Postmodern Hamlet

Halfway through Michael Almereyda's new film version of Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern take their pal Hamlet out on the club scene, where they slump on sofas with their beers and attempt to sound out Hamlet's secrets by shouting lines at each other over the thumpa-thumpa of the music. It is an amusingly symbolic moment: Can anyone hear Shakespeare's lines over the visual and aural noise of postmodern film?

I'm no language-is-all Shakespeare purist. I like the action, the intrigue, the mistaken identities. I even like the clothes. (Why not? Costumes were by far the largest expenditure for Shakespeare's acting company.) The past decade of image-is-all filmmaking has left me wondering, though, just how much can be suppressed while still offering audiences something of value. Go ahead and cut lines, recast the setting, rearrange scenes—I'm game. But what are we left with? That is the question.

Almereyda's Hamlet cheekily turns Denmark into a mammoth New York corporation. Hamlet's father is its recently deceased CEO, while Hamlet himself is played by Ethan Hawke as a rich-kid slacker, at once cynical and bewildered by the towering buildings and shallow people around him.

The concept and art direction of the film convey this bewilderment very effectively: Hamlet's world seems dominated by electronic devices and images. In his apartment, random still photos cluster around his video editing setup, and video images play distractingly. Fax machines and cell phones beep and buzz their way into scenes, and Hamlet's friends first view his father's ghost through a security camera.

The dominant theme of photo-images comments nicely on the dehumanizing effects of galloping technology while supporting Shakespeare's central concerns in the play with theatricality and introspection. Seeing Hamlet's introspection literalized as video footage is an apt transposition of the excessive speechifying in Shakespeare's text.

The technology theme also propels strong interpretations of certain scenes. In the so-called "nunnery" scene, the one in which Hamlet terrorizes and rejects Ophelia, Shakespeare's text leaves unclear how much Hamlet knows about Claudius and Polonius's plan to spy on him, using Ophelia for bait. Here Ophelia's dad rigs her up ahead of time with a hidden microphone, and the encounter between the distracted lovers begins as a tender near-reconciliation—until Hamlet uncovers the mic. With Ophelia's weak complicity in the spying plot instantly revealed, he storms at her, then exits, finishing the job with cruel messages left on her answering machine.

Almereyda also plays a delightful riff on the famous "to be or not to be" soliloquy by having Hamlet, well be fore the actual scene, vaguely attending to a Buddhist guru chirping away on video about how "to be" is not possible; we are in relationship with others and therefore must "inter-be." It's an ironic commentary on the non-relation ships in the film. Then, when soliloquy-time arrives, Hamlet mutters the famous lines while pacing up and down the "Action" aisle of the video store. (This scene's joke depends partly on one's prior knowledge of a traditional interpretation of Hamlet as a thinker who can never act: his own comments about conscience making cowards of us all occur only at the end of the scene.)

The whirring machinery and sterile corporate-and-chrome interiors of the film succeed in suggesting that turn-of-the-millennium life involves too much mediation and not enough genuine human connectedness. In deed, the characters hardly ever actually look at each other. So we perceive that the postmodern self is isolated, fragmented, dwarfed by the artificiality of devices and institutions. We also discover, unfortunately, that the postmodern self is boring.

The fatal problem with this Hamlet is that there is nothing interesting or intriguing about its central character. Hawke's prince skulks around with the charisma of a limp dishrag, muttering his lines with a breathy flatness that goes beyond melancholy and approaches semi-consciousness. When in an opening scene, he leaks out the lines "O, that this too too solid flesh would melt, / Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew," I thought, "Too late, buddy—you're already a puddle!"

This is no modernist intellectual, pacing darkly through the streets with brows knit in a philosophical agon. This Hamlet is emptied, exhausted; he appears so confused and impotent in action as well as thought that his occasional outbursts seem neither mad ness nor anger, but merely inexplicable aberration. This Hamlet neither generates plot nor analyzes events around him; he merely sags. Frankly, I was relieved when Laertes finally shot him, and he drifted off to "the undiscovered country" as we watched his life pass before his eyes (really!) in black-and-white video clips.

Unfortunately, the other characters are diminished to near-cipher status as well. Bill Murray's performance in the role of Polonius, though praised in some reviews, I thought squashed by the over all pallor of the film's human interaction. Laertes, played by Liev Schreiber, and Ophelia, played by Julia Stiles, offer the few scattered moments of emotional intensity in the film. I found myself grateful that at least Claudius (played by Kyle MacLaughlin) stands up straight.

Is this failure inevitable in postmodern treatments of Shakespeare, or of any story? Can a filmmaker represent the fragmenting self, the dissolving of coherent personality, the exhaustion of passion and honor and the lapsing into cynicism, bewilderment, and vulgar power-plays, and still create something entertaining and even … meaningful?

Yes. Sort of. Baz Luhrmann's 1996 Romeo + Juliet takes an approach similar to Almereyda's, but manages to avoid some critical miscalculations. For one thing, Luhrmann's film combines a radical visual concept with a corresponding, coherent interpretation of the play that retains some dramatic interest. As with Almereyda's film, the setting is a post-civilization fantasy city, a cluttered pastiche of cultural dregs. In this case, Romeo and Juliet lay their scene in the scuzzy resort city of Verona Beach. (The movie was filmed in Mexico City and Veracruz.) The conflict between the noble houses of Montague and Capulet has little to do with honor or ritualized gestures of rivalry. Instead, the violence clearly refers to modern gang warfare, and is so sub-bestial as to be cartoonish—an idea Luhrmann conveys with ridiculously speeded-up camera work in the opening, semi-comedic scenes.

In fact, all the secondary characters in the film verge on the cartoonish. Juliet's dad is an abusive drunk, her mother a vacuous victim, lusting after Paris. Tybalt is a snarling Latino machismo machine, and Mercutio a mentally unstable, druggie cross-dresser. The party scene in Act 1 becomes an utterly perverse bacchanalia.

But amid this mania, Romeo and Juliet find in each other a center of calm humanity. Luhrmann depicts this by slowing down the pace to a dreamy float when they meet, buoying their scenes with a lush orchestral soundtrack and amber, soul-style vocals, and by associating them with a water motif throughout—the famous balcony scene takes place mostly in Juliet's backyard pool, for instance. Water, in fact, nicely represents the paradox of love so hammered on in Shakespeare's text: a striving for life and serenity, shadowed precipitously by danger and death.

Playing Romeo and Juliet as two people trying to keep their human heads above the murky waters of post-humanity works well as an interpretation of the play. The text does depict the citizens of Verona as out of control—the grownups inattentive and unfair, the young people passionate beyond reason. And the text does steadily isolate the lovers until their suicide seems the most intimate act they can achieve. Any director must use these factors to build an interpretation that makes the lovers' final self-destruction convincing. Was it fate? the intractable feud? the lovers' own errors? chance? (There's always that problem with the postal service.)

Luhrmann's film offers a clear and poignantly relevant alternative answer: the lovers inhabit a world not worth living in. They find a moment of beauty and human connection in their love, but it is far too fragile to sustain. Luhrmann draws us into the tenderness of their moments, but keeps a slim distance from the lovers, too: when Romeo flees Verona Beach, his Mantuan refuge is a dusty trailer park, where we find him still scratching out sophomoric lines in his journal, still the slightly posed lightweight. Romantic love in this film is touching, but thin. It's an aesthetic relief, but hardly redemptive. No wonder Romeo and Juliet opt out.

Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, like Almereyda's Hamlet, reflects on the de humanizing effects of a world where truth and passion are rendered effete and all is glitzy-but-empty style and surface. But unlike Almereyda, when Luhrmann collapses the distance just enough to make us care for these two lovelies and their attempt at humanity, he awakens in us a longing for something more.

The frequent aerial shots of the concrete statue of Christ in Verona Beach reinforce this. They signify a longing for some deity to oversee this craziness and offer some order and compassion. But Christ is just a hunk of stone, a cultural artifact along the lines of the angel-kitsch clutter in Juliet's frilly bedroom and the forest of candles in the dark church where the suicides occur. They are emptied husks of something lost. And their presence in the film evokes a longing that lingers after the momentary fascination with the images and action of the film have faded.

This is where Luhrmann's treatment is superior to Almereyda's: it presents the exciting, gritty surface of a postmodern world, but also arranges to create a response to it in us. Hamlet presents another dimension of postmodernism, the emptied-out personality in a hulking, claustrophobic urbania. There's that familiar, grimly pleasurable ironic detachment, a little humble humor about art. But that's it.

Romeo + Juliet was quite successful at the box office. My students love it; many of them much prefer it to Zeffirelli's thoroughly romantic 1968 version. "I can relate to the Luhrmann version better," they say. Almereyda's Hamlet did not fare so well, and I suspect my students will not much warm to it, either. They will enjoy its cleverness and appreciate its depiction of ultra-urban glassy-eyed somnambulance. But I think the lesson to be learned from this Hamlet's lack of box-office luster is that no one wants the alpha and omega of human existence to be as this movie suggests, opening with Hamlet voicing over the "quintessence of dust" speech, and concluding with these words, plucked from the middle of the Player King's speech in Act 3:

Our wills and fates do so contrary run
That our devices still are overthrown;
Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.

Inescapable subjectivity and futility. (The opposite, curiously enough, of Proverbs 16:9: "A man's mind plans his way, but the Lord directs his steps.") When it's all about images and art-directed cleverness, and nothing is left of infinite faculties, admirable form, angelic action, or godlike apprehension—however fleeting—what are we left with? If this is the nature of humankind, why bother to tell or hear stories at all? What is left to care about or make artistic statements about? It may be that thoroughly postmodern entertainment simply implodes.

Debra Rienstra is assistant professor of English at Calvin College.