Hamnet

I originally wrote about how this film relates to Islamic moral ethics regarding death (which I have at the bottom), but after reading some online reviews, I was a bit surprised by some of the discourse.

---

Although I understand why many people believe this film is "emotionally manipulative" or "trauma porn" or "Oscar-bait", and therefore deserves a low rating, I respectfully disagree because I find that perspective slightly flattening. There is much more going on here than just "making you feel sad". The allusions to Orpheus, the mythic qualities of the forest, and the Oedipal triangle between William, Agnes, and Hamlet -- all of these are details that carry more weight than I believe people are giving them credit for.

And just because a film does not provide immediate pleasure and satisfaction doesn't necessarily mean it's not meaningful or worthy of applause. I agree that there is no single objective way to measure a film's value. But the increasingly common habit of treating a film's pleasurableness (?) as a proxy for excellence strikes me as alarming and reflective of a broader impulse to evaluate films mainly in terms of how efficiently they satiate our appetite, give us pleasure, and leave us gratified.
---
I walked out of the movie theater and began traveling back to my apartment. The rain was intermittently pouring down, and I, for whatever reason, felt like I could not bring myself to look anyone in the eye. Instead, I looked down at the beige sidewalk and studied the black dots left by old gum. Every single one was consumed, chewed up, thrown out, and left to rot away on this concrete. Once the mintiness slowly faded into nothingness, it was spat onto the ground and became this black freckle I stepped on.

I was waiting for the crosswalk to give me permission to move when an ensemble of party-goers assembled by my side. They all looked and behaved the exact same way: black shirts, blue jeans, each hunting for ketamine. Above me was the thudding heartbeat of mass-marketed house music. These folks were debating which club to go to next. "Do we go here, or should we go to this other one on East 6th?" was the central predicament for this posse. The conclusion they came to: go into this club, and if there was no ketamine to snort, leave.

I say this because I think the posture taken toward this film, media, and entertainment in general these days is closely analogous to chewing gum and leaving it on the sidewalk, or to hunting for ketamine to keep the fun going. Why must Hamnet, or any movie for that matter, need to make a person feel good in order to qualify as a "good movie"? What if the point of filmmaking is not to give an audience a "fuzzy feeling" on the inside, but to widen the aperture through which they comprehend the world? In other words, why must film serve as a vehicle for pleasure, like chewing gum or ketamine? What if the purpose of a film is not to give you pleasure?

For what it's worth, I am not holier-than-thou in this regard. I, too, want to spend my time on movies worth my time, and I, too, enjoy watching some movies just for the fun of it. In the same way that I am not anti-chewing gum or anti-ketamine, I am not anti-entertainment; but, I am skeptical of a frame of thinking that views film through the lens that if it doesn't immediately gratify us, it should be treated as a failure rather than as an opportunity to think more deeply about things like gender expectations, grief and loss, and parental love. Perhaps the purpose of film is not always to give us a burst of flavor, a quick sensation, and then hunt for the next thing, but rather, to disturb us a little and expand the set of questions we ponder.

Yes, Hamnet leaves a very unpleasant aftertaste. The residue it leaves may include an inability to look people in the eye, mixed with some blank staring at the sidewalk for a few minutes. But the discomfort of viewing a film that interrogates deep human emotions, even if not neatly packaged in a colorful logo, could be precisely what makes this film special in an entertainment landscape that perpetually attempts to maximize pleasure. Although I completely understand why one would not enjoy this film for its deeply saddening plot, I also think it is worth considering that the plot is more than just its sadness and includes important themes of family, love, and grief.
---
What Hamnet and Islamic thought can tell us about mortality

There is a real throughline with this film and Islamic moral thought. William's mom says something about how "you should never take your breath or anyone's breath for granted" or whatever. Islamic thought also treats every breath as if it were a miracle and a privilege.

In this regard, both Hamnet and this strain of Islamic thought hit the same philosophical beat: that life is fragile, contingent, and incredibly proximate to death. In fact, there is a line in the Qur'an that is constantly mistranslated into English that alludes to this. In English, this line translates the word "death" as a verb — i.e., as an action or event that occurs — whereas the original Arabic treats the word "death" as a noun. What that means is that in the original meaning of the word in the Qur'an, death is meant as a state of being. It is something that is ontological, something that is always near, and something that implicitly accompanies every single person you meet. In other words, the division between being alive and being dead is much closer than we often think, and every time we take a breath, we subtly challenge that boundary.

What that means -- and William's mom alludes to this -- is not that we ought to be incredibly morbid and obsess about death but that death can operate as a file upon which we refine our existence. If every breath is a privilege and death is provisional for everyone, then that changes how we use our time, build relationships with others, and understand ourselves, because life is treated like a truly scarce resource.

Put differently, one could reframe the sadness of this movie not as a reminder that the boundary between existence and non-existence is more porous than we often think; that because everyone's lives are limited and could be taken away at any moment, we ought to treat every person we meet with the utmost respect, regardless of who they are or where they are from or what they look like, because they, too, are living on the tightrope act we are on between life and death.