Hamnet, Movie, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Function of Art, Grief in Art, Universality of the Human Experienc
I have watched the movie Hamnet three times now. First, we watched it as part of a marathon of
watching almost all of the movies nominated for best picture of the year. I had been curious, but was closed to the
film. Reviewers had raved about the
emotional impact of the ending of the film.
When I read the book, I was impressed with the claustrophobic nature of
the long struggles with the children’s illnesses, and I saw the film as
similarly claustrophobic, spare, and therefore, on some level, cold. Recently, I watched it again with our local
“chapter” of the Association for Psychoanalytic Thought (Apt). The discussant was a local English faculty
member who really liked both the book and the movie. She
ended her brief presentation with four questions, one of which I will use to
organize this post, though all were thought provoking and inspired a lively conversation
about the film.
The third viewing of the film – a private one that the
reluctant wife and I did after the public showings – in which we watched the
film with the commentary of the director (and co-writer of the script), Chloe
Zhao – opened an emotional space to welcome the experience of parental
investment, loss and grief that I had not been able to access in my reading of
the book or the previous viewings of the film.
Don’t get me wrong, I cried when I read the book and at each showing of
the film. The final scene in the film
is, indeed, one of the most powerful (I think) in cinema, but I had a hard time
feeling this wash over me in the way that I fully expected a book or a film
with this theme that was clearly so excellently rendered to do.
The question that the English Professor asked was something
along the lines of: "Shakespeare’s name is not used at all in the book and only
once in the movie. What’s with
that?" Chloe Zhao’s commentary on the
film did not address that question at all.
It was mostly focused on the technical details, but focusing on those
details helped me understand the choices that she was making - including the
framing, especially of the interior shots, where she was making them into stage
sets, with a stable camera and a full frontal view. This was an homage to Shakespeare and the
tradition of setting theatrical performances on a stage rather than using a
more fluid medium.
Zhao acknowledged that, as a Chinese woman, she does not
know Shakespeare – neither the plays in depth, nor the oeuvre that is certainly
part and parcel of every English speaker's vocabulary. We may never have seen the plays but we have
heard his words spoken and even spoken them ourselves without knowing who we
are quoting. He is, as it were, a kind
of ghost himself – someone who has insinuated himself into who it is that we
are. One answer to the English prof’s
question is, then, when we never utter his name when we use his words – why would we need to do that here?
Zhao let her actors, particularly Paul Mescal, who plays Shakespeare
and is a trained Shakespearian actor, choose the lines that are quoted in the
movie. She also learned from someone
that, to follow a Shakespearean play, you don’t need to listen closely to the
language; words that can be dense and obtuse, but, she says, you should follow
the emotion. And she hopes that she is
able to do that in her films as well. It
is not an academic exercise to engage in watching a movie, but an emotional
one. We should give ourselves over to
our feelings.
A second answer to the prof’s question is that not naming
Shakespeare allows Agnes (beautifully played by Jessie Buckley)
to take center stage. We see her first
in the film and we see her as an organic being, someone who is deeply centered
in the life of the woods, who is connected to the underground – the caves that
are at her woodland home – but also the sky – the falcon that she tends – and
the surface of the earth – the herbs that she mixes into potions that address
the maladies that children and adults face.
If she is a witch, it is a good thing to be a witch. She is carrying on the tradition that comes
from her mother of opening her heart to the world, even when, or perhaps
especially when, this is difficult to do.
How did the Shakespeare
from Avon know about the vast variety of plants that he cites in his plays
and that are planted in Shakespeare gardens outside places that honor him? Clearly it was Agnes who was teaching him.
David Lindsay-Abare was at a talk back with a group of
analysts in New York after his play Rabbit Hole was performed. He reminisced that, when he was a student at
Julliard, his teacher told the class to write about what terrifies them. He remembers thinking, “I’ve got nothing.” Then he had a child. And he wrote Rabbit Hole, a play about the
impact on a suburban couple when the unthinkable happens; their child is run
over while playing in the neighborhood and dies. I was not blogging when I saw that play, but
it comes to mind in this play as these two parents, who clearly love each other
and their children, are torn apart by their individual grief – a grief that,
for a bit of relief, leads them – especially Agnes – to blame the other or to
see the other's grief as not as deep or powerful.
As if they are in two separate hells rather than realizing that they are
in one shared hell. To not call out
Shakespeare’s name is to see him, not as someone other – William Shakespeare, the Bard, but
one of us. We feel his (and her) pain as
our own.
Perhaps the depth of the pain is part of why it took me so
long to come on board with this film.
When my son was born, I found it hard to watch TV for more than a
year. I had never noticed before how
often someone dies on TV shows and in movies.
And, during that year or more, I felt the grief of the parent for every
NPC who bit the dust. The child who dies
in this film is far from an NPC. He is a beloved character who is cute and alive and heart warming and who gives himself
up to save his sister. How can you not
feel for him? But how can you open your
heart to this much pain?
The book and film ask you to do some gymnastics. They ask you to think that Hamlet is not
about a boy losing his father, who is now a ghost and wants retribution, but about a father losing his boy. Chloe points out that a happy accident
allowed the movie to underscore this important bit. The young Hamnet is, in this retelling,
brought back to life by his father in the role of Hamlet – and he gets to strut
upon the stage the way that the young Hamnet dreamed that he would do. The actor who plays the young Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) has an older brother (Noah Jupe) who stepped into the role of
Hamlet when the actor cast in that role became unavailable at the last
minute. The resemblance between the two
closely related actors makes the uncanniness of Hamnet’s reappearance vivid.
It also helped to be walked through the complications of the
this narrative and the complications of bringing it to life, but most
importantly, it helped to hear one of the artists involved in the project talk
about the ways in which the narrative was consistent with and underscored
deeply held personal beliefs and perspectives.
One of those beliefs is that chance is not random, but an opportunity to
allow the world around us to participate in the work that we are doing. The availability of the older Jupe brother is
just one example of this, the invitation to the actors to choose the Shakespearean
lines another, but the openness to improvisation, to letting the story grow, to
seeing how embodying the roles allows the actors to feel their way into the
organic truth of the story, all of this made this film feel less like a construction
of a master who would instruct me in how to feel about the world, and more like the product of a confederate feeling her way into a world that we both inhabit together.
Perhaps the discussion of the creation of the final scene,
that tremendous moment of contact between audience and actor, playwright and
wife, mother and son; the shared experience of a grief that we cannot bear alone
and that is both amplified and softened by the connection with others feeling
it, each in their own way – this moment was not scripted, but developed. Agnes barges into a place that is foreign to
her. She has no interest in sharing her
experience with others and she is not conscious of their presence. She acts without pretense – she acts
intuitively, instinctively, feeling her way onto the stage with her son. Her action draws others in. Those in the moment, and we who are
spectating the spectators. We feel the
pull, and all it - the movie as a whole and this very moment - is is pulling us in.
So my final answer to why the name William Shakespeare shows
up only once in these two articulations of this narrative is that it is not the
soul of the author that we go to the theater to explore, but our own soul. The author, the actors, our fellow viewers –
they are all instruments – coconspirators, in helping us better know what lies
just beneath the surface of that veneer that we have created for this event,
and for our lives in general. We are,
beneath it all, vital, alive, and intact subjects, who are deeply engaged in the
process of living. The play is a conduit
to that experience, helping us reconnect more deeply with ourselves and, in the
process of doing that, with each other.
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