Tag: movies

Now cracks a noble heart

When my psychiatrist asks me if I’m having “death thoughts” my answer is always the same: “not in the way you are asking, but yes.”

I’m not suicidal, but death is a constant preoccupation. The intensity increases and decreases as I cycle through the usual peaks and valleys of depression and anxiety. In other words, I’m pretty much always thinking about death (my death, the deaths of my loved ones, the deaths of strangers, the concept of death, life after death, etc.).

Naturally, I’m drawn to art about death and dying.

My sister recommended Hamnet to me, so I read it, and I want to write about it because it affected me greatly in all the best ways that great art does.

Hamnet, a Love Story About Grief

Grief is a kind of universal element that lives in all of us, like the carbon atoms in our bodies. Every human on earth has (or will have) a personal experience with death. New people join our own universes all the time and they all leave eventually, too. They always seem to leave before we’re ready. Nobody in Hamnet’s life was ready for him to go.

We know from the very beginning of this novel that Hamnet will die, so it’s not a spoiler. When it happens, we’re still shocked. The magic trick of this book, and maybe all great historical fiction, is how O’Farrell hides the historicals behind the fictionals.

Hamnet is a Boy and Agnes is his Mother

I can approach Hamnet thematically and say it’s about grief, but that’s not quite accurate. It’s really a book about a person, Agnes, who is a witchy sort of woman living in the middle ages in Stratford, England. Her husband happens to be a playwright we all know but he’s never named and we mostly learn about him as he comes in and out of Agnes’s story.

Agnes is a kind of village shaman, using herbs and other natural things to heal people. The writing borders right on the edge of magical realism, because sometimes it seems like Agnes really can learn about people just by touching their hands in a specific place, and sometimes it seems like her folk remedies actually can rid someone of the plague or fix whatever else is wrong with them.

In the world of the book, she can and she does.

She grows up feeling wrong, out of place, too dark, too tall, too unruly, too opinionated, too silent, too strange.

A Note About Craft

I am a big fan of O’Farrell’s writing. Here’s one of my favorite passages:

WHEN THE TWINS WERE VERY SMALL, PERHAPS AROUND THEIR first birthday, he had turned to his wife and said, Watch, Agnes had lifted her head from her workbench.

He pushed two slivers of apple across the table to them. At exactly the same moment, Hamnet reached out with his right hand and gripped the apple and Judith reached out with her left.

In unison, they raised the apple slices to their lips, Hamnet with his right, Judith with her left.

They put them down, as if with some silent signal between them, at the same moment, then looked at each other, then picked them up again, Judith with her left hand, Hamnet with his right. lis like a mirror, he had said. Or that they are one person split down the middle.

Their two heads uncovered, shining like spun gold.

I have read other reviews that mention how affected the prose is and that makes me wonder if I’m missing something or if they’re seeing something I’m not. However you want to describe Maggie O’Farrell’s writing, I think it’s great and I want to read more of it.1

A Mother’s Grief

You never get over grief. It’s not like a virus or infection that runs its course and goes away. We have to live with it always. It comes and goes.

Hamnet shows us the architecture of the grief in Agnes’s heart after her son dies. One measure of a great story is that it reflects back at you what you can recognize but in ways you never thought of before, or illustrates them in ways you would never have considered. I see myself in Agnes and her anguish.

This passage puts to words an experience we can all relate to: when we think of someone and, for a moment, forget that they’re gone.

She, like all mothers, constantly casts out her thoughts, like fishing lines, towards her children, reminding herself of where they are, what they are doing, how they fare. From habit, while she sits there near the fireplace, some part of her mind is tabulating them and their whereabouts: Judith, upstairs. Susanna, next door. And Hamnet? Her unconscious mind casts, again and again, puzzled by the lack of bite, by the answer she keeps giving it: he is dead, he is gone. And Hamnet? The mind will ask again. At school, at play, out at the river? And Hamnet? And Hamnet? Where is he? Here, she tries to tell herself. Cold and lifeless, on this board, right in front of you. Look, here, see.

It’s not just a book about how Agnes and her family roil and boil in their grief over Hamnet’s death. A good story also has a trajectory, a movement from the state of things in the beginning through some transformational event. That transformation is the heart of drama.

It’s part of the human story, too. We begin a life, even a single day, as one person and events happen that change us forever. Agnes suffers the death of her son and grieves and, in the last chapter, is permanently transformed. I’ll get to that in a minute.

Station Eleven (the series)

I haven’t read the book Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel. I was so powerfully affected by the series that I don’t want to alter it in my mind by reading the book. I don’t know if that makes any sense. I don’t even like recommending Station Eleven to people because I’m afraid they won’t like it as much as I did, or, perhaps worse, won’t be as affected by it as I was.

The tv show was a profoundly moving experience. I watched it as the last few episodes aired. It was a show that was being made before and during the pandemic and it aired those last episodes just as the lockdowns were ending.

The series is about Kirsten, in both the present day and 20 years after the pandemic that killed most of the world’s population. She is an actor in the Traveling Symphony, which performs music and plays to the communities that have sprung up in the bones of the old world.

It’s post apocalyptic but not in the way you might be used to. One of the things I loved about Station Eleven is how it depicts the end of the world as the beginning of a new one. Most post-apocalypse stories are about how society breaks down and sets people against each other. This does not ring true for me and what I know about people.

What do you see on the news when disasters happen? What do you see when tragedy happens in your own life or in your own community? People don’t scatter and huddle in their basements with guns aimed at the door — they spring into action to help. Look at the aftermath of any disaster, anywhere in the world. The pile of rubble that used to be a hospital is crowded with people digging others out, tending to the injured, comforting their neighbors. If the end of the world happened, I don’t think everybody would immediately leap at the throats of their neighbors.

There are violent people in the post-pan(demic) world of Station Eleven, but they’re fringe crazies, aberrant exceptions. They barely appear in the story at all.

By the end, Station Eleven brings all of the characters we’ve met over the course of 10 episodes and puts them in a post-pandemic, post-apocalyptic production of Hamlet. In acting out the play, our characters reach a kind of mutual understanding of each other and allows them to set aside the traumatic happenstances that led them to fighting and scheming against each other.

Hamnet is Also Hamlet

Factually, William Shakespeare had a son named Hamnet who died of the plague at the age of 11, and a few years later he wrote a play called Hamlet. We also know that Shakespeare made a lot of money and sent most of it back to his family in Stratford. He retired there, too.

In the book, we see a Shakespeare who can’t sit still. He needs to be in the city, performing, creating. Even after the death of his son, he can’t stay with the family. He can’t explain it to Agnes, who is perplexed by his callousness and selfishness. She watches him leave after their son’s death and she understands him even less than she did before.

In the book, Agnes hears that her husband has written a play with the same name as their dead son, and she’s enraged by it. How dare he! She and her brother travel to London expecting to be disgusted.

But that’s not what happens.

She watches the character of Hamlet, who looks and acts just like her son, who has been coached and trained by her husband exactly how the boy stood, or smirked, or walked, or spoke. Her husband plays Hamlet’s father, a ghost.

“Hamlet, here, on this stage, is two people, the young man, alive, and the father, dead. He is both alive and dead. Her husband has brought him back to life, in the only way he can. As the ghost talks, she sees that her husband, in writing this, in taking the role of the ghost, has changed places with his son. He has taken his son’s death and made it his own; he has put himself in death’s clutches, resurrecting the boy in his place. ‘O horrible! O horrible! Most horrible!’ murmurs her husband’s ghoulish voice, recalling the agony of his death.

He has, Agnes sees, done what any father would wish to do, to exchange his child’s suffering for his own, to take his place, to offer himself up in his child’s stead so that the boy might live.”

Agnes experiences her husband’s production as a catharsis, a revelation. Through this performance, she can process the death of their son and see, finally, and in stark relief, the context and shape of her husband’s grief, too. Agnes can move on to the rest of her life with a new understanding of her husband where before she had always struggled to comprehend him. Art transforms.

Shakespeare, Agnes, Kirsten and Jeevan all use performance, as witnesses and as participators, to talk and listen to each other.

The stage allows us to be vulnerable and exposed while also hiding our true selves behind masks and costumes. Words written for us, spoken by characters who bear no relation to ourselves except in our mutual humanity, resonate through time and distance and unite us together and help us, too, to understand each other. This is not just performance but all art. Great art shows us ourselves while it shows us things we’ve never seen.

I gave you a piece of Hamnet to read, so naturally I want to give you a piece of Station Eleven to watch.

This has small spoilers, but it’s from the second episode so you’re not missing much context. Jeevan, the man taping up the vent, is introduced to us as a guy watching a production of King Lear who sees a famous actor on stage have a medical event and instinctively runs on stage to help him. Kirsten is a child actor in the same production who gets lost in the chaos after this event and the simultaneous outbreak of a world-ending flu pandemic. They take refuge in Jeevan’s brother’s apartment.

Kirsten is also the adult woman in a production of Hamlet that does not fully unfold fully until the end of the show (but you can see it hopscotches through time).

Great Art Transforms Us

As we watch a play or performance, we experience the text of the songs being played or the lines of dialogue being spoken and they allow us to reflect on our own lives and feelings.

We see a wrathful Iago scheme and plot against his commander and remember the times where we, too, were passed over for a promotion. That other guy didn’t deserve it, but we do! When we see Othello, twisted and contorted into seeing an unfaithful wife, we can think of the times we lost our faith in our own friends or lovers. When Othello snaps and strangles his dearest love, we can all remember the times we treated someone badly because of our own anger or resentment.

Hamnet and Lincoln in the Bardo

The obvious accompaniment to this book, or maybe another book in a reading list, would be Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders. It’s a different kind of book in lots of ways — it takes place in the Bardo, or the space between life and the afterlife, and our characters are all unquiet ghosts in a cemetery. Stylistically they couldn’t be more different, as it’s all told in a shifting, choral sort of epistolatory first person. These ghosts witness Abraham Lincoln come to visit the temporary tomb of his son who has, like Hamnet, died young from a disease.

Lincoln’s grief is legendary and known to us. He is said to have held his boy’s body in this temporary resting place.

All three of these pieces — Hamnet, Station Eleven, and Lincoln in the Bardo, are in conversation with each other, at least in my mind. They are certainly in conversation with each other to me. Interestingly, Hamnet and Station Eleven kind of came out around the same time, so they weren’t in clear communication with each other.

You don’t have to squint to see it is also in conversation with The Pitt, which also hops back in time to the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. It, too, is kind of about grief and moving on when everybody seems to be dying around you.

We’re so powerless against death. We are always fighting it, writing about it, making shows and art about it, trying to understand it.