Hamlet on a rooftop

From Will Eisner's breakdown of Hamlet's "to be or not to be" speech.

Dews of Blood

From Act 1/Scene 1, early on:

The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets:
As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood,
Disasters in the sun; and the moist star
Upon whose influence Neptune's empire stands
Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse.

Love this. Love "dews of blood." Love "the sheeted dead." Love "the moist star." Horatio, Hamlet's good friend, has just seen the ghost of the King & thinks it's a bad omen. In the above, he's talking about how Rome purportedly looked right before Caeser was killed--how ghosts had appeared and run amok. Reminded me of "The Night on Bald Mountain" part of Fantasia. Completely and totally absorbed by that as a kid, LOVED it.

If I were filming Hamlet, I think I'd like this as a voiceover with a cold, hallucinatory depiction of what the speech describes. Like at the end of Nosferatu with Klaus Kinski, people feasting in the rat-and-Black-Plague infested streets.

Poster/Art

I love this. Click to see it large. By Eric Jonsson.

Bill Viola & Hamlet 2000

I google-booked A Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen and found that someone named Bill Viola, a video/multi-media artist, was thanked in the closing credits of Hamlet 2000. Bill Viola, according to the book, was a big influence on the aesthetic of the film, which has lots of pixelated home video footage, security camera shots (we first see the ghost through a security camera), reflections in glass, etc.

Apparently part of the "To be or not to be" speech was going to be filmed at a Viola retrospective at the Whitney, but it didn't wind up working out. At any rate, turns out Viola is heavily influenced by Buddhism, and the projections, etc., in his art are often cited (including by Viola himself) as having to do with the ephemerality of the self & its interconnectedness to the world, etc.

Innnnteresting, since one might expect the aesthetic in Hamlet 2000 would have to do with dislocation/fragmentation in late-capitalist consumer culture blah blah etc, considering the film's setting: global-corporate, a sterile world of limos, high rises, glass, logos, all buoyed by technology that feels intentionally cold (why is that always the case? I mean zzzzzzzzz seen it), faxes, answering machines, video, video surveillance, etc. Amazing how dated the tech looks in the film--no cell phones, no digital cameras, answering machines instead of voicemail, etc.

To be or to inter-be

More on Hamlet 2000: Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddhist teacher, showed up in the film.

I recognized Hanh, as I've been taking a beginner "Hardcore Dharma" class at a place called The Interdependence Project. I became interested in Buddhist philosophy last year after a cancer diagnosis. A cancer diagnosis is fucking terrifying, especially at first, when you don't know how aggressive it is, if it's spread, etc. So my interest: call it foxhole spirituality. Like getting "saved" on death row or something. Though
I'm not saved and not a Buddhist (but, interested) and not on death row; I'm cancer free and consider myself very fucking lucky.

Hearing "you have cancer" brings to mind what you'd likely expect. The meaning of life, one's own mortality. Forces your face right in there. No amount of Law & Order reruns and Ativan is gonna keep you from thinking oh shit, cancer, surgery, chemo, people die from cancer, I don't want to die, etc.

Anyway.

At one point in the film, we see that Hamlet has various video devices around his room, and on one a video is playing in which Hanh is talking about "being" — "We have the word to 'be,' but what I propose is the word to 'interbe.' Because it's not possible to be alone, to be by yourself. You need other people in order to be." (Am thinking about Hamlet paper topics--maybe something interbeing-ish? How Hamlet changes according the the constellation of people around him?)

I found another Hanh clip on youtube in which he talks about the Holy Trinity as representative of interbeing--the father is in the the son, the son is in the father, the father in the holy ghost etc. I thought of Hamlet, mourning his father, also named Hamlet, and interacting with his father's ghost.

Shortly after Hanh appears, Hamlet delivers his "to be or not to be" speech in which he contemplates death.

To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause:

...

But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?

So the rub is the fact we don't know "what dreams may come."
The dread of the unknown, death; they thought about it 400 years ago,
and the "undiscover'd country" is still this great terrifying puzzle.

Though Hanh says it's impossible to "be" alone, and I understand in theory, a cancer diagnosis certainly felt isolating. I did feel I was "interbeing" with people at the cancer center, though, quietly united with other people who were also facing this disease, thinking (or trying hard not to think) about shuffling off this mortal coil.

Gertrude = Kardashian

Today we finished the rest of Hamlet 2000, then discussed.

In order to view the film, we had to walk from the classroom to the basement of the library, which is a five second walk. The class is at 8 AM. The second we step outside, this one student, I'll call him Daniel, has a cigarette in his mouth. During class he keeps a cigarette on his desk. He's 19. He's awesome. As we're walking, "You know what I can't believe? I can't believe people fucking dress up to come to school. Like last spring semester I saw this guy wearing a fucking chinchilla coat."

The class hated the movie. General consensus: Julia-Stiles-as-Ophelia was boring as hell. Nobody could figure out why, if she's a photographer in NYC, she was so blah, such an utter pushover, and why she went crazy--since in the scenes with her father, she either stares out into space, or is quietly crying. And what were her feelings towards her brother, exactly? Who the fuck knows.

Daniel thought Laertes-by-Liev Shrieber was "a perv," and believable. Students agreed.

He said that Gertrude, played by Diane Venora, "reminds me of the Kardashian mother." I could see that perfectly. He also thought the film was ridiculous because there were murders, and no cops. "You can't spit on the floor in New York without getting arrested."

After class, as he's walking out, he comes up to me: "GOD I fucking hate that old English. Can you imagine someone talking like that on the fucking subway? I mean, right?"

Casting Hamlet

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So I'm teaching Hamlet

I'm teaching Hamlet in Queens, NY.

This blog = all things Hamlet, all the time.