I took an introductory creative writing class when I was doing my undergrad at the University of Calgary. In separate sections we covered poetry, short stories and drama. I don’t remember the context, but at one point the teacher went on a rant about how he couldn’t stand the writing of WO Mitchell (Who Has Seen the Wind).

He was probably being iconoclastic—trying to push and challenge our basic assumptions and imposed regard for CanLit. But he also had a stick up his ass about Mitchell: he called the novel “emotionally manipulative” and “easy”. As in, anybody can write something that pulls on your heartstrings, makes you cry, guides your emotions and creates catharsis in the end. It takes real skill to produce something that subverts and upends convention, while referencing a maximal amount of high art. The teacher’s literature would fit better in a modern art gallery—opaque, difficult to grasp, intentionally mystified, seemingly intellectual yet deliberately solutionless.

I remember thinking, I’d love to be able to write like WO Mitchell! To make someone feel something, and feel it deeply—isn’t that a worthy goal? Isn’t that, frankly, a universal goal of any art and artist? Don’t we want to be guided into a story and its characters, to laugh and cry with them, to experience in tandem their wonder and sadness and discovery and trauma? To step into someone else’s shoes without needing to have the same background or learning or grammar as them, and to have that very experience make us reflect back on our own lives?

I’m guilty of vying for the Ivory Tower School of Writing. I love Samuel Beckett, don’t forget! My list of favourite films include hard-to-crack titles like Memento and The Bothersome Man. I’ve read, and written about, texts which argue that all conventional theatre and literature is coercive, reactionary and politically expeditious (“bread and circuses”).

For example, Augusto Boal, whom I still cite when teaching, wrote about how Greek theatre was actually a vehicle for political control. He argues that, much like religion, art serves the state by regularly allowing its subjects to blow off steam. The moment of catharsis (when you’re weeping because of what has happened to the protagonist) is actually designed to purge your own pity and fear—and desire to rebel—so that tomorrow you will happily show up to your job and duties as a citizen.

I’ve written plays that avoid a simple story and deliberately obfuscate meaning. You know the kind: where afterwards the audience ask each other, “so what did it mean to you?” But these were probably always meant for my fellow theatre students and practitioners, not the general public. Maybe that’s who the creative writing teacher was also trying to write for. And he has a point, particularly today when we can’t sit through an episode of television, let alone a movie, without looking at our phone1.

And yet…

My wife and I watched Hamnet in the cinema the other day. I don’t remember the last time I had such a captivating and emotional experience in a theatre. And it’s not like the plot was shocking: the trailer gave pretty much the whole thing away.

It was the gritty, intense relationship to the characters and their oscillation between happiness and suffering (you know: parenting!). It was the performances, which were in turn given space by the director, Chloé Zhao, to breathe and linger on camera. The writing: sparse yet cutting, with a constant sense of foreboding, and almost no tilting of the hat to the famous play and playwright. And the music by Max Richter, which I didn’t recognize until “On the Nature of Daylight” hits the speakers in the final scene.

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So, I loved it. I remember it. I want to see it again. I was particularly enthralled by one of the central ideas of the movie: that theatre—and film, and all art—can be an act of resurrection. We have a unique human power to recreate, however imperfectly, that which we have lost. And, furthermore, we can make sense of our grief and loss, and even keep kindled something within us through the sheer act of sharing it with others. Ethan Hawke spoke about how art can be “sustenance” a few years ago:

Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about poetry, they have a life to live and they’re not really concerned with Allen Ginsberg’s poems or anybody’s poems. Until... their father dies, you go to a funeral, you lose a child, somebody breaks your heart, they don’t love you any more and all of a sudden you’re desperate for making sense out of this life and “has anybody felt this bad before, how did they come out of this cloud?” Or the inverse, something great. You meet somebody and your heart explodes, you love them so much you can’t even see straight... and that’s when art’s not a luxury, it’s sustenance.

But I wasn’t swept away by Hamnet because I’ve lost a child. Of course, the film made me imagine it happening. So, was my captivation and all of this just well-crafted “emotional manipulation”, à la WO Mitchell or This Is Us (who didn’t cry watching that damn show)? Isaac Butler seems to think so.

In his essay for Slate, Butler argues that Hamnet is a “prestige” film—the kind of movie that does everything it can to win awards and get you to show off to your friends by saying that you’ve actually seen it. Butler, a self-professed lover of Shakespeare, calls Hamnet “beautiful, respectable, and terminally dull”:

Hamnet, meanwhile, is a stately prestige picture, replete with magic-hour pillow shots and delicate silences to signal its importance. It is a textbook version of what the critic Manny Farber called white elephant art. To Farber, white elephant art was that which announced its aspirations to be treated as a masterpiece, “heavily inlaid with ravishing technique” to such an extent that no life can exist within it.

Honestly, I don’t necessarily disagree with Butler’s assessment that Hamnet is “prestige-oriented art”—I don’t know enough about its creation and process, and I certainly don’t care about the Oscars battlefield this year or any other. But for me, Hamnet worked. To say that “no life can exist within it” is flatly untrue for everyone who sat in the theatre with me.

At the end of his piece, Butler says that, “The mirror Hamnet holds up is not to any truth about the human condition but to our clichéd ideas of what makes for a worthy movie.” Maybe I don’t go to the cinema enough anymore to understand the struggle for worthiness, but I think Hamnet rings loudly and originally with the human condition.

It’s not that Butler doesn’t get the film in some way that I do. He is married with kids. He hosted a podcast about Shakespeare. I think, maybe, it just didn’t connect with him. It wasn’t to his taste:

The members of the audience sitting in the movie theater, meanwhile, sob in response. Or at least most of them did, as my wife and I sat in Cobble Hill Cinemas, stone-faced.

That’s okay! In fact, it’s a good thing. I enjoyed reading his piece on Hamnet, and it didn’t detract from my own experience. My undergrad creative writing teacher from over 20 years ago had a good point about Mitchell—but it doesn’t mean we should burn all copies of Who Has Seen the Wind. Unfortunately, the framing of Butler’s article is all about the heroes-and-villains race for Oscar glory, in a culture that seems to value the fight and the rage and the controversy over the sense that we are all individuals with our own sense of meaning and experience.

In a way, the clichés of walking through a modern art gallery, asking “what do you think the piece means”, have a point. Our taste is our guide. Not everything has to be a cultural flashpoint. I loved Hamnet, and you could analyze exactly how and why I’m just basic enough (or pretentious enough—up to you) to do so.

Did you enjoy this piece? What do you want to see more, or less of, in the future? Let me know!

Quote of the Week

“…the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature.”

— Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2