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Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (1990) Secondary Shakespearean characters stumble around Hamlet's castle in an existential daze trying to figure out what they're doing, why they're doing it, and ultimately, why they exist at all. Tom Stoppard adapts and directs his own Absurdist play, so the film retains whatever philosophical faults the original work may have had, but it's undeniably a joy watching Tim Roth and Gary Oldman bang their befuddled heads against the walls of life's seeming futilities.
TIL: Something’s rotten in the state of Denmark, and apparently it’s the math. There's a running gag in the movie in which a coin flipped by Guildenstern (or maybe it was Rosencrantz) always lands on heads, even after nearly 100 tries. Well, Evelyn Lamb, Ph.D. ran the numbers and decided that you would have to flip a coin at least two octillion (that's 27 zeros) times to achieve a run in which you get that many consecutive heads. In other words, Guildenstern’s feat is statistically improbable.
Of course, Rosencrantz (or maybe it was Guildenstern) himself had some non-mathematical guesses as to what was going on including time being frozen, some kind of purgatorial punishment, or maybe just plain old miraculous divine intervention. The Catechism reminds us that miracles “are the most certain signs of divine Revelation, adapted to the intelligence of all; they are ‘motives of credibility’ (motiva credibilitatis), which show that the assent of faith is ‘by no means a blind impulse of the mind’.” In short, they are occurrences which help the rational mind accept a reality which it cannot otherwise see. Given that, would nearly 100 consecutive heads on a coin flip be enough to convince you of the miraculous and to reject Absurdism?
I HAVE SOME NOTES: Continuing to jot down notes on my daily Scripture readings until they take my pencil away.
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