Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead [1990] + Hamlet 2 [2008] + The Lion King 1½ [2004]

Welcome back to My Year Of Shakespeare, the blog series where I avoid talking about Shakespeare. This week we watched a series of non-Shakespearean works built off Shakespearean ones.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is a Tom Stoppard movie about two side characters from Hamlet — I haven't mentioned them in any of the Hamlet posts because they are so inconsequential to the play, they're largely characters that exist to be explained to/at by more principal cast members — who become aware their world is a fiction of some sort; they are largely waiting outside Elsinore castle or in the wings of the throne room, farting around and trying to make sense of the narrow slices of context in which their demeanor changes to stagely and is then dismissed as they exit the audience-view.

There is a third major character introduced in this, The Player, here played by Richard Dreyfuss. I personally find Dreyfuss an annoying actor to watch, so him in this role was actually quite apropos casting - the Player is a bit of a pedant, as well as a metatheatrical element talking about how the metaphysics of theatre work.

Ultimately I found the film both immensely entertaining — Rosencrantz†, played by a young Gary Oldman, and Guildenstern†, played by a young Tim Roth, are terrific, Oldman's wide-eyed curiosity pairing well against Roth's sharper-edged cynicism — and immensely difficult to describe beyond what I've done here. This is the sort of movie people need to see when they hear about "oh it's so meta"; having grown up hearing things like Ferris Bueller or Blazing Saddles described that way, I can understand how a fourth wall break can be characterized as "meta" but this is on a different level, there's a constant re-evaluation of how meta we're currently operating that makes this a fascinating watch. I could've been so much more annoying at age 17 if I'd gotten into Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead rather than music, which I suppose is really saying something since music put me in front of a microphone and a crowd and said "go nuts, kid." I don't think this was a critical intertext for my enjoyment of Hamlet, but I am better for having watched it.

Also this week, I watched Hamlet 2. Hamlet 2 is another weird movie — Steve Coogan is Dana Marschz, a drama teacher in Tucson who is Going Through It; His life has not gone as he wanted it to - he is a recovering alcoholic and failed actor; his wife (Catherine Keener, who unfortunately doesn't get much to do) is trying to conceive and thinks he is the problem in the operation, is fed up with them having an adult man roommate (David Arquette, who has truly nothing to do) that helps pay the bills; his students don't respect him and think he is either severely corny, if not fruity; his faculty-peers feel similar, and the Principal notifies him the drama program will be shut down at the end of the term.

In response to this, he writes an atrocious play for the students to perform called "Hamlet 2", over everyone's objections that everyone dies at the end of Hamlet, how could there be a sequel? The answer: Hamlet has a time machine. and also rescues Jesus. Over various objectionable content in the play, he gets restraining-ordered by the school to not perform it there. His wife leaves him to run off with David Arquette. He falls off the wagon, tries to quit the project, but his students rally around him, find an abandoned warehouse, and get the ACLU involved so he can put on the play; the play opens to a sold-out house.

Hamlet 2 was written by Trey Parker & Matt Stone collaborator, Pam Brady, with Andrew Fleming (The Craft, Arrested Development) also writing and directing. It shows with how frequently mean-spirited its humor skews, including in Coogan's performance. The humor is frequently of the variety where "a social inferior is put in their place or has violence enacted upon them"; I suppose that has a somewhat timeless flavor to it, in that we've been doing that for forever, but it's also extremely of its time - post 9/11, pre-Obama, when the r-slur was being thrown around casually and calling things "gay" to mean "cringe" was unfortunately normalized. To paraphrase the WB cartoon disclaimer: "it was a product of its time, but that doesn't mean the parts that suck now didn't suck then too."

Nonetheless, it does engage with the central questions of the original text — Why is the event that I think should have happened not happening? Should I undertake these actions to make it happen? Like Hamlet 1, it engages with the doubt, restraint, pulling back in a very sympathetic way, even as it makes its protagonist endure the slings and arrows of his own outrageous fortune.

I think watching it as a companion piece to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was an inspired move, however accidental — both are mirrors to the original and reflect different facets. Where R&G tended towards didacticism then example in its explaining how drama (and tragedy) work via The Player (and the Player's "death" at Guildenstern's hand), Hamlet 2's play-within-the-movie demonstrates the counterexample, how tragedy stops working when you make all the conflicts work out, when you don't spill the blood (to actual, not-punching-down, comedic effect). Also you will have "Rock Me Sexy Jesus" stuck in your head as that happens.

Lastly for this week and this unit, I watched The Lion King 1½.

Billed as the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to the Lion King's Hamlet, it is Timon (Nathan Lane) and Pumbaa (Ernie Sabella) retelling their version of the events of The Lion King.

It is extremely that — they do the animated equivalent of waiting in the wings by touring all the other movie's locations, they comment on the play, they show up for their specific scenes. It's funny and heartwarming, extremely of a kind with both Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead as well as The Lion King, while looking orders of magnitude better than the sequel. There's several quite good animation gags and choices of framing that seem like love letters to the equipment used for hand-painted / drawn animation, such as the multifocal plane gag, or the impossibly long zoom-out to show the sheer size of the waterfall.

Unlike R&G, Timon & Pumbaa aren't embittered or suspicious about their plot; they have a more conventional narrative about feeling isolated from their respective peer groups. Timon's, more fleshed out, has Julie Kavner as his mom and Jerry Stiller as his high-strung uncle. Throughout, it will zoom out to break the fourth wall to T&P watching the movie in a theatre a la Mystery Science Theater 3000. At one point they pause the movie so Pumbaa can go use the restroom and we're treated to Timon mumbling to himself and picking his nose (in silhouette, of course).

A facet I noticed that was interesting for me is that the meta moves in a play (or, frequently, in novels/written stories) take me a lot of effort and conscious attention to pick up on (well, R&G excepted, it is very blatant) while the televised meta move of "a character is watching the movie", I truly think nothing of — normal to happen, commonplace even. For whatever reason, it introduces no narrative distance or cognitive hopscotch to my perception of a movie or tv show, and wonder whether any of the programming I watched as a kid did that, where I would've picked up on it as "normal" — maybe Animaniacs? The Tick? Ducktales? The Simpsons [s3-8 in increasingly worn out syndication]? I wonder if people who were raised with plays as their predominant entertainment medium would feel the same for on-stage theatrical metatextuality. It worries me a little, that it takes conscious effort for me to recognize it as "unrealistic", like maybe my perception of myself involves watching what I do as a separate audience. Maybe that's something I learned as a musician, a facet of learning to be on stage, that sort of performant disconnect. Or maybe it's easier to convey in a more visually discontinuous medium than it is in a more verbally conjured medium like The Stage.

In any event, I had a great time with all three pictures, all of them are at least worth the consideration if not the time to watch. Next month, on to The Henriad. Thank you for reading along with My Year of Shakespeare.

The Henriad schedule will be as follows:

• September 6 - The Hollow Crown, Season 1, Episode 1: Richard II
• September 13 - The Hollow Crown, S01/E02: Henry IV part 1 + The Lion King (2019)
• September 20 - The Hollow Crown, S01/E03: Henry IV part 2 + Mufasa: The Lion King (2024)
• September 27 - The Hollow Crown, S01/E04: Henry V
• October 4 - The Hollow Crown, Season 2, Episode 1: Henry VI part 1
• October 11 - The Hollow Crown, S02/E02: Henry VI part 2
• October 18 - The Hollow Crown, S02/E03: Richard III
• October 25 - The King (2019)
• November 1 - Chimes at Midnight (1966)
• November 8 - My Own Private Idaho (1991)
• November 15 - Henry V (1989)
• November 22 - The Black Adder [series one] (1983)
• November 29 - The Goodbye Girl (1977)