Andy Warhol and William Shakespeare

Andy Warhol and William Shakespeare are not normally considered to share similarities with each other, but Warhol’s painting “Silver Car Crash” contains a shared message with William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Both works of art have a common theme of fate and trying to avoid one’s fate.

The “Silver Car Crash” depicts a corpse lying over the interior of a car. In the painting, there are several panels which show different moments of a car crash. The work has a sense of predestination which is similar to Macbeth. The car accident seems inevitable, much like Macbeth’s fate in Macbeth. In Warhol’s piece, the driver must be doing everything in his power to avoid the accident, but it is too late. The accident is painted in black and white and shown from a variety of angles, with these two aspects of the painting combining to give the event a sense of finality.

Similarly, in Macbeth, Macbeth does everything in his power to stop the Weird Witches’ prophecy, but his effort goes in vain. Macbeth knows that Banquo’s children will take the throne after him, so he makes an attempt on the lives of Banquo and Fleance. Although Macbeth’s fall from prominence is not as rapid as the car crash, his decline is equally obvious. First he becomes jealous and then mentally unstable. Once he loses his mind, he makes a series of poor decisions which culminate with his death.

In this comparison, the driver in “Silver Car Crash” is Macbeth. Warhol does not show the events leading up to the crash, leaving the spectator clueless as to how the driver has ended up in the situation. However, the end result is the same. The driver is sprawled over his car, and Macbeth is killed in his own castle.