Is there a doctor in the house?

Actually, now there's two. My friend James, my dear closest friend in the entire world, has successfully defended his dissertation and joins the ranks of us "doctors". Congratulations buddy, I'm so proud of you. I knew you could do it. I'll call you soon, after you've caught up on your sleep.

So, I was in a metafictional mood tonight. I first watched Stranger Than Fiction, then I watched Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. I had never quite "gotten" the latter film before. But this time I went and read some comments at the imdb and I think I finally have a handle on what the film is about (goes to show all of you what an idiot I am, I had to turn to the cretins that comment on imdb for help).

The film is, or at least partly about, fate and the futility of the limitations of human intelligence. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are the subjects of fate. They are at the whims of a larger story, of which they only get small glimpses at. The fate of that story is that they are going to die. The question the film posits is: if Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were able to figure out the entire story, see the big picture, would they be able to change their fate? What the film shows is that they simply cannot fathom the full story. From playing games at questioning that never produce and answer, from having the script of their lives shown to the them by the tragedians, from having the pages of their fate LITERALLY float by them and they unable to read or comprehend what is written there, they simply cannot understand the big picture. By extrapolation, humans are limited in that we cannot comprehend the larger aspects of the universe, and in particular death. The film is very obsessed with death, I think because that is the be all end all of human existence. Literally. Perhaps if we understood the universe, we could understand death (death being fate), but we can't so we don't. We can only stumble along, getting small glimpses at the overall design and accidentally create beautiful things (ala the steam engine, the airplane, the theory of gravity as shown in the film) just to casually discard them.

The thing I can't quite figure out is the purpose of the tragedians. What purpose do they serve? Do the serve the same purpose in the original Hamlet, as a mirror to reality, a mechanism to show us that which is around us that we ignore? In part perhaps, but one gets the feeling that they are more. They are sort of omniscient, hinting at knowing the things we don't know, for example the whole "love, blood and rhetoric" speech, or always having people die in the plays they perform. There is also the famous line by the player: "the audience knows what to expect, and that is all they are prepared to believe". That speaks something close to the limits of human knowledge. But I don't think I see the entire purpose of the tragedians. Any thoughts from the peanut gallery?

Oh, and if you haven't seen the movie, go see the movie. Also, looking up the movie on imdb I found this. I don't....I don't know what to think.