Bologna’s Bridegroom: Meat and Murder in Scotland, PA

Abstract

Replacing the Middle Ages with the 1970s, and the Scottish royal court with a restaurant in a small, insular American town, the 2001 black comedy Scotland, PA explores issues of subjectivity, agency, and exploitation through tropes of food, meat, and “butchery.” Director Billy Morrissette’s transposition of Macbeth to an economically depressed American community highlights the moral, ethical, and social tensions between mass-produced and homemade, consumer and consumed, and a system of brutal instrumentality that reduces living subjects to objectified commodities. Reinventing the play as the tragedy of a deposed, provincial burger king, his rapacious usurpers, and the vegetarian outsider who exposes them, Scotland, PA repackages Shakespeare’s themes of power and ambition in a form accessible, palatable, and easily consumed in a fast-food nation.