When I was in high school, I decided a good activity for the Summer would be to read the Complete Works of William Shakespeare. It was a two-volume set, with very tiny type-font, on my parent’s bookshelf. Yes, that was precocious of me, and a dumb move – I couldn’t remember half of what I read because it was too much, all at once, and it’s also not a good idea for a teenager going in and out of love traumas to read 154 sonnets. But it did predispose me to quickly become a hardcore nerd fan of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, by Tom Stoppard, first as a play and then in cinemas (it came out in the US two years after I graduated high school). Which led me down the path of being obsessed with everything the man wrote. He died on November 29, 2025 and I’ve been reading all the obituaries and thinking of his effect on the world and me ever since.
But first, my favorite and oft-told Stoppard story, which I learned in my first film class in college. Stoppard (more than) once recounted that he once knew a man who owned several peacocks. As he was shaving one morning, he looked out the window and saw his prized peacock escaping the fenced yard, bolting down the street. He took off after his bird, still half-covered in shaving cream, wearing only pajamas and slippers. He soon caught the bird by the side of the next road. Just then a car drives by, and the wife asks the husband, what was that? “A man in pajamas with shaving cream on his face, holding a peacock under his arm, dear.” It was probably an even better story as Stoppard told it with many embellishments each time. But to Stoppard, it was an example of aesthetic distancing – how an audience builds reality around a scene, which can be very different than the reality of the back-story, which you (the audience) may learn. There was a perfectly rational explanation to what the couple saw, but it takes time to explain. Those were the stories he was interested in telling.
A digression – this is another way to view the entire kerfuffle around the war to buy WBD. None of the prices offered make any sense, everyone not involved in the merger thinks its a bad idea, and to be fair, the history of such mergers in the media sphere aren’t exactly stellar case studies. But if you step back, there is a bigger story, which involves streaming wars, flattering a Shakespearean president (see King Lear), the relentless pursuit of power by Zaslav (Othello), or maybe it’s all just backstabbing and sabotaging Ellison’s plans (see Julius Caesar, Othello, Hamlet, Lear again, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern…), or a combo of all of the above (theater). Holman Jenkins had a good take on these issues at the WSJ (this should be a gifted link past the paywall). We, the audience, are distanced from the real story here. But perhaps so are the protagonists - much like Mssrs. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern who made the mistake that they were the leads, when they were just the pawns in a bigger game being played (here by Malone, I guess).
But that’s the story of life which Stoppard never stopped trying to capture in words. As Ben Brantley said in a recent NYT “appraisal,”: Stoppard’s characters are trying “to solve the mysteries that confront them and us daily. These embrace not only the really big questions — the hard problem of consciousness or the mechanical clockwork of the universe — but also the issues of simply how to be in a world that keeps changing its rules on us and of the impossibility of fully knowing another human being.. Yet if the great conundrums could never be solved, Stoppard never discounted the mystical beauty of the attempts to do so.” (emphasis mine)
That’s what Stoppard attempted to capture in his works, and it’s why so many storytellers were and are drawn to him. Stoppard comes back to these bigger life questions again and again, up until one of his last plays, Leopoldstadt, which addressed Stoppard’s late in life discovery that he was Jewish. As Marc Tracy wrote in his NYT tribute, worth reading for the full Leopoldstadt back-story, “A recurring motif in “Leopoldstadt” is cat’s cradle, the children’s game of looping string around fingers to make increasingly complex designs. “The idea that in the cat’s cradle, every state emerges from a previous one,” Stoppard told the German novelist Daniel Kehlmann a few years ago. “That they’re actually deeply connected with each other: one turns into the other, which then turns into another. And they look different from each other, but you realize that, below the surface, something structural is connecting each stage, each manifestation, each form.” It’s almost dialectical, no?
I knew Stoppard had contributed as a screenwriter to many great films, but I didn’t realize he had also been a ghost-writer on many more until the obituaries came out, especially this one from Eric Grode, also in the NYT(I swear I do read other things). These included Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Revenge of the Sith, and even The Bourne Ultimatum (!). That was also the brilliance of Stoppard, and any great artist, being able to bring deeper meaning to the high and the low (although I’ll fight you with a rolled-up magazine if you think Bourne is the low film in that list). In all these works – from Stoppard, but also other great artists in film and other media I love – there is a search for these deeper connections. Sure, with Stoppard that could often be quite cerebral, but he wasn’t above good fun, action or adventure, so long as it was accompanied by some search for deeper meaning.
That’s among the reasons we turn to great theater and to great films – to find deeper meaning, to think harder (or lighter) about life, to figure out that puzzle. To wrestle with the bigger questions. Sure, we also go to experience community, to escape reality, and to just have fun. Not everything needs to be written by Stoppard of course (although…). But we want those kinds of experiences in the mix of what we watch. These are works that take time, artistry, curiosity, and a certain amount of risk-tolerance to make – trusting that there’s an audience who wants something a bit harder in their media diet. Every media battle over the years has been about power, money, and control. But the stakes for artists and audiences have also included what kinds of art will get made. Will it serve any greater purpose or just the bottom line?
That’s what is in danger of being lost as the streaming wars become the merger wars, become the please the king wars, become the need for speed wars (Sarandos: “meeting the audience where they are quicker” as Jason Tyrell points out here), become the algorithm pushing you to subscribe to more and more, even if you don’t watch or read what’s there wars(see Substack), become the race to the lowest common denominator in the quest for the most eyeballs wars, which is a hunt for advertisers war, which is really just a plot to distract you into such an insatiable appetite that you will fill that hole with more shopping and consuming, instead of the fulfillment that is brought from the contemplation needed when confronting works like those from Tom Stoppard. Losing that war would be a travesty (read Travesties).
