(Oh God. The Student Guildhall is playing Spice Girls at top volume. That has nothing whatsoever to do with this post, I just thought I would spread the pain around.)
Okay. Where was I? For some unfathomable reason it's suddenly really hard to think. Anyway, the next year was my senior year in high school, and we did Hamlet that year. I was in honors English, so we also had to read Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (it may have been only part of the play, I don't really recall now) and watch part of the movie. I didn't remember anything about it really; I think we only watched about 40 minutes worth and called it a day. The only thing I seem to have retained from that experience is that loose sheets of paper were an ongoing visual motif.
So this past week I thought maybe I should actually watch the movie the whole way through, what with this still being my favorite play and all. And I'm usually really wary of watching movies made from books that I'm really attached to, but 1) this was a play, not a book, so it's meant to be performed anyway; and 2) Tom Stoppard directed it, so I figured he wouldn't screw up his own work.
Yeah.
I don't want to be one of those insane people who claims they know the author's work better than the author does, and that they're totally doing it wrong (see: Harry Potter fans). Those people need to stick their heads in a bucket of ice water. But either I've been totally misinterpreting this play for the past seven years (I admit this is a distinct possibility) or Tom Stoppard mangled his own play, or maybe the producer stepped in and mangled it, I don't really know. But in the movie, the ending is very different, and I think it really changed the play, and I didn't like it.
In Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern disappear. Hamlet sends them to England and we never hear from them again; in the last scene we find out they were killed, but they never show up again and we never see them die. They just fail to reappear. I had assumed that part of the point of Tom Stoppard's play was a commentary on the way they just vanish and are never heard from again. Guildenstern has a line in Act 2, delivered to the Player, that was a reference to this:
No, no, no...you've got it all wrong...you can't act death. The fact of it is nothing to do with seeing it happen - it's not gasps and blood and falling about - that isn't what makes it death. It's jut a man failing to reappear, that's all - now you see him, now you don't, that's the only thing that's real: here one minute and gone the next and never coming back - an exit, unobtrusive and unannounced, a disappearance gathering weight as it goes on, until, finally, it is heavy with death.
And then, later on, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are killed, but we don't see it - it happens offstage, and we hear about it in the final scene.
In the movie, however, this line is cut, which made me mad because it's one of my favorites. What really pissed me off, though, is the fact that we see them die. I mean, either I missed the point, or the movie just went off in a totally random direction that ended up doing away with the original point of the play. I don't know. I thought the fact that they vanish in both plays and are never heard from again was the point, but maybe they needed visual drama or something.
I also didn't like Tim Roth's Guildenstern at all. Not one bit. (I always identified with Guildenstern and...no.) But that's a minor matter compared to the fact that either I've been misinterpreting this play for the past seven years, or Tom Stoppard allowed it to get mutilated this way.
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