Thanks for being here. For paid subscribers, a shorter companion to this essay will come later in the week thinking about Ophelia in Robert Icke’s Hamlet, David Lynch, and bodily injury. If you want to read more, and catch upcoming locked podcasts, consider updating your subscription plan. And if you’ve made it here without subscribing, you can do that here:
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I don’t know this yet, but I’m going to a wake. At the bottom of my building’s stairs, I notice the heel of my left clog is disintegrating. I consider going back inside and changing into shoes that won’t ruin my night. I take the chance, already a little late. By the time I reach the 2 at Bergen Street, I know I’m going to have to find a new pair of shoes. Again I have the thought to turn around, but I don’t.
I exit the train at Wall Street around 8 PM. The tall buildings are surrounded by a blue darkness already and it’s silent. There’s a wind that’s cooler than I expected for a day that’s been so hot. I half-expect a tumbleweed made up of gelled fin-bros’ hair to sweep past. Instead of running away spooked, I go to TJ Maxx. My shoes need to be replaced. I hem haw over a pair of sandals in a style I’ve wanted for a while. It’s getting closer to the time I agreed to meet a friend for a drink before the party. I buy the sandals. There’s supposed to be dancing at the party. I already picture myself being the girl who has to remove one of her broken shoes. Either this could be seen as endearing or attention seeking depending on the generosity of fellow party goers.
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I see Hamlet directed by Robert Icke at the Park Armory Theater. The ushers at the Armory Theater seem to take the play’s reimagining of 1200s Denmark to a modern surveillance state to heart. They bark at everyone directions to the bathroom, to keep masks on OVER THE NOSE. No one is disobeying this rule to begin with. I wonder what each of their theater kid villain origin stories are. I’m seeing the play because Hamlet, unoriginally, is my favorite Shakespeare play, and because Alex Lawther, star of my favorite show The End of the Fucking World, is playing the prince.
Of course it is way too hot in the lobby. Of course, the audience is mostly rich people who would refer to themselves as patrons of the arts, as if we were still in Elizabethan times. This would mean they wouldn’t be down in the mud and hay with the peasants, but in the higher rungs of the Globe looking down at us. Here, we are all seated on bleachers with somewhat comfortable seminar chairs. Of course, I’m seated in front of a dude who laughs at every double entendre as if he alone is in on the century-old jokes. (Later in the week, seeing Lost Highway at IFC, I’m seated next to someone who laughs at every Lynchian quirk. The vibes are uncannily similar.) I’m uncomfortable in the conditions, but I think this is the agreement of seeing live theater. You’re not meant to feel like you could fall asleep at any minute. Someone in front of me does anyway.
enjoy this still of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Hamlet
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The party in question is a wrap party for a downtown movie called www.rachelormont.com directed by Peter Vack and starring downtown hotties Betsey Brown, Chloe Cherry, and Dasha Nekrasova. Among throngs of other downtown wannabees, I show up with little expectation that I’ll actually get in. It’s a wrap party but it’s been advertised on Instagram and I’m a plus one, so get in on a technicality. The venue is odd. A multi-level bar facing the freedom tower. Before going in, we chat with some people outside who describe the inside. Airport vibes. Portraits of Spongebob and Patrick (I look for them later but never find them). The section of TJ Maxx homegoods stocked with beach themed live-laugh-love knick knacks. Blue and purple LED light. Eventually we go in. It’s early but there are familiar faces. Every person I talk to asks if I worked on the movie. You were either an extra or someone actually hired to work on the movie. I am neither. People keep talking about the Mike Crumplar substack that came out just hours before the party about the filming. Have you read it? That’s the next question. I haven’t read it, though I scrolled through on the walk over from Broadway. It’s very long. Someone asks me what I do. I say, I’m a writer. Then add, unfortunately. People keep saying www.rachelormont.com is going to be the craziest movie of all time.
I unexpectedly run into a few friends who I follow onto to the dancefloor. I think less about the scene. I do love dancing. Everyone looks stupid dancing, unself-conscious. Even hot people look absolutely ungraceful. On the ceiling, a compilation video projects memes from the accompanying cellectuals IG page. Even after its fourth or fifth run through, I keep watching the images flash across. I’m hardly tipsy but I do feel intoxicated. Everyone here has an idea of what the movie will be like, but like all good horror movies, what’s left to the imagination is best. Through the DJ’s fog machine, I see several sets of twins. Maybe I am hallucinating.
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On the train home, I read Mike’s piece. My feet hurt from the new shoes. It’s late but not as late as the party will go on. When I leave with my friends, the party has really started. I’m tired. The piece is tiring. From the beginning, I have the sense Mike is writing with the intention to avenge himself. What he describes in the piece is humiliating. I don’t know how he withstood two plus hours of ridicule–whether satirical or not–but he did and he wrote about it. Mostly I wonder why. What’s at stake in the article is the issue of criticism. Can someone put a work of art into the world without anyone taking issue with it? The set-up is an ouroboros: Crumps damned Betsey Brown’s Actors, Betsey Brown and Peter Vack damned Crumps’ critique, and Crumps damned their damnation. After the flood come the memes.
battle ground
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There’s a gun, because of course there is, in this Hamlet. On the tickets, we’re warned of it. This seems excessive, but maybe not given the uptick in gun violence that is actually not an uptick but seems more like one because of Twitter. I say to a friend that maybe we are living in the worst times ever. She says no, we just get to read about it. Remember there was the bubonic plague once. The gun is not a passive Chekov kind, but the kind that Hamlet holds to Claudius’ head execution style while he’s in a fit of prayer. The scene is staged to be unclear. Hamlet is either hallucinating Claudius’ confession—they make eye contact–or really interrupting the private moment. So Claudius may see Hamlet but is too overcome by his own confession to be alarmed. Maybe he kind of wants to die. The eye contact is an agreement. But true to the text, Hamlet doesn’t kill Claudius because if he does, Claudius might go to heaven. It’s fitting for being in New York in a time when Catholicism has a foothold and guns are everywhere. It’s fitting when the internet becomes the one place you can martyr yourself and have everyone watch.
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During the dumbshow scene, Hamlet and company join the audience to watch the play Hamlet has directed. A camera pans over their reactions, and catches the scope of the audience seated behind–and our reactions, too. The meta becomes more meta. Play within a play, audience within an audience, camera within a camera.
Peter Vack’s new movie creates the internet within the internet in his new movie. The audience there–extras paid and unpaid–became a human 4chan message board shouting insults, its own dumbshow with a cadence, just not in rhyming iambic pentameter. As with most of the Brown-Vack siblings’ content, it’s unclear what is truth and what is material for another meme (or mimesis, the mangled version of the original idea, what a meme really is, a hall of mirrors). An audience can’t be aware of itself, only what’s happening in front of it. Suddenly, you have a tomato in your hand. What can you do with it but throw it?
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Anyone can be a critic. Most people at the party have a critique. He doesn’t really say anything besides gossip. He doesn’t know what the word fascist actually means. I’ve said before, and ask again, does anyone on the internet know what the word fascist means? Under pressure, who could give a coherent definition of fascism in front of a crowd of people yelling at you? Who would actually want to? Third usage of jouissance in three articles. Conceited to think you have something other people want. Talking about it with a friend, she preempts my criticism with my own favorite phrase, self-serious. I say to someone I don’t think criticism matters.
Without seeing the movie the only criticism one could write is all speculation. So we only have the Crumps piece to critique. What both the scene in question from www.rachelormont.com and the Crumplar piece (that describes it) both ask is what it means to martyr yourself in the name of your art, i.e. in search of a greater truth like Hamlet dies in order to expose what’s been concealed. I’m not sure what truth there is when now the internet is the real world as much as the real world is the internet. Hamlet talks with ghosts, we talk with memes. Anyways, they don’t build statues of critics, but they do build statues of martyrs.
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There are cameras here. Some left sitting on white cloth tables, one in every person’s hand through their phones. Standing near a bar, a man comes up to me and a few others to test his flash. Oh is it working, he asks, then snaps a photo of me that’s from the neck down. How about now, he lifts the camera above his head and snaps. My eyes fill with dots of light. He doesn’t seem to know the other people I’m standing with but he says, wow this is a great photo and takes another from an angle that will behead all of us again.
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Polonius, who is not meant to be taken seriously, even pitied for his foolishness, advises his soon-to-be-wronged son Laertes, to thine own self be true. For Laertes, being true to himself will eventually mean to avenge his father, which is really a way to avenge himself. In The New Yorker review of the play, Icke says about Hamlet, “How can a child follow all of his father’s advice, about thoughts and clothes and manners, and at the same time ‘to thine own self be true’?” Mike Crumplar uses the phrase stay true to myself without self-consciousness in the piece. Say whatever you want but Crumplar does take himself very seriously. And his seriousness is what he believed would protect him. He writes, “Art is serious shit. And New York is a tough place.” Maybe this is where he went wrong in his approach. Not taking on a shit-poster’s persona, not embracing jester’s privilege. Robert Icke also disagrees with the classic interpretation of Hamlet’s instructions to the dumbshow players as orchestrative. He’s not telling the players to perform exactly as he instructs, but instead, to speak plainly so the audience can understand. “Speak the speech I pray you as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue.” Just say it normally.
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What I love so much about Shakespeare’s sonnets is the arrogance of the speaker’s belief his poems can memorialize not only his love of the beloved, but himself. He lives forever through the poem. Hamlet isn’t so optimistic. He laughs at the idea of legacy in the famous grave digger scene. Everyone ends up as a pile of bones. Jester and Caesar. I guess downtown people can be both, and maybe they know this. Throughout the Crumplar piece, he alludes to how what he writes will be bigger and more influential than the movie he’s writing about. I’m not sure if a claim can be made like this. Who decides what is more important? The traditional claim would be critics. But if the downtown scene is accomplishing one thing for the art world it’s undermining the role of the critic. Enter Mike. He comes to the downtown movie scene to kill it, but then realizes, if he kills it now, it might just go to heaven. Then what would there be to write about?
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On the way out of the play, the crowd is bottlenecked. We’re all solemn. It’s a bummer that no matter how many times you watch or read the play, everyone still dies. A man in front of me says, I’m all for innovation but that was just dreadful. I guess he’s referring to the use of cameras, the surveillance footage, Ophelia in a mental hospital, the fencing match at the end, the view into heaven from upstage. Hamlet joins the people he worked so hard to kill. People take their masks off as soon as they hit the theater’s main doors into the now balmy night. I don’t overhear anyone else’s review. Except the one I’m writing in my head.
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Don’t get me wrong. I love a prince of misery.