Stacked Deck

I’m front-paging a response that I wrote this morning to a reader about Mark Romanek‘s Never Let Me Go (and the Kazuo Isiguro book that the film is based upon). The film opens on 9.15, less than three weeks hence, so it’s time to start kicking things around.

It’s not a very well-kept secret that the book and the film deal with a grim-fate dynamic — an oppressive, locked-down situation in which “a long and happy life” doesn’t appear to be in the cards for the main characters. In response a guy named The Perils of Thinking brought up the notion that facing the fact that you’re going to die is a bracing and clarifying experience.

“The clarity that comes from recognizing where one is heading,” he said, “can allow one to prioritize and make the most of one’s most brutally limited resource.”

Yes, I replied. As in that famous saying about how “the clarity of mind that comes to a man standing on the gallows is wonderful.” As in face facts, sharpen your mind and prioritize.

I’ve always been one, however, to take it a step further and not just prioritize and all that, but to first and foremost revel and rejoice in the immediacy of the symphony. Death is something to be accepted, okay, but primarily fought and strategized against, frequently laughed at, lampooned and pooh-poohed, acknowledged but simultaneously “ignored” (in a manner of speaking), dismissed, despised and raged against (in Dylan Thomas‘s words) right to the end.

There is only life, only the continuance, only the fuel and the fire…only the next step, the next breath, the next meal, the next sip of water, the next hill to climb, the next perfect pair of courdoruy pants, the next adventure, the next hypnotizing woman, the next splash of salt spray in your face, the next staircase to run down two or three steps at a time, the next rental car and the next winding road to concentrate on and carefully negotiate, etc.

Knowing your time on earth is limited and that the clock is pressing down leads one to value the time left and to treat each day as if it’s your last…of course. But The Perils of Thinking also said that “as far as I’m concerned, resignation to (or, to use a less negative connotation, acceptance of) one’s ultimate fate is one of the more rewarding and true experiences any human can experience.”

Resignation and acceptance? I know what he means but somehow those terms sound more like what a person with terminal cancer has to come to terms with than a person living a robust life.

The basic premise of Ernest Becker‘s “The Denial of Death” (1973) is, to go by one summary, “that human civilization is ultimately an elaborate, symbolic defense mechanism against the knowledge of our mortality, which in turn acts as the emotional and intellectual response to our basic survival mechanism.

“Becker argues that …man is able to transcend the dilemma of mortality through heroism, a concept involving his symbolic half. By embarking on what Becker refers to as an “immortality project” (or causa sui), in which he creates or becomes part of something which he feels will last forever, man feels he has “become” heroic and, henceforth, part of something eternal; something that will never die, compared to his physical body that will die one day.

“This, in turn, gives man the feeling that his life has meaning; a purpose; significance in the grand scheme of things.”

All to say that from one what I can gather, not having read the book but having read a couple of reviews and a couple of summaries, is that there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of dynamic go-for-it activity along these general lines in Never Let Me Go. Nobody seems to protest, creatively deny, fight against, counter-attack, escape from or anything like that. The young people in the book have been created to donate, and donate they do, and then they die. Great.

A friend who’s seen Never Let Me Go says, “If the film is difficult for some people, it’s not because of the movie’s quality, but simply because it deals with issues that most people are uncomfortable with. The performances are all fine. And the direction is subtle. It has a modesty. It’s all handled with humanity. The point isn’t to wallow in their tragedy, but to relate their experiences to our own. If you understand that, the film slowly builds its power as it progresses.”

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38 thoughts on “Stacked Deck”

  2. Having not yet read the book or screenplay, I can’t comment on how the movie does or does not conform to these ideas, but, yeah, the first two-thirds of your post was a more thorough and literate summation of what I was trying to say.

    As for the last part, if my use of the idea of acceptance (I’d reject “resignation” for carrying, as I said before, too negative an implication) echoes too closely “what a person with terminal cancer has to come to terms with”, I think it’s as a result of my atheism and my acceptance of the lack of evidence of an existence or consciousness beyond this one.

    Just as a cancer patient lacking acceptance might diminish his quality of life by jamming tubes down his throat and poison into his veins to only momentarily ward off the inevitable, I think someone who expects a “life after death” might fail to see, respect, and immerse themselves in what is truly momentous and worthwhile in the life they currently live. Much like the other stages of grief one can be said to go through when faced with terminal illness, someone obsessed with “the next life” might spend their time bargaining for a better slot in that life or simply denying that they have to face an end at all, the whole time neglecting to embrace, as you said, “the continuance, the fuel and the fire”, and, especially, the other people we are share the escalator with, however temporarily.

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  4. And, by the way, I think there’s certainly no correlation between acceptance as we’ve been using it here and a lack of fire or a raging against the machines of death; as someone whose entire immediate family was dead by the time I was 20, I’m the first to say death can go fuck itself, and I’ll be sucking the marrow until my heart stops.

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  5. The book is incredibly boring and pretentious. It’s one of the reasons why people don’t read literary fiction anymore–someone recommends a book like this to them and they can’t finish it because it’s such a piece of crap. Nothing fucking happens. Every review of the movie will require a spoiler alert in every paragraph.

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  7. I thought Aronofsky covered these themes masterfully (the rejection of mortality and ultimately acceptance of death) in The Fountain.

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  8. Wells: I find it highly amusing you’re basing all of this — and your probable dislike of the movie — based on reading a frigging Wikipedia entry. Fortunately, it sounds like those who have actually seen the movie get the point of the story, and that Romanek’s pulled it off. (Shame you spoiled it for yourself beforehand…)

    And I gotta disagree, Prager — it’s incredibly moving. It’s just not obvious about it. It’s typical Ishiguro, and one of the reasons he’s among my favorite authors — a quiet first-person story about an emotionally-stunted character who realizes they’ve been living in a very different reality than they were raised in, and their struggle to come to terms with that fact.

    (Now, I grant you that it’s no REMAINS OF THE DAY… but it’s still fantastic.)

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  9. I read it with a book club. At least 6 very well-read people. Some had master’s degrees. We were all disappointed by this humorless book.

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  10. The book is lean and gripping. I read it in three sittings. I was actually a little embarrassed because I finished it on a plane and was in tears when the flight attendant took my drink order.

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  11. Prager: that’s fine, I’m not saying if you disagree you’re an idiot. I totally understand people not liking it, and you aren’t the only one I’ve talked to who didn’t. (I wouldn’t say “humorlessness” is necessarily a bad thing, though… I mean, we’re talking about a pretty serious drama here.)

    For me, the themes and plotting of NLMG and REMAINS are both very similar… and are both meaningful to me emotionally. What you take away from the book depends on whether or not you agree. Admittedly there’s not a ton of “action,” but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I’m curious to see how the movie deals with that.

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  12. At the screening I saw, every single person, me included, came out with the same question on their lips: “Why didn’t they run away?” Which is ironic considering the one-sheet.

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  14. Cobra, remember Jeff’s post recently about sheltered children who lead sheltered adult lives? That’s probably the answer.

    It’s like when kids who grow up in a cult, or even the Amish, for that matter, try to enter the outside world as young adults and can’t function because they simply don’t have the skill set to succeed. Often, they turn to drugs and crime.

    If they ran away, how would they be able to support themselves?…

    Simply, the characters in NLMG were raised in a very proper British environment and conditioned to behave and think in a certain manner.

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  15. “At the screening I saw, every single person, me included, came out with the same question on their lips: ‘Why didn’t they run away?’”

    That’s a simple one… because there would be no story otherwise. And something that would be a moot point, if the story is told well. I just re-watched “Time After Time” last night, for the first time in thirty years. And while I still enjoyed the movie greatly, especially Malcolm McDowell’s understated performance, I couldn’t help but wonder why there was so much hand-wringing over certain elements of the main story. The climax of the movie is foletold in the first act, and directly alluded to a couple more times thereafter. What happened at the end could have happened much earlier, but needed to happen when it did in order for the writer/director to tell the story he wanted to tell. And considering it’s a story about a guy with a time machine, the protagonist could have changed the outcome at any time, because he has a TIME MACHINE. But he couldn’t, because then we’d have no story.

    I like Romanek as a filmmaker, and I will give this film the benefit of the doubt. If it’s a well-made movie, it won’t matter that if the audience knows the outcome of the characters. It’s the journey that’s important, not the end.

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  16. Read the book and seen the film in two screenings.The first time stuck with me the whole weekend and prompted me to read the book. Still brought tears to my eyes the second showing even knowing what was going to happen.

    And yes, nothing really happens, nothing gets blown up and it’s a movie that couldn’t ever be made in Hollywood, far too subtle and understated.Mulligan is superb and the new Spiderman shows he can act as well.

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  18. Cobraverde: the kids are slavishly devoted to their purpose, which is pretty common in all Ishiguro’s books… even though it might not make them truly “happy.” Their circumstances are normal to them, because it’s all they’ve ever known. It’s “natural.” They want to do what they’re supposed to do, and do it well.

    Drawing (yet another) parallel to REMAINS — they don’t run for the same reason Stevens never tells (the maid — blanking on her name) “I love you,” even though it’s so obvious and so simple.

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  19. Prager: thanks for the tip. I was profoundly moved by A Prayer for Owen Meany, and find it to be Irving’s best work. And I’m not even religious.

    Guess I’m going to have to check out the book and the movie.

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  20. They didn’t run away because in the dystopia in which the film is set it would have never occurred to them to run away- they are so conditioned by their lives that they see no alternative to their very controlled existence. There is a fantastic scene in a rain lashed classroom which shows the complicity to their fate. It’s not resignation because they are not sad about it, just acceptance.

    I think the one sheet is pretty clever- yes they are running away, but on a pier- there’s no where to go. There is no escape.

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  21. “I read it with a book club. At least 6 very well-read people. Some had master’s degrees. We were all disappointed by this humorless book.”

    What were their Master’s degrees in, public administration? mortuary science? I read the book three, four years ago, and it has stayed with me. Ishiguro wrote something great here. A haunting story.

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  25. There are members of cults and other groups that never make a break for it, and maybe never really consider the idea, but if this is the world you’re presenting and some sense of rebellion or the slightest effort to say “fuck all this” isn’t present in at least one of the characters, then for all of the sad beauty the work may have, you’re not making drama.

    There’s an interview with Ishiguro on YouTube where he explains what he was trying to do with this story and you really get a strong sense of the fact that he didn’t care about the ins and outs of the world he was creating so much as he just wanted to deal with the human lifespan contracted down to three decades, and what it would be like to be young and face the twilighthood problems that would otherwise be presented to someone elderly. So it would seem that the characters remain passive because doing otherwise would take the focus off of this pre-ordained theme.

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  28. The big surprise that is at the heart of the book is pretty obvious, as it is to most of those reading and posting on this blog; one of the frustrations of the book is that it holds off this big “reveal” as if we don’t see it coming a million miles away. Otherwise, I kept wanting the novel to touch me in a way it never quite did, and I ended up disappointed, though not quite as harshly dismissive as George Prager.

    On the other hand, most people know what a movie like this is about when they walk in, so that may be to the advantage of this one. I hope so, and I’ll see it, probably.

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