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We’re in a “Hamlet” moment, with the 2025 films “Hamnet,” offering a backstory to William Shakespeare’s creation, and an Indian-centered version with Riz Ahmed in the title role. But the best may be yet to come with “Elsinore,” bowing only in theaters Nov. 20, with Andrew Scott of “Sherlock” and “Ripley” fame playing Ian Charleson, the “Chariots of Fire” star who took on the Danish prince in 1989 as he was dying of AIDS.
The film is already generating Oscar buzz for Scott’s interpretation of Charleson playing the part, which judging from the trailer is vastly different from his own acclaimed 2017 interpretation of Hamlet. I’ll have a full review of “Elsinore” after its premiere — as a collector of “Hamlets,” my favorite play, I can’t wait — but here I’m more interested in what a revisit of Charleson’s Hamlet says about fame, accomplishment, AIDS and our own time.
Consider President Donald J. Trump’s own “sense of injured merit.” He’s determined to have his name on the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts or the center is in peril of demolition. (On Friday, Sept. 18, protestors formed a human chain around the building, with a judge issuing a 30-day moratorium on any demolition.) He brooks no criticism, so reporters from CNN, MS NOW and Politico are banned from the White House. He feels Canada and other countries of the world have injured our merit, so tariffs go up, and those are just the tip of the invasion iceberg.
It was a beautiful day: That’s the first thing that anyone who experienced Sept. 11, 2001, will tell you about it. It was a beautiful day, what the pilots call “severe clear.” It had to be, because the terrorists who used those planes to bomb the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and who were foiled in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, didn’t really know how to fly that well. So the weather had to be good, “a seamless sky,” as I later titled one of my novels, whose centerpiece takes place on that day.
How best to remember it, 25 years later? At first, I thought I would write about the day itself and all that I had witnessed. But lover of history though I am, I realized that I had done that before and had no desire to do so again. Instead, I would rather focus here on 9/11/2026 and the future.
In his “Third Law of Motion” (1687), Isaac Newton observed that every action has an equal, opposite reaction.
In some cases, this produces a self-fulfilling prophecy. For more than a decade now, we’ve been hearing from the right and in particular the far right about the “radical left,” the “lunatic left,” the Democratic Socialists, the Communists, Antifa and all the other boogeymen who are going to destroy our country.
Be careful what you wish for. You might not only get it. You may very well create it.
What makes a great fictional character?
Hint: It doesn’t take a great work of literature or a wonderful human being.
Scarlett O’Hara — the Southern belle at the heart of Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind” — may be as self-centered as they come. But her refusal to accept defeat — no, nor none of her kinfolk, as she famously vows — in the face of the Civil War grabs you by the throat, holds you and won’t let you go.
In 1976, Anne Rice’s “Interview With the Vampire” — inspired by her grief over the loss of her daughter, nicknamed Claudia, to childhood leukemia — introduced us to another indomitable spirit. Over the course of the 13-volume “The Vampire Chronicles,” the French-born, 18th-century vampire Lestat de Lioncourt would earn a place in the pantheons of Gothic and gay literature as well as pop culture.