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Feb. 22nd, 2026 07:01 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
bookviewcafe_feedSo let’s look more closely at the film Hamnet and the question of exploitation. Is the event of the child’s death and the portrayal of the mother’s grief exploitative, or just an honest exploration of emotion? I think that the purpose is essential, and so is the quality—basically, it’s okay if you’re doing it well and doing it for a good reason.
That is, yes, the end does justify the means. Let’s discuss!
Purpose: The Why of the Events
Dramatic structure—the sequence of events in the plot—has the purpose of giving the audience an experience, ideally one that creates thought, emotion, and meaning. And often there is an element to the sequence that almost tricks the audience into a response. For example, if there’s going to be a betrayal in a story, it’s more effective when it comes soon after a moment of trust. (Hamnet does this—Will’s abandonment is all the more painful because it comes after he and Agnes have suffered together the loss of their son.)
Now sometimes this kind of trick has a nefarious or unworthy purpose, like creating shock or disgust or lust. Think of those scenes where the innocent teens coming upon dismembered body parts in the woods, or where the camera lingers salaciously on what we used to call “gratuitous nudity.” This will be exploitative, right?
And often dramatic structure and viewpoint are used to encourage audience identification with less-than-honorable characters. Sometimes when I’m watching British murder shows, I find myself being irritated enough by victims-to-be that I kind of understand why the murderer kills them. That’s a pretty harmless example, but imagine if I were led to identify with a Nazi character? That’s happening all over TikTok, isn’t it?
It certainly sounds like exploitation. But you know, that nudity could be in a schlocky porn video, or it could be in Romeo and Juliet. The murderer could be in a slash film, or it could be Macbeth. The Nazi could be in a hate-filled disinformation video, or he could be the lonely boy JoJo Rabbit who has Hitler as his imaginary friend.
So it all depends, right? If the purpose is just to make us feel gross and violated and sick, or even worse, excited by evil, that would probably that would be exploitation. But maybe the purpose is to make us examine our apathy or complicity or hypocrisy. Or maybe a character’s death is meant to make us cherish our loved ones and live more fully while we can.
With Hamnet, while I can’t speak for the creators, I think that was indeed one of the purposes of the little boy’s death—to remind us how lucky we are every day we have our children safe with us, and to make good use of the time we have.
Another purpose, I think, is to explore the emotion of grief. Grief is one of those emotions which feels very bad, but nonetheless is life-affirming and love-affirming. Grief is a sign that love is everlasting, that it lasts beyond death. That love persists, I think, is a very important realization. We cannot have love without loss. We know that the people we love will die, and somehow we have to find out a way to deal with this. We know that losing a loved one is going to be the worst experience we ever have in our lives, and yet we still have to love. And then we have to grieve because grief is a way of honoring that lost love.
The ultimate aspect of being human is that we are aware of our own mortality. We know we will die. Now we have just come through a global disaster where twenty million people—two million Americans—died in two years. Did we truly experience that? Do we still grieve? Shouldn’t we still grieve?
I wonder if that outpouring of vicarious grief the audience in my theater was, perhaps, a tiny bit of catharsis for that almost-ignored recent tragedy. Aristotle would no doubt agree—what we couldn’t let ourselves feel for our lost neighbors, we feel for poor little Hamnet.
Aristotle also indicated that one of the purposes of great drama is to teach us empathy. When we feel pity and fear for the characters in a drama, we’re learning what it’s like to be someone else, to feel with someone else. He also saw this as educational—we’re led to consider what we would do in this situation. In Hamnet, for example, we see that there are several ways to grieve, and none of them is “the right way.”
First, we have Agnes’s way. The intensity of her grief is entirely appropriate. She has given her entire heart to this child, and that is shown in her willingness to experience his loss. That is one way she honors him and the time he spent on this earth. But it’s also overwhelming. She can barely manage to take care of her other children, especially after her husband leaves for London again.
But we see a different way of grieving in Will. He withdraws—literally. He leaves his family and all the reminders of the child, and returns to London to write, act, and run a theater troupe. He distracts from grief by throwing himself into his work. This works—he becomes famous and successful. But his ability to work comes at a cost. He has deadened his emotions, and it shows in his treatment of the actors speaking the passages he has written. It also shows in his neglect of his family. He doesn’t even warn Agnes that he is producing a tragedy titled Hamlet—a variation of their son’s name.
Agnes’s grief by this time has become “complicated,” the current term for grief that doesn’t mitigate even after a year. As often happens when grief is unresolved, it has become anger. She turns her pain into fury at her husband for what she sees as, well, an exploitation of their son and their loss. She travels to London to accost him, and arrives just at the start of the performance.
So we have this dynamic of the heart and the head– emotions and intellect. She is emotional, he is rational. And this is a factor in relationship dynamics, that we are drawn to the opposite. The emotional is drawn to the control of the intellectual, and the thinker is drawn to the expressiveness of the feeler. But here we see the cost of the differences. The two of them cannot understand each other. They cannot have empathy for each other, because they feel so separated by this difference between them. And so one of the things I think that the film is playing with is how to resolve this. We are all feeling creatures, and thinking creatures. We might not have equal portions of heart and head, but we each have feelings and thoughts.
If Exploitation Is Done Exceptionally Well, Is It Okay?
I don’t want to spoil this final scene, which is very moving. But it definitely fulfills the dramatic purposes. It completes her journey, as she travels to the place she hates literally “in her son’s name.” It also brings her out of her terrible isolation when she joins with the audience to experience the character’s grief and anger. She also sees Will, who is playing the ghost of Hamlet’s father. And as they exchange gazes across the stage, we witness forgiveness and understanding. She understands now that he does indeed grieve, but in his own way—head, not heart.
(There’s an interesting post-modern twist here. The actor who plays Hamlet in this performance is the elder brother of the actor who played Hamnet. So while Agnes and Will do not know it, being characters themselves, they are looking at what their boy might be if he’d been able to grow up.)
And for Will, this final scene also is a resolution. Earlier in the film, in one of the clumsy moments of this usually elegant film, he stands over the Thames, reciting “To be or not to be” and presumably considering suicide. (This scene, I think, did verge on the manipulative.)
But he then returns to the Globe and his work. Now clearly he’s not being a good husband and father. But one of the difficult realizations for us non-geniuses is that masterpiece makers often are somewhat sociopathic in their ability to ignore what they ought to do, and focus on what they want to do. He is characteristically taking even this most intense of experiences and turning it into poetry—echoing Ben Jonson’s identification of his own lost son as “his best piece of poetry.” His grief isn’t gone, but he is dealing with it in his own way.
Again, Aristotle implies that one of the major purposes of art, especially of drama, is to create empathy, to make us feel for each other, to feel with each other. So in writing this to work through his loss, to make meaning of his son’s life, he is inviting other people to understand and experience grief and mortality.
The last scene shows that everybody in the audience is feeling together—an overwhelming empathy. They are also sharing grief and loss, because this is a broken-hearted London, after three centuries of plague, and a half-century of religious warfare. This sharing of loss shows empathy and sympathy for all those who grieve.
This film poses but does not answer the question: Is it worth it? Was worth it for him to leave his children and his wife in grief, in sorrow, and in pain in order to write the plays we still read 400 years later? Is it worth it? It’s certainly worth it to us, the modern audience. Was it worth it to him? Was it worth it to his family?
When we were discussing this ending, my husband suggested it resolves the conflict between “heart and head” exemplified in Agnes and Will. He reminded me of the concept of the dialectic, which starts out with one position (the thesis), and then presents the opposite position (the antithesis), and then resolves with a “synthesis” bringing together the two in a new way. (This is, btw, a great way to set up a relationship plot.)
What’s the third way here, combining heart and head? Agnes provides the experience of grief, and Will demonstrates the suppression of grief. What was the synthesis bringing together the emotional and the intellectual experiences?
Creativity.
As the director Zhao explains it, this film is about creativity as a primal force, a way to “alchemize one’s grief.”
By combining the experience of loss with the need to analyze that loss, Shakespeare created this great play, making meaning out of loss. After all, if we love, we have to experience grief. And to survive, we have to make some sense of it. And that’s where creativity arises. That’s where literature comes from.
“There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.” — Willa Cather
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