No year-end wrap-up
Before talking about Station Eleven, I’ll say that I’m not going to do a yearly write up of the stuff I watched in 2021. I watched some stuff, most of it was good.
Station Eleven, no spoilers in this part
But I do want to write about what I’m currently watching, Station Eleven on HBO. It’s a good thing that Shanon is in charge of our TV schedule, because there’s little chance I would have chosen on my own to watch a series where 99% of the world dies of a respiratory virus on my own. But Shanon had read the book and some good advance reviews of the show.
If you aren’t sure you want to watch a show about a pandemic, the good thing is that it appears to get past the “people getting sick and dying” part in the first episode (at this point I have only seen episodes one and two of what will be a ten part series). The flu in the show is much more transmissible and more fatal than covid-19 and people appear to get sick and die within a matter of hours.
So here are non-spoiler-y things I like about the first two episodes:
It’s set partly in Chicago. I squealed just a little when someone had a Northwestern mug.
It’s beautifully directed and shot by Hiro Murai and his cinematographers, including haunting visions of Chicago in the post-anthropocene.
It’s beautifully acted, especially by Matilda Lawler, the child actress who plays the young Kirsten. More on acting in the spoiler section, below.
The way the show shifts tone between humor, drama, and tense horror-style moments is compelling.
The fact that it’s based on a well-regarded book (one that Shanon really liked) gives me confidence that the weird stuff won’t just run the show completely off the rails and rob us of some kind of satisfactory ending (The Lost Effect).
Ok, below there are spoilers for the first two episodes, but just “I talk about what happens” spoilers not “I explain all the tiny details” spoilers (because I can’t explain all the tiny details, plus that’s tedious.).
Station Eleven, some spoilers
Twenty years after the pandemic, Kirsten (played as an adult by Mackenzie Davis) is an actress in a traveling Shakespeare troupe. And she’s built up to be a special actress—people remember her performances from years past, children in the towns they come to ask where she is, she’s playing Hamlet for heaven’s sake.
And as someone who wanted very badly to be an actor for part of my life, I really love art about the theatre. I love Topsy-Turvy, I love Vanya on 42nd Street, Birdman, all kinds of films about the theatre and acting. One of the problems though, is that when a character is built up to be “a great actor,” you now have a real-life actor playing a character actor who is then acting in the fiction (perhaps one reason why the play in Station Eleven is Hamlet which has its own play-within-the-play scene). And then the real actor has to like act harder or something to show us what a good actor the character is.
And I really love the way Station Eleven handles this. We see Kirsten in Hamlet’s first scene in the play, as s/he banters and spars with Gertrude and Claudius. The scene has its share of famous lines (“a little more than kin and less than kind”; “not so my lord; I am too much i’ the sun”; the “O that this too, too solid flesh would melt” soliloquy) and in Station Eleven, they concentrate on the exchange between Gertrude and Hamlet where she asks her son about his grief for his father, “Why seems it so particular with thee?” And we know how Hamlet replies:
Seems, madam! nay it is; I know not ‘seems.’
’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected ‘havior of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly: these indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play:
But I have that within which passeth show;
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.
But when Kirsten’s Hamlet replies, it’s not with snark or contempt for Gertrude, but with pure raw pain, loss, and grief. The show cuts between adult Kirsten onstage and child Kirsten first realizing that her parents and everyone else she knows is now dead, and it seems like that pain is still pure and fresh and pouring out through Hamlet.
As the creepy guy says to Kirsten after the performance, “You’re charged with that Day Zero pain. It’s like you never left.” And that specificity, that reason why people respond to her is much better than her just being a “great actress.”
I think acting teacher Sanford Meisner wrote something like, every actor needs to be able to draw on past trauma but fortunately just going through adolescence provides enough to draw on for your entire life. Kirsten is doing what I’m pretty sure Meisner explicitly says not to do—drawing on unresolved, present trauma, something that is true and real to her, not something in the past—and of course this is what Hamlet is saying as well. Like Hamlet, Kirsten could be playing but she’s not. “Seems, madam! nay it is; I know not ‘seems.’”
Of course the other thought I had was “good lord she’s got like four more hours onstage with this intensity! Pace yourself!” Audience must have been worn out by the end!
Reservation Dogs was my favourite telly this year. Have you seen it?