Remember The Ghost of Hamlet

When Branagh's version of Hamlet came out on DVD in 1997 I was a recent high school graduate. Upon viewing the film with my friends I promptly fell asleep. I've since come to learn that the mark of a great film is whether or not it puts you to sleep (Re: Stalker, 2001, Solaris, anything by Orson Welles).

I'm writing my M.A. thesis about ghosts and what I believe are the ethical ramifications of haunting and memory. Much of the literature, and what in my field we call theory, about ghosts uses the Bard's seminal work as an example. Derrida draws his notion of the Visor Effect, the fact that the ghost can see and not be seen, from Hamlet. He also elaborates on a complex interplay between the quick (people that are alive), specters, and language but I don't understand it yet.

Trauma theory and psychoanalytic theory dealing with ghosts also draw largely from Hamlet. Nikolas Abraham, one of two Freudians that first expanded the field of psychoanalysis to include ghosts, wrote a sixth act of Hamlet with the intention of explaining the ghost. Of course the fact that there is a strong father figure and a strange interaction with the mother in Shakespeare's play only strengthens the tendency toward a psychoanalytic approach to ghosts.

Needless to say, I'm very excited to again watch Branagh's filmic interpretation of Hamlet with it's all-star cast of players. Not only is a beautiful film visually, but Brangh does not cut a single word from Shakespeare's play, which is perhaps his most significant contribution to the long list of films and television versions of the Bard's play (67 according to imdb).

As I try to build support for my thesis, the ethics of haunting, I too will draw from Hamlet. Indeed, the last words uttered by Hamlet's father's ghost are, "Remember me". The ghost of the father, along with the lost souls of Dante's Inferno, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo, Dicken's Marley and of course Cervante's Cave of Montesinos, found in the heart of the novel Don Quixote, want to be remembered, they want to be saved from oblivion by way of remembrance. There is, of course, some corollaries with my personal beliefs about our relation and obligation to our kindred dead. It's not appropriate to discuss them in an M.A. thesis and I think the rapidity with which we read information on the Internet tends to cheapen anything published thereon, so I will leave it at that.

I'm not sure what the point of all this is, I guess that Branagh's version of Hamlet is a great film and that I like it in part because I like ghosts and am writing about them right now. Good times, remember the ghost of Hamlet's father.