A Review of "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead" & Life

Hamlet said "To be, or not to be; that is the question." Should he choose life or should he choose death? The ultimate underlying, age-old question, of course, is: What is the difference between the two? We only imagine that there is one, but we can't know with certainty until the circle has been completed. And it's knowledge we can't share with others.

As human beings continue to find new and better ways to answer questions, through science, technology, genius, or sheer luck, the questions about death will, hopefully, always remain unanswered and unanswerable, at least to the living. Death may exceed our wildest dreams or confirm our worst nightmares. If we knew it was the former, we would long for and pursue death; the latter, we would dread and fear it more than we do now. Maybe that one unanswered question is necessary for the preservation of our humanity. We can believe, but we can't know. Maybe for what we cannot fathom, there are good reasons we can't know the answer.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who themselves seem to be opposite sides of the same person, completing their own circle, take this ultimate question and throw it back and forth, laugh at it, cry over it, argue and agree, talk and listen, parry and thrust, discuss and examine it throughout the film. Eventually, through their own fault or no fault of their own, they discover the answer. But they're not sharing it with us. They can't.

Their characters represent us all - travelers, questioners, minor players, our lives important only to ourselves and our small circle. And, it is not by accident that the two men are interchangeable and can't remember their own names. They examine basic truisms about life through reflection, metaphor and symbolism. The movie entertains as it enlightens because, as viewers, we are both Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and we are ourselves. They are either side of the same coin, just as we all are both sides, and either side, of ourselves. They give the impression that they have no idea who they are, where they are, or what they're doing. Most of us know the feeling.

Tom Stoppard expands Shakespeare's ideas of contrast and conflict, mirror images and perfect circles, using two minor characters from Hamlet, but also borrowing themes from other Shakespearean works, such as blindness and sight, in King Lear, and well-known themes from lines in As You Like It: "All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances;" and even Romeo & Juliet: "What's in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet."

The artistic intent of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern is to mimic life, as their lives mimic art, by literally and figuratively making fun of truth, masking it, hiding behind it, revealing it, distorting and playing with it and sharing the result with their audience (us), because, if there is no one to see, they (and we) don't exist. Symbolically, we are all both sides of the same coin, and we must chose to use one side or the other, by our beliefs, which organize the chaos of our complicated, impossible to understand world. They're trying to make sense of life just as everyone does and has, likely since we first realized we would die and began to measure time.

Keeping to the theme of mirror images and reflection, the movie ends the way it begins. Coyotes, which, according to some pagan religions, symbolize something that tricks us to make us laugh and help us learn, are howling mournfully while lighthearted banjo music is playing. Almost everything in the movie reflects our humanity back at us and provides us with lessons about life.

The movie, a comedy, seems to be almost a mirror image of the play, a tragedy. If we examine everything we do, and everything we feel, even, perhaps, everything we are or will become, as human beings, we might find that the opposite of what we believe is true as well. Maybe life is a circle and we are each our own center. Or maybe it's a two sided coin and the only thing we control is the choice about which side we'll use. How much we'll spend is not usually up to us. All our lives, as we search for the meaning of life, we may find the meaning of life is in the way we live.

But a truth and a point of view do eventually emerge, because, as the player says, "Truth is a permanent blur in the corner of your eye." The characters, the symbols, the metaphors and even the clichés aren't just contained within the story; the story itself is all of those things.

At the end of the movie, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. At the end of Shakespeare's play, Hamlet, King Hamlet, Prince Hamlet, Gertrude, Polonius, Ophelia, Laertes, Claudius are dead too. The movie and the play have at least one thing in common with one another and with life in general. Everyone dies. No matter what other truths or lies we believe or tell, that basic reality never changes. If life is a perfect circle, where every action has an immediate and opposite reaction, every flip of every coin has an equal chance of landing heads up or heads down, and everyone is "in the same boat," maybe the message we're left with is that death is nothing more or less than a reflected image of life.

We have a beginning and an end.
We have nothing and everything.

We are happy and sad, sick or healthy, rich or poor, good and evil,
fearful and courageous, right and wrong, empty and full,
calm and crazed, complicated or simple,
trusting or skeptical, alone and together, intelligent and ignorant,
important and irrelevant, realistic and idealistic, finders or keepers,
friend and enemy, memory and forgetfulness.
We are nothing and everything.

We see and are blind, hear and are deaf, move and are still,
believe in fact and in fiction, possibility and impossibility, accident and intent,
free will and fate,
heaven and hell,
ourselves and each other.
We know nothing and everything.

We feel pride and humility, love and hate, vengeful or forgiving, jealous and indifferent,
happy or sad,
rage and resignation,
pain and pleasure.
We feel nothing and everything.

We work and play, sleep and wake, talk and listen, argue and agree, want and need,
tell the truth and lie, suffer and celebrate,
reveal and recognize, give and take, progress and regress,
advance and retreat,buy and sell, help and hinder, walk and run,
sink or swim, act and react, feel and touch, lose and gain,
ask and answer,
create and destroy,
offend and defend,
live and then die.
We can do nothing and everything.

We have a future and a past,
We have nothing and everything.