A Game of Questions

[tealin]

WARNING: Excessive consumption of this script may be hazardous to your sanity.

Lately, while working, I've been listening to the DVD of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. It's well-acted and very dialogue-dependent* and the script is fantastically clever and entertaining. The trouble comes when you actually try to figure things out. It's – well, it's theatre of the absurd, so... it's absurd, but one can't help trying to piece things together and try to explain why the title characters are there, how they got there, and ...well, why anything. My roommate has a theory, and it goes like this:

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern ... are dead.

This is a fascinating theory, and if you pay attention you can pick up all sorts of clues that might back it up, but what does it actually solve? Is this some sort of wacky afterlife? How can they die again? Or do they die? Someone reports they do, which isn't conclusive in itself, but in the words of whoever said it, 'That's all we have to go on.'

Now, the theory I had come up with** upon viewing this film in high school is that the Players (or rather the Player and his cohorts) insert these hapless travellers into a work of fiction; they get literally 'caught up in the action' as the Player had promised – so the whole time they're at Elsinore, they're in the play. Not as actors, pretending, but the play, the fundamental thing that a stage production seeks to reproduce. It's sort of like a virtual reality except without the goggly things and the suits; they are actually there.. This is the purpose to the random pages that keep blowing through scenes: they are a visual reminder that we are in a work of fiction. This is an old game to the Players, and I suspect they have gone through this a lot with any number of victims. The Player himself does say he has been here before, and knows his way around – probably the plot as well as the castle, if not better.

This still doesn't explain why Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are wandering around the woods in the first place, or who summoned them ... but for that I draw inspiration from Jasper Fforde: they are fictional characters. The summoning – the first thing they remember – is the author calling them into being, the woods are the sort of inter-fictional limbo from which they must jump into their assigned roles, and the Players and their cart are the intermediaries who perform this function.

Like I said, complete rubbish.

An interesting line, though... when describing what they do, the Player says 'We transport you back into a world of intrigue and illusion' – Back? Is it just an endless cycle?

All scholarly postulating aside, I am still of the opinion that it would be wicked cool if Dreamworks made an animated version with Miguel and Tulio in the title roles. Road to El Dorado is practically theatre of the absurd already (whether it was meant to be or not) and they've got almost exactly the same personalities as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, so why not? At least this movie would actually have a PLOT. And cleverness. And be marketable to a grand total of ... ooh, five people?

*I have to keep my eyes on my work, see. Triplets of Belleville would not be a good movie to listen to while working. I like movies that might as well be radio plays for this purpose.
**Or arrived at without really thinking about it so therefore it's probably all rubbish.

Comments

ros and guil

[thelowkeyloki.livejournal.com]

i prefer the theory that shakespeare just shoved in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Hamlet as filler. characters are expendable, dependable, lovable, they serve the purpose that the author wants them to serve, while others focus on the characters as whatever they want them to be. for instance, i thought Zabini Blaise was an Indian girl when i read Harry Potter, until i was informed otherwise. this is why spin-offs and fanfiction (to a degree) works after all, doesn't it? people take unimportant characters and make them important, or major characters and completely change the author's description to suit their own purpose to express their point. Stoppard took two minor characters and puts the question like this: what were they really doing for the whole play anyway? this one question therefore makes a completely amusing play/movie, and it offers a plausible theory of what they were doing in Elsinore, blending in with their actual Hamlet scenes. Hamlet, one can argue, has a theme of questioning existence, like Hamlet contemplating suicide and death. naturally, Ros and Guil would question their existence (as university students, one would suppose that they study philosophy and other greek works.) Ros and Guil are Dead is actually an excellent example of "what if" or "what was". it really makes you think.


oh yeah, i used this type of theory on my AP Literature exam last year