{"id":343,"date":"2012-10-02T19:56:04","date_gmt":"2012-10-02T19:56:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/?page_id=343"},"modified":"2013-06-07T17:27:01","modified_gmt":"2013-06-07T17:27:01","slug":"hamlet-on-film-a-post-911-take","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/issues\/volume-iii-2009\/hamlet-on-film-a-post-911-take\/","title":{"rendered":"Hamlet on Film: A Post-9\/11 Take"},"content":{"rendered":"

James A. Lewin, Shepherd University<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

On Sept. 12, 2001, film audiences of the world woke up with the sense of being trapped in a bad movie. As Young Hamlet must have felt returning to Elsinore after the death of his father, irreducible grief and mourning expanded to become a sense of outrage haunted by a ghost of history calling for revenge. Hugh Grady has argued that each era must find its own \u201cpresentist\u201d Hamlet<\/span>, where \u201cPresentism\u201d may be defined as seeing in Shakespeare\u2019s world a \u201csimulacrum of our own time.\u201d If so, the crisis of authority in Hamlet<\/span> representing the question of sovereign authority in the early seventeenth century nation-state may also reflect our early twenty-first century crisis of legitimacy on a global scale. After Sept. 11, 2001, a terrible yearning was born to define the international authority needed to set right a time so out of joint. Gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson prophesied \u201cguerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front line and no identifiable enemy.\u201d Could a post-9\/11 Hamlet on film reverse the prophecy and transform our movie-lovers\u2019 collective conscience?<\/p>\n

As defined by critical clich\u00e9s, Hamlet<\/span> offers an unlikely role-model to confront post-9\/11 terrorism and unholy war. But if contemporary scholarship on Hamlet<\/span> were transferred into popular culture, perhaps the corny clich\u00e9s could be revised while remaining faithful to the sources and origins of Hamlet\u2019s identity. Instead of a pathetic, self-obsessed anti-hero, Shakespeare\u2019s Hamlet could make a comeback as a hard-boiled investigator who traces the line between individual morality and the power of the state.<\/p>\n

The ideal venue for this new\/old Hamlet would be on the big screen. The perpetrators of the 9\/11 attacks targeted a culture expressed through its cinema. The dream-work of the movies could restore the humanity repressed by the traumatic memory of crimes against humanity.<\/p>\n

A post-9\/11 Hamlet on film would storm the box offices rather than pursuing, like Young Fortinbras, the invasion of foreign lands \u201cBy strong hand\/ And terms compulsatory\u201d (1.1.105-6). Rather than determining, like Laertes, to \u201cdare damnation\u201d (4.5.133), a new-millennial Hamlet would hoist the nihilistic engineers of jihad on their own petard.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Many of the best-known film versions of Hamlet<\/span> have, unfortunately, reinforced the popular notion of Hamlet as a neurotic prince, enfeebled by romantic sensibilities and Oedipal inhibitions. Not that there is no validity in this received tradition from Goethe, Coleridge, Bradley and Freud. But Hamlet\u2019s individuality does not exist in a political vacuum.<\/p>\n

For example, Laurence Olivier\u2019s post-World War II Hamlet pursues a place of psychological refuge within a non-political world. To make sure his film does not pose a threat to the re-established conservative hegemony of the early Cold War period, Olivier excises all scenes involving Fortinbras, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and the spoken parts of the play-within-the-play. He also reduces the uprising of Laertes to create a politically neutral performance that exalts the cultural status quo. In Olivier\u2019s film, Claudius never utters the line about the divinity that hedges a king. That would be awkward in terms of the political correctness of the time.<\/p>\n

Olivier\u2019s Hamlet <\/i>is a Freudian study in self-doubt. In a series of lectures delivered in 1953, at the height of the film\u2019s popularity, Peter Alexander challenged the premise in Olivier\u2019s Prologue that defines Hamlet<\/span> as \u201cthe tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind\u201d (v-vi).<\/p>\n

Instead, Alexander cites Raymond Chandler\u2019s private detective who must remain \u201chumane without loss of toughness\u201d (Alexander 185). Thus, Hamlet could be seen as a prototype of the hard-boiled investigator, taking the law in his own hands to confront a legal apparatus usurped by crime.<\/p>\n

Clicking fast-forward to a post-Cold War new millennium, Ethan Hawke\u2019s Hamlet, as directed by Michael Almareyda, remains a flawed, over-sensitive character played in the mold of Holden Caulfield rather than Philip Marlowe. Such popular approaches to Hamlet emphasize the personal aspects of the drama, focusing on sexual desire and fear of death, finessing the political and providential overtones of the drama.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

But, since September 11, 2001, our point of view has \u201cundergone a destabilizing shift in significance\u201d (Fedderson and Richardson 150). The attacks on the World Trade Center, according to this analysis, transformed the film\u2019s \u201cpervasive paranoia\u201d from a focus on the \u201cinner, private, and individual to the outer, public and geo-political\u201d (152).<\/p>\n

Other pre-9\/11 Hamlet film versions, such as those directed by Kenneth Branagh and Russian director Grigori Kozinstzev have restored Fortinbras and other political subtexts, partially shifting from a Freudian to a Machiavellian \u201cfocus on Hamlet\u2019s power struggle with Claudius for the Danish throne\u201d (Crowl 130). Nevertheless, the popular reception of Hamlet<\/span> continues to reduce Shakespeare\u2019s tragic hero to an idiom. To \u201cplay Hamlet,\u201d still commonly means to be wishy-washy, melancholy, self-obsessed, and unable to act in a decisive manner.<\/p>\n

In The New York Times, for instance, Daniel J. Popeo, of the Washington Legal Foundation, decries politicians who \u201cplay Hamlet\u201d as dithering rather than drilling for oil in Alaska. From a different end of the political spectrum, Warren Bennis of the University of Southern California, informs The Washington Post of the fine distinction between the \u201cgenuine reflection and reconsideration\u201d of a wise Obama, as opposed to the \u201cincessant inability to act\u201d of Shakespeare\u2019s Hamlet.<\/p>\n

In Shakespeare\u2019s time, to \u201cplay Hamlet\u201d was to be crazy like a fox. Returning to the original Elizabethan idiom, scholarly criticism offers an alternative to popular platitudes. Instead of a Romantic-Freudian neurotic, we should re-invent Hamlet as a subversive trickster and righteous agent of radical change, whose unresolved Oedipal conflict underscores his intention to consign Claudius to the pits of damnation.<\/p>\n

Hamlet as cunning trickster would also be true to the original source material from Saxo Grammaticus\u2019 Historica Danica<\/span>. Saxo\u2019s account informed the French text by Belleforest that may have been available to Shakespeare. Of course, we do not know if the so-called Ur Hamlet of scholarly speculation presented Hamlet as a wily coyote. But Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy<\/span>, Brutus in The Rape of Lucrece<\/span>, and Titus of Titus Andronicus<\/span> also conceal their madness by playing madder than they really are while biding their time to take revenge. And Hamlet explicitly states his intention of putting on an \u201cantic disposition\u201d to camouflage his pursuit of justice in \u201cstrange or odd\u201d behavior (Hamlet<\/span> 1.5.180;178).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

From his first words, Hamlet establishes his role as a jouster of puns, rebuffing the king who is \u201cmore than kin and less than kind\u201d for putting him \u201ctoo much in the sun.\u201d Yet, Hamlet is nothing if not sincere, deriding his mother for her happy-face in the shadow of death while he mourns without pretense: \u201cSeems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not seems\u201d (1.2.65, 67, 76).<\/p>\n

Like the sentinel Francisco, who appears and disappears in the first scene of the play, Hamlet is \u201csick at heart\u201d (1.1.9). A troubled heart reverberates in the text, through Hamlet\u2019s first soliloquy (But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue\u201d 1.2.159), returning in Laertes\u2019 anticipation of revenge (\u201cIt warms the very sickness in my heart\u201d (4.7.54) and again in Hamlet\u2019s prescience of his own demise (5.2.208-9).<\/p>\n

But after seeing the ghost, Hamlet conceals his madness by exaggerating it. Furthermore, his feigned madness frees him to confront Claudius without revealing his guilty knowledge to anyone but his intended victim. Thus, he fashions his own version of an old script \u201cThe Murder of Gonzago\u201d to \u201ccatch the conscience of the King\u201d (2.2.601).<\/p>\n

Hamlet\u2019s play-within-the play is one of a series within the text. Polonius directs a spy-master\u2019s honey-trap with his daughter Ophelia as bait. Hamlet\u2019s \u201cMousetrap\u201d throws the court off the scent by casting the leading villain, Lucianus, as nephew rather than brother of the king, yet making sure that Claudius knows that Hamlet knows what only Claudius knows. Ultimately, in the final poisonous parody of a Mummers play featuring Hamlet jousting with Laertes, all trappers are trapped by their own devices.<\/p>\n

Hamlet turns the tables on opponents tricking all tricksters with tragic irony. He retaliates with language, parchments, poisons or swords \u201cwrested from his adversaries, directing them back with telling effectiveness.\u201d Typically, Hamlet \u201clets his adversary attack first. Then, using the weapon of his adversary, he strikes swiftly home\u201d (Shepard 281-282).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Hamlet lives in a world usurped by the powers of treason. In Elsinore, loyalty to the king means complicity with a criminal regime. Apart from Horatio, nobody can be trusted except the gravedigger.<\/p>\n

In Hamlet\u2019s Elsinore, passive obedience to the status quo represents the litmus test of fools and knaves. Polonius and his progeny exemplify the privileged elite corrupted by their proximity to the sovereign villain. Polonius is a Donald Rumsfeld type political infighter obsessed by a paranoid awareness of the \u201cunknown unknowns\u201d (Rumsfeld qtd. in Furedi).<\/p>\n

Yet, in Almaderya\u2019s Hamlet<\/i>, Bill Murray shows us a Polonius who loves his kids and wants the greatest good for the greatest number. A living clich\u00e9, he is oft quoted by speakers at graduation ceremonies: \u201cThis above all: to thine own self be true\u201d (2.3.78).<\/p>\n

What could Polonius mean by himself? Socrates might wonder.<\/p>\n

Does Polonius, or any of us, have a self to which to be true? Or is that self only a potential, lurking in the shadows of the repressed conscience?<\/p>\n

Shakespeare developed his tragic vision in his English history plays. By delving into the atrocities of the collective past, the playwright was able to define the significance of sovereignty in terms of a complementarity of power and legitimacy. Only by integrating the body natural and the body politic can authority be established under the providence of history.<\/p>\n

Claudius sees himself as king of tricksters. Like Hamlet, he believes his transgressions may be justified by political necessity. Unlike Hamlet, however, Claudius is a fugitive of providence. After having usurped the throne through the murder of his brother, Claudius still claims divine right: “There\u2019s such divinity doth hedge a king\/ That treason can but peep to what it would \/ Acts little of his will” (4.5.123-5). Faced with a popular uprising led by Laertes, Claudius invokes the ideology of the body politic to co-opt divine law, along with all else, to his lust for power. Claudius represents himself as the voice of reason but is the voice of diplomatic despair. He is the trickster king of the corrupted body natural.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Hamlet, in contrast, is the prince of the dispossessed body politic. Passed over for succession after his father\u2019s death, Hamlet seeks truth over power. He, too, is a trickster who sanctifies sarcasm. But, unlike Claudius, Hamlet surrenders his self-interest in pursuit of cosmic justice.<\/p>\n

Hamlet\u2019s character contains \u201ccomplementary natures within a single protagonist\u201d allowing for the \u201cprincely exercise of power\u201d and \u201csatiric exorcism of power\u201d (Hedrick 76).<\/p>\n

Old Hamlet, the medieval warrior king, haunts him. Claudius the usurping monarch is his blood enemy. But Hamlet\u2019s true progenitor may be the court jester Yorick, whose skull Hamlet discovers in the graveyard scene of act five. As described by my dear former professor David P. Young, Yorick is \u201ca sort of spiritual parent\u201d to Hamlet as well as a \u201ccounterpart\u201d since \u201cthe jester\u2019s part\u201d has been adopted by the prince who finds \u201cmadness and foolishness more congenial and useful than heroism\u201d (Young 204).<\/p>\n

Yet Hamlet is a trickster with a troubled conscience. He realizes that killing Polonius is a tragic error. Nevertheless, he accepts it as his destiny to become the scapegoat of a terminally corrupted world. Doomsday is mentioned three times in the text (1.1.120; 2.2.242; 5.1.60). Also the \u201clast trumpet\u201d (5.1.232). But the world does not end. It drags on, as the shallow opportunist Fortinbras takes up the crown.<\/p>\n

Shakespeare had a unique ability not only to portray life-like characters but to show those characters changing and evolving in life-like ways. Yet rarely, if ever, has a film version of Hamlet<\/span> represented the transformation of the title character from the opening to the final act of the drama. The Hamlet of act five is not the Hamlet of act one.<\/p>\n

The gravedigger, Hamlet\u2019s sole equal in wit and wisdom, tips off the fact that Hamlet is thirty years old by act five (5.1.164). Based on this evidence of the text, it seems that a number of years have elapsed since Hamlet\u2019s first adolescent soliloquy contemplating the seductions of suicide. In the course of the first four acts, Hamlet has grown up. He has discovered his tragic destiny and made an uneasy peace within his own conscience.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

\u00a0As demonstrated by Lisa S. Starks, cinema and psychoanalysis may be taken as dual keys to our consciousness of modernity. Both films and depth psychology simultaneously promote and undermine individual identity by \u201cquestioning the boundaries of the modern subject and decentering its position in the world\u201d (181). In film, the alter-ego may meet itself returning from the fulfillment of its own fantasies. In this sense, movies serve as \u201ca metaphor for modernity and its radical other, the double that undermines its authority\u201d (200). Hamlet of act five, as his own alter-ego, doubling himself, enacts his final gesture of love and fate. In this artistic apotheosis, Shakespeare has continued significance as a cultural authority for a world suffering from the nightmares of history.<\/p>\n

For example, as directed by Sven Gade, Asta Nielsen\u2019s post-World War I film Hamlet: Drama of Vengeance <\/i>posits a Hamlet who is female at birth, inverting the revenge code through an expressionist film with a pacifist subtext. Incorporating traumas fresh in the memory of the European audience of trench warfare and social upheaval, Nielsen\u2019s version, balances\u00a0 politics and providence within the puzzle of Hamlet\u2019s personality. Just as Asta Nielsen transformed a war-weary audience, we too need a bold leap of the imagination to inspire a cynical and paranoid populace.<\/p>\n

\u201cWho\u2019s there?\u201d (Hamlet<\/span> 1.1.1). The opening line of Shakespeare\u2019s plays hearkens back to the rebirth of drama in the call-and-response rituals of medieval church that had banned Roman theater. Yet, somehow, we are never ready for that challenge in the dark of midnight:<\/p>\n

Question: Who is there? Answer: The Son of Man.<\/p>\n

Unlike the dogmas of religion, however, Shakespeare\u2019s Hamlet<\/span> has multiple levels of interpretation. A secular martyr, Hamlet dies sacrificing both the crown and the hope of redemption. A profane messiah, he excises what is rotten in the state of Denmark. A non-sectarian savior, he gives his dying support to Fortinbras, the son of his dead father\u2019s arch-rival.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

In August 2006, a Scripps Howard\/Ohio University \u201csurvey of 1,010 adults, found that 36 percent of the American public suspects that federal officials assisted the 9\/11 attacks, or took no action to stop them so that the US could justify going to war in the Middle East\u201d (qtd. in Furedi).<\/p>\n

What the poll did not ask is how many adult members of the American public are prepared to accept their own culpability for being complicit, or failing to prevent, or justifying the 9\/11 attacks for the sake of oil, power, or a complacent sense of superiority to the wretched of the earth.<\/p>\n

Each production of Hamlet <\/i>redefines Shakespeare as a cultural authority. Shakespeare\u2019s text incorporates the conflict of internal\/external consciousness — from the opening scene, through the play-within-a-play, to the fatal denouement. Thus, the problems of Hamlet are our problems.<\/p>\n

For victims of apparent injustice, should revenge be mandated or forbidden? How do we establish the authority of a global crusade for freedom of conscience? Hamlet<\/span> is haunted by a Shakespearean Ghost. We are haunted by Hamlet<\/span>. To be or not to be is still the question.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

Works Cited<\/p>\n

Alexander, Peter. Hamlet: Father and Son<\/span> Oxford: Clarendon, 1953<\/p>\n

Almereyda, Michael. Director. Hamlet<\/i>. Film. USA 2000.<\/p>\n

Crowl, Samuel. Shakespeare and Film: A Norton Guide<\/span>. NY: Norton, 2008<\/p>\n

Fedderson, Kim and J. Michael Richardson. \u201cHamlet 9\/11: Sound, Noise, and Fury in Almereyda\u2019s Hamlet<\/i>.\u201d College Literature 31.4 [Fall 2004]. Project Muse http:\/\/muse.jhu.edu<\/a><\/p>\n

Furedi, Frank. \u201cFive Years After 9\/11.\u201d http:\/\/www.spiked-online.com\/index.php?\/site\/article\/1603<\/span><\/p>\n

Gade, Svend. Director. Hamlet<\/i>. Film, Germany, 1920. With Asta Nielsen.<\/p>\n

Grady, Hugh. \u201cHamlet<\/span> and the Present: Notes on the Moving Aesthetic \u2018Now.\u2019\u201d West Virginia Shakespeare and Renaissance Association. Bethany, West Virginia, 2005.<\/p>\n

Hedrick, Donald K. \u201c\u2019It is No Novelty for a Prince to be a Prince\u2019: An Enantiomorphous Hamlet.\u201d Shakespeare Quarterly<\/span>. Vol. 35. No. 1(Spring, 1984). 62-76. Olivier, Laurence. Director. Hamlet<\/i>. Film, UK, 1944.<\/p>\n

Shakespeare, Hamlet<\/span>. Ed. Harold Jenkins. The Arden Shakespeare. NY: Methuen, 1982.<\/p>\n

Shepard, Warren V. \u201cHoisting the Enginer with His Own Petar.\u201d Shakespeare Quarterly<\/span>. Vol. 7. No.2(Spring, 1956) 281-285.<\/p>\n

Starks, Lisa. \u201c\u2019Remember Me\u2019: Psychoanalysis, Cinema, and the Crisis of Modernity.\u201d Shakespeare Quarterly<\/span>. Project Muse http:\/\/muse.jhu.edu<\/a>
\nThompson, Hunter S. \u201cFear and Loathing in America.\u201d http:\/\/sports.espn.go.com\/espn\/print?id=125075&type=story<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Young, David P. \u201cHamlet, Son of Hamlet.\u201d Perspectives on Hamlet<\/i><\/span>. Ed. Holzberger and Waldeck. Bucknell UP: Lewisburg. 1973.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James A. Lewin, Shepherd University On Sept. 12, 2001, film audiences of the world woke up with the sense of being trapped in a bad movie. As Young Hamlet must have felt returning to Elsinore after the death of his father, irreducible grief and mourning expanded to become a sense of outrage haunted by a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1384,"featured_media":0,"parent":68,"menu_order":8,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"full-width-page.php","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-343","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1384"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=343"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/343\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1014,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/343\/revisions\/1014"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/68"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}