On Hamnet and False Feeling
Earlier this year, at the cinema, I watched Hamnet (2025) in a state of ambivalence. The music, the imagery, Jesse Buckley's grueling performance brought tears to my eyes again and again. But consciously, even in the grip of feeling, my mind was vigorously opposed to the film, seething, in fact, not least at its revolting sentimentality (all that mawkish business with the twins). Welling up in the theater, I was suspicious of my emotional response. I thought it was wrong.
Whatever its merits, Hamnet is calculated to play upon the emotions, working behind the viewer's back to provoke a particular reaction. As Pauline Kael once noted, it is possible to feel these emotions and, at the same time, resent the manipulation.
I do resent the manipulation. I resent it, too, when I go home for the holidays and see supermarket Christmas commercials, the scenarios equal parts nostalgia and cliché, the sole aim of which is to put the supermarket at the center of a generic fantasy of family and food. Their intentions are transparent, but they are no less effective. I am moved despite myself.
This same suspicion crops up even much higher on the cultural ladder, as, for example, when I listen to Puccini. His music is so lush, so lavish, flooding and overwhelming the listener, yet it often seems to me that it is all feeling without the intelligence of, say, Mozart, perhaps because Puccini lacks restraint. Mimi's aria in La bohème is very beautiful, but even as I am moved I also sense its falsity – not only in the words, which are extravagantly weepy, but also in the music. It luxuriates in itself, constantly verging between verdancy and putrescence.
These works I am talking about are all, in different ways and to differing degrees, pre-processed, pre-digested, arranged to leave little room for thought. They work upon our emotions almost mechanically. They do not lend themselves to individual response. They aim at just one response, whoever the audience may be.
Today, it is widely assumed that an authentic response to a work of art can only be arrived at by clearing your head, experiencing the work, and asking yourself how it makes you feel. If your emotions are stirred, the work is a success; and if tears roll down your face, a triumph. The feeling is authentic, the rest is pretension. From this perspective, suspicion of one's own response is "artificial," a snobbish posturing based on received ideas about what is good and what is bad, about the kind of thing one is supposed to like.
That this position is widely intuitive shows that we have yet to work through the ideological inheritance of the nineteenth century, when feeling was promoted as the arbiter of truth, giving rise to a culture in which the heart was exalted and the head regarded with increasing suspicion. Generating this new culture was a spiritual revolt against the authorities of tradition and reason (which, of course, are themselves in tension). A fetish was made of the "natural" self, an authentic core buried beneath the artificial encumbrances of culture and thought.
One word for all this is "anti-intellectualism." The anti-intellectual sees education, an acculturating process, as distancing the subject from "real" life, filling the head with ideas. In ostensible opposition to the intellect, immediacy gains currency; and feeling (bodily, concrete, warm) is seen as more immediate than thought (disembodied, abstract, cold). The enduring fantasy of nineteenth-century Romanticism, in all its guises, is that we might slough off the artificial trappings of civilization and set our "inner nature" free.
These currents rippled across America almost two centuries ago, most famously in the work of the Transcendentalists. They continue to ripple across America, in resurgent but weakening waves, and outward across the rest of the world, which is unevenly but continually Americanizing in more ways than one.
But feeling is not more natural than thought. Even if the capacity for emotion is evolutionarily prior to that for rational thinking, the latter and its precipitates act back upon and transform the architecture of emotion. Each of us receives an education of feeling whether we know it or not – an education that entwines our instincts and emotions with abstractions, symbols, images, and ideas.
If feelings can be educated, they can also be mis-educated – that is, predicated on false ideas about reality. For the emotions are, at least in part, a kind of commentary on reality, which means that, insofar as they fail to engage reality, they are unreasonable or inappropriate. For example, we sometimes find that our anger toward another person is, upon reflection, misplaced and that we are really angry with ourselves. And sometimes we realize that what we experience as anger is, in fact, a "mis-felt" expression of sadness.
Deference to feeling is misguided, then, because emotions do not justify themselves. Though their power is real, they can nonetheless be wrong. Our feelings can also change, as history continually shows us; but they do not always change for the right reasons. Perhaps most people simply adapt to a changing cultural atmosphere, passively absorbing and then conforming to new norms, adjusting their behavior and intuitions without understanding why.
The only way to systematically bring one's thoughts and feelings into alignment with reality – even at risk of putting one into conflict with the wider culture – is through rational, critical reflection. Insofar as emotion points us toward truth, the intellect is called upon to investigate and adjudicate. This is a necessary condition for pursuing moral progress, that is, for trying to become a better person who acts on better judgments about reality rather than evolving in any indifferent direction, blown about by the fickle winds of culture. To submit to these winds is essentially carelessness, that is, intellectual and moral immaturity.
Maturation involves learning to put distance between stimulus and response, opening up the time and space of critical reflection. Mindfulness is one recent name for the practices that open up this time and space. It is a mistake to think that mindfulness means embracing one's whims and inclinations, acting on spontaneous impulses. Mindfulness is really the opposite of that. It is a technique for becoming less reactive, less impulsive. Living mindfully is a constant struggle against immediate response – against the first thought, the first feeling, the first desire – disrupting those short-circuits, those mental and behavioral habits that expedite our sense-making, in order to perceive reality as it really is.
Mindfulness is attentiveness, but it takes effort to pay attention. And the allure of manipulative works of art is that they invite you to turn off your brain, to stop paying attention and become purely reactive. They aim to close the gap between stimulus and response, so that you surrender your critical faculties – that aspect of yourself that resists being fully subsumed by any experience – and wholly submit to the force of the work, to be carried away by it.
This is the logic of Hamnet. In the absence of any real plot, it is just a vehicle for raw performance: the actors stand before the camera and unfurl, throwing themselves into extravagant emotional states. We cannot help but react to such extremes of feeling, but we ought not mistake tears for truth. Hamnet is a shallow film because it is little more than this wailing and fighting, a woeful sob-fest. There is nothing for the mind, for the spirit. Just one long groan.