By Stuart Mitchner

The long strange trip of this column includes a world-famous 34-year-old singer songwriter from West Reading, Pa.; a 79-year-old film director from Düsseldorf, Westphalia, born August 14, 1945; and a Scottish king slain in battle against his first cousin and rival Macbeth on or around August 14, 1040 — but then Shakespeare had a more productive fate in mind for King Duncan when he wrote Macbeth.

Who’s Afraid?

When the news aired about the terrorist shutdown of Taylor Swift’s Vienna concerts that led to thousands of disappointed Swifties singing her music in the streets of Vienna, I put the Tortured Poets Department into my car’s CD player. I was thinking of the 22 fans killed by terrorists at the May 2017 Ariana Grande concert in Manchester as Swift let it all out, “So I leap from the gallows and I levitate down your street, crash the party like a record scratch as I scream — ‘Who’s afraid of little old me?’ And you should be, you should be, you should be!” To paraphrase the song rocking my car, “If you wanted her dead, you should’ve just said so because nothing makes her feel more alive.”

Saved by Rock ‘n’ Roll

As for Wim Wenders, whose “life was saved by rock ‘n’ roll,” it’s safe to say that the director of The American Friend, Paris Texas, Wings of Desire, and, more recently, Perfect Days, will never make a film of Macbeth. Imagine Macbeth sharpening his sword while singing “Too Much on My Mind,” as Bruno Ganz does in The American Friend. Ray Davies’s thoughtful little song, with its plaintive message — “It seems there’s more to life than just to live it” — would be weirdly out of place in a play shaped by witchcraft and hosted by Lady Macbeth (“The raven himself is hoarse that croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan under my battlements”).

Wenders in Princeton

In late February 2001, when Wenders spoke to a full house at the James Stewart Theatre in Princeton, he was 55, and seemed younger, a warm, personable, unassuming presence. When a baby made a noise, he said, “Patting might help.” When someone sneezed, he said “Bless you.” Speaking about “the importance of place,” he recalled taking long walks in Berlin and wanting to make a film about it; he spoke of apartment buildings, a lighted window, shadows moving behind it, a woman leaning out. “I want to know everything about this place. How these people live, how they have fun, what they worry about, how they eat, drink, sleep.” One way of knowing was to invent the angels brooding over Berlin in Wings of Desire (1987). Flash forward to 2023 and Wenders does something less ambitious but no less cinematic in Perfect Days while driving around Tokyo listening to Patti Smith, Otis Redding, Van Morrison, and Lou Reed with Hirayama, a public toilet cleaner endearingly played by Koji Yakusho.

Converting Highsmith

My first encounter with Wenders took place on a rainy night in October 1977, when I drove to the Montgomery Center Theatre to see The American Friend. Writing about the experience 30 years later, I noted that it was “still raining, but it wasn’t the same rain any more, nor was it the same parking lot, nor the same street lights, nor the same night. Even my car had changed. It was gleaming like a vision.” Everything I saw that night had been transformed by Wenders and his cinematographer Robbie Müller.

However, when Wenders added comradely warmth to the friendship between Ganz’s Jonathan Zimmerman and Dennis Hopper’s Tom Ripley, the change didn’t go down well with Patricia Highsmith, the author of the thriller that The American Friend was loosely based on. Although Wenders charmed her into giving him the rights to Ripley’s Game, she had reservations about a rock and roll Ripley who quotes Bob Dylan and brags that he’s “bringing the Beatles back to Hamburg.” In a 1976 interview conducted as he was about to begin filming, Wenders admits, “I didn’t particularly like the Ripley in the novel. I couldn’t relate to him, he’s so strange …. And Highsmith’s idea of the completely amoral person just doesn’t interest me that much.” Although Highsmith’s initial response to the finished film was negative, when she saw it later at a public screening, she was, according Wenders in a 1988 article, “full of praise for Dennis Hopper, whom she had flat-out rejected the first time. She now wrote that my film had captured the essence of the Ripley character better than any other films.”

Wenders and Macbeth

After thinking it over between paragraphs, I realize that Wenders actually could make a film of Macbeth. After all, he’s no stranger to murder, having filmed a particularly shocking one in The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1972) and several in The American Friend, capped by a wildly exciting sequence in which Ripley and Jonathan execute two American gangsters and throw their bodies off a moving train. Wenders’s difficulty relating to Ripley is understandable; the wonder of Shakespeare’s dark tragedy is the way he makes you identify with Macbeth. The most relatable of directors, Wenders also has an appreciation for the power of amplified music that would attune him to the “sound and fury” surrounding and speaking through a character at the mercy of his imagination.

Weird and Wayward

Having written at length last week about the word “weird” without mentioning its most famous literary source, I’ve tracked it down in Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 3. When the witches hear “A drum. a drum! Macbeth doth come,” they chant, all together, “The weird sisters, hand in hand, posters of the sea and land, thus do go about, about.” The word shows up again in Scene 5, which begins with Lady Macbeth reading a letter from her husband centered on the moment “these weird sisters saluted me, ‘Hail, king that shalt be!’”

A footnote in the 1836 edition of the Dramatic Works comments, “for weird the old copy has wayward, evidently by mistake. Weird from the Saxon, a witch, Shakespeare found in Holinshed.” Given the word’s range of uses today, it’s interesting to find that it was originally mistaken for “wayward.” But according to the Saxon, that would give us the Three Weirds. In fact, when it comes to Macbeth, words can have a fatal significance. The theatrical superstition known as “the Macbeth curse” says that terrible things may happen if you speak the name of the play offstage; to be safe, say “the Scottish play.”

22 Deaths

A few days prior to the May 1849 Astor Place riots described at length in the Library of America anthology Shakespeare in America, Herman Melville and Washington Irving signed a petition addressed to the Scottish actor William Macready, whose performance of Macbeth at the Opera House had been savaged by the hisses, threats, and cat-calls from supporters of his American rival, Edwin Forrest, who was across town playing the same role at a less elegant venue. When Macready refused to be driven from the stage, rotten eggs and coins and chairs were thrown, and the police finally had to stop the show. Macready had planned to take the next boat home until he received the petition, which requested that he reconsider his decision, and assured him “that the good sense and respect for order, prevailing in this community, will sustain you on the subsequent nights of your performances.”

Macready said okay, another performance was announced, and the city geared up for a riot. Though the chief of police had 900 policemen at his disposal, 22 people were killed. In the context of this weird and wayward column, I should mention that the same number were killed by the explosion at the 2017 Ariana Grande concert.

Writing 10 years ago on the occasion of Shakespeare’s 450th birthday, I wondered about the so-called Macbeth Curse. Would the rioting have led to so many fatalities had Hamlet or Othello been the play onstage at the Opera House? Few lines in either work seem as creepy, as ominous, as inviting of catastrophe, as the Second Witch’s “By the pricking of my thumbs, / Something wicked this way comes.”

Swift in the Kitchen

There’s nothing like a touch of Taylor Swift in the wee small hours, as happened while I did my customary janitorial work in the kitchen accompanied by Swift’s Tortured Poets Department. Probably this was the 20th time I’ve heard the album, and the best, for my recent exposure to Macbeth put a Shakespearean spin on the sounds, as if Hecate and the three weird sisters were singing with one voice in a heavenly/infernally sublime chorus of phrases like “I’m gonna kill her,” “Down bad, wakin’ up in blood,” “Am I bad or mad or wise,” and still my favorite “So Long London” — “I saw in my mind fairy lights through the mist … How much sad did you think I had in me? Oh, the tragedy….”