THIS PAGE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY PICPAL.COM THE PICTURE PALACE
| The Hamlet Syndrome |
| Home | Manifesto | Stage | Essay | Videos | Interview | Bibliography | Links | "Chat" |
Jennifer's more than short answer to the question, "Why make a Web site about someone you've never met?" (originally posted prior to 9/11/01)
Now even those once swept up in Net mania have soured on the whole notion of using the Web for anything. It must seem sillier than ever that I (still!) maintain a Web site about someone who'll never know me from Mrs. J. L. Plimstock of Plymouth, Devon. As my one last, puny swipe at the encroaching AOL agglomeration, I will try to offer some justification for all this - before the inevitable happens and no one thereafter will be able to conceive of a non-corporate Internet.
A convention peculiar to live theater offers a legitimate comparison to the social experience of navigating a Web site. Actors who leap into the orchestra seats or run around the aisles may be under the impression that they're breaking what's known as "the fourth wall" (the invisible line along the lip of the stage that audience members aren't allowed to cross). What they're really doing is moving it into the audience. The Web has suddenly broken that centuries-old standard by allowing the audience to move the fourth wall back. This *should* intimidate the actors. It is an encroachment of their territory, no matter how delicately negotiated.
The Web helps audience members to handle the difficulties of their situation: The basic contrast of the roles of performer and patron involves their respective approaches to the theatrical experience. An actor must not overthink a role or risk becoming inhibited. Meanwhile, the audience member is more often bullied into *not* thinking (reacting in shock; driven to some emotional outburst by comedy or drama; presented with some paradox or red herring, etc.) and can only readjust, with effort, afterwards. Theatrical collaborators, in film or on stage, are part of an ongoing social experience including rehearsal and repeated performances. By contrast, the theater-goer generally has only one experience to go by, without much chance for serious reflection. Web pages, being collaborative, cumulative, and available around the clock without interference, allow time, opportunity and active assistance all at once.
[A quick, generalized example of the risk of an unexamined viewing experience is this: A heterosexual woman comes away from some banal film about some otherwise repellent male character with a hook still in her belly, because she swallowed the bait (in the form of an empathetic actor) reflexively. Academics may offer some overall critique of the propagandistic machinations of Hollywood pop culture, but they do nothing for this not so imaginary woman. How many times have you instinctively responded to a genuine show of emotion that only surfaced in a film by accident, or despite the most carefully orchestrated interference? Does it not cue you to confound the performance and the character, or even mistake one for the other? What has anyone ever done to help you make sense of such an absurdity? Do you think it's easier or better to make believe nothing happened? I don't.]
The Web feels creepy because it is creepy, a fact better faced than politely ignored. A Web site, being neither a full-blown social interaction nor a proper publication, is still a "new media" monstrosity that neophytes find unavoidably disturbing. The impression of stumbling across someone hauling their guts out for public view in some one-act freak show results from lack of familiarity with the technology, however. Readers may feel as if someone they just met has told their life story in less than a half hour without proper introductions, because they don't yet realize they have entered a world that renders the notion of proper introductions meaningless.
Yet what you are reading right now is not about begging strangers for love or pity or validation. Odd as this may sound, it isn't personal. It's too late for this to be about me anymore.
I only finally put a small site up in March of 1998 about a particular actor to be pissy, because that actor's name was the one I always used to test the newest entertainment search engine. Each database came touted as a be-all-end-all; every one failed the <warner, david> test. (Even now out of more than two billion URLs, Google finds not anything by Amazon or the IMDB, but pages by someone who may as well be the aforementioned Mrs. Plimstock.) I had one printout of a newspaper article as my starting point, but the detail that kept jumping out from that text at me, about having to force a way out of bed every morning, had nothing to do with any generic subject matter. What I didn't realize at the time, three months after my father's death, was that my obscure practical joke was about to double as an electronic message in a bottle.
Why go to strangers? A strong parallel can be made to the most generic aspects of religion, beyond the shallow comparisons people often make between saints and mass media figures. "What is religion for?" atheists sometimes ask. It's a way of bringing total strangers together on the most abstract terms for those occasions that preclude you from even speaking to your nearest and dearest. In the simplest terms, that sort of orderly convergence of strangers is what eventually transpired on these pages.
Soon enough, I got the first of a constant trickle of responses. That and each from then on was announced from the same point of view - of someone driven to despair by this new medium that claimed to have something for everyone, yet catered to every taste but theirs. Following that came the first of the gifts, stray clippings from personal collections that couldn't possibly be mirrored in any serious research library. The pieces arrived from all points of the globe thanks to a mere handful of strangers. They floated into my view, distracted as I was, as if I had opened to random pages in The Bible or dealt out a series of tarot cards. Stray comments in all those interviews and reviews, not necessarily logically or causally connected in any way and most of which I won't quote out of context here, kept leading me back to the issue of burying a parent for the first time.
Please know that despite my preceding references to divination, the last thing I was looking for was advice on what to do. I couldn't grieve until I could think again. Only robotics experts and Shakespeare seem to know how frightening the notion of beginning to think is. My father's death was something for which he and I had prepared assiduously, for as long as I can remember, for reasons the two of us knew best. I had not realized that once the funeral was over, I would find the rest of my life unaccounted for to the point of being unimaginable - literally beyond my ken.
When people talk or write about a mass media "muse," they only invoke the coarsest aspect of the term as a cute, snide sort of pun not meant to be taken seriously. They don't notice that some people who seem madly absorbed by their icons (of whatever sort) are not engaging in "mere" "idolatry" after all. They are simply and urgently and completely trying to focus.
Shakespeare's Hamlet does not portray insanity as much as how sanity, when defined as the ability to question one's own mental stability, can be a profoundly self-alienating reality. It's not just a matter of having your compass spin out on you. The monumental blankness of unprecedented grief leaches the feeling of pointlessness into everything you do and see, until nothing's free of it. Even your sleep becomes devoid of dreams, because your mental processes have been halted at their deepest level. It does indeed make one "dull and muddy-mettled," and "lack gall/To make oppression bitter." Everything people pat themselves on the back about as being a matter of will becomes thoughtlessly easy, and vice-versa. You literally become beside yourself. "That monster custom," winding along its course, affects nothing. One day I noticed my mother going on a trip without her ring. I knew, without asking why, that she did not want to travel alone with it on and invite the question of why her husband was not at her side. I understood it was her right and not my business. Yet without the slightest hint of a loss of control a wash of resentment came over me. Not acting on the urge was automatic, but willing away the feeling was impossible. Usually you can realize you're being childish, or talk some sense into yourself in some way, and irrational emotion is banished as simply as effect follows cause. On this occasion, for the first and only time, I lived a double mental life in which I carried on normal conversation as if nothing was amiss, even while this mindless rage cycled pointlessly inside of me. Such is the horror of sanity. That's what The Hamlet Syndrome feels like.
Hamlet, the most quoted and borrowed from, and most widely read and seen of all cornerstones of Western drama, can seem far too familiar to experience as if never before. Without fully realizing, I was about to try to do just that, by way of the reviewers' contemporary reports of the Hall/Warner production in mid-60s London. Having seen the BBC television production at fifteen, I remembered it as the adolescent's Hamlet, a grand melodrama in which the hero gets to run around and break things and smack at people and die a spectacular death. (From that perspective, the character is hardly different from my pre-schooler's King Kong, who - once you think about it - basically gets to do all those things in a far shorter period of time.) This new and completely imaginary Hamlet was to be completely different.
Warner's was a Hamlet whose questions were not rhetorical. That approach apparently still marks his interpretation as unique, the work of "one with the capacity to externalise... self-distrust" [Harold Matthews, Theatre World, October 1965]. As I reread them, the critics' asides about being in one's own head began to refer less to the self-absorption of youth, or the typical ingenue's preference for make-believe over communication, than to that crippling implosion of self-awareness that grief ignites. Ronald Bryden [New Statesman, 27 August 1965] set the stage this way: "As he denounces the firmament to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern... [Warner's Hamlet] watches to see if they find his pessimism as impressive as it sounds. Do they believe it? Does he?" *Can* he? Doesn't it sound unbelievable - a grasping at superlative cliches, "an almost pedantically articulate attempt to impose a meaning on... inner chaos" [The Times, 20 August 1965]? Doesn't the death of childhood render us, if only temporarily, emotionally incoherent?
Ask yourself the question, "How do I feel?" It is not rhetorical. What's the most fundamental way you can ask that question, when you cannot feel much of anything at all? Ask again; see if you can hear its shifting inflections echo inside you. It's an actor's exercise that may help you someday in real life, when The Hamlet Syndrome places you in that phenomenal mental realm beyond the reach of metaphors.
Now, after some sort of mysteriously unconscious progress, I can dream again. I no longer wake up feeling like a stranger in my own bed. Not that it's anyone's business. The real reason to keep these pages in place is the possibility that they might give someone else a chance to focus when they need it. We'll see about that.
[Top]
| Please link this, not repost; thanks! |
| What's New at PicPal.Com! |