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head, through a superimposed image of the human brain. In this shot as in others, Olivier attempts to bring the viewer into Hamlet’s unconscious, indicating that the perspective of the film is Hamlet’s interior life, his mind. The many emblems that recur throughout the film—particularly the bed, Ophelia’s chamber, the empty rooms, and Hamlet’s chair—all represent Hamlet’s own unconscious desires and anxieties. Through this valiant and brilliant attempt to make visible the workings of the unconscious, Olivier ends up uncovering what had been conspicuously buried within Freud’s and Jones’s Oedipal interpretations of Hamlet: failed mourning and melancholia.

Roger Furse’s art direction for the film—the narrow, winding staircases; the dark, gloomy, foreboding sky; the play of light and shadow, whites, grays, and blacks—represents the world of Elsinore from Hamlet’s perspective, as projections of his own internal torture and grief. Visual emblems, such as the deserted rooms and Hamlet’s empty chair, serve to reinforce the sense of absence, and also to forge a symbolic link between that loss and Hamlet’s own ego, an association that is further accentuated by Olivier’s physical presence and line delivery throughout the film. In the opening court scene, seated in the chair that comes to represent the emptiness of grief, Olivier positions himself as the alienated mourner, whose dejection and self-deprecation appear to have no reasonable cause. In various shots, Olivier strikes a traditionally melancholic pose to stress the prince’s grief and self-absorption, and he delivers Hamlet’s soliloquies with pronounced emphasis on the word “mourned” in the line “a beast that wants discourse of reason/Would have mourned longer” (1.2.150–51) and on any references to loss.

Through this iconography, the film represents instances of Hamlet’s failed mourning for both the lost mother and the father, which despite its Oedipal trappings, become among the most prominent features of Olivier’s Hamlet. When Hamlet’s father appears in his ghostly form—a large, shadowy figure clad in armor—he seems to dominate his son, who falls to the ground as if thrust down into submission by the specter’s threatening presence, suggesting abuse and violation (Donaldson 1990:31–67). These scenes dramatize the melancholic’s desire to inflict pain on his or her own ego in retribution for the internalized loss. The melancholic, who assumes blame for the loved one’s death, thus seeks self-punishment and degradation in response to the inner emptiness that cannot be mourned successfully.

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