Appendix to the appendix about „Hamlet“: perpetual “reload”?

The week before last “Hamlet” got “reloaded” unintentionally, as usually happens by going to the cinema. I saw “The Big Short” which is an amazing film, outstanding, even taking into account all the amazing U.S. film productions I have seen just in the last year (like “Boyhood”, “Carol”, and “Steve Jobs”). But this film – I just sat there, literally with my mouth open and couldn’t believe it. And I thought: There must be hope for this world if people actually can make such an outstandingly intelligent and intrinsically funny film about this kind of issue. Even though nobody laughed except myself, which was kind of embarrassing. So I have no proof that anybody else understood the film which was rather difficult to “follow” of course. Without the German subtitles I wouldn’t have understood ANYTHING, but I am rather used to that. I am so glad I went to see it even though there is Brad Pitt in it. But that wasn’t a problem anyway because I didn’t recognize him.

What is even more amazing than the film itself is probably that it made the short-list for the Oscars. I am usually not interested in the Oscars at all, but in this case I checked immediately. And who knows – of course I don’t believe that it will make it. But I promise: If either “The Big Short” gets the Oscar for “best film” or Michael Fassbender gets “best actor” for “Steve Jobs” I will celebrate. And if both of this happens – which would be more of luck than EVEN I have had in the last few years – I will certainly get drunk, even if I have to do it on my own! Because nobody will understand my NEED to celebrate in this case, and I even know that it is stupid. Because the Oscar wouldn’t make me “more right” now than I was right about being pissed off about Susan Sarandon getting the Oscar for “Dead Man Walking” whereas Sean Penn got nothing, and his’ was probably the most remarkable feat of acting I had seen until then. (Well, in the long run: he has two of them now, I think, and he got “best actor” in Cannes for this one, which I remember having been enormously pleased with.) But this was probably when I stopped caring about the Oscars. Now I might even take it up again - but especially continue to watch U.S. films again, as I have already started to do in the last few years.

But about “Hamlet” … The “reload” happened when I left the cinema and suddenly that thought struck me: I am beginning to understand now! (And I think this might as well happen AGAIN more than a few times.) This time it was about Hamlet’s madness, an issue I have always dodged – like a couple of other important issues in the play – until I saw David Tennant’s Hamlet. Which made me think: I don’t think he really “got it” but there must be a REAL reason for Hamlet to “become mad”. That is, another reason than the requirements of plot or even Hamlet’s own reason of strategy. Because, just as a strategy, faking madness isn’t really a good idea. Mostly because, under normal circumstances, it must be incredibly difficult to “keep up” all the time. So there must be a real reason for him. Maybe that he HAS TO do it to make it easier for him to “survive” under these circumstances. I even think it must be for him kind of a “natural reaction” to what his world has become, and, consequently, not really difficult to “fake”. Something that he WANTS to do because it allows him to finally speak the truth in a world that is fundamentally deceitful.  But how much truth there is, and how much strategy, is of course difficult to decide. I think this was how I CHOSE to understand it when I saw Benedict Cumberbatch as Hamlet.

But to understand THIS you really must have an idea of what the world has become for him. The RSC used this broken mirror – which I understood as an incredibly powerful visual metaphor for the kind of “prison” Denmark has become for Hamlet. But as a visual metaphor it doesn’t SAY what it means, and “we” have to fill in the content ourselves. Which is difficult, exactly BECAUSE we think we know “Hamlet” so well – to a point that we got used to what happens to the main character.  And we need to use something like this distorting or magnifying glass to understand what he is going through. And, I think, in a fictional text, we are required not just to understand it but to FEEL it. Which was for me finally achieved by recognizing “The Big Short” as an “emotional” metaphor for what Shakespeare aimed at in “Hamlet”. And this is a state of reality that is at the same time kind of unreal, unbelievable, and genuinely threatening. I think this is why Shakespeare chose to “unsettle” the audience by trying to make them realize that they don’t understand anything, just when they think they do.

And when I have this general metaphor of something I ACTUALLY FELT as a “sample” of how Hamlet must have been feeling – adding to this that, for him, it was the state of HIS OWN PERSONAL WORLD that is at stake! – I suddenly can PLACE the issues I HAD understood and feel the weight and importance they might have for Hamlet. For example, I couldn’t understand the scandal Hamlet is feeling about his mother marrying his uncle. Dover Wilson enlightened me a bit on this issue, but I cannot see any proof in the play that there must have been unfaithfulness before his father’s death, and he gives none. And marrying the brother after one’s husband’s death was a very common thing, at least in the Middle Ages, certainly not “incest”(!), so I didn’t – and probably don’t – understand (yet?) what is the most important cause for Hamlet’s depression BEFORE he meets his father’s ghost. He obviously hates his uncle though we don’t really know why. But I somehow understood the scandal nobody is talking about, the question that is never raised: Why didn’t Hamlet become king after his father’s death? And I understood then the scope of Gertrude’s betrayal towards her son. Because, without the prospect of marrying the present queen, Claudius wouldn’t have been elected. And I think that was the moment I began to understand that there is DEFINITELY something wrong here – before we learn about the murder.

But there is another parallel still, even more important than the “state of the world”. Because what “The Big Short” analyzes in an absurdly funny – and finally the more enlightening – way is what happens when you start to ACT UPON THE TRUTH. Which is TRAGEDY. Which is people being unable to pay their mortgages, families losing their homes, and, in the end, people dying. And this realization is even more unsettling than I care to think. Of course we know that lying about the actual state of something cannot go on FOREVER. But it can go on for an amazing length of time. And, frankly, what is the state of the U.S. national budget JUST NOW? I don’t know, of course, and I don’t want to know! And I don’t want to know what will probably happen if the truth about it finally “gets out” – which is all the people “in charge” are continually trying to keep under the radar … Now just try, for a moment, to take WHAT HAPPENS IN “HAMLET” seriously, which is what I am trying to do: What if these idiots just hadn’t told Hamlet about the ghost? What would have happened then? Who knows. The only thing we can be rather certain of is that fewer people would have died …

And I have now come one step closer approaching an issue that is probably even the most important to me. It is about the value and USEFULNESS of significant works of fiction. Which means what they can actually BE USED FOR. Even apart from what I have stated already a few times – that you can use them to understand other texts and even the structure of “real life issues” and, in some cases, the nature of your own real life experience. Which is probably not in every case because they literally contain the “truth” about these issues, but because, in a way, you have to repeat or double these structures to analyze and understand them. And because understanding them “theoretically” often isn’t enough. There has to be an emotional content that you can only find in fiction. And, because of that, you create some kind of memory about these things. Which is unlike the kind of memory we acquire through trauma in real life, which is rarely useful and can hurt us permanently. Because, however perversely, we have ENJOYED these moments when we actually “lived” them. Often because of a sense of humour, or an “innate” understanding of structure and beauty, or maybe even because of a sense of freedom: that we are free to choose IF this is about ourselves or not. That we are free to “take on” this depth of feeling which would be kind of inadequate in real life. I am speculating, I DO NOT KNOW why my worst moment in “The Crucible” was actually my best moment watching it. It was only afterwards that I thought: What right has this self-important author to tell me the truth ABOUT MYSELF? Might be that I really understood only afterwards when I had the leisure to think about it. But I wouldn’t have REMEMBERED this moment if I hadn’t felt the truth and importance of it ALREADY THEN.

Anyway, everybody knows that we easily forget knowledge acquired “theoretically”, but by reading fiction, and remembering what we have “lived through” reading it, we acquire layers and layers of memory that can be used over and over again – and, by being used, develop new layers and change on and on, changing us …

(And, of course, by now, having read some more of Dover Wilson in the meantime, I have realized that I have now probably reached the point where I could GET STARTED on “Hamlet”.  This book is great, by the way, driven by an amazing ability to READ what is actually in the text and make sense of it, and, what is of even greater interest to me, of making his method of reading transparent. His argument is so convincing that it took some time for me to find out that I fundamentally disagree with him about Hamlet because of what he states to be the right method of “reading” the play, and the character. Which was an exciting discovery, but, as he is so much better, he’ll “beat” me. At least at the moment I don’t feel that I am up for the challenge. In any case: a book that survived a century because it is so relevant, and I am grateful for the recommendation!)