enjoyed this film so much, i watched it again the next day. picked up a lot
that was missed the first time
regarding the puppet show - within the structure of the play, this is very interesting - can anyone explain why?
The dumb show/puppet show is a small-scale representation of what is going on at large. The puppets represent the Players, and the Players represent their real-life counterparts. What is being acted out through the puppet show and the tragedians snaps back to reality and the small-scale becomes the large-scale.
Think of it like mirrors facing each other--the reflection of the reflection continues to multiply as it reaches to infinity; the Royal Court in Hamlet is being played by the Tragedians, and the Tragedians are played by the puppets.
Stoppard's main theme (along with fatalism, at least as I see it) is the cyclicality of the characters' roles. Every time the play Hamlet is performed, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have to play and replay their respective roles, as do the rest of the characters. That's just the way it is--"It is written," as the Player says. No one "decides" what will happen; Shakespeare wrote the play that way and it will never change no matter how many times it is performed, so they're doomed to play out their roles until "everyone who is marked for death dies" each and every time. The puppet show and dumb show, and the repetition/reflection of each, shows that nothing can be done to alter the actions that will follow. The events have all happened that way in the past, and they will continue to happen that way into the future.
i was hoping the puppets were going to start acting out a play with smaller puppets. x
shareIt has to do with the absurdist element of the play as well as the blurring of the lines between art and reality. It is supposed to be an irrational and absurd shift in the film, but it also illustrates Stoppard's point that the world of R&G lacks order which the player's world has. Art in Stoppard's view allows people to live in a world to find order. Art and the real world are in constant conflict in order to demonstrate the conflict between art and reality.
Hope that makes sense :)
Hamlet in Shakespeare uses The Murder of Gonzago to flush out the king's guilt ('the play's the thing/ Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king'). Hence it's a play within a play.
Stoppard's just having further fun with this. R & G Are Dead it already itself a play within a play in concept, and the dumb-show and the puppet shows are therefore plays-within-a-play-within-a-play (and if you argue that R & G's meeting with the Players actually gets them involved in the action there's an extra level, and they're plays-within-a-play-within-a-play-within-a-play).
I like the idea above that the puppet people should have been shown putting on their own play!!
Just a painted face on a trip down suicide row
great comments, everyone.
sort of reminds you of those russian dolls that have copies of themselves inside themselves, inside themselves...
tried to turn a few people onto this, they couldnt sit through it. wierd. or maybe not. it takes a certain turn of mind to enjoy the thing, apparently.
Yup that's exactly the image I had in mind. That and the videoclip for Bjork's Bachelorette:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJnhaXwK86M
...Which reminds me of Dreyfuss' remark that actors are "the opposite of people". Of course, he meant it in a much lighter sense than what I am about to say; but I'm thinking that actors don't inhabit only one of these Russian dolls worlds, but they are the bridge between one world and the next. These are worlds separated by an invisible wall, through which both the audience, and the actors, can see, but the characters on stage cannot. Theatre (and cinema) is, at least in the case of this movie and its world, a representation, a token impressive both through its own form, and through what it stands for. But, in order to represent, the play needs to separate itself from our reality, to which it remains connected through creation and representation.
Concerning creation, the author does not quite inhabit the Russian doll world she creates, it's more like IT inhabits her; one way or the other, the two ARE connected for a while, during creation (after which the author is just as constrained to observation alone as the audience).
Concerning representation, the actors have a much stranger job - they are allowed to cross the barrier and inhabit the world; but not as free agents, they have to lend their bodies to already written characters, in order to make them visible to the audience. Or to make them alive for the audience. When Dreyfuss' character (!!) says that they need an audience, maybe he also meant to say that the characters don't exist properly unless someone is watching them, so there's nothing for an actor to embody otherwise. Of course though, the primary reason why he said it was the simple idea that theater cannot work and actors cannot survive without an audience.
As to the characters themselves - they are not free agents either, but that's because they are artificial constructions, and without limits and regulations they would disintegrate. So the written laws of their universe are like our physical laws, it's the thing that keeps stuff together . So I guess that Gary Oldman, being constantly surprised and mindful of the physical rules, was sort of becoming aware of the Matrix. OR, perhaps this is inherently happening to a character who becomes self-aware - aside from noting the weirdness of the written world, he also observes the rules of the REAL universe. OR, perhaps it is simply a strange case of contamination, where the world of the actor seeps through the inner fourth wall that separates an actor from his character, who is thus strangely able to observe physics, and build planes and things, none of which existed in the Shakespeare-created universe. And thank goodness that nobody payed attention to his discoveries, or he would have worked like a virus, infecting the whole narrative web of self-awareness. (OR, I've watched too much cyberpunk)
And then again, concerning the actors, maybe they were simply meant as a metanarrative device - which also kind of set them apart from the rest of the world, and gave them the right to execute R&G in the end (because Dreyfuss' character was representing the King of England, and took R&G as characters in the play he was enacting, thus killable and torturable beings, not people with rights and stuff). Maybe an actor is always on the "outside" of the world, on standby, ready to represent, always inhabitable - by his or her own character or by somebody else's contraption.
there's a highway that is curling up like smoke above her shoulder