation'. To this end, this analysis will focus on Luhrmann's use of song, which, in addition to staging a modernisation of Shakespeare's tragedy, operates as a doorway, binding his film to Sartre's novel, and its own staging of a song, even as it marks its autonomy. Like Sartre's theory of nothingness, then, Luhrmann's very specificity, that which distinguishes his work from that of others, also serves to highlight his use of a recognised artistic medium, which embeds him in a world and links him to other texts. Both texts, Luhrmann's film and Sartre's novel, will be reconsidered as filmic and literary entities