Hamlet

Of my list of fifty, this was the first film that, as I recount in my autobiography, really made an impression on me when I saw it on television in 1975, with my dad by my side. Precisely in trying to understand how a defect or fault in my father’s character corrupted the whole family dynamics, years later I would ponder much in the words that, in Laurence Olivier’s voice, we listen at the beginning of Hamlet (1948 film):

So oft it chances in particular men
That for some vicious mole of nature in them,
By the o’ergrowth of some complexion,
Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason,
Or by some habit grown too much; that these men–
Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect,
Their virtues else — be they as pure as grace,
Shall in the general censure take corruption
From that particular fault.

As a teenager watching it at home, I was most impressed by Hamlet’s inward-spiralling soliloquies in one of the early scenes, when he is left alone in the hall and the court guests leave. If instead of the forty-year-old actor Olivier, the director had cast a teenage actor of my age—as he appears in Shakespeare’s tragedy!—I would have connected much more with the character. But even so, his soliloquies near the beginning of the film made a big impression on me because that is what I used to do as a teenager, and precisely because of a family tragedy that no one but me seemed to have any introspection about.

However, it is impossible to critique the film without critiquing not only Shakespeare, but the Christian era of which both Shakespeare and I are a part.

As Alice Miller observed in one of her books, the Judeo-Christian commandment to honour the parent has been fatal to the mental health of Christians (and I would add, of atheistic neo-Christians alike). Although Christians destroyed the vast majority of the classical world’s plays, tragedies and comedies, in the little that remains it can be seen that in both Iphigenia and Electra it’s clear that there is maddening mistreatment of their children by their parents. But not in Hamlet where an uncle is the bad guy. Nevertheless, for the Elizabethan period Hamlet was a breakthrough in the right direction, although millennia earlier the Greeks had already reached the marrow of the human soul. In sum, for the time Hamlet definitely represented a leap forward to a more self-conscious self.

Another thing that, now grown up, struck me when I rewatched the film was the character of Ophelia when Hamlet wants to grab her: the personification of the eternal feminine that I’ve been talking about on this site, which also appears in Shakespeare when we listen: ‘In her excellent white bosom, these…’ Hamlet’s scenes with Ophelia in the castle should be paradigmatic of how women will be in the future ethnostate, and are worth seeing. But back to what I said above.

Whites won’t mature as long as they are trapped by Judeo-Christian commandments. Even in areas as distinct from racial preservation as mental disorders (in Shakespearean tragedy we read that the teenage Hamlet was said to be deranged), we can never understand each other unless we transvalue our values to the values of the times of the Greek tragedies. Back then, before the commandment to honour our parents, it was easy to see that Clytemnestra’s mistreatment had affected the mental health of her daughter Electra; or that Iphigenia’s sacrifice by Agamemnon had affected Clytemnestra terribly, and so on. Even the tough Spartans wept at these open-air tragedies when they visited Athens because they reflected what was happening in the real world.

So much do Christian ethics permeate the secular world that even in his Dictionnaire philosophique Voltaire says that ‘It is natural for children to honour their parents’, and the so-called mental health professionals of our times feel the same way. In our century, the Judeo-Christian injunction to honour the parent, now secularised, moves writers to shift the villain of the story, for example from father to uncle as in Harry Potter (and Hamlet!) and only through such a shift is audio-visual drama permitted.

To transvalue all values is to recognise that the tragedies of the classical world were more profound and direct than the indirect tragedies of our Christian era. And even though Shakespeare, like Montaigne, set religion aside in their writings, they still moved on the axiological scale of our age, where the mandate to honour the parent is so profound that there is a whole fraudulent profession, psychiatry, which tries to keep the parental figure out in the cases of traumatised children and adolescents at home (cf. my books in Spanish).