draw thy breath in pain

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (1990)

One, I think it's very neat how the 90s film leans into the exploration of RC as the man of the earth in the sense that he is of the senses - he is the one who lives in the world and explores it. He is, as GS said, pragmatic, from the Greek prasso 'to do'. When he sees a row of jars, he goes over and touches them. When an apple falls on him, he eats it, when GS does not. When the question arises of sun's and time, he would rather simply go and open the window and see what is happening. He makes animal noises when the only other option is to think. He is the embodiment in ragad of tactility, and all the physical consequences thereof. However, he will never (and cannot be) more than that because he does not think.

Guildenstern is the philosopher. He falls into contemplations, into epistemology, into thoughts and thoughts about those thoughts. When he wanders about he doesn't lie down in random places. He stands still and listens and parses information and digests it. He despises the obscene and values the classical. He, more so than RC, understands their place in the Narrative, and the Narrative's place in them. But, less so than RC, he cannot understand the fundamental principles of the world outside the human imagination, because he doesn't spent time being physical with it.

Between them, RC is more lost and more forgetful because he is not in his native element. He is not in a place that is, or functions as, reality. He wants to go home. For GS, it's constant (and maybe too much) information and ideas. It's also kind of why I was disappointed with how the ending was portrayed in the film - I like RC 'giving up' on trying to understand where they are or whats going on and then vanishing, leaving only GS or the psyche lingering on the struggle for a moment like the brain on the verge of death and the physical body starts shutting down from the extremities first. GS and RC are always together and interchangeable bc they are one person. They are the body and the brain, the physical and the conceptual. They cannot function in the 'world' without the other.

Also gives some context to the idea of the 'follower', in the sense that the body is the follower of the mind and also that the physical reality may well exist outside of the individual but it must be decoded and processed by the individual's brain via the senses before being accepted as present. Therefor the physical follows the conceptual for the individual.

Obviously these are not exclusive archetypes, for GS evidently interacts with the 'real world' as he knows it to a certain extent, and RC engages in those intellectual little word games, but also the more I think about it the more that game of questions just sounds like one person talking to themselves in their head again. Making up nonsensical rules for a game when they're bored, the representative so-called left and right sides of the brain firing together.

RCGS heed their summons but they are not active participants in their adventure; even their so-called attempts of delving are foiled too easily. They lack vim. Their endeavours are cautious. They are prey for the predator of the plot bc they do not look out and only in, towards each other and thus the self. The plot moves around them and they stand still and eventually are outpaced by it - the scenes move around them, the script turns thr page before theyre ready and eventually they arrive at the end without even realising it.