When I put out a public poll for Shakespearean films for me to review,
this one was the least surprising entry.
I am surprised it came in third though.
"Thanks Rosencrantz and gentle Guildenstern."
"Thanks Guildenstern and gentle Rosencrantz."
"I want to go home."
"Don't let them confuse you."
[intro music]
This is Rosencrantz.
And this is Guildenstern.
Or maybe--oh no, wait, um, yeah
"I'm sorry. His name is Guildenstern and I'm Rosencrantz."
They are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Two minor characters from William Shakespeare's Hamlet.
They're Hamlet's best friends, supposedly, though Hamlet trusts Horiatio far more than either of them,
and they're asked to spy on the prince by the king and queen of Denmark.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern do not matter.
That's their primary attribute.
You could replace them with any other stock messenger character and the play would be no worse for it.
In fact, when Laurence Olivier filmed Hamlet in 1948
he cut them out entirely and won an Oscar in the process.
Marcellus has more lines than Guildenstern.
Osric has a more fleshed out personality than either of them.
Fortinbras is more important plotwise and he's almost always cut.
But these guys?
They're defined by their disposability.
The title of this film comes from the last time they're ever mentioned,
when a random ambassador walks into that slaughterhouse of a final scene and coolly says,
"that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead."
They are two characters doomed.
Doomed to be surrounded by people more interesting than them.
[clucking sounds]
By the way, yes that is Iain Glen from Game of Thrones clucking like a chicken.
God, this movie has its moments.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is a play by British playwright Tom Stoppard
that first premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1966.
It was a hit from the start, though it wasn't until 1990 that it was brought to the screen.
Stoppard directed, with Gary Oldman and Tim Roth as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern respectively...or not.
"My dear Guildenstern."
"You've forgotten, haven't you."
"My dear Rosencrantz."
The scene-stealer role, however, is a third minor character from Hamlet--
the player king, here played by Richard Dreyfuss.
"You're actors! We're the opposite of people."
The player king is the actor asked to perform the murder of Gonzago for the king.
A classic example of the play within a play, or "metatheater."
It was a relatively common device in Elizabethan theater
and Shakespeare used it before in plays like A Midsummer Night's Dream.
But here it's central both dramatically and thematically.
It's possible to give a postmodern deconstructivist reading, not just of this play, but of Hamlet.
Hamlet is a fan of classical tragedies,
finds himself in a classical tragedy,
then uses a classical tragedy to push the plot forward.
In the speech that ends with "The play's the thing..."
he gasps in amazement that the actors he watches can summon such passion to the stage,
even for fictional characters.
For Hamlet, the tragedy of the stage pales in comparison to the tragedy of reality.
Of course, Hamlet has a lot to be sad about.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern don't.
Their primary state seems to be boredom punctuated by confusion.
That's what most of the play entails.
Two men struggling to figure out what to do next
before being pushed aside by forces beyond their control.
"Can you by no drift of conference get from him [fades out]"
But when they're not being caught up in the comforting rhythms of a familiar tale and blank verse
they end up doing what all actors inevitably end up doing.
Waiting for their cue.
"Hm?"
"Yes, what?"
"I thought you--"
In all honesty, this sort of thing works better on stage than on film.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are essentially waiting offstage.
And in film there is no offstage.
There is simply in-frame or it doesn't exist.
And here it just reads as dead air.
Stoppard never directed a film before or since
and at first it's clear why.
He seems a bit lost for things that they can do.
One thing he invents for the film is a running gag where Rosencrantz recreates famous scientific discoveries;
Galileo's falling bodies,
Archimedes's bathtub,
Newton's apple.
"Uh...would you like a bite?"
You could probably read it as an extension of the play's famous opening
where Rosencrantz defies the laws of probability by getting heads on all of his coin flips.
"Heads."
They try to look for meaning in it, but really the coin flipping doesn't mean anything
and that, of course, means everything.
Yes, they have the data that a coin has come up heads so many times,
but they aren't any closer to understanding why.
As if simply by gathering empirical evidence they can say to themselves,
"I understand the breadth of the universe I inhabit, yet I cannot give it meaning."
That if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them,
I cannot, for all that, apprehend the world--
Is this a quote from something?
Just--text, text on the screen.
Alright, I'm curious, keep it going, skip ahead.
A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts,
what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know
and to live in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults?
To will is to stir up paradoxes.
Okay, I'm curious now, can we get an attribution on that quote?
AH-HA!
Yes, Camus, should have guessed, Albert Camus,
it's a passage from The Myth of Sisyphus, it's part of his argument about the philosophy of absurdism,
duh!
Camus wrote The Myth of Sisyphus in 1942, which boldly began with the declaration,
"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide."
Wow.
He and Hamlet are fine bedfellows.
Camus saw the purest expression of humanity's existence in the story of Sisyphus,
a mortal condemned for eternity to push a stone up a mountain
in a cycle of endless labor.
There are conflicting reasons given why Sisyphus was punished like that, but it's unimportant.
The important thing is that this task is, well, absurd.
In the decades following the essay's release,
a wave of new theatrical works gave Camus's ideas artistic expression in the Theatre of the Absurd,
where actors would come onstage and in hilarious, bizarre, and poignant ways
struggle to understand why they're there.
The most famous play from this loose movement is, of course, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot,
in which two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, wait for a man named Godot.
A man who never comes.
Yet they stay there because that is their task; that's their role to play.
Like the actors onstage themselves, they are simply doing.
The parallels to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead are fairly obvious.
"There's a logic at work, it's all done for you."
"Don't worry. Enjoy it. Relax."
We never do figure out just why Vladimir and Estragon are waiting for Godot,
nor do we ever figure out who Godot is, what he wants, and why it's so important that he comes.
But we all know why Rosencrantz and Guidlenstern are talking to Hamlet.
We know there's a world outside of them.
We know what Hamlet wants in detail, because as audience members
we get to hear his thoughts rendered in some of the most beautiful verse
in the history of the English language.
But they don't.
[no audible speech]
"What's he doing?"
"Talking to himself."
Instead, they're faced only with questions.
So many that they make a game out of it.
"Repetition! Two love, match point."
They never fully understand why they're there or why they die.
They even start to wonder why they're so important that they should be marked for death.
"They had it in for us, didn't they, right from the beginning. Who'd have thought we were so important!"
"But why?"
The sad thing is, unlike Vladimir and Estragon,
we know exactly how important Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are.
Anyone familiar with Hamlet knows exactly where in the story they fit
and the minuscule impact they have on the overall plot.
And ultimately? They did nothing wrong.
That is, they did nothing.
They let the play, well, play out.
Essentially, they, like Hamlet, are good students of drama.
"Events must play themselves out to an aesthetic, moral, and logical conclusion."
"What's that in this case?"
"It never varies. We aim for the point where everyone who is marked for death dies."
"Who decides?"
"Decides? It is written."
What Stoppard's done is take a modern school of thought and historicize it.
Take a mid-twentieth century philosopher
and show that his ideas have been present in drama for centuries.
In many ways, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is as much a remake of Hamlet as an inversion.
All the same themes are there--
we're asked to ponder the nature of tragedy as an art form,
we're taken inside the minds of those questioning their existence,
and most poignantly, we're asked to ponder the nature of death.
"But nobody gets up after death! There's no applause, only silence and some secondhand clothes."
"That's death!"
And of course, even that death is staged.
[applause]
"Oh, come, come gentlemen, no flattery."
Stoppard isn't just deconstructing Hamlet. He's far more ambitious.
He's deconstructing all of fiction.
He points out the ways in which our stories can never fully encompass lived experience.
How something coldly performed is far removed from something deeply felt.
And yet, that removal helps us deal with it.
Camus wrote that we always perform within the absurd, but out happiness lies in our ignorance of it.
He wrote of Sisyphus:
"What are they?"
"They're dead."
Camus famously ended his essay,
"One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
Maybe we should imagine the same of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
After all, they always die.
But at the same time, they're always back for the next performance.
"There must have been a moment at the beginning when we could have said no."
"Somehow we missed it."
"Well, we'll know better next time."
"Till then."
[music]