The Hamlet Project: Laurence Olivier (1948)

In Ron Rosenbaum’s excellent book “The Shakespeare Wars,” he calls attention to the theory of “The Unbroken Chain of Hamlets.” The idea is that the role of Hamlet, going all the way back to Richard Burbage strutting the stage at the Globe, created something with the role that survives to the next man to take it, and on and on. If so, we might wonder what of his survived in the first major screen production of “Hamlet,” that of Laurence Olivier. It is the only Hamlet to have ever won an Academy Award for best picture, and it was directed by the man some still consider the greatest actor of all time.

Olivier wrote years later that he believed someone else should have played Hamlet, as he tended to embody dramatic, energetic roles. That tells us something about what he himself thought of the character, in what he called, pound for pound, the greatest play ever written. It is often thought to be the most problematic of his three Shakespeare films, as he is playing the young prince at age 40. There were some critics, Peter Hall for example, who still felt Olivier’s Hamlet is too direct, and would have killed Claudius too quickly. To tone down his energy, Olivier dyed his hair blonde. He was also insistent that his movie not be a filmed version of the play. One of the transformative experiences of Olivier’s career was working with William Wyler in “Wuthering Heights.” So he begged off color for black and white, wanting deep focus photography for his scenes. He preserves some of the traditional touches though – such as the prince’s doublet, and costumes for the king and queen that resembling playing card conceptions. 

He also had to be conscious of length, so Olivier cut Rosencrantz and Gildenstern completely from the play, effectively removing the politics from “Hamlet” and centering it squarely on the tragedy in the royal family. Because of his time, Olivier put a great deal of emphasis on the Freudian reading of the play, meaning that Hamlet can’t easily kill Claudius because he subconsciously wants to do the same thing as his uncle – kill his father and bed his mother. In his writings, Olivier said he felt the key speech for Hamlet was, “How all occasions do inform against me” ending in the line, “My thoughts be bloody.” In other words, by this time, Hamlet is resolved on his revenge. Yet he cut this line from the film, so that in essence, his opening narration, “This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind,” is absolutely true. 

And so you have a movie of a play that, in some ways, is at cross purposes with the title character, and a medium disclosing the flaws of the conception. The prince broods because he knows what he must do, and wrestles with the doing of it. An actor used to action must find a way to dramatize the paralysis of inaction. “Whenever an actor first attempts Hamlet,” Olivier wrote, “he should be aware that it’s a sporadic collection of self-dramatizations in which he tries always to play the hero and, in truth, feels ill cast in the past.” And because of Olivier’s technical decisions, this film of a play occasionally feels exactly how it wasn’t supposed to feel – like a filmed play.

The first image is crashing waves.  We see Hamlet’s body borne on the battlements, revealing the ending for anyone who didn’t read the play in school, and making it clear that this play is, in some ways, about death. In various scenes, “Hamlet” feels gothic and suffocating, almost like a horror film, with the camera panning menacingly through empty passages and past empty throne rooms and bedrooms.  “The story is seen through his eyes,” Olivier observed, “and, when he’s not present, through his imagination – his paranoia.”

Long takes hold the actors in agony, forcing the viewer to pay attention to the dialogue and each reading.  Terrence Rafferty’s observation was that something is stalking our players, as we observe “human behavior, in all its awful futility, through the cold, unblinking eyes of God.” Still, Olivier makes it easy for us. Our first look at Claudius (Basil Sydney) is as a blowhard drunkard, Gertrude (Eileen Herlie) as a thoughtful mother, Polonius (Felix Aylmer)as a fool.

The best technical choices, besides color and camera use, are Olivier’s stylistic decisions with the speeches. Hamlet’s first great soliloquy, “O that this too too solid flesh…” is spoken in voiceover. This is an obvious yet brilliant choice, as we are hearing Hamlet’s thoughts. But then, as Hamlet repeats the phrase, “And yet within a month” aloud, he is engaged in a duet with himself, which perfectly mirrors his actions.  Olivier takes this a step further during the “To be, or not to be” speech, as he is up on the parapet, looking down at the waves crashing against the rocks. The camera is behind his head as we hear his thoughts. We wonder – Is he thinking of killing himself because of what he has just been forced to do to Ophelia? Then, as he mentions sleep, he almost pitches forward, as if in that twilight between sleep and dream.

Olivier isn’t just an actor interested in preserving performances on the screen. As director, he is conscious of the importance of striking images. When he emerges from the fog in silhouette with his sword at meeting the ghost, he looks holy, and his best self-conception. When the ghost recounts his murder, we see Hamlet imagining it, yet we do not see the face of Claudius. The murderer is left anonymous.  When Hamlet crushes Ophelia (Jean Simmons) during the Nunnery speech, he kisses her hair as she weeps, as though he’s trying to tell her that his insanity is all an act. For so much of the first part of the film, Hamlet is silently brooding, looking out of windows, into rooms, mulling over his fate.

The action changes with the coming of the actors. We see Hamlet, in darkness, and once Polonius comes forward with the torchlight, the silence breaks. (Olivier will use the torch later, during the dumb show to expose his uncle’s treachery.) The players and a walking dog enter, there is an explosion of light, sound and motion, which snaps Hamlet out of his indecision. Once they leave, he shouts, “The play’s the thing,” and we wonder if all of this hasn’t perhaps happened a little too fast.

Some portions do not play as well today as they no doubt did back at the film’s release. Ophelia’s death, for example, staged like an old painting, with voiceover to explain her end, is one example. Then again, when Hamlet is at sea, we get about 20 seconds of swashbuckling which almost makes us wish we could see this movie. Jean Simmons’ Ophelia is suitably helpless and tragic, and Norman Wooland’s Horatio, without the restraining influence of Rosencrantz and Gildenstern, is all one requires in Hamlet’s friend and sounding board.  

Hamlet is finally resolved to his task just before the sword bout with Laertes (Terence Morgan), even though this act itself doesn’t seem to be getting him any closer to revenge. But once Gertrude drinks the spiked wine, the music slows down, the action slows down, and it becomes obvious something is wrong. The fight is staged well, the action flows, with camera movement and cutting serving to heighten the situation, even as our eyes are drawn back to the doomed queen.

Olivier was most proud of his 14-foot leap at the end onto Claudius. We then see Hamlet without hesitation plunge his sword into the king, then the king grope for the crown, and collapse, after he is surrounded by his suddenly observant guards. Peter Cushing’s sinister Osric, who a moment earlier seemed in on the plot between king and would-be assassin, now holds the dying Laertes.

Hamlet collapses on the throne, king at last, and his body is borne through the castle, past the seat where he first brooded, and past the rooms where our action took place and we arrive back where we started. There is no invading army to bring down the curtain on his kingdom. His indecision has already done that for him. 

Also:

The Play's the Thing
Laurence Olivier (1948)
Toshiro Mifune (1960) 
Richard Burton (1964) 
Kenneth Branagh (1996) 

Set Your Fields on Fire

The award-winning novel by William Thornton

Available now

Read the first chapter here

Some of the coverage of "Set Your Fields on Fire"

 You can order "Set Your Fields on Fire"for $14.99 through Amazon here.

It's also available on Kindle at $3.99 through Amazon here.
Read an interview I did with AL.com on the book here.   
Here's my appearance on the Charisma Network's CPOP Podcast. 
Here's an interview I did with The Anniston Star on the book. 
Shattered Magazine wrote a story about the book here. 
The Alabama Baptist wrote about the book here.
This piece appeared in the Marietta (Ga.) Daily Journal.
Here's the write-up from The Birmingham Times.
Read a story for Village Living here.
This story appeared in The Trussville Tribune and this video.

Here's my appearance on East Alabama Today.
Story and video from WBRC Fox6 here. 
Here's the write-up in The Gadsden Times on the book.
Read a piece I wrote for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
A piece about some inspiring works for me.

This is another interview with the fleegan book blog here. 

Read a piece I did for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
Read another interview with the fleegan book blog here. 

The Transmigration of Timothy Archer by Philip K. Dick

In the first chapter of Romans, the Apostle Paul warns about the consequences of unbelief, saying that those who “suppress the truth in unrighteousness” risk the sure wrath of God.

“For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man…And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper...” (Romans 1:21-23, 28)

Paul goes on to say that such people are worthy of death, and yet they encourage others to follow their examples. I was reminded of this particular passage several times while reading Philip K. Dick’s last novel, “The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.” The title character, an Episcopalian bishop, strikes the reader, to use James’ words from later in the New Testament, as a “double-minded man, unstable in all his ways,” much like the tumult of the wind-harassed waves.

In the mammoth and challenging “Exegesis of Philip K. Dick,” the author says that he conceived Archer as the “fool in Christ,” the kind of California figure one would recognize from the news over the past four decades, attracted to the scent of any passing intellectual fad. Angel Archer, our narrator and the bishop’s daughter-in-law, tells us early on that Archer will die, in effect, because he “mistrusted” Christ.  

The novel opens on Dec. 9, 1980, as Angel is one of millions of people around the world mourning the murder of John Lennon. It is the latest blow in her life, and provides the soundtrack for her delving back into the past. At various moments, we flash back and forth between 1980 and the previous decade.

There is an air of Marshall McLuhan in the book, as the concept of the medium occurs in several forms. Archer pulls books off his shelves to quote long passages, much longer than one would expect in a 250-page novel. No book gets quite the workout of the Bible. Dante’s “Divine Comedy” is referenced, as is Goethe’s “Faust.” The philosophy of Heidegger and Schopenhauer, Beethoven’s Fidelio, the music of the Beatles – the term “media” comes to mind. But medium also means the spiritual go-between practicing contact between the real world and the spiritual, and it can refer to the drugs our three main characters take. Dick is interested in vehicles – for images, ideas, even real vehicles, as a long conversation about cars makes apparent.  

The story catalyst is the moment Angel introduces her father-in-law to her feminist friend Kirsten, and the two begin having an affair. When we (along with Kirsten) meet Archer, he is a well-known spiritual figure, having marched with Martin Luther King Jr. But from the beginning, he comes off as a man in a hurry, chewing on one idea only long enough to provide a taste for the next one. Only one idea that Archer seems done with, though, is the divinity of Christ. Archer’s Christianity seems of the rationalist school, so much so that he is brought up on charges of heresy, which he survives.

This victory gives him hubris, which allows him to flout societal conventions by continuing his affair with Kirsten. It also inspires him to pursue a belief that Jesus’ teachings were not original, but had been stated about 200 years earlier in recently-discovered scrolls by an obscure Jewish sect, the Zadokites. Archer, though, does not retreat from the idea of Christ, but only from the traditional notion of Jesus. This leads him to seek out increasingly esoteric theories – such as whether the Eucharist is actually a mushroom that bestows on whomever consumes it eternal life. When he is asked why God has been “silent” for the last 2,000 years, he does not point to the appearance of Christ as God’s ultimate revelation. He simply says he doesn’t know.

Paul’s thought – that abandoning the anchor of the Gospel from an individual’s thought processes begins the process of drifting into madness – gets a workout in this novel. But Dick examines several forms of what Angel calls “the ferocity of madness,” turning the idea sideways, that faith itself may sometimes resemble madness. Angel, who is not a Christian, understands all too well what she sees happening in Archer’s life, as well as her own. She feels a vain self-satisfaction because she knows Bishop Archer, the celebrity, which keeps her unable to point out to him how he is slowly drifting toward becoming a discredited crank. It is somehow too much to ask for him to believe that a man claiming to be God's Son could return from the dead, but easy for him to embrace the idea that his own son is trying to communicate with him from beyond the grave:

“That this trying out of every possible idea to see if it would fit finally destroyed Tim Archer can’t be disputed. He tried out too many ideas, picked them up, examined them, used them for a while and then discarded them…some of the ideas, however, as if possessing a life of their own, came back around the far side of the barn and got him… The ideas did not work. They got him off the ground and then betrayed him and attacked him; they dumped him, in a sense, before he could dump them.”

Archer increasingly seems, to borrow Flannery O’Connor’s phrase, “Christ-haunted.” He needs Christ, but he has abandoned the familiar Savior concept and cannot focus on a replacement, as there is nothing big enough to fill that hole. We shouldn’t be surprised when we last see Archer in his corporeal form, lost in an Israeli desert, looking for the immortality promised in mushrooms, mistaking it for the Bread of Life. Whether anything will come after for him, strangely enough, requires faith.

Set Your Fields on Fire

The award-winning novel by William Thornton

Available now

Read the first chapter here

Some of the coverage of "Set Your Fields on Fire"

 You can order "Set Your Fields on Fire"for $14.99 through Amazon here.

It's also available on Kindle at $3.99 through Amazon here.
Read an interview I did with AL.com on the book here.   
Here's my appearance on the Charisma Network's CPOP Podcast. 
Here's an interview I did with The Anniston Star on the book. 
Shattered Magazine wrote a story about the book here. 
The Alabama Baptist wrote about the book here.
This piece appeared in the Marietta (Ga.) Daily Journal.
Here's the write-up from The Birmingham Times.
Read a story for Village Living here.
This story appeared in The Trussville Tribune and this video.

Here's my appearance on East Alabama Today.
Story and video from WBRC Fox6 here. 
Here's the write-up in The Gadsden Times on the book.
Read a piece I wrote for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
A piece about some inspiring works for me.

This is another interview with the fleegan book blog here. 

Read a piece I did for WestBow Press about writing the book here.

Read another interview with the fleegan book blog here. 

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami

One of the pleasures of reading Haruki Murakami is in finding the little jokes, the Easter eggs he places in his novels, which somehow arrive in front of us like overstuffed entrees and stingy appetizers at the same time. The title hero of Murakami’s latest novel takes a trip late in the story to Finland, hoping to learn the truth behind a 16-year-old mystery. As he arrives in Helsinki, he tells a taxi driver that he doesn’t like heavy baggage. By the time we reach this moment, we understand he is commenting on the weight of his life.

 “Colorless” opens with Tsukuru contemplating death for six months during his sophomore year in college. The reason: for several years, Tsukuru had four incredibly close friends with whom he shared sports, the arts, education and the slow climb to maturity. The group was comprised of two boys and two girls, all of whom possessed names with colors. All except Tsukuru, which is the reason he is “colorless.”

Tsukuru left their town for school in Tokyo, but returned home to visit. However, one day, one of the members of the group told him they no longer wanted anything to do with him. He must not contact them; he must not see them. There is no explanation given. This becomes the central trauma of Tsukuru’s life, as he is suddenly deprived of his identity and forced to abandon his emotional base and all of his happiest memories.

Later, Tsukuru describes the moment as being hurled into the ocean from the deck of a ship, left in the dark waves alone as the vessel surges on. The moment changes how Tsukuru sees himself. His nickname takes on new resonance, as he truly sees himself as colorless, without any distinguishing characteristics or redeeming aspects. He has been stripped of all confidence, and wonders if he can make any meaningful contact with anyone. He remains trapped emotionally in the feelings of his late adolescence, so that when he arrives at his contact with the reader, he is outwardly a successful professional man but a barren, stunted soul within.

Like Murakami’s other work, the novel’s passages melt into a fusion of the temporal and the spiritual, the real and the dream. Past, present and future mingle with destiny and reality, faith and facts. One is never sure exactly how accurately Tsukuru perceives the world around him. But as the work unfolds, there is also a sense that he is traveling a path already made for him. Judging by some reviews, the process as rendered in the novel is too superficial, or dwells too long in vague, dreamy passages for some readers. My only criticism is that Tsukuri’s journey seems taken up with several moments of searching for some new way to render the emotional twilight that has already been firmly established. Occasionally, some scene written as a new revelation sounds suspiciously identical to an earlier epiphany.

Slowly Tsukuru is able to rebuild his life. He finishes university, and fulfills a lifetime goal of designing train stations. He recreates himself in Tokyo, and eventually finds a friend in a man named Haida. But that friendship collapses in a way all too familiar, so that Tsukuru continues to live in fear, uncertainty and apprehension about himself and his place in the world. Any attachment may end suddenly, without explanation, due to some still shadowy flaw.

It is only when Tsukuru becomes involved with a woman, Sara, deep into his thirties, that he finally is able to confront the truth of what happened 16 years before. Sara, using social media, discovers what has happened to his friends.

Tsukuru seeks them out, one by one, questioning them and finding out why he is no longer among them. What struck me as most lifelike was the distance time grants to all. Tsukuru discovers that his friends have all travelled different, unexpected paths, yet understandable in hindsight. When his memories of himself collide with their memories of him, he is shocked at how oblivious he was to what his closest friends thought of him. How little we know each other, how little we know ourselves.

There is a perception of the calamity of existence, with Tsukuru seeing in other lives, as he has known in his, that awful, unexpected happenstance can wipe away everything. And despite our best intentions or planning, some things in life are simply gifts from heaven, with no explanation.

“An evil spirit possessed her,” Eri said softly, as if revealing a secret. “It clung to her, breathing coldly on her neck, slowly driving her in a corner. That’s the only thing that can explain all that happened to her. What happened with you, her eating disorder, what happened in Hamamatsu. I never actually wanted to put it into words. It’s like, if I did, it would really exist. So I kept it to myself all this time. I decided to never talk about it, until the day I died. But I don’t mind telling you this now, since we’ll probably never see each other again. And you need to know this. It was an evil spirit – or something close to it. In the end, Yuzu couldn’t escape.”

Murakami’s work happily fuses the commonplace and the ethereal, so we feel, as we often do in life, that the line between coincidence and destiny is not easily discernible. When does bad luck become “an evil spirit?” Perhaps the thing I most enjoyed about this novel was how I felt this apprehension, that wicked things happen in the world, and occasionally we cannot explain the magnitude of it, but merely stand grateful that it has not touched us most potently. Being swallowed by the whale means being consumed in a suffocating darkness that somehow, at the same time, saves us from the storm outside. While Tsukuru survived, not everyone was as lucky.

There is also the question of faith rewarded. Why does Tsukuru keep going? Not even he is sure, but he is a survivor, and he understands that some things cannot be explained, but endured. At one point, Tsukuru hears a story from his friend Haida about an encounter his father had with a man who was convinced he himself would die within a month’s time. He tells a complicated tale about his gaining an ability to see invisible things and learn hidden truths. It sounds like the testimony of a Christian, speaking heavenly truths amid the darkness of a fallen world:  

“I don’t care if you believe it. Because sooner or later you will. Someday you will die. And when you’re dying – I have no idea when or how that will happen, of course – you will definitely remember what I told you. And you will totally accept what I said, and understand every detail of the logic behind it. The real logic. All I did was sow the seeds.” 

The book’s ending isn’t completely satisfying, because we aren’t sure what happens to Tsukuru when he returns to his girlfriend Sara. When we occasionally wander into Murakami’s fantasias, we want a resolution he is unwilling to completely give. But the important thing, he seems to be saying, isn’t Tsukuru’s next step on the pilgrimage, but that he has finally made peace with what came before.  

I previously wrote about Murakami's "after the quake" here. 

Set Your Fields on Fire

The award-winning novel by William Thornton

Available now

Read the first chapter here

Some of the coverage of "Set Your Fields on Fire"

 You can order "Set Your Fields on Fire"for $14.99 through Amazon here.

It's also available on Kindle at $3.99 through Amazon here.
Read an interview I did with AL.com on the book here.   
Here's my appearance on the Charisma Network's CPOP Podcast. 
Here's an interview I did with The Anniston Star on the book. 
Shattered Magazine wrote a story about the book here. 
The Alabama Baptist wrote about the book here.
This piece appeared in the Marietta (Ga.) Daily Journal.
Here's the write-up from The Birmingham Times.
Read a story for Village Living here.
This story appeared in The Trussville Tribune and this video.

Here's my appearance on East Alabama Today.
Story and video from WBRC Fox6 here. 
Here's the write-up in The Gadsden Times on the book.
Read a piece I wrote for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
A piece about some inspiring works for me.

This is another interview with the fleegan book blog here. 

Read a piece I did for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
Read another interview with the fleegan book blog here.