“He lives not.”
Before seeing Chloe Zhao’s “Hamnet,” one of the top contenders to win this year’s Academy Award for Best Picture, I had never sat in a theater full of people audibly weeping. Hands digging through purses for tissues, gasps as people tried to catch their breath, trying not to let out too loud a sob: I could hear it all. But I had also never seen a death on screen that felt so jolting and true to the fragile and transient nature of life.
We see death on screen all the time — gore and horror are some of the biggest box-office draws these days, as violence is increasingly glamorized, and we all become more and more desensitized to blood and guts. Why, then, does the death that plays a central role in “Hamnet” disturb us so deeply? Why did I feel my stomach drop in a movie I thought was going to be more “Shakespeare in Love” than “Romeo & Juliet”?
No matter how much visceral violence we witness in media, there’s something about the actual moment of death that usually escapes artistic representation. In “Hamnet,” Zhao presented us with a startlingly embodied moment of life ending in a way I’ve never before seen in a film. Most on-screen deaths feel distant and removed, but in “Hamnet,” death is put back into our lives as an intimate reality.
In William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” Hamlet famously poses the question “To be or not to be” in one of his soliloquies. Our obsession with how “to be” and how to continue being often shrouds the fact that one day, we will all have to face what “not to be” means. The portrayal of death in “Hamnet” shows us that these two options are not mutually exclusive; one cannot choose “to be” permanently, and expect the transition into “not to be” to be on our own terms. Accepting that “not to be” is inevitable also means accepting the pain that comes with it.
The story of “Hamnet” is told largely from the perspective of Shakespeare’s wife, Agnes, as she meets and marries Will (as the movie calls him), and they eventually have three children. The heart of the film lies in the performance of Agnes and Will’s son, Hamnet, who, quite tragically, dies rather suddenly from the plague around the middle of the movie. “Hamnet” is based on the historical lore that one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays, Hamlet, was named after his deceased son.
In the film, we literally see the color leave Hamnet’s skin and we hear his death rattle as well as his shaking hand reach out to his mom. A lot of illness-related child deaths in film are peaceful and fairly slow. There’s a catharsis in watching someone talk about seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and telling their family not to worry about them, that they’re going to a better place. We’re conditioned to see death as a smooth transition from one realm to the next, with the sickly child acting as an all-knowing angel who has more wisdom about the afterlife than the rest of us.
“Hamnet” allows us none of these comforts. Hamnet himself seems terrified. At one point, he even looks at the camera as if the viewer is Thanatos, the Greek god who comes to escort souls to the underworld. It is as if by witnessing his last few excruciating moments of life, we are playing a role in hastening it; Hamnet cannot go gently into that good night, as the poem goes, because we (as well as Agnes) will not let him.
By not glossing over the details of death, “Hamnet” returns death to our mental conceptions of what it means to be alive. Too often, death is relegated to something completely exterior to our experience of the world. Sick people reside in hospitals and the elderly in convalescent homes. Unlike in Shakespeare’s day, a lot of us have never even witnessed the actual moment of death.
Witnessing that limit, that exact moment of finitude that we all will have to face eventually, does shocking things to how we move in the world. Leaving the theater, I felt the importance of the movie’s portrayal of pain as something we cannot ultimately overcome. Agnes’ scream when her son dies also reminds us that we cannot stop pain from being part of our family members’ lives, either. But this leaves us with an opening, a window for possibility: how will we “be” when we stop treating “not being” as irrelevant to our lives? How can we bring back pain and death into our everyday lives as something to acknowledge rather than hide from? “Hamnet” does not necessarily answer these questions, but it does turn our heads away from the glossy image of a Hollywood death, tearing our eyes towards the end of all ends — the agonizing “not to be,” that, without which, there would be no “to be.”
Contact Ava LaLonde at lalonde@oxy.edu
