Lost All My Mirth: Michael Almereyda's Hamlet

Michael Almereyda's Hamlet is one of the few film treatments of Shakespeare that I like, that I think is not only good as an interpretation, but also good as a film. One reason is that this is a very self-reflexive piece of filmmaking. Besides being about the story of Hamlet, its also a film about the dominance of media, of visual culture, of communications technology in contemporary life. Almereyda manages to work in references to nearly every form of currently existing media. Video abounds; television screens and computer monitors, surveillance cameras and Times Square telescreens are included in nearly every shot. Some of the dialog is delivered via email, fax, teleprompter and answering machine; eavesdropping becomes wiretapping. And Hamlet wields a Pixelvision camera in the film's first extended sequence. As one critic remarked, "this is a Hamlet for the information age."

Almereyda has set his Hamlet in NYC year 2000 and slightly modified a few plot elements: Claudius is CEO of Denmark Corporation, fighting off a hostile corporate takeover by competitor Fortinbras. Elsinore is no longer a castle, but a swank hotel. Claudius and Gertrude make public appearances at press conferences and social benefits, not court.

Ophelia is a trust fund princess slumming on the LES, dressed in couture and sneakers and carting her cameras and photography equipment around in a Manhattan Portage messenger bag. Hamlet is a slacker film school student, a would be video artist obsessively reviewing footage of his life with the smudged door stamp from last night’s club still on the back of his hand. That we live in a world irrevocably mediated by the image is eloquently, wittily, and forcefully brought home by Almereyda's staging of that most iconic of all theatrical moments, Hamlet's "to be or not to be" soliloquy, in a Blockbuster video store.

The film also continually juxtaposes high and low culture elements on every level: the Shakespearian language we hear confronts the contemporary images we see, the soundtrack combines music referencing Hamlet by both classic composers (Tchaikovsky's "Hamlet") and rock musicians (Nick Cave and The Birthday Party's "Hamlet Pow, Pow, Pow"), even the casting carries this theme through by combining figures with pop culture resonance Ethan Hawke, Julia Stiles and Bill Murray) with those more associated with theatre and Shakespeare (Sam Shepard, Diane Venora, Liev Schreiber).

The film is visually and aurally dense: there's much to look at and much to listen to. The score, by film composer Carter Burwell, is evocative and haunting.

So where can we most profitably place our eyes and ears?

While I think there is much to be said about how Almereyda treats Shakespeare's text, I don't know if that's the best place to begin for a class devoted to narrative. True, Almereyda cuts much, but frankly the last stage production I saw ran about the same length of time. I like placing the famous speech from Act II at the beginning ("I have of late, where for I know not, lost all my mirth...") because it both cuts out the backstory blah blah of the watchmen and it is my favorite bit in the play.

Instead, I think we could begin with looking at the issue of mediation: the way our perception of the world, of how things are, is mediated by narrative and the various media in which it is encoded. In other words, we are always already in language, in symbolic systems, and we know our lived-in world through language and media, not by immediate access to "things in themselves". To be always already in a world of symbolic mediations means that we're always in a world of socially constructed representations and values. As cultural theorist Frederic Jameson puts it, "history is only accessible to us in narrative form."

Above all, Almereyda's Hamlet argues for the primacy and power given film in contemporary society. That is why his film references so many forms of the reproduced image, and why he specifically locates the central elements of Shakespeare's play within an explicitly filmic context: Hamlet as aspiring filmmaker and avid film fan, the replacement of the play-within-a-play with a film-within-a-film, the Blockbuster location of "...to be or not to be...," and finally, Hamlet's questions about the reality of feelings emoted on the stage are now asked of a Movie Star, a pop culture icon of passion and action. "What would he do had he the motive and the cue for passion that I have?" asks this Hamlet, not of one of the court players, but of James Dean.