What If...?

Hanif Kureishi, "What If I Want You to Let Me Go?"

Why do people not rebel, even when they know their way of life leads to a global catastrophe? - a contribution from Slavoj Zizek.

Written by Slavoj Zizek,

Quite by chance, I only recently saw Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go (2010, screenplay by Alex Garland based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro), and it struck me as arguably the most depressing film I’ve ever seen. I suspect the reason why is that today, with all the crises that more and more affect our daily lives, from global warming to wars and the threat of digital control, we find ourselves in a position very similar to that of the heroes of Romanek’s film.

Never Let Me Go mixes in an extraordinarily efficient way a science-fiction premise with intimate psychological drama and a love story. A medical breakthrough in the late 1950s has extended the human lifespan beyond 100 years, but to achieve this, the state grew clones who are destined to donate their organs to prolong the lives of mortally ill people. However, for this activity to become acceptable, a profound change had to occur in public morals, radically redefining what counts as socially acceptable – driven by the promise of survival, people accepted this since clones were artificially produced outside the network of kinship relations and were thus perceived as beings who didn’t count as fully human.

The story begins in 1978 and follows three children, the young Kathy H, along with her friends Tommy D and Ruth C, who live at Hailsham, a traditional boarding school. The teachers, called guardians, encourage students to be health-conscious and create artwork, and they have little contact with the world beyond the school's fences. Miss Lucy, a perceptive new guardian, tells her class that they are all clones who exist to be organ donors and are destined to die early in their adulthoods after a couple of donations (maximum 4); she is quickly fired by the headmistress. As time passes, Kathy grows attracted to Tommy, but Ruth wins him for herself despite his initial interest in Kathy. This love triangle is resolved years later when a broken Ruth reveals she only seduced Tommy because she was afraid to be alone; consumed with guilt, she wishes to help Tommy and Kathy seek a deferral (there is a rumor circulating among the clones that if a couple proves they are really in love, their donations will be postponed). She leaves them with the address of Madame, whom she believes has the power to help them, and soon dies on the operating table during her second donation. Tommy and Kathy, now his “carer” (the one who stands by a clone during donations to make his/her life easier), finally enter a relationship, but after they discover that deferrals are a myth, Tommy explodes with grief and anger as he did as a child. Tommy dies during his fourth donation, leaving Kathy alone, and after a decade of caring, we see her contemplating the ruins of her childhood. Finally getting ready to begin her own donations, she questions in a voice-over how different – or not so different - her life has been from normal people's.

The book’s big enigma remains unanswered: why the main characters never try to escape their fate of an early death (although they could easily attempt to disappear into society)? The story is pervaded by radical ambiguity regarding this point: do the donors accept their fate because they are not fully human or because they are, in some basic sense, more human than the rest of us, ordinary humans? Numerous comments offer a whole series of divergent answers. First, there is the obvious scientific one: the donors are “genetically engineered clones. Their genes were designed to eliminate the fight-or-flight response.” Then, there is external control: Hailsham is surrounded by an electrified fence; all donors wear bracelets which register their movements so that they can be located at any point, etc. Finally, there is the donors’ psychic stance: they have no outside perspective; they are unable to develop any kind of dream of a better outside to escape to, and they possess no legal documents to identify them in the external world…

However, when they reach the age to become donors, they are moved from Hailsham to Cottages, isolated countryside buildings where they see and interact with “‘real’ humans living their lives, growing old, having relationships, feeling and crying and laughing the same way they do. Even with the brainwashing as kids, why do they not question their rights and purpose as adults? This is how the human brain works when processing experiences: it elaborates, creates questions, and motivates changes. Why does every single ‘real’ human among them have zero ethical dilemma and not rebel against the state of things, although they clearly see that those ‘donors’ are fully human?” They even escape to a nearby small town, visit an ordinary pub, etc. – so why do not some of them at least kill themselves?

The weirdness of this feature becomes obvious if we compare Never Let Me Go with The Island (Michael Bay, 2005) - a comparison solicited by Ishiguro himself who pointed out that he wanted to do the opposite of an individual finding himself in a similar situation of total control and then rebelling against it. The Island is about Lincoln Six Echo (played by Ewan McGregor), who struggles to fit into the highly structured world in which he lives, isolated in a compound on an island, and a series of strange events that unfold make him question how truthful that world is. After he learns the compound inhabitants are clones used for organ harvesting and surrogates for wealthy people in the outside world, he attempts to escape with Jordan Two Delta (Scarlett Johansson) and expose the illegal cloning movement… What we get here is a standard Hollywood-Leftist story of a heroic individual rebelling against the oppressing regime; he triumphs and ends up on a lone island with his beloved. What makes Never Let Me Go such a truly depressing masterpiece is that it provides no easy way out; part of its traumatic impact is precisely the fact that the reason why donors do not rebel (or try to escape at least) is not specified – again, in contrast to usual catastrophe movies where the external threat (evil conspiracy, virus, aliens…) is sooner or later identified. We find ourselves in a non-specified situation of mortal dread that deprives individuals of their basic tendency to survive, hope, and fight. What makes this dread all the more oppressive is its “abstract” nature of an oppressive atmosphere. Even when they still desire things (as in the love triangle of Tommy, Cathy, and Ruth where sexual passion, jealousy, and envy intermingle), the joy of love is tainted by the all-pervasive depressive background. It is too much to say that there is a contrast between the depressive atmosphere and the intricacies of the love triangle: their love is an organic part of the atmosphere, and one should not restrain from the staggering conclusion that this depressive atmosphere makes the three donors ethically much better people. The reason Ruth (superbly played by Keira Knightley) breaks down and confesses her manipulations to Tommy and Cathy is that she is well aware how close to her “completion” she is already after her first donation – one can safely presume that, without the traumatic background of being a clone raised for donations, she would remain what she was, a rather insolent seductress playing with other people’s emotions and even joyfully bringing them pain. I find the crux of the film in depicting how the depressive atmosphere of knowing one’s fate.

So let’s go to the end in these risky speculations: what one should reject is the fake “wise” concluding meditation of Cathy where she arrives at the result that, in some sense, all “normal” humans resemble clones: we are all caught in destiny imposed by an anonymous other and awaiting a certain death… Or, to put it in a different way: Never Let Me Go struggles with the big enigma of our time: why do people not rebel – even when they clearly know their way of life leads to a global catastrophe? Why is indifference emerging more and more as the predominant stance of our life which is only occasionally interrupted by wild rebellions that really change nothing? The answer suggested by the film is much more subtle than a simple critique of conformism since it introduces a key difference: we “normal” humans do not know when and how, exactly, we will die, and this uncertainty sustains our secret disavowed hope that – maybe, just maybe – we will not die. In other words, our “normal” everyday existence is based on a disavowal of what we all know well, but in an abstract, impersonal (not-subjectivized) way. To paraphrase the well-known syllogism, all people are mortal, but I am maybe not… In Never Let Me Go, we are compelled to fully assume our mortality.

So the donors in the film are not lacking a perspective on the outside reality – on the contrary, they attain a perspective which we, “normal” people fully immersed in social reality, automatically deny. It is our “normal” everyday existence which is a lie. The pessimistic conclusion to be drawn from all this is that if we fail to assume our mortality, this does not make us ethically better persons: only against the depressive background of an impenetrable deadly threat can we occasionally act in a kind and compassionate way. And is this also not the lesson for us today? Not a cheap humanist optimism but full acceptance that we are doomed. But does this mean that we should simply accept the meaninglessness of our lives? There is a notion (with a religious background, but nonetheless open to a materialist reading) which shows a way to make one’s life meaningful without falling into a trap of some higher power guaranteeing this meaning, that of vocation. In his Shattered, Hanif Kureishi notes that, much more than top specialist doctors, nurses are those who consider their job a vocation:

“In every town, in every city in the world there are hospitals that are full of nurses doing a devoted job. From the conversations I’ve had with the nurses, with whom I spend most of my days, and some of my nights – not having known any before – they consider their work to be a vocation, a calling, a whole way of life. They dress and undress me, wash my body, genitals and arse, cleaning everything. They brush my hair, change my dressings, feed and engage me in conversations; insert suppositories, change my catheter and brush my teeth, shave and transfer me from bed to chair – this is their everyday work. /…/ The nurses here are cheerful, they sing and make jokes, but they are not well paid. Wages are certainly lower in Italy than they are in the UK but they have been doing this for years and, as far as I can tell, want to carry on. One nurse told me he didn’t have a girlfriend because he was too exhausted from his work to sustain a romantic relationship.”

Kureishi is perspicuous enough to immediately add that vocation and sexuality are not to be opposed – they can be in competition because they are both vocations. Note also the profoundly theological Deleuzian remark that, in an authentic vocation, I don’t choose it but I am chosen by it: “There is also a sexual aspect to the notion of vocation, since such a choice, like sexuality, isn’t an option, but something you are inexorably drawn to. It chooses you, rather than the other way round.” We should take this parallel to its logical conclusion: if I fall passionately in love with a woman (or the other way around) and she is indifferent towards me or even finds me disgusting, love was still not my own free choice – my experience is that I was chosen to love her. There is a recent film which focuses precisely on vocation as a way to escape the capitalist commodification of our life, also in the form of dedicating it to some higher spiritual pursuit (a form which is still confined to the fulfillment of our ego: Krzysztof Zanussi’s late masterpiece Liczba doskonała (The Perfect Number, 2022). A young Polish mathematician-physicist is immersed in his scientific research and in the teaching of his subjects, while his elderly Jewish-Polish cousin from Jerusalem would like to donate him the wealth accumulated during his life as a businessman. The young mathematician rejects this offer, since he wants to remain poor but happy in his life of teaching and researching Physics – he knows his vocation is the elaboration of the space-time theories of Quantum Physics… simple as it may sound, this solution actually works. It provides a new version of the old and often misused formula of freedom as a recognized necessity: the necessity I recognize is my vocation. To see this, one has to be caught in it – only in this way can we leave behind the cynical distance that predominates today.

Zanussi describes a period of '(American) Exceptionalism"... and how we're NOT exceptional anymore.  We no longer 'believe' in Constitutions or the principle of Negative Liberty.