Breathless

Jean-Luc Godard’s film, Breathless (1960), is according to many film scholars difficult to classify in terms of genre. Relative to uncovering the philosophy espoused in the film, genre-classification looks superficial at best. The film becomes a crime story early on as soon as Michel shots a policeman for no apparent reason, and Godard seems more interested in highlighting the film noir stylistic features, such as when Michel repeatedly mimics Humphrey Bogart in running a thumb across lips and perhaps even incessantly smoking, than in constructing a gripping crime-story. Godard deviates from the crime genre as most of the middle of the film is centered on Michel and his love interest, Patricia before fusing the romance with the crime plot. I contend that the “hole” in the middle of the film is actually full of Sartre’s philosophy of existentialism, which is based on human subjectivity and the choices that are made out of it (and no other basis).

The film’s large middle section is not an enigma, even though the narrative is more or less suspended, and neither is Patricia. She represents the problem of twentieth-century modernity as described and explained by existentialism in that she is too weak to make a choice regarding whether to accept Michel’s romantic overtures to be a couple. She has only her own subjectivity on which base her choice, but the weight of the choice is too much for her as she struggles in fear. In contract, Michel steps up to the proverbial baseball home base and definitively choses her. In terms of Sartre’s philosophy, Michel is strong and Patricia is weak. This is not to say that Michel is immune from her weakness. Nietzsche, after all, explains why the strong can be beguiled by the weak and thus made vulnerable in spite of being stronger.

Patricia is the femme fatale precisely because her subjective take on whether she is free—the most important value, according to Sartre—is so mixed up or boggled in her mind that she winds up sacrificing Michel so as to be able know her own subjectivity enough not to be afraid (of it?) and to make a definitive choice regarding them becoming a couple. Her subjectivity is hardly strong enough to be the basis on which she can make a definitive choice. Pathetically, she backs her awareness of whether she has feelings for him out of her decision to turn him into the police. I must not be in love with you because I just decided to report you to the police. I submit that falling in love with someone can be likened to catching the flu rather than being slightly hungry. When a person has fallen for someone or has come down with the flu, one's experience is itself so impacted that it is rather obvious that one is down for the count, even allowing for some lag time in which the person is under the illusion that life will go on as usual. It's not like, Oh, I think I may be hungry. 

Patricia’s subjectivity is hardly strong enough to be the basis on which she can make a definitive choice because she is so unaware of her own consciousness of herself, and yet according to existentialism, such consciousness is the only possible basis on which a human being can make choices, and, in acting on them, invent oneself ex nihilo. “The problem is that I don’t even know,” she tells Michel concerning what is wrong. This alone can furnish her with existential fear, or angst. “I’m not unhappy,” she tells Michel, “but I’m afraid.” In perhaps the best line in the film—a line that suggests that Godard has split the crime narrative in the film in two in order to open the middle up for philosophy—she says, “I don’t know if I’m unhappy because I’m not free, or if I’m not free because I’m unhappy.” She doesn’t even know if she is happy or unhappy! It is thus not possible for her, at least while in that condition of such limited self-awareness, to be authentic in herself and towards Michel. It is no wonder that he is frustrated with her state.

Heidegger would say that Michel is authentic. “Do you think of dying sometimes?” he asks Patricia. “I do,” he continues. “All the time.” He is not afraid to face the truth that he, like the rest of us, will eventually die. In what can be taken as a premonition, Michel blurts out, “I’m tired. I’m going to die.” In what can be taken as an indication that she has not faced the fact that she too will die one day, Patricia tells him, “You’re crazy.” He is actually well-grounded, and thus authentic, according to Heidegger. To avoid the realization—to hide from it—that death is inevitable is to lead an inauthentic life. In answer to Patricia’s question during an interview at an airport, a novelist says his greatest ambition in life is, “To become immortal, and then to die.” Of course, to be immortal is to not be able to die, so the answer just shows that the writer is evading his own realization. It is no wonder he is a sexist.

Michel is actually a stronger person than Patricia. He even tells her, “I’m more advanced than you.” Why? He has come to terms with his existence as finite, and this thus no longer afraid (as he was when he shot the policeman). As such, he can make an interesting choice that seems absurd or counterintuitive. Patricia reads Michel a line from William Faulkner, a novelist: “Between grief and nothing, I will take nothing.” It’s not clear whether nothing refers to not having any feeling, or not existing at all. Nevertheless, she asks Michel to choose between grief and nothing. At first, he demurs, and thus evinces momentary weakness in not being up to choosing based on his own subjectivity. “Grief is stupid,” he finally blurts out. “I choose nothing. Its no better, but grief is a compromise. You have to go for all or nothing. I know that now.” You have to go all in, rather than make half-baked choices. It is ironic that in being strong enough to choose based on his own subjectivity alone, his choice is for nothing rather than to feel something. It takes incredible strength of will to choose nothing rather than something. Perhaps it is in a human being having come to the realization that someday death will deprive oneself of existing (and out of this, an essence) that one’s choice can be nothing (i.e., either not feeling anything, or not existing) rather an uncomfortable emotion without freaking out.

 In contrast, Patricia does not go “all in” because she demurs on making a definitive choice until the end of the film, and even then, she backs into her choice by choosing indirectly by calling the police to report Michel. Until then, in not choosing, she is nothing because, according to Sartre, we are nothing but the choices (plans) that we make. It follows that Michel is in love with nothing, and yet he goes all in anyway. Put another way, it is not clear that he can be in love with her when she is virtually cut off from her own subjectivity. If she doesn’t know whom she is, and what she feels, and if she is incapable of making emotional choices, how can he love her? How could he trust her?  Well, this is perhaps his fatal flaw, at least in regard to the femme fatale. Even a more advanced, or stronger person is vulnerable. This is clear both to Hobbes and Nietzsche. Hence the latter recommends that the strong maintain a pathos of distance from the weak, lest the sickness, or bad odor, of the latter infect the stronger. Michel misses the “red flags” in Patricia’s indecision and her underlying emotional instability (e.g., her not knowing whether she is happy or unhappy), and thus misses the opportunity to walk out on her to protect himself from her possibly turning him into the police for the murder.  I submit that being in love is an existential space in which a person’s perception of one’s freedom drastically narrows.

Patricia, in Godard's film, "Breathless," is overcome by existential angst.

Patricia is dangerous to Michel because even though she knows that she is free to take or leave (or turn in) Michel, she has not come to the realization that she is indeed free. This is qualitatively different than having a sense of a de facto narrowing of freedom. She doesn’t know if her lack of freedom is causing her unhappiness, or whether her unhappiness is responsible for her lack of freedom. Jean-Paul Sartre would tell her, of course you’re free, for “there is no explaining things away by reference to a fixed and given human nature. In other words, there is no determinism, man is free, man is freedom.”[1] Drawing on Nietzsche’s famous yet typically misinterpreted line, “God is dead,” Sartre concludes as an atheist (whereas Nietzsche had been a theist) that there are no divine commands to ground ethical decision-making and thus “legitimate our conduct.”[2] The only thing a person has upon which to base one’s choices (i.e., plans and actions) is one’s own subjectivity. We are “condemned to be free,” Sartre writes, because the only basis of our choices, and our very essence, is our subjectivity.[3] We can’t get divine decrees from a god who is dead.

Lest we succumb to Patricia’s paralysis of indecision, Sartre wants to assure us that his existentialist philosophy is optimistic, for it “leaves to [mankind] a possibility of choice” because we can invent ourselves through our choices without being tethered to an external authority or tradition.[4] More abstractly stated (by Sartre), “there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence, a being who exists before he can be defined by any concept.”[5] In making choices, we can’t rely on a pre-conceived notion of human nature as good or bad. Therefore, subjectivity “must be the starting point.”[6] This spells trouble for characters like Patricia whose subjectivity is elusive, and yet amazing freedom to characters like Michel for whom subjectivity is like a rock on which to invent oneself without being tethered to antiquated crutches.

Drawing on Sartre’s existentialism, we can go further, underneath or beyond (i.e., transcend) the movie’s dialogue, to more fully take account of Patricia’s difficulty in deciding on whether or not to be Michel’s girlfriend. Generally, a person whose choices are based in one’s subjectivity must surely feel a sense of responsibility for those choices once taken. We are responsible for what we are as individuals, and this is in terms of the choices we make. “Thus, existentialism’s first move is to make every [person] aware of what he is and to make the full responsibility of his existence rest on him.”[7]  As if this is not enough weight on one’s shoulders, Sartre goes on to insist that the person is “responsible for all [people].”[8] This is quite a leap; whereas it is easy to accept that Patricia feels responsible for calling the police to report Michel’s whereabouts because her decision comes from herself—no god has decreed that she do so—that she is responsible for everyone as a result seems more tenuous to me unless I have missed dialogue in which she tells Michel that she made the choice not just for herself, but also to show herself as a normative, or model, type of person for others to emulate. Absent such dialogue, such a sense of responsibility from playing a role in the ongoing invention of our species is either absent in her case, in which she falls short of illustrating Sartre’s philosophy, or she is unconscious yet moved by the role-model responsibility.

Sartre maintains that how other people regard a person is important to how that person views one’s own subjectivity. So how one presents oneself—what sort of person one is—is important. The “absolute character of free involvement” enables everyone to realize oneself “in realizing a type of mankind.”[9] In choosing whether to accept Michel as her boyfriend or leave him, Sartre would insist that she has a sense that she is choosing what type of woman she wants other people to see in her. She and Michel have had sex. He very much wants to have sex with her again; in fact, he seems obsessed with several parts of her body at more than one point in the film. She surely realizes that having sex again if they are a couple reflects on her as a type of woman. Sartre would go further in contending that that being that type of person (for others to see as such) and not another type (sex without being his girlfriend) plays a role in the realization of mankind of a certain type.

According to Sartre, “(I)n creating the [person] that we want to be, there is not a single one of our acts which does not at the same time create an image of [mankind] as we think [it] ought to be. To choose to be this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose. As a result, my action has involved all humanity. . . . Therefore, I am responsible for myself and for everyone else. I am creating a certain image of [mankind] of my own choosing. [The person] who involves himself and who realizes that he is not only the person he chooses to be, but also a lawmaker who is, at the same time, choosing all mankind as well as himself, cannot help escape the feeling of his total and deep responsibility.”[10] Each choice contains normative content in that a value is being created or invented that in turn reflects how our species should be. It is as if each choice of each person is reflected in everyone else and in the whole, and, furthermore, that these are reflected, as in a gaze, back on the respective choosers and thus informing their respective subjectivities. In short, an individual person’s choice, even in whether to accept someone as one’s boyfriend or girlfriend, carries with it a profound sense of responsibility even if the person is not aware of it. Patricia seems not to be aware of it, even in terms of what sort of woman she would be morally.

Perhaps the species-formation “macro” aspect of the responsibility lies in what Jung calls the collective unconscious. Even just economically, Adam Smith held that in a competitive market, both buyers and sellers are fixated on their own respective self-interests and are thus oblivious to the unintended “macro,” or common good. Even as inventors of values from clean slates as Sartre contends, we don’t see how the typical choices we make even in a day play a role in the type of humanity that we collectively are inventing. Whether mankind is good or bad is not preordained, and thus can only be the product of individuals making plans and acting, for these in turn are essentially what we are, which presupposes only our existence.

In conclusion, I contend that Godard suspends the movie, at least as a crime narrative, to present us with two distinct paths open to each of us as envisioned by existentialism. Michel is not afraid to choose, even though his decision to accept Patricia as his girlfriend (and wife?) is based on nothing but his own subjective opinion, which he must know is biased because he knows he is in love with her. Yet he does not waver once he had made the choice. This character provides modernity with a solution to the problem of the death of God. In contrast, Patricia unwittingly succumbs to the crisis of modernity in essentially being lost without external supports like religion or a moralist state. She is thus unable (or unwilling) to reach down into her subjectivity and pull out an answer. She doesn’t even know whether she is happy, and she does not realize her freedom. She can invent values, and thus the type of person that she presents to the world and can even impact the sort of species that humanity is becoming, but all of this eludes her. She is not an enigma; rather, she is a casualty of modernity’s casting away the past—the good as well as the bad. She is explainable as a character in terms of Sartre’s existentialist philosophy. If we have nothing but ourselves to fall back on in inventing ourselves from nothing, and knowing that the world is watching and may copy (or reject) us, making choices may scare the hell out of some people, while others, perhaps a few, may have the determination and guts to go forward boldly into that night of nothingness, which is ultimately death anyway. At the end of the movie, Michel pays the price of Patricia’s unmoored subjectivity and her resulting fear and unhappiness. He is not afraid even of death, and in fact he may bring it on by running away from the police. That his death is his choice may be reflected in the fact that he closes his own eyes. Yet even so, he is stronger than Patricia, and he, not she, can be taken as a role model playing a role in the type of humanity that our species should be.  

---

[1] Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions (New York: The Wisdom Library, 1957), p. 22.
[2] Ibid., p. 13.  Sartre may be misinterpreting Nietzsche here, for he was no atheist. Rather, his claim was that in admitted vengeance into a being of perfect goodness, that concept of God is discredited. This is not to say that the divine itself does not exist (i.e., the living God). Sartre might reply, however, that without a viable idea of God, we have nothing to fall back on.
[3] Ibid, quoted material.
[4] Ibid, p. 12.
[5] Ibid., p. 15.
[6] Ibid., p. 13.
[7] Ibid., p. 16.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid., p. 41.
[10] Ibid, pp. 17-18

Passengers

Augustine wrote that Christians are ideally in the world but not of it. The fallen world is not the Christian’s true home. For the 5000 (plus crew) prospective colonists hibernating aboard a mammoth spaceship in the film, Passengers (2016), the planet Earth was presumably not their true home—or maybe that home was becoming climatically rather untenable and the 5000 were lucky souls heading for a new, unspoiled home. In any event, the film’s central paradigm can be characterized as “travel to” and “end-point.” That is to say, means and end characterize this picture at a basic level. The film is particularly interesting at this level in that so much value is found to reside in the means even as the end is still held out as being of great value.

For Aurora Lane, intentionally woken by Jim Preston with 89 more years to go on the trip, Earth had not been home in the sense that home is where love has been found. For her, home was mobile—moving through space at half light-speed—for she found love with Jim in spite of the fact that he had deprived her of living to see the end-point, the colony-planet. In refusing Jim’s new-found way of putting her back to sleep so she could wake again just four months before the end of the voyage, Aurora must have realized that she had found her home with Jim traveling through space. With plentiful food and drink, and no need even of money, Aurora and Jim faced a downside only in the possibility of encroaching loneliness. Headless waiters and a bottomless bartender—all robots—could not be said to give rise to any viable sense of community.

It is strange, therefore, that 89 years later, at the end of the voyage, the awakened crew and passengers do not encounter any offspring having been made out of Jim and Aurora’s love. The couple having realized that they would not live to see the new world, would they not have naturally wanted to have children who would have a chance of seeing the prospective paradise? It seems to me that the screenwriter did not think out the consequences of the couple’s decision far enough in this respect. The awakened passengers and crew should have come upon both trees and the grown children whose entire life had been in space.

In spite of having only each other, perhaps Aurora and Jim relish the peace that can be so compromised in a community (imaging having an apartment complex all to yourself!) and the freedom from the insecurity of want—two assets that could only be found during the journey. The spectacular views of space are also worthy (although it is difficult even to imagine a ship of such material that could withstand such a close pass to a sun). Yet, even so, how difficult it is for us—the audience—to understand why Aurora and Jim could possibly come to prefer a life spent entirely en route, on transportation. We are so used to being goal-oriented, teleological beings that we miss the sheer possibility that the journey itself might constitute a full life worth living.

Abstractly stated, we are so used to relegating means to an end as long at the end is viable that we have great trouble enjoying the means apart from the end. As long as the end stands a chance of being realizable, we cannot ignore it and thus fully rest content along the way.

The ability to reason about means and ends is a virtue.[1] Interestingly, virtuous actions “may be pursued ‘instrumentally’ but must be done ‘for their own sake.’ . . . They must be ends in themselves. . . . Actions truly expressive of the virtues are actions in which the means are prized at least as much as the extrinsic ends to which they are directed. . . . The telos, the best life for human beings to live, is an inclusive end constituted in large part by virtuous activity.”[2] In other words, virtues are both means and ends. A person should value acting virtuously for itself, rather than merely as a means to an end. While not a virtue-ethics guy, Kant uses this characterization in Critique of Practical Reason to claim that human beings should be valued as ends in themselves, rather than merely as means to other ends (e.g., manipulated). Can a boss ever push his use of his subordinates for his own ends sufficiently out of his mind to value those people as ends in themselves—as having inherent value?

The space voyage in the film is shown at first as only a means to a distinctly different end, the colony. Yet by the story’s end, the spaceship comes to be an end in itself too. Due to the length of the trip and the appreciably shorter human lifespan, Jim and Aurora find value in the means not as a means, but only as an end in itself.  Yet as human beings, could they ever come to disconnecting the spaceship from awareness of its end? Could Jim and Aurora ever feel a sense of ease on board without the sense that they have lost or given up the spaceship as a means? For the remainder of their lives, the colony is ahead of them. Is it even possible that two human beings could become oblivious to this fact?

Here on Earth, the Christmas season is so oriented to Christmas Eve and Christmas Day that it is scarcely imaginable that the festive atmosphere during the first three weeks of December could be chosen over Christmas itself. I suspect that more adults like Aurora and Jim, being without family, would prefer the season over the holiday itself—even opting out of it. Yet can a person come to enjoy a Christmas show or attend a Christmas party without having in mind the “not yetness” and the “betterness” of Christmas itself? What if the experience with friends at the Christmas Party two weeks before the actual holiday is better than the saccharine day itself? Can the experience ever hope to get its due regard and esteem for its own sake even as it is regarded as a means?

---

1. Joseph J. Kotva, The Christian Case for Virtue Ethics (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1996): 24.

2. Ibid., p. 25.

Interstellar: Being in Love as a Black Hole

As difficult as it is to grasp the nature of a black hole and its all-consuming gravity, Interstellar (2014) also traces the powerful yet mysterious gravitational pull of human love, including that utterly unfathomable condition we know as “being in love.” We fall in love, which is an expression that presupposes gravity. Yet such all-consuming attachment may not even in principle have as its object our species itself. Even falling in love may be dangerous—just look at Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

“You have attachments, even without a family. I can promise you, the yearning to be with other people is powerful,” Cooper explains to Dr. Mann in the film to justify getting back to Earth as soon as possible. “That emotion is the foundation of what makes us human—not to be taken lightly,” the father of two adds. We are indeed social animals. Yet we don’t seem to be hard-wired to feel an attachment for our species itself, as demonstrated by humanity’s failure to keep global warming from potentially rendering our wise species, homo sapiens, extinct. In fact, the film pits the yearning to be with another person against the species’ very survival, suggesting that being in love is very powerful indeed as well as possibly ruinous to the species.

Brand’s yearning for a man she is in love with places her in a conflict of interest in giving her recommendation on which of two planets to visit. “Love is powerful, observable,” she says. Here on Earth, we know that being in love can lead people to make drastic life-choices that are irrational by any other calculus. A person in love may decide to suddenly walk away from years of work in a field without even a threat of regret in order to be with the other person in another city. A person whose love is unrequited may abruptly change a daily routine or even move to get some distance from the other person. In addition to hopefully being “cured” of being in love with him or her as soon as possible (though time usually takes it time as a thickener of sorts), ending the fierce, unrelenting pain of the rejection is also of high priority. The continued yearning without its object and the hurt from the rejection can be agonizing if the person loves deeply.

Brand describes being in love as being profound. “Maybe it’s some evidence, artifact of a higher dimension we can’t consciously perceive,” she explains to justify her planetary recommendation being consistent with seeing the man with whom she fell in love many years earlier. Love is the one thing we can perceive that transcends the dimensions of time and space. “I’m drawn across the universe to someone I haven’t seen in a decade, who I know is probably dead,” she confesses. It is as if a worm-hole exists between the two souls, rendering their connection as immediate in spite of the oceans of space between them.

Drawing on Kant, I wonder whether being in love distorts both space and time in how they appear to us. The time spent with a beloved passes must quicker, at least initially, than does the time spent apart when the heart yearns to be at one with the other. The area where the beloved lives and works takes on a drastically different meaning and value, both in itself and relative to other places. This special “bump” may even be immune from the waning effects of time due to its own warp.

Finality, such as in the beloved cutting the person still in love off from any further contact and meaning it, is inherently at odds with the love’s innate ability to massage time and space. Particularly a person who falls deeply in love with another person has difficulty in finality at such depth. It is as if the constructed wall violates fate itself, if not the very nature of the love. Yet a person in love can be wrong in sensing fate being at work; the existential feeling in “falling head over heels” in love—that such loving comes out of one’s very core being—is not the sort of thing that a person can turn off (or on). 

To someone who has never been in love, all of this must seem like something in another galaxy. Even to a person who has fallen in love but is not presently in love with the person in love with him or her, it is easy to dismiss the other person’s condition as insignificant or even crazy. It can thus be easy to walk away without any guilt for what the other person is to go through emotionally.

“Maybe we should trust it even though we can’t understand it,” Bland says as she advocates going to the planet where her beloved may still be alive. But should we? If being in love distorts time and space by means of its relentless gravity, then is it wise for other people and the person in love to trust the emotion? He or she may be wrong about fate; the beloved may not be “the one” after all. Indeed, “the one” may actually be cruel, all too comfortable with finality.

Astonishingly, the person in love may still yearn for the underlying good in the other person even as the beloved is bent on inflicting so much hurt that he or she will never have to see the person again. A person in love willing to risk such rejection to work things out demonstrates just how much he or she values love above all else. It is also likely that a person willing to inflict a maximum pain to be rid of such a person forever demonstrates just how little he or she values love itself. Lest it be concluded that a black hole of sorts resides at his or her core being, falling in love may also be quite selfish. Faced with a powerful, relentless yearning for one person, a person in love is hardly unmoved by what he or she wants. Such love, as well as such hate, may not be trustworthy, and may even be dangerous. Perhaps our species would have evolved better had we the ability to fall in love with our species rather than individuals. 

The Holiday: We Accept the Love We Think We Deserve

Two women suffering from unfaithful boyfriends swap homes in California and Britain, respectively, where they each meet a local guy and fall in love. By unfaithful, I don’t necessarily mean cheating; rather, the cheating variety can be situated within the larger category of not committing to love one person completely and with fullness of heart. Such is the plot of The Holiday (2006), a film that is essentially about five good people. As the three unfaithful people are pruned out, the viewer is left with an optimistic feeling about human beings being capable of emotional intimacy.

The film opens with Amanda Woods finally getting confirmation that Ethan has been sleeping with a coworker. In fact, the deceitful guy is in love with the other woman. Frozen emotionally from the pain of witnessing her parents split up many years earlier, Amanda cannot bring herself even to cry. In an idyllic hope to get over the hurt by spending Christmas in Europe, she swaps houses with Iris Simpkins. Iris is in love with Jasper Bloom, whose engagement to a coworker takes Iris by surprise. Faced with the excruciating hurt from being in love with someone who has chosen someone else, Iris too goes with the idyllic hope that a few weeks in Los Angeles will lessen or remove the pain.

In England, Amanda meets Iris’s brother, Graham, who does not take long to fall for her. His love is real. Indeed, a deep connection can be sensed up front without meaning it is merely a crush. I think such connections can exist from the start, rather than necessarily coming about only after two people grow together. Amanda is paralyzed deep down, but she finally melts at the last minute and the two are together on New Year’s Eve.

In Southern California, Iris befriends Miles, and their mutually growing interest reflects perhaps a more subtle connection that can “fly under the radar” without detection. Arthur Abbott, a retired screenwriter and neighbor whom Iris befriends, sees the connection before either Iris or Miles, and Arthur’s good nature shows through as he acts as a catalyst. Even so, Iris is distracted by Jasper, who keeps in contact with her for selfish, inconsiderate reasons, and Miles still has feelings for his ex-girlfriend, whom he discovers has been cheating on him. She finally shuts the door (literally) on Jasper when he was visiting her in Los Angeles, and Miles refuses to give Sophie a second chance. Once trust has been sliced apart by not enough love on one end, even the other person being very much in love is not sufficient to heal the ruptured intimacy. Love must be mutual, or it is bound to go off kilter and crash.

In The Holiday, the people who are strong enough in character to say yes to emotional intimacy with one person above all others win the day. The film presents a world in which good people rise above the chaff. Life is not one big picnic with noodle salad for those people; Iris, Amanda, and Miles must struggle, for instance, to overcome their respective feelings for people of a lesser god—wounded souls who for whatever reasons cannot or will not overcome their inner demons and come the rest of the way to adult intimacy. As the last scene shows, much carefree freedom goes with the mutual intimacy, whereas the freedom of the deceivers is illusory, for they are trapped in souls too afraid to grow.

Little Women: Strong in Death and Love

Little Women (1994), based on the novel by Louisa May Alcott, can be thought of as a social history of civil-war-era New England—that is to say, the film captures what life must have been like on a daily basis. Yet the human predicament resonates and thus makes the film moving for viewers far removed from the world of the Marsh family in Concord, Massachusetts. In particular, the film confronts the viewer with the hard task of going on even with the emotionally heavy experience of loss.

The film presents the uneasy feeling of “ending” through two manifestations: death and love. Regarding the former, the Marsh family, and especially Jo, must come to terms with the loss of Beth. With a weakened heart from a fever and minutes from death, Beth tells her sister Jo, “I know I will be lonely for you, even in heaven.” Jo’s realization after the death that she will never see Beth is so hard that she writes a novel of her childhood as a means of vicariously holding on to Beth. It is difficult indeed to come to terms with never again seeing a person who has meant so much. This is true too in romantic love when it is as if fate has brought two people together, and yet one demurs and the other must accept the loss.

“You don’t need scores of suitors; you only need one, if he’s the right one,” young Amy Marsh advises her three older sisters.  When a beloved is felt to be “the one,” the forced return to life without that person can feel like a long prison sentence. Few people rise to such a rank; they can be few and far between—which is a testament to their tremendous value. So much distance, in other words, exists between “getting in” and “never to be seen again” that the heart struggles to make the journey.

In rejecting Laurie’s proposal of marriage, Jo feels that she will never find “the one” tailored to her, for she is rather unique as an independent writer in the nineteenth century. Faced with the unfathomable distance between loving Jo and never seeing her again, Laurie marries Jo’s younger sister Amy. At first, she resists, saying she will not date someone still in love with her sister.  Laurie denies it of course, telling Amy, “I have always known I should be part of the Marsh family.” Amy eventually agrees to marry him, and he need not face the prospect of never again seeing someone who has meant so much to him. Although he need not face such a hard sentence, his chosen path back to “just friends” with Jo is not easy.

The transition that Laurie undergoes in his relation to Jo is not one that many people in Laurie’s emotional place can make. Once you start falling in love with a person, it is nearly impossible to going back to just being roommates, for example. Once you discover that the person you are falling for is not falling for  you, continuing as "just friends" almost certainly goes with much pain, especially if the one you love starts dating someone else. 

Fortunately for Jo Marsh, she finds love in Friedrich, a poor academic tutor from Europe. That he is much older than her and comes with empty hands (i.e., not much wealth) are of no concern to Jo, as she really loves him. Putting her hands in his, she tells him that his empty hands are full now. That's love, which transcends, and thus relativizes, all those criteria that seem important in the absence of love but suddenly pale in comparison when a deep connection is felt. 

Life goes on even amid deaths and loves lost—and even love takes hold in spite of it all. This is the message conveyed by Little Women. Facing the prospect of their father’s possible death in battle and Beth’s weakened heart, the little women are hardly little; and years later, in going on after Beth has died, knowing they would never again see her, Meg, Jo, and Amy are hardly little women. Jo is hardly little when she wraps her heart around poor Friedrich. Life is indeed not only the struggle for existence as Darwin postulated; it is also the plight of the elusive yet very deep meaning felt as two people come together as if by instinct. 

Subtle Anticipations in Film Narrative: Foreshadowing in A Single Man

Tom Ford’s approach in screenwriting and directing his first feature film, A Single Man (2009), which is based on Christopher Isherwood’s novel of the same title, can be characterized as thoroughness oriented to the use of film as art not merely for visual storytelling, but also to probe the depths of human meaning and present the audience with a thesis and thus something to ponder. As Ford reveals in his oral commentary to the film, that thesis is that we should live in the present, attending to it more closely, because today might be our last day of life. George, the film’s protagonist, supposes that in intending to commit suicide at the end of the day covered by the film, he chooses the final day of his life—hence retaining and exercising some control over his otherwise hackneyed daily routine. Though an exquisite use of foreshadowing that subtly and vaguely anticipates his death, the film gains a depth of meaning that operates at different levels. The underlying meaning is nuanced, even multivalent, rather than entirely opaque and transparent. In this essay, I take a look at Ford’s use of hints anticipating George’s death. Being salient in the script, they serve as a good illustration for aspiring and even accomplished screenwriters who want to touch the unconscious as well as awareness.

The most transparent foreshadowing takes place at the beginning of the film, in the morning before work, in the kitchen. George’s heart disease suddenly clenches and he winces in a quick spat of pain. In Christopher Isherwood’s book of the same title, which Ford adapted for the film, the fit is a spasm—a mere cramp that George has on a regular basis.[1] The film begins closer to consciousness.

“I don’t see my future,” George says as our narrator at the beginning of what would turn out to be the last day of his life in spite of his last-minute decision not to kill himself. Sitting in his modern, Frank Lloyd Wright-based house in Malibu, California on November 30, 1962, he knows he plans on killing himself—an intent that is entirely missing in the book. The professor is genuinely perplexed, as if the lack of any envisioned future would be any surprise on his last day on earth. He is inexplicably stupefied even as he goes over his plan to commit suicide. In the book, George tells Kenny at the bar late that night, “The future—that’s where death is.”[2] It is all so open-ended, as if a blank screen so bright nothing on it can be seen.

Just as vaguely, George says “I’m going away” in answer to a hustler’s suggestion of “Maybe another time?” as the two look into the setting golden sunlight after work. Later that night, George answers his friend Charlie’s desire to get together again real soon with, “I think I will be quiet this weekend.” In the book, George nearly falls down stairs going out from Charlie’s front door, very nearly falling “ten, fifty, one hundred million feet into the bottomless black night.”[3] In retrospect, these remarks are chilling, even ominous, for they imply an insufferable, terminal void into which even a person’s consciousness and thought dissolve; and yet, as George lies prostrate on his bedroom floor, dying of a heart attack just before 3 a.m., his voice narration informs the audience, “And suddenly it happened.” Another foreshadowing, perhaps, though this one is for the viewers, who in answer to the anticipated void at the end of their own lives dare to hope.

The foreshadowing is also done by substituting awkward inexplicable reactions in place of the expected. The effect is to open up the narrative, as if pregnant with new-found potential directionality. Looking at George during cocktails before dinner at her stylish house, for instance, Charlie observes, “Darling, you don’t look well; remember that heart attack you had?  You don’t look so hot.” Even though George intends to put a pistol to his head later that night, I find it odd that he barely registers a reaction. To be sure, he has no incentive to run to a hospital for a stress test.

After dinner and an enjoyable dance, George lights two cigarettes and hands one to his former lover. “It’s not like smoking will kill me,” he deadpans. Charlie, her own drunken state doubtlessly being a factor, does not take the hint as she should. Is George unconsciously crying out for help? Rather than two people connecting, the two alcoholics are talking past each other even as they presume (and crave) emotional intimacy. George lost it a year earlier when his partner Jim died in a car crash in Ohio, and life was in black and white for him ever since—except for that last day, when George found himself amazed with the beauty in the ordinary and then unexpectedly connecting.

After leaving Charlie’s house, George goes to his neighborhood bar. Finding Kenny, a student clearly obsessed with his professor, curiously there (pensively waiting, in the book’s version), George confides to him (hence establishing emotional intimacy), “You know the only thing that has made the whole thing worthwhile, has been those few times when I’ve been really, truly been able to connect with another human being.” The question is thus whether this new, unforeseen connection will mean a suspension or cancellation of the current plan.

The answer is not delivered directly or all at once. Once again, the narrative has depth, and thus reaches out on more than one level using foreshadowing. Back at his place with Kenny after their short swim in the Pacific Ocean after drinks at the bar, George realizes that his watch has stopped. “My watch seems to have stopped,” he says—again, strangely perplexed. A hint for us that time has run out for George, only he does not realize it even though he still intends to end his life that night; he is still under the impression that he is in control of when his life will end. Besides being a neat-freak, George has nearly suffocated himself tightly in controlling his interior and exterior, yet as a functioning alcoholic he is anything but in control of even himself.

Minutes after realizing that his watch has stopped, George passes out as Kenny looks on. In his recurrent dream of drowning, the depressed, still grieving professor finally gets to the surface and can breathe. This awakens him, and he finds and locks away his gun, no longer intent on ending his life.  No doubt the emotional intimacy with Kenny—finally connecting with another human being again—has brought color back into George’s life. Ford cleverly varies color saturation to distinguish the pallid world of George’s depression from Charlie’s liveliness and Kenny’s emotional connection. In fact, Kenny plays a savior role, rather than merely that of an obsessed student—even keeping his professor safe by holding the gun while sleeping on the couch after carrying George back to bed. According to Ford, although it is not clear that Kenny is interested in men, he willingly offers his body to George when the two return earlier from swimming.

Kenny has indeed saved George, at least in terms of suicide.  Yet the Fates, intimated for the audience by the sight of an owl taking flight as George opens his front door to glimpse the nearly-full ruddy moon, will have the last word in this affair we call life. As Ford points out in his commentary, the owl has long stood for death being not long in coming. George is in a state of suspended animation, for he finds himself ensconced in one of his rare, fleeting moments in which the universe and everything in it, including his own life and even his partner’s crash, make sense. “A few times in my life,” he narrates, “I’ve had moments of absolute clarity. When for a few, brief seconds, the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp, and the world seems so fresh; it’s as though it had all just come into existence.” Burning the suicide notes he had written to Charlie and someone else, he concedes that he can never make such moments last. “I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I’ve lived my life on these moments; they pull me back to the present.” With that, the thesis is transparent: live in the present, for today may just be your last. Such alignment is suddenly undercut, however, as George gets his wish even if he is no longer willing it.

Realizing that “everything is exactly the way it’s meant to be,” George reaches out for to his bed stand for water only to feel himself in the clutches of a fatal, all-consuming heart attack. Ford says George is even wrong about everything then being just right in his life. How cruel it is of the Fates to cut into one of those rare conditions of insightful equilibrium. The Fates will not be denied by what little control we think we can muster, or perhaps George pulled the trigger with all the years of smoking and drinking—a subtle and gradual means of suicide.

As he lay on the floor barely alive, we hear the slowing clicks of his alarm clock. The clock stops, and George sees his deceased partner lean down and kiss him on the cheek—the kiss of death—for “just like that, it came.” Suddenly the overhead camera shot turn to black and white; there is no longer any living in the now for George. We are left with what is perhaps the deepest level of meaning in the film—what now?

With George narrating his own death, his soul must exist in the film’s story-world. “And suddenly it happened.” People don’t usually say that death came. So I suspect that given the sense of amazement in “just like that,” George experienced something liberating, or at the very least a sudden change or transformation into another realm of existence in which his emotional pain could not go. He does not mention his dead partner, Jim, so I suspect that whatever suddenly came, it was existential rather than restorative in terms of human relationships. In effect, death relativizes them such that seeing earlier departed loved ones is no longer important.

Narrative visual art can indeed plumb the mind’s depths and thus register as substantive instead of superficial eye-candy. Films that leave an audience thinking and feeling deeply for a sustained period of time are themselves multi-layered, with multivalent symbols placed at various degrees of subtlety throughout the narrative to foreshadow. Such films register at various depths of human meaning and reflect its complexity through the use of linguistic and visual symbols, each of which contains by its very nature more than one loosely-related meaning. They play even with time by lending to human nature more omniscience than it has a right to. It as if the screenplays have been written as orchestral pieces, with more than one instrument group—each at its own level of subtlety and duration, and yet likely simultaneous with various others at foreshadowed intervals.

---

[1] Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man , (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1964), p. 13.

[2] Ibid., p. 157.

[3] Ibid., p. 145.

Casablanca: What Makes a Film into a Classic?

Like books and songs, many movies have been made that cannot escape their particular time. In writing my academic book, for example, I aspired to speak beyond those living to generations not yet born because my aim was the production of knowledge beyond mere artifacts of the world in which I live. I knew that the verdict on whether the text passes that crucial test could only come long after my own death. Among films, even though Casablanca is a film immersed in, and thus reflecting its time—the context in 1942 being of course World War II—the film transcends all that to resonate in the following century. In his oral commentary, Rudy Behlmer argues that the film “transcends time.” He goes on to provide us with a list of the usual suspects behind what lies behind the making of a classic.

Firstly, the interplay of the characters still resonates, in that it means something to people outside of that context and is thus still able to illicit emotional responses. In this sense, the film still lives. For example, being torn between two lovers is hardly a dated concept, as the experience renews itself in each generation. Rick’s dejected mood following being betrayed while in love is also something that resonates with many people, and undoubtedly in generations to come. Unfortunately, even a corrupt public official, personified as Louis in the film, is all too familiar to us today, whereas Laslo’s willingness to sacrifice for a higher purpose is largely lost in all the tussle of the business-oriented, consumerist cultures today. Yet the salience of the ideals—sacrifice and renunciation in fighting the good fight against the bad guys—still resonate because ideals themselves are timeless.

Secondly, although Laslo and Louis may be too cliché, Bogart’s character (Rick) is both complex and dynamic (i.e., follows a character arc). As Behlmer puts it, “he is not a bad guy . . . He was an idealist, lost it, and then regained it.” Additionally, Elsa is not some stereotypical love object, and she undergoes changes as well. She becomes caught in the emotional struggle of loving two men in different ways or for different reasons. Rick too is conflicted, most notably whether to send Elsa on with her husband. In fact, as Roger Ebert points out in his oral commentary, the German-expressionistic lighting being associated with the two characters on screen sends a message of emotional turmoil to the viewer’s subconscious. Both this multi-layered approach and internal emotional conflict itself help the film resonate with viewers in any era.

Lastly, the build-up of suspense, owing in part to the difficulty a first-time viewer has in predicting the ending, points to the plot itself as contributing to the film having become a classic. Weaving together strands from melodrama (i.e., plot-driven), drama (i.e., character-driven), comedy, and suspense-thriller helps the film itself avoid stereotyping and provides it with a certain multivalency—a term that Margaret Mead applies to symbol. Perhaps having a multidimensionality renders a film more interesting, and in this respect too makes it more likely that a film will survive into succeeding eras.

In Socrates’s dialogues, both narrative and dialogue of course are salient. In reading them, I noticed that very little that only an ancient Greek would be familiar with is in the texts. The orientation being philosophical, timeless ideas are major players, and, in The Apology at least, the narrative of an innocent man being put on trial and sentenced to death still resonates. In fact, early Christian theologians such as Jerome and Tertullian wrote of Socrates as anticipating Christianity as a “Christ figure.” In fact, the notion of the immortality of the soul comes from Socrates’s Meno (pre-bodily existence being necessary for us to be able to recall knowledge not taught). In short, avoiding things that people in other epochs could not know and privileging ideals and principles that transcend a particular time and place may be vital ingredients to making a film into a classic.