Hamnet and the Nothing

When we die, what do we become and where do we go? Do we “turn into” Nothing? Do we “return to nature”? What would that even mean? What is nothing? An average undergraduate philosophy student might chime in here and tell you that the question “what is nothing” is actually nonsensical since “nothing” cannot “be.” Nothing is not a force, nor is it really a void created after the fact, as if we were speaking of a contrast between two things or two states of affair… It is always “with” being while somehow not being. In fact, we can’t really speak of “nothing” directly. Heidegger cleverly captures this by asking instead “how is it with the nothing”? (Essay on Metaphysics)

Chloe Zhao explores being and nothingness, love and death, in her recent film “Hamnet,” which is based on a novel of speculative fiction by the same name. It recounts events that might have inspired William Shakespeare in his writing of one of literature’s greatest plays: the Tragedy of Hamlet. The key event, however, is no fiction. Shakespeare’s real life son Hamnet died at the age of 11 years old. Four years later the bard released “Hamlet” (which was the same name as Hamnet at the time).

What I found so fascinating with this movie—other than the fact that it grabbed my heart strings and violently yanked at them—is the pervasive presence of duality. From the depiction of black voids within green forests, to the near death of a child during the mother’s birth pangs. What really affected me for some reason (it might have to do with the constant presence of the myth of Orpheus which Will Shakespeare recounts in the beginning) was the dark thresholds—doors, gates—around which life and love are represented—be it by a wedding or a tapestry of forest trees. To be or not to be that is the question of this film: what is death’s relationship to life, love, being? Being and nothing, these are the central questions not just of Hamnet, but of philosophy and art tout court.

Agnes—Will’s wife—gives birth to their first child by the caves in the forest. Throughout she wears red, the color of the heart and of menstrual blood. We first encounter her curled up amidst roots under trees as if she were the heart of the forest, the maternal spirit of the earth. Will, on the other hand, wears blue. His lofty, intellectual aspirations make him a scholar. He is not “without roots” and is moved by the inspiration of bodily beauty and the cycle of life, but he does soar in and through his work, like Agnes’s hawk. You could oversimplify by contrasting Will and Agnes as you would contrast mind and body. But each embodies both in their own way. Bloody Agnes and Celestial Will always remain within each others orbits, spinning around each other throughout the narrative as if in a dance. Opposites who are themselves by being with the other, yet truly themselves and not the other. Their wholeness is the source of their need—since to give love becomes an ache and a necessity.

It is interesting to me that the recluse Heideggerian filmmaker Terrence Malick stepped out—if only for an instant—from his Hidden Life to publicly praise this movie about being and nothing. Zhao’s film shares many themes with Malick’s work. In his “Tree of Life” Malick contrasts nature and grace between the father and mother in a way that has echoes in Hamnet. From the obsession with doors, hands, and water, to the embedding of characters within landscapes that—to use Heideggerian terms—simultaneously evoke dasein (being there) and das nicht (the nothing).

Speaking of similarities, it is also clear that Hamnet shares a lot with Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016). From the back and forth between Ian and Louise to the dance of Agnes and Will, from the prescience of Louise to the visions of Agnes, and from the love of both mothers to their respective losses (and of course the famous “On the Nature of Daylight” by Max Richter, who composed the score of Hamnet).

The other place duality shows up in the film was in the presence of doppelgängers—a literary technique Shakespeare made liberal use of in his plays. Beside the duality and unity between the two protagonists, Agnes and Will, there is also the scenes of the twin children swapping clothes to trick their father, and then swapping places to trick death. There is of course the swapping places of Will and his son in the play—one dead and missed, the other alive and depressed (not to mention the actors for Hamnet and Hamlet being real life brothers).

A series of echoes successfully produces catharsis by the end due to the subtle chiastic structure of the film. The colliding of Agnes and Will is presented to us as an Orpheus myth. At their wedding Agnes emerges from the nothing, as if from a womb, from matter, into the liminal threshold where Will turns around, like Orpheus, to look at her. Agnes—nature—is ephemeral, like her son. At the Globe we see how the death of Hamnet was in fact the spiritual birth pangs of Will’s producing of the play, of Hamlet—and then and there he turns around to look at Agnes.

The heart of the film, it seems to me, opens with Judith’s sickness. Going into the film with the knowledge of the outcome adds a layer to the scene where Will says goodbye to Hamnet three times before leaving for London. At first the brother and sister seem to symbolically represent life and death—as we see in the near death of Judith at the beginning and her ominous sickness at the end. This representation of duality seems to point to the interchangeability of being and nothing. The symbolism seems to illustrate the illusion of otherness as the source of grief and suffering, salvation from which would be the realization that all is one. But what happens next seems to undermine this: In a gut-wrenching scene, Hamnet gives his life to his sister, tricking death into taking him over her. Suddenly, through this gift, the symbolism of “sameness as otherness” is overcome and transformed into the symbolism of “otherness as the unity of love.” Paradoxically, when the brother takes the place of his sister, a new symbolic unity turns what seemed to be an illusion into an affirmation of the reality of the other. Judith lives. Hamnet has tricked death.

At the denouement, Will, playing the ghost of Hamlet’s father, movingly pronounces his thrice “Adieu,” closing the chiasm. Shakespeare’s gift of his son to the world is universalized through his craft and still brings many together in a cathartic and spiritual unity that only art can accomplish.