| damaged philosophy?
I just watched the film Damage [from the Josephine Hart novel of the same name]. I have seen it many times and it never fails to enthrall me regarding the manner in which any particular human identity is dangling by the slenderest of threads; a precarious and fragile confabulation; and always but one circumstantial jolt away from unravelling.
It is the story of Stephen Flemming, a successful member of the Bristish Parliament who has spent his whole life convinced that only by ordering and controlling events he encounters from day to day can his life be understood as meaningful and purposeful and settled. It is the quintessential calculated life rife with the redundancy of ritual.
He has his perfect career and his perfect family living in his perfect home with his perfect future planned out amidst all the creature comforts of a lucrative, civilized world. He may one day even become the next Prime Minister.
But there are cracks in the mirror of course. And then one day he meets his son's "new girlfriend", Anna. He begins a tempestuous affair with her and as a result of it his whole world comes crashing down. His son discovers the affair quite by accident and as a result of that discovery he backs out of the love nest out into a hallway, stumbling over a banister and crashing to the floor below. He dies.
So, the man loses his son, his lover, his wife, his daughter, his job, his home, his future. He loses all that he has known as "my life"; and a whole sense of identity that revolved around it.
In the blink of an eye.
In the final scene of the film he is far, far away in another world. He tries to encompass it all by speaking to the audience:
"It takes a remarkably short time to withdraw from the world. I traveled until I arrived at a life of my own. What really makes us is beyond grasping....way beyond knowing. We give in to love because it gives us some sense of what is unknowable. Nothing else matters in the end."
But in the end the film makes it quite clear how this point of view is just another illusion....another attempt at ordering and controlling what can be never be either ordered or controlled. His tumultuous, all consuming obsession with Anna was really just a reaction to what he could no longer bear---being his well-ordered and controlled self in his well-ordered and controlled world.
He is even able to admit this to himself:
"I saw Anna once more only. I saw her by accident....changing planes. She didn't see me. She was with Peter. She was holding a child. She was no different from anyone else..."
Somewhere between these observations being completely true and completely bullshit lies the reality of our own lives....our own reactions to them.
But what is certainly true [as Anna tries to convey to Stephen] is that "damaged people are dangerous....they know they can survive." And once you know this you are all the less likely to fall back on who you think you are because you come you understand that who you think you are is often all you really are instead. And you come to accept how easily a circumstantial landslide can reconfigure you into, for all intents and purposes, an entirely different person. And when you have begun to accumlate such experiences...enough to know just how fragile "I" really is....you are less likely to be impaled on the horrors you might bump into adventitiously around the next corner. You can survive because there are so many other ways in which to reconstruct the fragments of self. Then you might become all the more cynical regarding the ways in which you are able to manipulate others in order to shape the world to your own liking.
Or maybe not. Maybe you will go in the other direction instead.
In any event, you no longer come to think of yourself as wearing masks around others...you come to think of yourself as being one instead.
rp |