Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
I imagine Albert Camus is somewhere in Heaven watching Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and (hopefully) laughing himself silly, though he may be too busy pushing a boulder up a mountain just to fill his heart.
Based on the play of the same name, and directed by the playwright, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is an absurdist comedy about the two characters from Shakespeare’s Hamlet who are tasked by the king of Denmark to find out just what exactly is going on with the prince. Along the way, they forget their own names, get lost in the chaos of the world, and question the existence of their free will.
What makes the film absurdist is not the absurdity of the plot’s events, but rather its thematic focus on the Absurd. Brief philosophy lesson: though the idea has its origins with the likes of Immanuel Kant and Søren Kierkegaard, it was the French philosopher and writer Albert Camus who popularized the concept of the Absurd—the existential clash between man’s search for purpose in a chaotic universe that offers none. While some philosophers allowed this contrast to spin them into a nihilistic dread, Camus used it as inspiration to live defiantly and find enjoyment in the chaos. Rosencrantz takes this misalignment between man’s desires for meaning and the world’s refusal to offer any and uses it as a source of comedy, placing its two main characters directly in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and tasking them with a quandary that not even actors who played the lead role could answer: is Hamlet mad, or is he simply pretending?
This fool’s errand is perfectly suited for two fools, who stumble through Shakespeare’s proto-absurdist drama searching for definitive answers in a pre-determined plot which provides none. Whenever Gary Oldman’s character (I can’t remember if he’s Rosencrantz or Guildenstern, and part of the joke is that they themselves can’t remember either) gets close to finding some physical order in the world around him, the experiment falls apart when he attempts to demonstrate it. The pin falls faster than the feather, the Newton’s cradle pots break, and the coin that turned up heads seventy-eight times in a row until—they needed it to, in which case it turned up tails.
This search for order and meaning implies a level of agency that the two lead characters may never obtain, as demonstrated by the troop of players. Given that the film takes place within the play of Hamlet, which itself features a hint of metadrama, Rosencrantz increases the metadramatic element by including a performance by the players of a simplified version of Hamlet, which foretells the deaths of Roth and Oldman’s characters. The vignette on the ship is yet to unfold in real life, yet the players seem to know just how the Danish prince will discover his friends’ betrayal and double-cross the double-crossers. Still, the hapless duo is powerless to stop it. Or are they? As they stand on the gallows in England, Roth’s character wonders aloud, “There must have been a moment at the beginning when we could have said no. Somehow we missed it.”
And yet their earliest memories are of being summoned by the king to spy on his nephew. Are they fully contained by the play? If so, what meaning could they possibly find other than advancing the plot? Perhaps that would be enough if the rules of their world made sense, but they quickly poke holes in the plot to which they are bound. Hamlet’s father was king. Now that he’s dead, why does the throne not pass to him but to his uncle? Even if the lineage question could be answered, why must the new king marry his dead brother’s widow? Something really is rotten in Denmark, and not just because the prince appears to have lost his mind.
On that matter, the two leads fail to agree on a single diagnosis of Hamlet’s troubles. Rosencrantz thinks he’s depressed because he was passed up for the throne; Guildenstern thinks the prince was just toying with his old friends. “Half of what he said meant something else, the other half didn’t mean anything at all.”
Despite this frustrating lack of clarity, the film manages to reveal to us something profound. Instead of sending its characters on a nihilistic death spiral, it fills the screen with witty dialogue and humorous misadventures that lead them nowhere, except to the end of a rope. The player taunts them and mocks them, refusing to provide them with an authentic death until it’s their own. And who is the executioner? None other than the player himself. But why should he have this power over Rosencrantz and Guildenstern? He himself is also in the story of Hamlet. Guildenstern even asks the player directly who decides who lives and who dies. The player’s response? “It is written…We follow directions. There is no choice involved.” Yet our two leads ignore him, searching constantly for their own purpose, for what exactly they must do to help Hamlet and please the king.
Who is in charge? Who has written the plots of their lives? All these and more are posed, yet never answered. A bottomless comedy that plays off a bottomless tragedy, always begging questions but refusing to resolve a single one. We could become frustrated, or we could sit back, and laugh, finding our own enjoyment in the disconnect between the leads’ desire for meaning and the stubborn world they inhabit which refuses to make them anything more than functional characters. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The absurdist comedy that makes us, the audience, absurdists by the end of its runtime. Don’t worry too much about logic, reason, or meaning. Just enjoy the ride.
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