The Crying Game: What the Hamnett Debate on Grief and Porn Says About Women, Cinema, and Colossal Falcons | film

‘IIs it porn or is it art?” A familiar question, even an old one, where nudity is concerned, and (excuse the thumbnail) well resolved – that is to say: we leave it to the tastemakers to decide, which tips the scales towards ‘art’ if one or both of the protagonists are not good looking.

“Is it grief porn or is it grief art?” is a more puzzling question. Sadness porn, in relation to cinema, may indicate that the film in question is emotionally manipulative and formulaic; The Art of Sadness suggests that the film unleashes universal and real emotions.

It’s strangely circular. In a film about grief, the valuable quality is depth of feeling; It stands or falls by how deeply the protagonist(s) experience emotion, and the audience validates its intensity, and buys itself into the imaginative contract, by its ability to reflect that depth. You decide whether it is art only if you already feel it so deeply that it should be so, in other words. If death leaves you cold and you find the ensuing emotion manipulative and tyrannical, this logic is deeply disturbing.

I’m talking primarily, of course, about Hamnet, the 2020 dramatization of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel. On paper, it should be art: Jesse Buckley and Paul Mescal are more than wonderful, both with qualities of gravitas and believability that are always evident; They probably couldn’t have turned it off if they tried. It’s visually sumptuous and the dialogue is by contrast simple and clever.

It can’t be spoiled – but if you don’t know anything, look away now – to say that Hamnet, the only child of William Shakespeare and Agnes, née Hathaway, died of the plague at the age of 11. The death of a child is an unparalleled tragedy, so any remark about an actor’s on-screen charm – for example, “I didn’t find him that charming, I preferred girls” – is taboo, fair enough.

There are a number of principles of screen grief that give it intellectual heft and agenda: the first is that women feel things more deeply than men, especially the patriarchal bond, but also their connection to the natural world, and to unspoken things, like magic. Buckley curls up in tree roots, sometimes unable to breathe from anxiety for her daughter, anxiety that stems from maternal love mixed with charming obsession. She expected a deathbed, and it only included two children, so, with three children, something terrible was bound to happen.

These feminine qualities also define the film adaptation of Helen Macdonald’s memoir H Is for Hawk – once again, two wonderful actors, Claire Foy and Brendan Gleeson as daughter and father, played the only way they know how, which is to say, well. When her father suddenly dies, Foy retreats to a secluded raptor community, harking back to her ornithological connection to him, and her adamant refusal, through obsessive hand-feeding of Mabel the bird, and corresponding neglect of self-care, to allow Gleason to die. True grief stops all clocks, that’s the message, and only women know how to do that, partly because only women really feel it, and partly because only they can mess with time.

It sounds a bit dogmatic, but what makes it sad is that you can only join the character in their swamp; Whether it’s Buckley’s roar or Foy’s eerie silence, emotion allows no outside influences; Either you feel it with them without a doubt or you don’t understand.

“The natural world” is a generalization. What I’m really talking about is the birds; Agnes has a falcon, and Shakespeare’s first offer of a date is to make her a glove (he is from a glove-making family). Bird watchers were upset that the film used a Harris’s hawk, which was impossible in ornithology in 1680s England (it wasn’t introduced until the 1960s – why they couldn’t find a goshawk, other people have wondered, not me). In the book, it is a kestrel and indicates Agnes’ free, soaring spirit and challenge to tradition. In the film, the winged creature plays a lighter role than Ted Hughes, as do the hawk in H Is for Hawk, the size-changing parrot in Tuesday 2024, and the crow in last year’s The Thing With Feathers. These birds, one way or another, are all death.

Tuesday Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays Zora, the mother who cannot accept the impending death of Lola Petticrew’s very winning character. The Thing with Feathers is an adaptation of Max Porter’s extraordinarily poignant novel Grief is the Thing with Feathers, which doesn’t even come close to reminding you of the power of the novel. As memento mori, birds no longer mean liberation, but rather the opposite; The camera lingers on their eyes, their eerie alertness, their sudden movements – especially in H Is for Hawk: all the bits about birds, in other words, that make you feel terrible if one flies into your house, because they’re disgusting.

Again, there is something prescriptive about the images in each case; If you do not prefer feathers to fur, if you cannot see the greatness in a creature unless it allows you to pet it, if you cannot tolerate its independence, love it and set it free, if you cannot enjoy it because it is so ugly, it is death, You are missing some qualities of originality and wisdom.

Tuesday stands out among all these films for having a sense of humor: it got lukewarm reviews, which were fair, but also reflected the fact that no one knew at the time that many other “Birds Like Death” films would follow that were worse. Louis-Dreyfus’ avoidance is really funny; She’s constantly embarking on a ridiculous and urgent task—selling her collection of taxidermy mice, and needing urine—while her daughter tries to get her attention until she dies.

In general, a sad film will not tolerate any comedy; You get the odd cliché reference to the joy of loss, classically (as in H Is for Hawk) the family laughs when the funeral director shows them some paltry coffins, but the absurdity of the wider annihilation is too much to bear. Denial, delusion, avoidance, the brutal intrusion of banal normalcy into moments of existential suffering—all this is very funny, as you will know from any lived experience of grief; But sadness porn does not support laughter any more than regular porn. This may be the single best test of whether or not this is art.

“The crow is my father’s everything,” says Benedict Cumberbatch in the press notes for The Thing with Feathers. “He’s an instigator. He’s an angry harbinger of sadness and incompetence. He’s my worst inner critic. He’s a guardian angel. He’s a protector.” It is, of course, a man’s melancholy, so when he is unable to speak, it is masculine insufficiency rather than feminine mystique, and when it comes to his feathered imagination, it is his science of withdrawal from the abyss, rather than a portal out of stupor, back into the world (as Mabel is for Helen).

Men get a great deal of grief from the tropes of grief as depth, because it would be uncommon to find dignity in ineffability. Chloe Zhao, Hamnet’s director, said that while making the film she discovered that “female leadership — and this doesn’t just mean women, it means the feminine consciousness of all people — [draws] The strength of intuition, relationships, community, and interdependence.” Which, again, is a bit circular, since Agnes’ melancholy cycle largely displays none of those values, and yet they must be there, because women feel them, and if any man feels them, it is because he is tapping into his feminine consciousness.

Whether it’s grief porn or grief art, there’s nothing wrong with enjoying it by the way. Each one to his own.