The medium of film has an
amazing ability to trigger emotions, even very strong ones, through dialogue,
narrative, cinematography, and even sound. The suspension of disbelief, if achieved,
renders the impact all the more complete. Dread, for example, can be conjured
up even at a deep level in the psyche of a film-viewer. That emotion can be
fused with another, seemingly antipodal emotion, such as joy, and an
instrumental score can capture and stimulate both. Such is the case with the
film, Silent Night
(2021), which interestingly was made during the global coronavirus pandemic in
which even young people were suddenly confronted with the notion that they
could die rather than grow up. The film’s closing instrumental version of the
song, “Silent Night,” incredibly fuses joy with dread and even hints at distant
religion as sheer depth in feeling rather than anything supernatural. The
fusion of Christmas joy and the dread of suicide inexorably coming up is best epitomized
by the instrumental, hence more than by the plot, dialogue or visuals.
As for the plot, Nell and
Simon, and their three boys, have friends over for Christmas in their upscale
house. Nuclear war has broken out, with Russia attacking Europe. Anticipating
this eventuality, the government has made “exit pills,” which is a play on the
so-called, ideologically-coined term “exit” meant to hide the fact that Britain
seceded from the E.U. (i.e., states secede; they do not “exit” except in Euroskeptic
ideology). Of course, voluntarily “exiting” life to avoid suffering a slow, certain
death from radiation-poisoning is very different than a state seceding from a
union of states; such a state goes on as a sovereign state. The inexorable
finality of existing, once known to be coming up, is excruciating in a way that
politics cannot know or reach. I know that of which I am writing. The will to
cease willing, period, is difficult for the human mind to accept, let alone
grasp in its bluntness.
Kant wrote that a moral principle can have the necessity of a law even though a person can will either to follow the principle or ignore it. For most people I suppose, the same voluntarism (i.e., voluntary choice of the will) instantiated in the decision to end one’s life tends to overrule the decision to end one’s own life, even at the last minute. Such is the force of the instinct of self-preservation; Nietzsche’s will to power pales in comparison, and yet it is precisely that will that has caused the nuclear war in the film. In other words, the will to power forces the people in the house to overcome, or master, their intractable instinctual urge for self-preservation.To be sure, the family and their friends in the film have an incentive to take the pill before the radioactive cloud reaches the house, but even so, only with the slight radiation poisoning of Art, one of the three sons, does the physician, James, urge everyone to go to the bedrooms to take the pill. It is ironic that Art is the only one to survive to the end of the film; his father, Simon, had not given Art an “exit” pill, believing him to be dead already. Presumably in being left alone in the house the next morning, as the nuclear-winter slow is falling eerily in peace, Art would die a slow death (unless he ventures outside into the radioactive snow).
It is precisely as the camera
closely pans all the pale heads of the dead people in the bedrooms on that
morning that the Christmas favorite, “Silent Night,” is played as a sound-over.
As the song progresses, a subtle dark undercurrent of dread builds in a way
that coincides with the joy of impending hope. It is the precisely seamlessness
between the Christmas carol and a melody of death that the two emotions of joy
and dread can be experienced together rather than dichotomously. The music’s
overall harmony is downright eerie. Back during the scene of the Christmas Eve
dinner, the dialogue sets up the two emotions as mutually exclusive, as Simon
tries in vain to keep talk of the impending suicides from taking over the holiday.
But the synthesis is not achieved until the instrumental music that takes the
viewer from the story-world.
The political implications of the nuclear bombs being heard in the distance, at least where Nell’s mother is located, may come to the fore for viewers when the credits are rolling. Even through the film, viewers could be excused for hoping that a last-minute peace deal with Russia would be announced such that no one would take the “exit” pill and everyone in the house would wake up, as if from a bad dream, on Christmas morning. Christmas is, after all, about the advent of hope for even such a sordid species as homo “sapiens.” It is not until just before the cloud reaches the house that the inhabitants swallow the “exit.” Such is the strength of the instinctual urge of self-preservation that even Thomas Hobbes argued in his text that the right of self-preservation is not ceded even to an otherwise all-powerful political sovereign, which a king or a democratic assembly.
For viewers of the film in 2024 or especially in 2025, thoughts of Russia lobing nuclear bombs on Europe could well have had the uncomfortable ring of reality imitating art, given Russia’s years-long invasion of Ukraine. Putin starting a nuclear war if the E.U. had provided Ukraine with enough weapons to make a dent in Russia is not as unrealistic as merely watching the film might seem it to be. Some viewers of the film as 2025 was coming to an end could even have been thinking while listening to the Christmas carol of joy intertwined with dread that due to the political leadership both of Russia and Israel, the species could no longer put its faith in sovereign nations; that something of a check as in a world federation with limited though sufficient power is needed in the nuclear age. In other words, the film portrays the futility of entrusting nuclear arms to politicians without an overarching check on them beyond the nation-state. The “exit” pills in the film should not have been needed; if Russian and European politicians could not resolve their differences without launching nuclear bombs, then even this possibility stands as a good argument for relegating the UN in favor of an international force that is capable of stopping political disputes from annihilating the species. Nevertheless, even such political matters pale in the film, as in real life, in comparison to the ongoing excruciating anguish felt by a person who knows that one will not exist ever again after a certain, upcoming, time. The characters in the film do a good job with this anguish, and except for not making sure that Art is already dead, they take the cue of the approaching toxic cloud and swallow the pills with fortitude. No one should experience that.
