Hyupnosis in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead: Chapter 2 Part 4 of

THE BIG PICTURE: A POST-JUNGIAN MAP OF GLOBAL CINEMA

by James Whitlark, Ph.D.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1991)

…in the course of amnesia’s illustrious career, it has been viewed as the core of traditional hypnosis, the core of psychopathology in general, the core of Freudian psychoanalysis, the core of Jungian complexes, and the core of modern-day Ericksonian hypnosis.…Sometimes it is responsible for the bad effects of repression; sometimes it is applauded for its positive effects in hypnosis. One could get vertigo investigating this puzzle called amnesia. —Stephen Wolinsky, Trances People Live

In the old hypnosis, two of the favorite symptoms of deep trance were catalepsy (during the height of the session) and amnesia (following it). They are certainly not a sine qua non of trance, but they are sufficiently famous so that immobility The Exterminating Angel alludes to the first while Tom Stoppard’s play and movie Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead indicates the second. And such reference may point the unconscious toward hypnosis–even though (or because) in each film the symptoms are not presented literally. With overwhelming repetition, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead develops Hamlet’s theme of multi-faceted denial. For instance, Shakespeare’s Hamlet had found the seemingly simple command “remember me” flit instantly from his brain, though he promised to erase all else from his mind and write “remember me” in a perpetual identification with the father (1.5.97-98). Carrying this further, the movie has all its characters substitute obsessive repetition for the repressed essentials of their lives. The players, for instance, say that they have lost almost their entire repertoire, their raison d’être. Instead, they repeat pieces of it seemingly at random, forgetting what has gone before.

In contrast, The Exterminating Angel shows identities built on direct attachment to the world, an attachment that impedes movement (as inevitably as the immobility of death comes to the rich Egyptians of Exodus brought by the first Exterminating Angel, to which the title alludes). The work Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead shows identities built on attachment to detachment, or more precisely negation–an extreme opposite to pure attachment, but also leading toward death. One of the facets of this amnesia is theatre-of-the-absurd confusion, which contributes to the hypnotic effect and becomes a foundation for an identity formed in defense against understanding frightening truths:

Confusion is a naturalistic trance state, which emerges when the child is overwhelmed by an event, interaction, or emotion. Because of the threat, the child resists experiencing the episode, and it is in the resisting process that a state of confusion or disorientation emerges. Once resisted, the child will protect himself from the non-experienced experience by surrounding it with confusion and creating an “identity” that can meet or stop the overwhelming stimulus. Confusion provides the shift in consciousness out of which the coping mechanisms of the new identity are selected. (Wolinsky 166)

Especially in our age of crushing, geometrically accelerating information, one may well ask, what personality arises from confusion? Appropriately, at Rosencrantz’s and Guildenstern’s introduction, an extreme long-shot reduces to indistinguishable doubles, as Rosencrantz thereafter again and again forgets which is which. According to the script, “The two men look like cowboys in Indian country” (Stoppard 1). Bandannas conceal their faces. Instead of establishing their identity in relationship to a genre, this elusive lead is as intrusive as the blues music that accompanies the scene.

Before the audience has heard an audible word from them, a close-up focuses on their horses' hooves, again making the characters indistinguishable. By those hooves, a light pulses on a coin. Attracted by that rhythmic flickering (comparable to flickering metal foci in stock movies about hypnosis), Rosencrantz seizes it. After they wager on a toss, other gold pieces replace it. Despite their changing coins, one-hundred-fifty-seven repetitions of heads occur in a row. Cameras follow many of these tosses (sometimes in slow motion) and the musical score dramatizes their flickering movement. The characters arrive at a players' cart (reminiscent of the oneiric one in The Seventh Seal). Continuing the currency motif, the First Player talks of the jingle of a single coin (cf. the Zen koan, the sound of one hand clapping). Rosencrantz and Guildenstern wager with him over another toss. When a coin finally turns tails, the protagonists find themselves via a filmic cut magically transported to the interior of Elsinore castle. (Or does the camera depict their amnesia of the trip?)

In the altered consciousness of the film, paranormal events defy logic or statistical analysis. As Hubert Dreyfus remarks in an article on Martin Heidegger, “Science is our religion in the very important sense that science tells us what reality is” (Dreyfus 519). Significantly, Rosencrantz begins experiments of Newton or others but he is distracted and forgets what he is doing each time. The characters’ trance distorts time, as depicted in a fast-forward, then reverse. The protagonists lose the time between their presence in Elsinore and on a boat in mid—ocean.
The movie performs or parodies scenes from Hamlet (some more than once), themselves containing repetitive word play as Hamlet seeks to hide his intentions in mad or witty puns and redundancies. Guildenstern causes Rosencrantz to cry by accusing him of simply echoing his words. According to a commonplace of Shakespeare criticism, Hamlet is about the iterating loop of Original Sin, echoed within the crime in the orchard (alluded to in both dramas). In such a painfully repeating existence, confusion and amnesia are perhaps the only way to ignore the agonizingly obvious, the death that pursues Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from the title onward. Trying to ignore anything that might foreshadow this doom, they are, in a sense, already dead. As The Exterminating Angel was offered as a reductio ad absurdum of immobility (designed to teach the audience its horrors and suggest that they pursue the opposite), so Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is a reductio ad absurdum of inattention. As the characters are distracted so the film itself is a distraction for the audience, an interruption of their compulsive worries and other self-induced trances. In its larger effect on an alert audience, though, its very strangeness may stimulate the development of attention and memory in trying to make sense of it.

Like Buñuel, Stoppard has said that he expected the work’s meaning to emerge in the unconscious of the audience so that it is open to a pluralistic (i.e., stage-six) array of different interpretations (Tom Stoppard, interview, "Ambushes for the Audience: Towards a High Comedy of Ideas," Theatre Quarterly 4.14 (May 1974) as quoted in Tom Stoppard in Conversation, ed. Paul Delaney : 58). Beginning with his previous farce “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear,” Stoppard’s exploration of the unconscious relationship of memory/amnesia to the Shakespearean legacy has been influential, continuing (as Debra Murphy has argued) through the Golden-Lion-winning Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, various productions of Hamlet, as well as Stoppard’s (and Marc Norman’s) screenplay for Shakespeare in Love (1998).

Continue to THE BIG PICTURE Chapter 2 Part 5

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