Shooting Up The Abyss: Pandemic Malaise in Grand Theft Hamlet

SCENE I. – LOS SANTOS. A STREET

Enter RUSTIC MASCARA, POLONIUS

Who’s there?

Dawn breaks through the mist. It spills down pink and purple hills. In the city, a breeze ushers stray garbage down silent streets. There’s a loon somewhere, by a lake, but it’s still.

Who’s there?

Forms are about, as yet unintelligible. Perhaps someone I know? No one here is entirely recognizable to me. This may be a product of time and distance, of my isolation. Those who are closest to me have become mere voices and those farther removed have faded into the realm of ideas. If they were to appear before me now, I almost wouldn’t believe it. I’d call it an apparition, a figment of my imagination materialized. 

Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself.

A ghost? No, the idea of a ghost doesn’t hold water. It exists in my mind. It’s a coping mechanism, a way to push back the unbearable truth of solitude. This ghost looks—

…like the king…

—like the thing that was my compass, the thing that gave me purpose before I was shut away and lost the locus of ideas and of everyone I knew. A place? A place. I remember how we all looked each other in the eyes and communed. Another life. Right now I am standing on this empty street, and it is only I who haunt it.

I walk by the shore, the city, the forest, the ruins of abandoned structures. All these scenes are disjointed, like the geography of dreams. But then I turn a corner and I’ve stumbled upon the ghost:

A theater.

* * *

What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord,

Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff,

That beetles o’er his base into the sea,

And there assume some other horrible form,

Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason

And draw you into madness?

I hesitate to write about the pandemic because it is so recent and so collective that it feels simultaneously too imposing and too tired to touch. I also, like many, many others, simply don’t wish to revisit it. It is a type of trauma, but because my experience of it is not unique, there is no real catharsis in exorcizing it. Somehow, there’s nothing to “work through” if everyone else has gone through the same thing. And it doesn’t live in my body or my mind as a trauma. I was so lonely and so distressed for such a long time, but the overriding feeling I have on the topic is boredom. I’m too bored of the pandemic and too tired of it to devote any kind of thought to it. I have actively avoided films, TV, and books about it, though the general dearth of such material suggests I’m not the only one who feels this way. So perhaps it’s a good thing I didn’t know Grand Theft Hamlet was a pandemic film. 

In January, 2021, the UK had just entered its third lockdown, and so actors Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen were out of work, their theaters shuttered. They found a means of actively socializing with each other playing Grand Theft Auto. In what otherwise could be considered detrimental to one’s mental health and social skills, the hours a day the pair began to spend in Los Santos, the hyper violent facsimile of Los Angeles in which the game takes place, became a tether to human connection and a way to enact a kind of quotidian routine. In the beginning, the side missions of the game doled out micro doses of purpose, and the rote nature of it all provided a backdrop for long, free form conversations, but it didn’t take long for them to grow bored. Grand Theft Auto isn’t a particularly challenging or intellectual endeavor. It’s meant for decompression. 

Los Santos is designed to be a realistic rendition of a city, and the facades of daily life are there, but functionally it is really a collection of empty stages for violence to play out. Warehouses, parking garages, beaches, alleyways. Aesthetically, it’s the Los Angeles of The Fast and The Furious, but spiritually it’s the Los Angeles of Reservoir Dogs. The fast cars are almost incidental; it’s not a racing game, it’s a world full of live players who are all armed potential threats. Missions in the game often involve organized crime and all interactions are hostile. If one plays with a strategy, tension can be allowed to build, but for many there is no strategy; the fun is in the havoc, in the random violence. Los Santos is not a place for working out problems, it’s a place for subverting them. 

It is all the more surprising then, when Sam and Mark stumble upon an empty amphitheater in Los Santos. Almost certainly, the game designers were thinking of a concert space in this moment of world building, but Sam and Mark immediately see it for its theatrical potential. They hop their Ed Hardy-clothed avatars upon the stage and begin reciting Shakespeare. It doesn’t take long for one of them to suggest the loftiest of side missions: staging a production of Hamlet within the world of Grand Theft Auto. 

Theoretically, their obstacle is an emotional and intellectual one. People enter Los Santos for an easy release—the quick, animal release of letting out a primal scream or smashing a plate—and Sam and Mark would be asking those they encounter to engage in something completely antithetical to achieving those ends. Their biggest hurdle, they anticipate, will be convincing people to engage in the protracted exercise of theater, to commune with each other through art and perhaps share a raw emotional experience.

Much of Shakespeare hinges on poor communication and ends in tragedy that could have been avoided had everyone not been so strange and avoidant and jumped to wild conclusions. This is also the experience of Sam and Mark in advertising their auditions. More often than not, they are shot and killed or forced to flee before they can finish a sentence. They are continually forced to adjust their approach, turning around and approaching people backwards or shouting a question and then immediately running away. Their efforts are not met with great reward, and in one instance they accidentally draw the police into a shooting match, a moment which contains maybe the best line of the film: “You can’t stop art, motherfuckers!” They regroup and post an audition notice.

* * *

There is a point in Hamlet when a play is staged within the play. Suspicious of Claudius in the death of his father, Hamlet intends to gauge the former’s guilt in his reaction to a play containing a murder scene closely resembling the recent regicide. In the moment, Sam and Mark seem unaware of their parallel exercise. 

The choice of Hamlet is a natural one for a couple of classically trained actors to make. It is, next to Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth, Shakespeare’s most well known play, and the most likely for the two to already have mostly memorized. The familiarity of it certainly makes it an easier sell to the Los Santos public than Coriolanus or Measure For Measure. And it has some of the juiciest roles. But Hamlet is also a play about madness and isolation. It’s about internal monologues and grandiose ideas that gestate in the mind without an outlet. Freud found it to be a critical text for the illustration of neuroses. And by early 2021, almost a year into the pandemic, but still before widespread availability of a vaccine, seclusion and paranoia had led many of us, Sam and Mark included, to a neurotic nadir. Hungry for human interaction but rusty on how to perform it, unsure of what the rules were anymore. 

The two recruit Sam’s wife, Penny, also an actor, into the fold, and though she’s very game for the idea, she’s new to open world video games, and her outsider perspective allows her to bluntly state the subconscious mechanisms at play without respect for the facade. She identifies the escapism of the activity and occasionally laments the detrimental effects Sam’s full submersion has had on their family. She openly discusses loneliness and depression, both her own and her companions’. She ponders the state of their relationship and asks Mark about his grief. 

It proves difficult to recruit actors; many show up and leave randomly, some show interest but then disappear; a middle aged woman using her nephew’s account is cast only to be replaced by her uninterested nephew, who promptly quits. But the ones who do stick around naturally open up to more intimate conversation. Many have dealt with grief or unemployment, many are sad and looking for a way to distract themselves. 

There is a strange effect that happens in the theater at about this point in the film. The entirety of Grand Theft Hamlet takes place in the world of GTA, edited by directors Sam Crane and Penny Grylls through screen grabs, so Sam, Mark, and Penny are only known through their avatars, which are somewhat comically rendered. They occupy an uncanny humanoid valley, their movements are jolty and clumsy, and they possess a short list of exaggerated emotional expressions. The incongruity of the dialogue and the visuals of the video game are the source of much of the humor, and for the first half of the film the laughs are frequent, but then it falls off. This is not a product of the filmmaking, it marks a point at which the audience begins to accept the avatars as the format of delivery. As everyone begins to reveal themselves, their avatars start to lose their comedic power; they cease to be a barrier. And so, when they manage to pull off a livestream of their production, with impressive attendance, and reach the famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy, there is no humor, because we know the suffering that each each of them has toiled with and work it took to achieve the performance. We know, concretely, that each has weighed the futility of what Mark refers to as, “the crushing inevitability of your pointless life.”

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn

No traveler returns, puzzles the will,

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of

Loneliness is an abyss, and it makes one a bit solipsistic. The voids around you are only filled with ghosts, ghosts of former lives and desires, of faded relationships and disregarded aspirations. Ghosts that taunt like the one that taunted Hamlet into delusion. A vision of his lost father, his compass, without whom he was suddenly adrift. And there in Grand Theft Auto, through ridiculous avatars, these actors did banish the ghosts, at least for a moment.