Have you ever looked at a piece of history and realized the most important person in the room was the one nobody bothered to write down? Today, we're talking about the film that sounds like somebody with a head code or a spelling mistake, Hamnet and not Hamlet, it's Hamnet. Stratford-upon-Avon, late 1500s, not the postcard version, the muddy, loud, frankly, it smells like wet leather and livestock version, but before you think I'm going highbrow literature here, that's not what we're doing, because it's not about the dusty old books, it's about the stuff that keeps us up at 3 a.m. Movie Monday, Hamnet Coco, Mother's Day, yesterday. Yeah, let's keep it off, right?

Whole two weeks of- We're talking about Mother's. Yeah. But now we're gonna do two full weeks of mother-themed movies, TV shows, we're going all out for the moms. Now, how was Mother's Day for you over there, Coco? Mother's Day is always great if you demand what you need out of Mother's Day.

I got it, yeah. I have a lot of moms that are online who are like, I hate Mother's Day, nobody does anything for me, it sucks, you know, and I'm like, how do you not just plop yourself down on the couch and say, day off, y'all are taking care of me today, because that's kind of what I do. Yeah. All right, but I do, I'm like, I work hard, today is my day. We went to the zoo.

Nancy wanted to go to the zoo, I'm like, all right, and there was lots of moms at the zoo, the zoo was packed. I started thinking about it, I was like, why do so many moms wanna go to the zoo for Mother's Day? And I came up with two answers. One, it's because they wanna leave their kids there, because they're feral anyway, and they wanna keep them at the zoo. That's probably not it.

I think the second part is, maybe it's that primal part of being a mother, you wanna be around. Oh, we took a lot more, huh? Yeah, yeah, remember when we did Night Bitch? Yeah, there you go. You know, like going back to giving birth in a pile of hay or something.

Yeah, you get in the dirt, whatever it is, but I think that might be, there might be a trigger there, there might be something that women connect to, because for Father's Day, I don't think, I wanna go to the zoo, but then again, Father's Day is a month later in June, and it's probably gonna be 120 degrees, so. Right. There's a, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I think part of it is, moms want, not all moms, let's be honest, no judgment. You wanna spend a day, my mom was one of those that was like, she said to us yesterday, she goes, do you guys even remember what we did on Mother's Day?

I didn't see you all day. She was like, I wanted you gone. I was in my room all day. I didn't wanna be bothered. I didn't wanna be touched.

But I think for a lot of moms, they're like, I do want a day with my family. I wanna spend it with my kids. I just don't wanna take care of anybody. I just wanna break. Like, so it's nice if we can go to the zoo, but like, I can relax and enjoy the zoo for once.

Yeah. That's how I see it. I would be like, K dads, or whoever, you know, it's like, you plan it, you pack the bags, you pack the car, you make sure everybody has their water bottles. I'm gonna get in the car and wait to be taken to the zoo. Yeah, yeah.

No, I see that too. Yeah. I see that, yeah. Makes sense to me. I love the zoo though.

Love the zoo. Yeah. Let's get into Movie Monday though. Hamnet. I cannot wait.

One that you put on the docket, probably wouldn't have come across my radar, but then again, it would have, because it did get nominated for a bunch of awards, and you know, you start watching this movie, and for me, it took me a couple times to get through this movie. Gotta get through the beginning. If you're not in the mood for something like this, you're not gonna wanna sit there and watch it. So you gotta kinda prep yourself that you're going back to the 1500s. You're gonna go live in this dirty, just, I mean, it's wet, it's raining all the time.

Like, I just, I felt like I needed a bath watching it at home. Yeah, pretty realistic, and I mean, honestly, that period of time in that place, it probably was very stinky. Nobody took showers, nobody took baths. There's a reason there was the bubonic plague. It's dirty.

It was a little dirty. Yeah, so we're in 1580s, Stratford-upon-Avon. You know, like I said, it's not your pretty postcard version. It's not your beautiful scenery movie. I'm not, don't get me wrong, it is a beautiful movie, but it's not gonna make you feel clean.

And we've got a guy named Will, glove maker's son, basically the Elizabethan version of, his dad has a small business, and he's trying to not take it over. Like, that's what he's got going on. He meets- He's an artist. Yeah, he meets Agnes, who history calls Anne Hathaway, and labels her a shrew who trapped him into marriage. That's what history kinda lays her out in.

But Maggie O'Farrell, the writer here says, and I'm with her on this, says, wait a minute, not so fast. What if she was, you know, magic? What if there was some other stuff that goes on with Anne Hathaway and Agnes here? So you got all in all, one marriage, three kids, two twins named Hamnet and Judith, and one very hungry, very patient, fleet carrying the black plague. That's kinda what this movie comes down to.

Coco, what'd you think about this flick here, overall? Well, you know, nitty, like, the gritty, dirty England countryside 15 seconds, you know, all that aside, the aesthetic of the movie is absolutely right up my alley. In fact, I've been doing a lot of, like, marketing and branding work for Prism Healing, my business, and trying to figure out, like, what does the branding look like? What are kinda the aesthetics? And this movie came up.

As a suggestion, you know, those who've been listening to me in Practically Magic podcast, or, you know, if you follow me at all, you know I love practical magic. Yeah. We covered that in the Witch Movie Project, because, again, that aesthetic, the general vibe of that movie is 100%, you know, what I try to help people understand what magic really looks like. I mean, you can go really magical with it, you can go Harry Potter with it, you can be like, oh, you know, magic wands, sparkles come out, there's something transforms into something else, and blah, blah, blah. Real actual magic, quantum physics, spicy psychology, whatever you wanna call it, more like this movie Hamnet than most other ways that Hollywood could portray, you know, what it means to be powerful, what it means to be a healer.

And I think that is my favorite part about this movie, is what showed that strength. And, you know, there was some criticism, I mean, with witch talk being a thing, you know, they're like, it probably most likely wouldn't have looked like this if she had been what they called a cunning woman, but there were many men and women in the societies of that time and age and before that, that were portrayed as, and the etymology of the word witch comes from the person who everyone came to for healing and help in some way. And I've talked about this before, one of the things I culturally love about whales in particular is that they had less witch trials during this time period, you know, King James and the witch trials that started at some point after this, we know about that history, but whales in particular, they did not see their witches or whatever their word for witches, the Swinryche, the cunning women, they did not see them as evil in any way. In fact, they saw them as the person you would go to if you were having a problem. Like instead of blaming the witches for cursing the land and the crops are dying or the cows are dying or whatever, you know, might be going on, rather than blaming the witches, they would have blamed the fae and they've gone to a witch to ask for help.

And I think Agnes' character in this movie perfectly portrays that type of person where she had wisdom passed down to her, her and her brother commiserate over like the wise words that their mother had spoken to them and how they were taught how to use herbs and medicines and help women give birth and things like that. They, you see that come out in them and then she's teaching it and that's how she nurtures her own children. She's intuitive, she has visions, she trusts her visions. She's not somebody who's like, I think I saw something in a dream, but I don't know, it's a little, that's a little weird. She's like, no, I saw this, this is what's going to happen.

I don't know how it's gonna come about, but I do know that I saw two people at my deathbed or, you know, she has these premonitions and then she just goes with it and she's confident in what she believes. I just loved this movie for all of that element. I'm a big fan of Shakespeare, you know, being a theater person, obviously. Shakespeare did some cool stuff. Oh yeah.

But, I mean, we've praised him enough. Do we think maybe like over the centuries? Exactly, and we can get into all the conspiracies about like Shakespeare, who he was, was it one man, was it a woman, was it multiple people? Like there's all these questions and all this stuff. You know, do you think, do you have premonitions?

Is premonitions, are those common or can we just call dreams a premonition? I mean, sometimes they are a dream. Some people, that's how they receive their downloads, if you will. I text you over the weekend, I had a dream about me and you. Oh, yeah, we haven't talked about that.

No. I was gonna ask you, what was that about? I have no clue. So you had a dream, tell us about this. Let me text, let me read the text that I sent you here because this one.

I was a little busy hanging out at prom with your wife. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm texting, I was texting you while you were out at prom with my wife. We were at prom, yeah. Yeah, but I had a dream, and here it is.

I said, I had a dream that me and you talked about back rooms. Like super vivid to the point I actually had to look up our recordings and see. I did, I got up, it was like middle of the night. I was like, did we talk about this or not? We actually were filming this in the back rooms.

Now I don't know if you're familiar with the back rooms yet but you will be soon. Yeah, let's just leave it at that, all right? Let's leave it at that. The back rooms are coming. There's an A24 movie coming called Back Rooms also.

Oh. May 29th, and back rooms are a different genre. It's a new genre. I don't wanna take away from Hamnet though. Back to that movie.

It's a dream. Okay, so I do think information comes through dreams. And I think that if you're really good at deciphering, this dream felt like it meant something. There was a message behind it. Sometimes you can even feel that the dream didn't come from you.

And I don't know how to explain that any other way, just that I know that dream wasn't me, wasn't my subconscious. It was like a download from the collective consciousness or something. Is that channeling? Is that what channeling is? Is that different?

What is this? I mean, there might be some people wiser than me in a different way that would say it's different or that there's a difference. I don't think so. I think that the channels in which something comes from, the ether, the collective consciousness, whatever you wanna call it, the universe, it's coming in just different ways. I think people can feel it in their body.

They can hear it through their clear audience. There's different gifts that we receive information, but I think it's about developing those gifts and being more into it, allowing yourself to be trusting your intuition. I feel this in my gut. I feel that I'm being led to this or I'm being told this or however it comes to you. And I think it can come to people a lot of different ways.

I don't think there's anybody more gifted than anyone else. Ah, okay. It's kind of my, I think there's people who develop the gifts, who develop the skills and who lean into it. I think there are others who are like, I don't know anything about that. Woo Woo is weird to me.

Yeah. Not interested in developing those gifts. Well, you mentioned the universe playing a part in this, and I think it did because you got all this stuff going on. And the real gut punch is, tell me this doesn't feel like a modern thriller slash drama. You got the plague creeping through England and it's not an if, it's a when.

You got Hamnet, the boy, and his twin Judith sister getting sick. They try to trick death. You ever try to bargain with the universe? Take me, not them. That's what this 11 year old kid does.

It's what Hamnet does. And here we go. The universe, being the cold hearted bitch that it can be, says deal. Yeah. And that's what happens.

So think about what happens after this. Is there survivor's guilt that kicks in, living in that house? You know, does Judith feel like she's only half of a set that's left because she lost this? What happened in that scene? That scene's incredible, by the way.

It's about halfway in the movie. When they do the, they try to trick death. And yeah, death takes Hamnet. There's an X-Files episode about that. There is, right?

I'm just, it's occurring to me just now. I'm like, you see death coming for you and you turn your head. Scully, as a character, you know, in that episode is gonna live forever because she turned her eyes away from death. But this is a powerful story because it doesn't just give us the snapshot of the Shakespeare family and what happened to them. It's about this trauma and grief that shatters and ripples through generations.

I truly believe, and you know, some people talk about this in the witch community of like the witch wound, things that happened in that period of time. This was pre witch hunt, witch trial time, but it was still like, you know, Christianity being what it was at that time, it was creeping in, right? No, King Henry VIII was also suspicious of witchcraft and would accuse and behead those that he felt were using malicious witchcraft against him. So it was creeping in as something that people were starting to fear. You know, this plague, I mean, so many people losing family members, how can that not ripple through the generations afterwards of people losing children and, you know, holding their own child in their arms while they died.

I mean, it's just, ah, the heaviness and tragedy of it. So powerful. The grief that Agnes shares and William as well. I mean, they share in this, he's kind of a little bit removed because he's living in London, you know, writing plays and doing that. He's a little bit removed from his family, we know that.

But there's this connection with them. There's this connection and that scene at the end where they share in that grief, where she realizes he wrote this play Hamlet in honor of their son and she's on the edge of the stage reaching out for him. Oh my gosh, I get chills all over my body. How can you not? It's hard, but let's talk about Will.

And you said it, like he's living in London. He's becoming the bard. Yeah. He's the original. Legend himself.

He's the original, I'm doing this for the family dad who was never actually with the family, you know? How many of us have used the hustle or the career as a shield from keeping, from dealing with heavy stuff at home? He's writing, think about this, think about this. He is writing fucking comedies while his son is being buried. Is he a genius?

Yeah, is he a deadbeat? Maybe a little bit, you know, I think so. But it's the tension we all feel. For sure. I mean, this is where you go back to the conversation we've had before about mothers and fathers who are artists or passionate dreamers, ambitious people.

Life in what's portrayed in this movie and book is that he didn't wanna be a simple, you know, glove maker or tradesman or anything like that. He had these ambitions and dreams, right? He had these stories to tell. He wanted to be on the stage or behind the scenes in the stage, writing the words that he wrote. And you see all this like passion and I have to be in London, I have to be there.

And she's like, I can't be there, but I know you have to be there and I will support you, right? So she's gonna stay home, raise the kids out in the countryside. She's gonna sacrifice having her husband there and available but knowing that this is what he's gotta do. How many times have we seen a story like that? And I'm glad that the focus is on her in this movie because again, we're going back to Mother's Day themed but she made the sacrifices to make the family work.

And so he, you know, even in losing his son but not just in losing his son in day-to-day parenting life, he gets to kind of avoid it, right? He gets to be in London writing. And he talked about channeling. He can channel and transmute that grief energy and probably a lot of guilt of not being there, not being with his kids and not being there for his son's last moments, all these things, channels it into the art of Hamlet, right? And I think that's the, I think that's a tension that we all feel, you know, trying to build a legacy while the foundation is cracking under our own feet.

He's trying to leave a mark. People trying to leave a mark, you don't need to try so hard sometimes. Yeah, there's no real winning at it or there's no real right or wrong way to do it. No, but- I mean, you can give a lot of criticism to somebody like William Shakespeare and be like, you banded your family to go be a big star in London, you know, but then also he's Shakespeare. Exactly, and that's where I'm gonna go because he's got art and it's basically an exorcism if you think about it.

I mean, four years later, he writes Hamlet, not Hamnet after his son Hamlet. People think it's about the Prince of Denmark. I think it's a seance. You know, imagine being Agnes, you lost your son, your husband has been gone for years and then you hear he's written a play called exactly the name of your dead kids. Yeah, like you're not gonna just cast that as to the side.

You're gonna go to the theater, you go see your husband on a stage playing the ghost. The father is the ghost and the son Hamlet is the one left behind. He literally swapped their fates on stage so he could talk to his son one more time. That's beautiful, right? And a messed up- I don't think I've ever seen Shakespeare performed so well than that scene right there.

I mean, just- Yeah. Because there was all this new information behind it that just made your stomach and your heart drop. And this is the thing about Shakespeare because a lot of people can have their thoughts about it. Yeah. It can be really boring.

It can be really awful to sit through. Trust me, I know. I was in theater for many years. Sometimes it can just be like, oh, we're over. But when it's performed really well, it is fantastic.

We have the Cedar City, the Shakespeare Festival here in Utah every year. And sometimes those performances are just above and beyond. Just absolutely amazing. I gotta point out, I love the one scene there when they're on the stage in the middle-ish of the movie. And he's got two of the actors, two of the players, and they're doing the lines back and forth.

And he keeps saying, again, again, again. And finally he says, you're just, basically I'm paraphrasing, he says, you're just saying these words. Yeah. And I felt that. I'm like, yeah, you're right.

You've got to feel this. You can't just be reciting because that's where you fall into what you're talking about. And it's boring as hell. I'd rather watch paint dry or grass grow. Language.

I mean, gosh, just to think about how he came up with basically making poetry out of everyday conversation. And it's just incredible, really. After watching this movie, we watched the Leonardo DiCaprio, Romeo and Juliet. And I made my 11-year-old watch it with me. And I was like, you need to know how incredible these words actually are.

And that movie is one really great way to see how poetry comes to play. What an incredible movie. What an incredible soundtrack for that movie as well. Oh, I know. Oh, 90s.

All right. We can get into more about William Shakespeare, but back to Agnes, the mother, and this incredible portrayal of somebody who just, if this is how she really was, she deserves all this spotlight on her in this movie to show the wisdom that she had, the connection to nature, the nurturing mothering that she was giving her children. Everything about her just, it felt like home to me, or what I wanted to be, what I wanted to feel. And I wanted to be more like her as a mother in this movie. I want my kids to gather around so I can show them how to smell the thyme and rosemary in the garden and what it's for.

These medicines that grow from nature. And the way she, when she was getting ready to give birth to her first child, and she had to be in the woods, she had to be, that was so incredible. Back to that primal urge to be in nature and be around animals. We were talking about going to the zoo for Mother's Day. I'm like, that makes sense to me.

When they tried to keep her from it in her second birth, and they were like, no, you can't go out there. It's literally flooding out there. You can't go to the woods. And she's like, I have to be in the woods. I just felt that everywhere.

Yeah. Incredible. You do like the woods. I do. Nah.

I loved the imagery. And you kind of got a feel for that. Like, you talked about like the dirty feeling. I wonder if it was a conscious choice. It probably was.

Obviously everything with movie making. Yeah. But more in the house or in civilization, it felt dirty. But you noticed how different it felt when they went out into the woods. It was green.

It was clean. It was, even if it was raining and wet, it was somewhere I still wanted to be. Yes, I did notice. Had to be conscious. There's no way in hell I would ever want to be in the streets anywhere near Stratford upon Avon.

No way. Yeah. What did they call them? The chamber pots? Yeah.

No way. They were just like chamber pots being dumped out the window into the streets. Yeah, no thank you. You know who I just thought about was great at performing Shakespeare? Will Friedle in Boy Meets World.

Remember the episode that he Yeah. Woke everybody out of the water? And that's real. I mean, sure he's doing it great on the show, but he actually performed it really, really well. There's probably tons of people that can perform Shakespeare really well.

But there are a lot more who can perform it way, way too bad. Yeah, there can be some stiff performances for sure. And I have, we've talked about this before on the podcast, but I have judged high school drama to come to us for many years, and sometimes you get assigned classic scenes. And I'm not gonna lie, I'm a little bit like, okay, all right, we're gonna be listening to a lot of Shakespeare today or whatever, sit down. And, but honestly, sometimes it is a little bit like, all right, there's some work to be done here, but sometimes it's incredible.

Sometimes those kids, even high school kids can just pull it together and perform like nothing else. And I'm like, fantastic job, way to go for kind of getting it. Like getting Shakespeare and portraying it in a way that we can understand. And I did see my favorite Shakespeare play, Midsummer Night's Dream at the Globe Theater in London when I was there in 2023. Check that off my bucket list.

Nice, did it smell awful? Did they still throw the chamber pots in the street? What was it going on there? No, it's great, it's clean, it's wonderful, they serve food. I actually had a seat under the awning, but it's built like the old Globe Theater, so the middle is totally exposed to the elements, and it was raining that day.

It felt bad for the people who were standing by the stage, just like you see in the movie Hamnet at the end, she's right there in the front of the stage. People really do stand in the center, like there's no seats there. So for two hours, they're standing in the ring to watch the play, that's how important it is to get the entertainment of the day. So yeah. What's your final thoughts here on Hamnet?

I know, I know. Just remember that witches portrayed in this movie is the absolute epitome of what I consider to be the witch. Mm, okay. Witches have had such a negative bias, witchcraft, anything like that, for so many centuries now, that it is really time to look at this movie, even if it's not as accurate as people, it wouldn't have been like that in that time, she would have been more of a Christian woman. Okay, fine, because there are plenty of Christian witches, doesn't matter.

The point is, these are the people in your community that you would go to for help, for advice, for healing. So when I call myself a witch in the community, I wear that as a badge of honor, and if I call someone a witch, or if I say, hey, that's witchcraft that you just did, it's an honorable thing I'm talking about, and I want that to be changed eventually. I want movies like this to show that that is a real thing. There is nothing magical or fictional about that in movies like this. This is what we are engaging with, and I've had some recent, I don't know, pushback on using words like witch and witchcraft, where people are like, well, some people really don't like that word, and I'm like, too bad, because guess what, you're doing witchcraft, and you're doing witchcraft, and you're doing, everybody's doing witchcraft, guys.

How many of you are lighting candles and making wishes? Please, come on, it's witchcraft. So that's my soapbox for the day, and I loved this movie. You're gonna get some people coming at you for that. We're all practicing witchcraft.

I guarantee they're gonna be coming out of the woodwork to come and help them. All of these witchcrafts, all of the rituals and rites, all of the, you know, you can call something else if you want, but it's still witchcraft. You heard it right here, when you put that birthday candle on your cake and you blow it out, that's witchcraft, folks. Yes. We're gonna get a lot of people heated.

I loved Hamnet, go check it out, it's on Peacock. Peacock put that out. I'll watch it again, it's one of those, they'll probably start showing this one in schools, maybe, I don't know. You have to be, you know, it'll be controversial if they do, but once again, books in schools aren't already controversial these days, that they're already teaching, so I loved it. I thought it was great.

Go watch Hamnet, and for the Freqs out there, you know, when have you had to bury something to make something bigger, to make something great? When did you have to let something go? Yeah. When did you take a loss and turn it into art? Maybe not to a level of Shakespeare making Hamlet, but where's your Hamlet?

Freqs out there, this is Parallel Frequencies, I am just playing, she is Coco, you are the Freqs. We will see you on the other side.