‘Is it porn or is it art?” A familiar, even dated question where nudity is involved, and (forgive thumbnail) pretty well-resolved– which is to say: we let the tastemakers decide, and it tips the scale towards “art” if one or both protagonists are not that good-looking.
“Is it grief-porn or is it grief-art?” is a more vexed question. Grief-porn, in relation to cinema, would suggest that the film in question is emotionally manipulative, formulaic; grief-art would suggest the film unleashes feelings both universal and true.
It’s curiously circular. In a film about grief, the valorised quality is depth of feeling; it stands or falls by how profoundly the hero(ine) experiences emotion, and the audience proves its acuity, buys itself into the imaginative contract, by its ability to mirror that profundity. You only get to decide whether it’s art if you’re already feeling it so deeply that it must be, in other words. If the death left you cold and you found the ensuing emotionality manipulative and domineering, this logic is quite annoying.
I’m talking in the first instance, of course, about Hamnet, the dramatisation of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel. On paper, it must be art: Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal are more than brilliant, they both have qualities of magnetism and believability that are always evident; they probably couldn’t switch those off if they tried. It’s visually sumptuous and the dialogue is contrastingly spare and intelligent.
It can’t be a spoiler – but if you know nothing, look away now – to say that Hamnet, the only son of William Shakespeare and Agnes, née Hathaway, died of the plague at the age of 11. The death of a child is a peerless tragedy, so any observation about the onscreen charm of the actor – for instance, “I didn’t find him that charming, I preferred the daughters” – is verboten, and that’s fair enough.
There are a number of principles of screen grief that give it intellectual heft, an agenda: the first is that women feel things more deeply than men, particularly their parental bond, but also their connection with the natural world, and with unspoken things, like magic. Buckley curls up in the roots of trees and sometimes can’t breathe with anxiety for her daughter, anxiety whose wellspring is maternal love spliced with witchy premonition. She has foreseen her deathbed, and it features only two children, therefore, having three, something terrible is bound to happen.
Those womanly qualities also define the film adaptation of Helen Macdonald’s memoir H Is for Hawk – again, two wonderful actors, Claire Foy and Brendan Gleeson as daughter and father, performing the only way they know how, which is to say, well. When her dad dies suddenly, Foy retreats into isolated commune with a bird of prey, a reach back to her ornithological bond with him, a stalwart refusal, via obsessive hand-feeding of Mabel the bird, and corresponding neglect of self-care, to let Gleeson be dead. True grief stops all the clocks, is the message, and only women know how to do that, partly because only women feel it truly, and partly because only they can mess with time.
It feels a little dogmatic, but what makes it grief-porn is that you can only join the character in her mire; whether Buckley’s roaring or Foy’s eerie silence, the emotionality allows in no externality; you either unquestioningly feel it with them or you don’t understand.
“Natural world” is a generalisation. What I’m really talking about is birds; Agnes has a hawk, and Shakespeare’s first dating overture is to make her a glove (he is from a glove-making family). Birders were vexed that the film used a Harris’s hawk, an ornithological impossibility in 1580s England (they weren’t introduced until the 1960s – why oh why couldn’t they have found a goshawk, other people, not me, have asked). In the book it’s a kestrel and it signifies Agnes’s soaring free spirit, defiance of convention; in the film, the winged creature performs a more Ted Hughes-lite role, as does the hawk in H Is for Hawk, the size-altering macaw in 2024’s Tuesday and the crow in last year’s The Thing With Feathers. These birds, one way or another, are all death.
Tuesday stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Zora, the mother who cannot accept the impending death of Lola Petticrew’s extremely winning titular character. The Thing with Feathers is an adaptation of Max Porter’s extraordinarily moving Grief is the Thing With Feathers, which doesn’t come close to even reminding you of the power of the novella. As memento mori, birds no longer signify liberation, but rather, its opposite; the camera lingers on their eyes, their eerie watchfulness, their sudden movements – particularly in H Is for Hawk: all the bits about birds, in other words, that make you freak out if one flies into your house, because they’re disgusting.
Again, there’s something prescriptive about the imagery in every case; if you don’t prefer feathers to fur, if you can’t see the majesty in a creature unless it will let you pet it, if you can’t tolerate its autonomy, love it and set it free, if you can’t relish it for its very ugliness, its deathiness, then you are missing some qualities of authenticity and of wisdom.
Tuesday stands out among all these films for having a sense of humour: it got lukewarm reviews, which were fair, but also reflected the fact that nobody knew then that so many other bird-as-death films would follow that were worse. Louis-Dreyfus’s avoidance is genuinely funny; she is constantly embarked on some ridiculous, urgent task – selling her collection of taxidermy rats, needing a wee – as her daughter tries to get her attention in order to die.
Generally speaking, the grief film will brook no comedy; you’ll get the odd hackneyed nod to the hilarity of loss, classically (as in H Is for Hawk) the family getting the giggles as a funeral director shows them some trashy coffins, but the broader absurdity of mortality cannot be borne. Denial, delusion, avoidance, the brutal intrusion of trivial normality into moments of existential agony – it’s all pretty funny, as you’ll know from any lived experience of grief; but grief-porn can’t brook laughter any more than regular porn can. This might be the best single litmus test for whether or not it’s art.
“Crow is everything to Dad,” says Benedict Cumberbatch in the press notes for The Thing with Feathers. “He’s a provocateur. He’s an angry harbinger of grief and inadequacy. He’s the worst internal critic. He’s a guardian angel. He’s a protector.” The Thing is, of course, grief in a man, so when he’s inarticulate, that’s masculine shortcoming rather than feminine mystique, and when he attaches to his feathered phantasm, that’s his flag to pull back from the abyss, rather than a portal out of numbness, back into the world (as Mabel is for Helen).
Men get quite a raw deal from grief-as-depth tropes, because it would be so unfashionable to find dignity in their inarticulacy. Chloé Zhao, Hamnet’s director, said that in its making she discovered that “feminine leadership – and that doesn’t mean just women, it means the feminine consciousness in all people – [draws] strength from intuition, relationships, community and interdependence”. Which, again, is a little circular, since Agnes’s grief cycle largely displays none of those values, yet they must be there, because a woman is feeling them, and if any man is feeling them, it’s because he’s tapping into his feminine consciousness.
Whether it’s grief-porn or grief-art, there’s nothing wrong with enjoying it, by the way. Each to their own.
