damaged philosophy?

[randall patrick]

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

[Disinterested]

Damage is one sick flick. Love Jeremy Irons. Great actor!

[Jack]

This has happened to me. One out-of-character, totally unexpected and unpredictable (yet evidently consistant with a flaw in my personality) act that profoundly altered the course of my life and rewrote the impression I had of myself. Your description of the situation is accurate to some degree in my life. True, the illusions are shattered and you now perceive yourself radically different than before.

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.

I'm not "impaled on the horrors" because every moment has an element of horror to it. I've become inured to horror. Yet that doesn't depress me (much does, but not that) because it's reality for me. There is no viable alternative to reality, so I might as well accept it (and "me") and move on.

[Dadoo]

Aye, contrivance.
I, contrived.

To some, a promise; to most, a threat!
Who really cares, but those who do?

The mask of ambiguity, indifference or ambivalence is looked upon as adreadful sight by those who are imitating. Innovation is an essential piece of the puzzle, for those who understand all people are in the act of contriving a mask that will suit their expression or emotion in context.

I know that the eyes will recognize themselves in the mirror, in any mask that fits their current pleasure.

A perfect mirror is not made of glass.
It is the eye of a beholder, reflecting the energy back at the beholden.
The totality of which forms the variable interplay and essence of experience.

Angel of incidence
you are equal the
Angels of reflection.

Which mirror will you choose to gaze?

The perfect reflection, once known,
can change a life absolutely and completely. as in the movie.
Often, you are that perfect mirror and expecting another to flawlessly reflect is the pinnacle of hypocrisy and ultimately absurd.
As Irons found out.
As we will and are All finding out.

Thanks for a great post and keen insight. I glazed over that flick on my first pass.

Dadoo