The Honors College hosted their third Night Owls movie night with a “Hamlet” satire, prompting a lively discussion about predestination and agency.
On Friday evening, a group of Honors College students, along with several faculty, gathered to watch the 1990 absurdist drama-comedy “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.” The movie, adapted from a play by the British philosophical playwright Tom Stoppard, focuses on two relatively minor “Hamlet” characters. In the original play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are childhood friends of Hamlet’s who are tasked by the Danish king (Hamlet’s uncle) to ascertain the cause of their friend’s madness. The pair later accompany Hamlet back to England, where his uncle has arranged for the English king to behead Hamlet. Hamlet swaps the letter with an order to kill Rosencrantz and Guildenstern instead and so the two are hanged.
The pair follow the same path in the movie, starting with their summons to the Danish palace and ending with their execution in England. However, Stoppard creates a meta world in which the duo are essentially actors hired to take on the roles of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They work in the wings of the actual events of “Hamlet,” all the time trying to figure out who they are and why they have been sent for. The audience watches the most dramatic parts of the original Shakespearean tragedy — Hamlet’s soliloquy, the murder of Polonius, etc. — take place on the sidelines. The focus is instead on the Monty Python-esque ramblings and antics of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, played by Gary Oldman and Tim Roth, respectively.
The movie begins with the pair on horseback flipping a coin some 150 times with it landing on heads each time, introducing a departure from reality. The two then run into a band of tragedians traveling in a caravan and all are soon transported to the Danish castle at Elsinore. When called upon by the king, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern fulfill their Shakespearean script, but when not interacting with other characters they have no idea of their identity or purpose. An attempt to understand themselves and their roles leads them to correctly go through the motions of the tragedy, leading to their ultimate deaths. The tragedians, who throughout the film have been acting out the events of “Hamlet” to create a play within a play within a play, pack up their caravan and leave in the final scene.
The movie is clever, absurd and deeply meta. It is clear that the original live theater version of the script would be more effective, but there is also something to be said for the added question of agency raised by the film format. In a live play, the actors still technically have the choice to alter the script, but not so in a recorded movie. The organizers chose to turn on subtitles, which was a very good choice as the density and wit of the dialogue is difficult to follow in a film format (the script is reminiscent of the sitcom “Arrested Development” in that not a fraction of the humor can be picked up in the first watch).
The discussion that followed, led by Honors faculty Dr. Post, Dr. Traldi, Dr. Walden and Dr. Lizardo, was also very thought-provoking. Common themes were free will, agency, reality, fortune and the absurd. The central debate was whether Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have free will. They are clearly experiencing an altered reality in which they are essentially actors, as reinforced by a recurring motif of paper thought to be the script they act out. But they also choose at each locus to continue to entertain their curiosity by playing into the narrative. In that way, the two fulfill the central question “To be or not to be?” because they continuously choose being, as detached and absurd as their existence is, as opposed to disengaging from the “script.” Students and faculty offered their own perspectives on the metaphor, message and style of the film. Many also made connections to the Honors College canon, with references to Homer, Boethius, Augustine, Kierkegaard, Camus and Nietzche, among others.
The discussion of the main characters’ agency of course prompted thoughts about the extent of every person’s free will. To what extent does each person create a persona based on what they are told? What does it take to buy into or escape an established narrative? Watching the film may have raised more questions than answers, but it was a satisfyingly existential way to spend a Friday night.