DVD

Aging is so weird. The first time I saw Hamlet the experience took two and a half hours: because that’s how long Laurence Olivier edited his movie for. The first time I read it it took me maybe five hours, Lear probably six hours. That’s because when I’m reading, I look out the window, or in my belly button, as often as I look at the page. I’m not just wool gathering; I find Hamlet out the widow or in my belly button when reading Hamlet and looking out the window. In the theater, in the movie, the lines are timed. When I’m reading I take my time. And the longer I take the more I see.
And of course it took me half a dozen years between seeing the movie and reading the play, and weeks and weeks between the assignment being due and my getting around to it.

With London weather so iffy, daylight so short, the original performances of Hamlet or Lear would have been sped through. The professor has fits at how much the movie production cut in its version: think how much Richard Burbage and the Kings Men might have cut on a blustery afternoon. It’s a play. Theater is a business. It’s not the Easter mass, it’s not the bishop’s sermon. It’s incomprehensible why Shakespeare put so much into it. Because he could? Because it amused him to?

What it is is so richly layered, so redundant -- not in the English teacher’s trivial sense but in the engineer’s profound sense -- that the audience member who understands 90% of the words and the audience member who understands 30% of the words are still seeing much the same drama. You could hear none of the words, watch from a blimp, and still experience some of the story, some of the drama.

The last time I read Lear it took me three days. That was thirty-odd years ago. I don’t dare read it again. If I read it again it might well take me three years.

It took me years and years to read War and Peace some parts I read slower than the characters were living it. When WBAI radio decided to read it out loud, continuously, they scheduled a week. Who knows how many of us read along, staying up all night, every night: thousands of us for sure. It went faster than anticipated and we listened to lots of Russian music during the breaks. Some parts we read repeatedly.

But Olivier’s Hamlet, at the Thalia theater would take one hundred fifty-five minutes: for the matinee, for Saturday night. And that’s one reason I loved movies. Empty your bladder before it starts: because it keeps going. You’ve got to sit and pay attention for however long the company edited it at: an hour and a half, two hours, sometimes longer. Olivier, Bogart, Orson Wells, says the line. Pay attention or you’ve missed it.

Until VCRs, DVDs. Now it can take me all day and all night to watch a one hundred twenty minute movie. The DVD for Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander has been siting next to the Macintosh for weeks now. I’ve watched one scene. It was so great I had to pause it and catch my breath, write emails about it, look up the cast at IMDb.com. Good God: Gunnar Bjöornstrand and Erland Josephson on the same celluloid!

more in a bit