What If I Want You To Let Me Go?

Film still from Never Let Me Go, dir. Mark Romanek (2010).

Quite by chance, I only recently saw Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go (2010, screenplay by John 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 is that today, with all the crises that increasingly 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 an intimate psychological drama and love story. A medical breakthrough in the late 1950s has extended the human lifespan beyond one hundred years, but to achieve this, the state grows clones that are destined to donate their organs to prolong the lives of mortally ill people. However, in order for this 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 accept this, since clones are artificially produced outside the network of kinship relations and are thus perceived as beings who don’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, or “complete,” early in their adulthoods after a couple of donations (maximum four); 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 that she only seduced Tommy because she was afraid to be alone; she is consumed with guilt and 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 she after dies on the operating table during her second donation. Tommy and Kathy—who is now Tommy’s “carer” (the one who stands by a clone during donations to make their life easier)—finally enter into a relationship, but after they discover that deferrals are a myth, Tommy explodes with grief and anger like he used to 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 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 (even though 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 do they accept it because they are in some basic sense more human than the rest of us ordinary humans? Numerous possible 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 fright-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 their 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 experience no ethical dilemma and not rebel against the state of things, even though they clearly see that the “donors” are fully human? The donors even escape to a nearby small town, visit an ordinary pub, etc.—so why don’t some of them at least kill themselves?

The weirdness of this becomes obvious if we compare Never Let Me Go to The Island (Michael Bay, 2005)—a comparison solicited by Ishiguro himself, who stated that he wanted to do the opposite of an individual finding himself in a 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. A series of strange events unfold that make him question how truthful that world is. After he learns that the compound inhabitants are clones used for organ harvesting and as 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 an oppressive 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 as an oppressive atmosphere. Even when they still desire things (as in the love triangle of Tommy, Kathy, 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 refrain 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 Kathy is that she is well aware of 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. The crux of the film is its depiction of the depressive atmosphere of knowing one’s fate.

Let’s take these risky speculations to their logical conclusion: what one should reject is the fake “wise” concluding meditation of Kathy, in which she arrives at the idea that, in some sense, all “normal” humans resemble clones—we are all caught in a destiny imposed by an anonymous other and await 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, 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 (non-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.

The lives of the three donors in the film are meaningless—but they are meaningless precisely because the meaning of life (in the ordinary sense of its function) is fixed in advance. They know why they are here, namely to serve as donors. In a further paradoxical twist, this fixed meaning confers on their lives a depressive beauty and sustains their longing for love and a vocation (in the movie, painting) as a way to surpass their predicament. Maybe it is precisely because the fate of their lives is fixed and prevents them from dedicating themselves to love or a vocation that they experience the need for love and a vocation all the more urgently and profoundly. You fully experience what really matters in your life only when it’s missing.

The donors in the film do not lack a perspective on 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 that 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 people: only against the depressive background of an impenetrable deadly threat can we occasionally act in a kind and compassionate way. And is this not also 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 lineage, but nonetheless open to a materialist reading) that shows how to make one’s life meaningful without falling into the trap of some higher power guaranteeing this meaning: the notion of vocation. In his memoir Shattered, Hanif Kureishi notes that, much more than top specialist doctors, nurses 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.1

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 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.”2 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 that focuses precisely on vocation as a way to escape the capitalist commodification of one’s 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 teaching, while his elderly Jewish-Polish cousin from Jerusalem wants to bequeath to 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.

However, Zanussi complicates things. He presents the two positions—the rich Jewish businessman and the young poor scientist dedicated to his vocation—as two parallel stances echoing each other: both men are focused on their own life achievement, both exclude any intense relationship with others. In both cases, there is no space for a loving “we.” At the film’s end, the uncle’s death has a sobering effect on the scientist; he shows compassion for others and responds to the love of a woman who has been faithfully waiting for him until he is ready to be part of a loving “we.” I am skeptical about this stance because I think that love and compassionate social engagement (like that of Kureishi’s nurses) are also forms of vocation. Zanussi’s scientist is not a truly consistent figure. He combines authentic vocation with pathological features which are not an immanent part of a person’s vocation (he is extremely ambitious, he wants to be remembered in history for his discovery). There is no immanent contradiction between pursuing science as a vocation and engaging in a loving relationship or fighting for social justice. Even if the two appear to enter into conflict (“does your scientific or political vocation not make you neglect our love?”), we should reject the very terms of this choice: in an authentic dilemma, one should not decide between cause and love, between fidelity to one or the other. The authentic relationship between cause and love is more paradoxical.

The basic lesson of King Vidor’s film Rhapsody (1954) is that, in order to gain the beloved woman’s love, the man has to prove that he is able to survive without her, that he prefers his mission or profession to her. There are two immediate choices: (1) my professional career is what matters most to me, the woman is just an amusement, a distracting affair; (2) the woman is everything to me, I am ready to humiliate myself, to forsake all my public and professional dignity for her. They are both false; they lead to the man being rejected by the woman. The message of true love is thus: even if you are everything to me, I can survive without you, I am ready to forsake you for my mission or profession. The proper way for the woman to test the man’s love is thus to “betray” him at the crucial moment of his career (the first public concert in the film, the key exam, the business negotiation which will decide his career). Only if he can survive the ordeal and accomplish his task successfully despite being deeply traumatized by her desertion will he deserve her—and she will return to him.

The underlying paradox is that love, precisely as the Absolute, should not be posited as a direct goal; it should retain the status of a by-product, something we get as an undeserved grace. Perhaps there is no greater love than that of a revolutionary couple, where each of the two lovers is ready to abandon the other at any moment if revolution demands it. The question is thus: How does an emancipatory-revolutionary collective which embodies the “general will” affect intense erotic passion? From what we know about love among Bolshevik revolutionaries, something unique took place there. A new form of the couple emerged: a couple living in a permanent emergency state, totally dedicated to the revolutionary Cause, ready to sacrifice all personal sexual fulfilment to it, even ready to abandon and betray each other if Revolution demanded it, but simultaneously totally dedicated to each other, enjoying rare moments together with extreme intensity. The lovers’ passion was tolerated, even silently respected, but ignored in the public discourse as something of no concern to others. (There are traces of this even in what we know of Lenin’s affair with Inessa Armand.) There is no attempt at Gleichschaltung, at enforcing the unity between intimate passion and social life: the radical disjunction between sexual passion and social-revolutionary activity is fully recognized. The two dimensions are accepted as totally heterogeneous, each irreducible to one another. There is no harmony between the two—but it is this very recognition of the gap which makes their relationship nonantagonistic.