Page 146 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

I Know Not Seems / 135

through, always acting on impulse. Laertes symbolizes the simple atti-
tude that he who hesitates is lost. Then again, one can also be lost (as
Laertes almost is when he wrongly turns his wrath on Hamlet) by
failing to think things through. Hamlet's is the opposite approach:
Look before you leap. Its downside is that intellectual consideration
may lead, in Chamberlain's words, to total stasis. "If, like Hamlet,
you begin to doubt your reasons for action—you may be lost."
The following spring, the show received five highly deserved
Emmy Awards; that it is not readily available on home video today
is inexplicable.

The Name of Action
Hamlet
Warner Bros., 1990; Franco Zeffirelli

By the time Zeffirelli mounted the most ambitious Hamlet since
Olivier's, the screen enjoyed relative freedom of image and idea. The
director made the most of it, expanding Olivier's oedipal suggestions
by graphically dramatizing them. On the other hand, Zeffirelli aban-
doned Olivier's most questionable and limiting element, the con-
ception of Hamlet as a man who could not make up his mind. In the
person of Mel Gibson, Zeffirelli's Hamlet is anything but indecisive.
Yet even an ultramasculine hero may be plagued by other intense
inner problems.
So Zeffirelli emphasized the similarity Freud himself noted
between Oedipus the King and Hamlet. For Freud, the two plays and
characters stood the test of time, serving as lasting touchstones for
mankind due to something deep and dark in the human condition
these seemingly different narratives addressed, which was the uni-
versality of the Oedipus complex. For the Greeks, Oedipus may have
seemed a strange story about a man who inadvertently kills his own
father, then sleeps with his mother; in Freud's view, the tale repre-
sents an emotional period through which each male must pass.
Every boy, at some point, resents the father who intrudes, at work-
day's end, into a home that mother and son have up to that point
shared.
Freud saw Hamlet much as Shakespeare did, as a strong man of
action, and cites the scene in which Hamlet, while at sea, defeats a