Contemporary Cinema and the Philosophy

of Iris Murdoch

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 For Jean Bolton and Richard Menzies

In loving memory of Kat Lindner

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 Contemporary Cinema and the
Philosophy of Iris Murdoch

Lucy Bolton

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 Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in
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© Lucy Bolton, 2019

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 Contents

List of Figures vi
Acknowledgements vii
List of Abbreviations ix
Frontispiece: Iris Murdoch pays loving attention to art x

1 Introduction 1
2 Film as Art, and Cinema as a Hall of Reflection 21
3 Film as a Moral Fable 51
4 Film and the Existential Hero(ine) 75
5 Film, Love and Goodness 104
6 Film, Comedy and Tragedy 130
7 Film and Women’s Stories 167
8 Metaphysics as a Guide to Movies 203

Bibliography 223
Filmography 229
Index 231

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 Figures

1.1 The face of Lee Miller, in The Blood of a Poet/Le sang d’un poète 15
1.2 Iris Murdoch’s thoughts on Rin Tin Tin on the reverse of a postcard 16
2.1 Anna’s complex emotions on display, in Birth 32
2.2 Jackie Kennedy sees the crowds lining the streets, in Jackie 36
2.3 Footage of Diane Polley from Stories We Tell 42
2.4 The alien looks at her own ‘human’ face, in Under the Skin 48
3.1 Lisa looks at the driver and says ‘green’, in Margaret 55
3.2 Jasmine breaks down after Dwight’s call, in Blue Jasmine 65
3.3 Becky knows there’s nothing she can do, in Compliance 70
4.1 Maria Enders realises Val has left, in Clouds of Sils Maria 88
4.2 Dr Cemal looks us straight in the eye, in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia 93
4.3 Eliza and Romeo have a frank conversation, in Graduation 100
5.1 Susanne helps Nejat recall his father’s love, in The Edge of Heaven 119
5.2 Juliette and Léa learn to live together, in I’ve Loved You So Long/
Il y a longtemps que je t’aime 123
5.3 Eva perseveres with realism and love, in We Need to Talk about Kevin 126
6.1 Khrushchev and Malenkov argue over who invited the bishops,
in The Death of Stalin 139
6.2 Michèle offers a cognac, in Elle 150
6.3 Lee Chandler dreams of his children, in Manchester by the Sea 160
7.1 The rancher lovingly looks at Elizabeth, in Certain Women 182
7.2 The girl who rang, in The Unknown Girl/La fille inconnue 189
7.3 Dr Jenny Davin’s steady attention yields results, in The Unknown Girl/
La fille inconnue 194
7.4 Marieme realises she cannot go to high school, in Girlhood 198
8.1 Iris Murdoch refers to film in an annotation on a page of her copy of
Gilbert Ryle’s The Life of the Mind 211
8.2 Mary Magdalene as a spiritual leader, in Mary Magdalene 214
8.3 Eve encourages Adam to dance, in Only Lovers Left Alive 221

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 Acknowledgements

Thank you to Gillian Leslie from EUP for her enthusiasm for this book right
from my first mention of it, and to her colleagues Richard Strachan, Emma
Rees and Rebecca Mackenzie for their help over the last couple of years. Thank
you to all the readers of this book along the way, including the anonymous
reviewers and those who have given me invaluable feedback on specific chap-
ters and the whole thing: Jean Bolton, Miles Leeson, Richard Menzies, Anat
Pick, Hollie Price, Lindsey Smith, Catherine Wheatley and Emma Wilson.
Many thanks to colleagues at Queen Mary University of London for facilitat-
ing the sabbatical I needed to write the book: David Adger, Janet Harbord, Sue
Harris and Shirley Jordan.
Thanks to those who have invited me to speak about Iris Murdoch and film
over the past three or four years and who have given me the opportunity to
receive so many comments and helpful suggestions on this as work in progress.
In particular, Robert Sinnerbrink for the Cinematic Ethics event at Macquarie
University (2015); Miles Leeson at the University of Chichester (2017); Lisa
Downing and Kate Ince at the University of Birmingham (2014); David Sorfa
at the University of Edinburgh (2015). And very special thanks to Fiona Smith
at the National Portrait Gallery, and Aga Baranowska and David Edgar at the
British Film Institute, who have so generously allowed me to pedal my film
philosophical work to the public.
My most sincere thanks go to my friends and colleagues at Film-Philosophy,
who have always supported my work, given me encouragement and friendship,
and infinite, good humoured, intellectual companionship. Thanks to William
Brown, Catherine Constable, John Ó Maoilearca (especially for stories about
Iris Murdoch), David Martin-Jones, Richard Rushton, Robert Sinnerbrink,
David Sorfa and Catherine Wheatley in particular.
Thank you to my friends and colleagues at Queen Mary University of
London, especially in the Centre for Film and Ethics. Particular thanks to my
undergraduate and postgraduate film philosophy students over the past ten

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 viii CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

years, and to my PhD students Simon Dickson and Alice Pember, whose film
philosophical discussions have enriched my work no end.
I am grateful beyond measure to my Murdochian fellow travellers Miles
Leeson, Pamela Osborne, Anne Rowe and Frances White. Thank you for
welcoming me to your community of scholarship, sharing your knowledge so
generously, and inviting me to be part of the Iris Murdoch Review. You have
supported me far beyond my expectations and I am truly in your debt.
For connections, ideas and suggestions that have added to this project in
many ways, thanks to Laura Adams, Lucy Fawcett, Lucas Hare, Ian Killick,
Carly McLaughlin, Lucy H. Oulton, Anat Pick and Sercan Şenozan.
Special love and thanks to my goddaughters Jess Wilson, Charlotte Hatha-
way and Asha Stobbart, and to my support system: Laura Adams, Tanya
Aplin, Bela Kapur, Julie Lobalzo Wright, Natalie Marcus and Ludo, Caraline
Menzies, Lindsey Smith, Megan Smith and The Wilsons. That support sys-
tem includes Laverne, Babs and the team at The Currant, Wanstead – thanks
to you all.
I thank my intellectual spirit animals, Lisa Downing, Anat Pick, Libby
Saxton, Lindsey Smith and Catherine Wheatley, with gratitude and humility.
And all my love, forever, to Jean Bolton and Richard Menzies. I could not have
written this book without you.
Part of my analysis of Blue Jasmine in Chapter 3 was published in my essay,
‘Attention to the details of film and form: Blue Jasmine as Murdochian Moral
Vision’ (2017a). Part of the work on Margaret in Chapter 3 appeared in my
article, ‘Murdoch and Margaret: Learning a Moral Life’ (2017b). Some of my
analysis of Only Lovers Left Alive features in my review of the film in the Times
Higher Educational Supplement, 20 February 2014.
Finally, I want to thank Fatih Akin for granting me permission to use the
image of Lotte from The Edge of Heaven on the cover. Her smiling face in this
scene means a great deal to me and substantially contributes to the meaning of
this book.

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 Abbreviations

These are abbreviations for works written by Iris Murdoch. Where possible,
essay references are given to the reprints of Murdoch’s philosophical works in
the collection, Existentialists and Mystics (E&M; Conradi 1997).

A&E ‘Art and Eros’ [1980], E&M 464–95

AD ‘Against Dryness’ [1961], E&M 287–95
E&M ‘Existentialists and Mystics’ [1970], E&M 221–34
EB ‘Existentialist Bite’ [1957], E&M 151–3
EPM ‘The Existential Political Myth’ [1952], E&M 130–45
F&S ‘The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists’ [1977],
E&M 386–463
HT ‘A House of Theory’ [1958], E&M 171–86
IP ‘The Idea of Perfection’ [1964], E&M 299–336
KV ‘Knowing the Void’ [1956], E&M 157–60
L&P ‘Literature and Philosophy’ [1977], E&M 3–30
M&E ‘Metaphysics and Ethics’ [1957], E&M 59–75
MGM Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals [1992] (2003), London: Vintage
OGG ‘On “God” and “Good”’ [1969], E&M 337–62
OTC ‘On the Cinema’ (1956), British Vogue, 112, August, pp. 98–9
S&G ‘The Sublime and the Good’ [1959], E&M 205–20
SBR ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’ [1959], E&M 261–86
SGC ‘The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts’ [1967],
E&M 363–85
SRR Sartre: Romantic Rationalist [1953] (1989), London: Penguin
T&L ‘Thinking and Language’ [1951], E&M 33–42
VCM ‘Vision and Choice in Morality’ [1956], E&M 76–98

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 Iris Murdoch pays loving attention to art, by Sophie Bassouls. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford,
25 January 1977. Copyright Sophie Bassouls.

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 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Thinking about

Cinema and Iris Murdoch

Where virtue is concerned we often apprehend more than we clearly

understand and grow by looking. (‘The Idea of Perfection’ (IP): 324)

The ‘world’ of The Concept of Mind is the world in which people play
cricket, cook cakes, make simple decisions, remember their childhood
and go to the circus, not the world in which they commit sins, fall in love,
say prayers or join the Communist Party. (Sartre: Romantic Rationalist
(SRR): 78–9)

I ris Murdoch was a philosopher concerned with morality and goodness, art
and experience. She believed that moral philosophy is something we all
undertake in our everyday lives, and that paying attention to art is a way of
developing our moral visions and becoming better people. Cinema is an art
form that shows people grappling with moral choices and living ethical rela-
tionships, and undoubtedly experiencing cinema can be morally challenging
and affecting for the filmgoer. In this book, I bring Murdoch’s thinking into
dialogue with cinema in a sustained way for the first time, and explore how
experiencing film can be an exercise in moral training, and how the philo-
sophical challenges of contemporary cinema can be illuminated by Murdoch’s
philosophical writings. Among other things, this book asks, can cinema make
me a better person?
Iris Murdoch wrote very little about the cinema. She is well known as a
writer of twenty-six novels, and her biography has been written from the per-
spective of several significant individuals in her life and depicted on-screen in
the film Iris (Richard Eyre, 2001). What is lesser known is that she was also
an influential philosopher who worked in the fields of moral and political phi-
losophy. Her writings about the role and function of art in our lives, and her
visual and practical philosophical examples, suggest possibilities for thinking

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 2 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

about film through a Murdochian lens. Connections between film and philoso-
phy are well established in academia, and indeed the consideration of film as
a philosophical medium has taken place since the first days of seeing images
of our world projected on a wall or a screen. Questions of how the contents of
a film relate to the world around us, and how film is uniquely able to show us
ourselves as social beings, reconfigured, reshaped and in sharp focus, have been
the subject of enquiry for philosophical filmmakers from Jean Epstein, Maya
Deren and Sergei Eisenstein to Ingmar Bergman, Jane Campion and Kelly
Reichardt. The images and operations of cinema have formed the basis of the
writings of film critics such as André Bazin and the enquiries of philosophers
such as Stanley Cavell, and the mysteries of the cinema have fascinated writers
such as Virginia Woolf and indeed Murdoch, who expressed interest in and
respect for cinema as I shall explore. The academic discipline of film studies
has analysed cinema in various ways, including cultural conditions of produc-
tion, theoretical approaches about authorship and genre, critical perspectives
such as realism and post-modernism, and psychoanalysis, which dominated
film theory in the 1970s and 1980s. Recognising the philosophical content of
individual films, and indeed proposing that a film can be philosophy in action,
has formed a valuable contribution to the understanding of how cinema works
as a provocative, contemplative, productive experience. Drawing on the film
studies tradition of close analysis of image, movement and sound, the nuances
of a film’s, a scene’s or even a moment’s philosophical content can be made
abundantly clear.
This approach can reveal the way in which a film is posing a question,
or offering a perspective, or arguing a position: in this film world, this hap-
pens. Another aspect of the film philosophy relationship is where the work
of a particular philosopher is brought into dialogue with a film or selection
of films, as I am doing here. The question then arises as to the nature of the
relationship: are the films being used to illustrate the philosopher, or is the
philosopher being explained through the films in some way? Or perhaps it
is being suggested that the films can be better understood by knowing the
philosophy of a particular thinker. Does any of this matter? Well, only inas-
much as there may be a perceived superiority of the work of the philosopher
over the work of the film in some way, and this is not what is intended by
the film philosophy approach and certainly not by this book. This work is
a meeting of equals: the concepts and thought of Iris Murdoch, and the
content of the selected films. How this relationship works will be developed
across the pages of this book, but the equivalence of the two elements is
fundamental.
In this introduction, I will give some background to Iris Murdoch’s philo-
sophical work and career before explaining her significance as a philosopher
and outlining the remit of her work. I will begin to explain her thinking about

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 INTRODUCTION 3

morality, goodness and art, thereby setting up the chapters that follow to stage
an encounter between Murdoch’s philosophy and a range of international
contemporary films. This will further the discipline of film studies, and the
sub-discipline of film philosophy, by bringing Murdoch’s thinking into rela-
tion with cinema in a sustained and detailed analysis, and introduce a British
philosopher into the discipline who bridges the divisions between analytic and
continental philosophical traditions.

MURDOCH’S PHILOSOPHICAL CONTEXT

As Justin Broackes argues, ‘Iris Murdoch was a professional philosopher

before she was a professional novelist and her work was brave, brilliant, and
independent’ (Broackes 2012: preface). Murdoch had studied ‘Mods and
Greats’ (ancient history, Greek, Latin and philosophy) at Somerville Col-
lege, Oxford between 1938 and 1942. At this time, she was studying with ‘the
golden generation’ of women philosophers at Oxford: Philippa Foot, Mary
Midgley, Elizabeth Anscombe, and, a little later, Mary Warnock. Murdoch
then worked as a civil servant, for His Majesty’s Treasury in London, and
then as an administrative officer with the United Nations Rehabilitation and
Relief Association (UNRRA) between 1944 and 1946, travelling to Belgium
and Austria. She met Sartre in Brussels in 1945 when he gave a lecture there,
and her notes are carefully recorded in a notebook held in the Iris Murdoch
Archive at Kingston University.1 In 1947, Murdoch took up a studentship at
Newnham College, Cambridge, where she met Wittgenstein and, although
he was leaving Cambridge, she was able to work in close proximity with those
he had influenced (Broackes 2012: 4). She was elected to a fellowship at St
Anne’s College, Oxford, in 1948, where she stayed until 1963. She published
her first book, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist in 1953. This was the first book to
be published on Sartre in the English language, and, according to Mary War-
nock, ‘remains one of the most penetrating studies of the early Sartre’ (1996:
155). Murdoch published her first novel, Under the Net, in 1954. She was
building a body of philosophical work which included the Sartre book, papers
given to and published by the Aristotelian Society, and radio talks and lectures
on existentialism, theology and politics. During this time of her philosophical
career, in the 1950s, she was challenging the philosophy of her elders, such as
Gilbert Ryle (author of The Concept of Mind (1960) referred to in the epigraph
to this chapter), and her peers such as R. M. Hare, Stuart Hampshire and A.
J. Ayer (with their emphasis on language and behaviour). In her 1951 paper
‘Thinking and Language’ (T&L), Murdoch investigates how Wittgenstein
and Ryle fail to account for any kind of ‘inner experience’ (T&L: 38). She gave
a talk on ‘Metaphysics and Ethics’ (M&E) for BBC Radio (Third Programme,

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 4 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

1955; M&E). In her 1956 paper given to the Aristotelian Society, ‘Vision and
Choice in Morality’ (VCM), Murdoch demonstrates the inadequacy of Hare’s
moral philosophy to account for everyday human behaviour and individual-
ity, and ends the piece by looking to ‘contemporary continental philosophers’
where such an ‘imaginative exploration of the moral life’ is being practised
(VCM: 97).
Murdoch had clearly been excited by Sartre but she came to find his brand
of existentialism to be a solipsistic void, for which ‘the supreme virtue is reflec-
tive self-awareness’ (SRR: 105). This will be examined in detail in Chapter 4.
The work of Simone Weil was far more influential upon her. Justin Broackes
writes how reviewing The Notebooks of Simone Weil for The Spectator in
November 1956 ‘made a huge impact on Murdoch’:

Her review was penetrating – it was a real achievement to weave together

for the review a presentation of ideas so clear, expressive, and fundamen-
tal out of the six hundred pages of Weil’s wandering and brilliant text.
And the material that Murdoch found there was, I think, both fruitful
and not at all easily domesticated in the house of Oxford philosophy.
(Broackes 2012: 19)

In an earlier talk given on BBC Third Programme in 1951, Murdoch expresses

clearly how much of an impression Weil has made on her:

What she writes is striking. She expresses herself vividly, sometimes

violently; and her work has that unmistakable fresh tang. She is that rare
thing, an original thinker. One gets too the impression of an exceptional
degree of seriousness. We are not surprised to learn that she impressed
people she met as a truly spiritual person. (Murdoch 2017: 10)2

The qualities that Murdoch admires in Weil are revealing of the values and
passions of Murdoch herself. The rarefied linguistic philosophy of the Oxford
tradition, and the self-centred romanticism of Sartre, were devoid of imagi-
nation, spirit and fellow feeling. Weil’s qualities stood apart as consisting of
selflessness and commitment missing from these others. But Murdoch did not
follow Weil’s philosophical commitments wholesale. Not one for such asceti-
cism or self-restraint, Murdoch did not embrace the austerity that so charac-
terises Weil’s lived philosophy. The influence of Weil’s concept of ‘attention’
on Murdoch was profoundly significant; as Broackes argues, ‘prior and perhaps
even greater in some ways than the influence of Plato’ (Broackes 2017: 17).
The Platonic influence on Murdoch can be seen in her consideration, and pri-
oritisation, of ‘the good’: there is such a thing as a transcendent good, and
we are all aiming for it. As Peter Conradi explains, ‘Iris Murdoch poses two

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 INTRODUCTION 5

questions that link her intimately to Plato: what is goodness or what is a good
man like? And what is the place of love and desire within the quest for good-
ness?’ (Conradi 1994: 330). In Weil, writes Broackes, Murdoch found ‘a form
of Platonism expressed with a heady religious tone’ (2012: 20), and this helped
her to formulate language, concepts and imagery to express her moral think-
ing. Murdoch’s philosophical writings, however, were overtaken by her pro-
lific writing of fiction. Usefully, Broackes identifies three elements that led
Murdoch away from being a professional philosopher at Oxford in the late
1950s: enjoying writing successful novels; the increasing impact of Hare’s
moral philosophy and the lack of impact of her own work; and thirdly ‘the dif-
ficulty of domesticating within the existing philosophical world the new ideas
she was developing from Weil’ (2012: 20). Murdoch’s following as an academic
philosopher was not really taken up until John McDowell in the 1970s, by
which time Murdoch had become known much more as a novelist who used to
do some philosophy.3
There was a resurgence of popular interest in Murdoch at the turn of the
century, which began with the publication of her husband John Bayley’s mem-
oirs in three volumes, detailing their struggles with Murdoch’s Alzheimer’s dis-
ease. The wave of interest continued with the film Iris, which saw both actresses
who portrayed her, Kate Winslet and Judi Dench, nominated for Oscars, and
saw Jim Broadbent win for his performance as Bayley. Peter Conradi’s autho-
rised biography, Iris Murdoch: A Life, was published in 2001, and his study of
her work originally published in 1986, The Saint and the Artist, was republished
that same year. Academic interest in Murdoch’s work and life was bolstered
by the acquisition of her archive in an Arts and Humanities Research Council
(AHRC) funded project led by Dr Anne Rowe at the University of Kingston in
2004. Out of Rowe’s work evolved the Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies, the Iris
Murdoch Review and a biennial international conference. Upon Anne Rowe’s
retirement, the Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies moved to the University of
Chichester in 2016 under the directorship of Miles Leeson, and is going from
strength to strength as The Iris Murdoch Research Centre. BBC Radio 4 had a
Murdoch season in August 2015, during which they broadcast dramatisations
of two of her novels, The Sea, the Sea (1978) and A Severed Head (1961). There
is, in popular culture at least, less focus on her work as a philosopher than there
is as a novelist and public figure. However, the burgeoning field of Murdoch
studies is remedying her exclusion and placing her in the forefront of their
literary and philosophical work, including life writing, biography, and moral
and political philosophy. There has certainly been an upsurge in interest in her
philosophy in Oxford, evidenced by several conferences in the past few years,
and also the development of the Women (In Parenthesis) project on the work
of Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Murdoch and Mary Midgley, based at
the University of Durham.4

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 6 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

Murdoch never closed the door on philosophy, and more works followed
across her career, ranging from essays and a collection of articles to her lengthy
final philosophical book. The works are: Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, first
published in 1953; the compilation of three essays in The Sovereignty of Good,
first published in 1970; ‘The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Art-
ists’ (1977); Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues (1986), where Murdoch engages in
arguments about the nature of religion and of art; and Metaphysics as a Guide
to Morals (MGM), first published in 1992, the work that some might call her
magnum opus, but others might call a baggy monster.5 There is also the collec-
tion of essays, interviews and reviews compiled by Peter Conradi in 1997, Exis-
tentialists and Mystics (which includes essays such as ‘Vision and Choice’ and
‘The Existentialist Hero’). All of these works will feature across the chapters of
this book, in relation to different films and concepts. The essays in Existential-
ists and Mystics will be cited as they arise, rather than set out in full here, but
references will be made to at least fifteen essays, talks and articles, published
between 1950 and 1980. This demonstrates the length of time that Murdoch
was writing non-fiction, but there was also a long period of her career where
the focus was clearly on writing novels. Her philosophical concerns were con-
sistent across her career, however, and developed and evolved, and these are
what I will consider in relation to film in this book.

PHILOSOPHICAL CONCERNS

Murdoch was concerned with the moral life and moral vision of everyday
experience, in contrast with the behaviourist analytics and the existentialists
who were the leading philosophical voices at the time. Murdoch’s perspec-
tive is referred to by many as moral realism, as Broackes explains, ‘allowing
the world to contain such things as the courage of an individual person or
the meanness of some petty act’ (Broackes 2012: 1). Broackes describes this
approach as broadly Wittgensteinian, which Murdoch also combined with
moral psychology and the idea of moral training, influenced by Plato. In other
words, for Murdoch, rather than abstract or artificial choices, moral philoso-
phy is concerned with the question of how I can become a better person. She
wrote in 1967 that,

Moral philosophy is the examination of the most important of all human

activities, and I think that two things are required of it. The examina-
tion should be realistic. Human nature, as opposed to the natures of other
hypothetical spiritual beings, has certain discoverable attributes, and these
should be suitably considered in any discussion of morality. Secondly,
since an ethical system cannot but commend an ideal, it should commend

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 INTRODUCTION 7

a worthy ideal. Ethics should not be merely an analysis of ordinary medio-

cre conduct, it should be a hypothesis about good conduct and about how
this can be achieved. How can we make ourselves better? is a question
moral philosophers should attempt to answer. (‘The Sovereignty of Good
over Other Concepts’ (SGC): 363–4)

This passage contains the heart of Murdoch’s moral philosophy: thinking

about real people and how we work, how we make moral choices, how we
might make better ones, and what ‘better’ might be. In Sartre: Romantic
Rationalist, she engages with Sartre the novelist, the human, the cultural fig-
ure and the philosopher; and also with his existentialist philosophy. Murdoch
finds ‘the general impression of Sartre’s work is certainly that of a power-
ful but abstract model of a hopeless dilemma, coloured by a surreptitious
romanticism which embraces the hopelessness’ (SRR: 111). In ‘Vision and
Choice in Morality’ in 1956, she distances herself from the prevailing moral
philosophical thinking at Oxford, considering that their ‘picture is simple,
behaviouristic, anti-metaphysical, and leaves no place for commerce with
“the transcendent”’ (VCM: 80).
These are the two major departure points for Murdoch’s philosophy: she
moves away from her peers and establishes new modes of thinking and a new
attitude to morality in everyday life and in art. In this way, Murdoch is posi-
tioned between the British tradition and the continental tradition, drawing on
both but finding a new perspective. As mentioned above, she was very influ-
enced by Simone Weil, and her concept of attention; especially in relation to
the idea of ‘the Good’ as a transcendent reality and the idea that progress in
morality is a matter of meditation, not just action. Bringing this thinking to the
debates in film philosophy will enable the divide between the two traditions to
be seen in a fresh light and perhaps not as polarising as can sometimes be the
case. Murdoch offers an alternative framework, mindset and vocabulary for
thinking about film as moral philosophy, and the role of film in our individual
moral thinking and training.
Murdoch is particularly concerned with the idea of moral perception, and
this is where many of her visual metaphors come into play. This is enlarged
upon in Chapter 3, but for now let me clarify that this is about the per-
ceptions of individuals. Broackes describes Murdoch’s model of morality
as being about the ‘perception of particulars’, and how this was ‘radically
distinctive’ (2012: 11). This was not morality as instinct or passion, or intel-
lectual intuition, or linguistic puzzle-solving, and was not about judgement
or issuing prescriptions. Murdoch argues that different moral choices are
made on the basis of different conceptual schemes. She writes, ‘I can only
choose within the world I can see’ (IP: 329): a person’s conceptual appara-
tus focuses their range of options, which determines their moral world. It

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 8 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

is through attention, in the Weilian sense, that we are able to ‘un-self ’, or

become less focused on ourselves, in order to determine a more ‘just and
loving gaze directed upon an individual reality’ (IP: 327). This invites an
encounter with the gazes of cinema, both on- and off-screen, of character,
camera and filmgoer, to see how moral thinking about film might be enliv-
ened by these notions of attention and inner vision. It is here that I propose
Murdoch’s contention in the epigraph, that we might apprehend more than
we understand and might grow by looking, becomes pertinent to the experi-
ence of cinema. Indeed, it seems from some glimpses of her writings that she
was aware of cinema’s potential in this regard, despite the fact that she did
not develop these ideas beyond one essay.

MURDOCH AND THE CINEMA

To celebrate British Vogue’s centenary year in 2016, the magazine’s website

published 100 archive pieces from the magazine, described as ‘some of our
favourite pieces’. As she is introduced, ‘Booker-prize winning author Iris
Murdoch’ had written a short piece for the August 1956 issue of British Vogue
on the particular art of the cinema.6 This essay is remarkable for several rea-
sons. Firstly, when it was written: in 1956, the year that Murdoch gave the
paper ‘Vision and Choice in Morality’ to the Aristotelian Society. In VCM she
talks about the limitations of language to conduct moral philosophy, and calls
upon philosophers to be like poets, to extend the limits of language and enable
it ‘to illuminate regions of reality which were formerly dark’ (VCM: 90). She
also refers to the type of fantasy that ‘a private film show à la Walter Mitty’
might be (VCM: 85).7 Although, in that paper, she does not suggest cinema is
a way to conduct moral philosophy, the Vogue article shows that cinema was on
her mind, and that it could be an art form she would consider capable of the
requisite humanity and insight: an illuminating, external, truth-seeking light,
not a purely imaginary deceptive fantasy. Secondly, the cinematic references
that Murdoch draws upon to illustrate her thinking are canonical, before the
film critics’ canon had been invented! This shows that Murdoch was seeing
international films such as Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954), as well as
British fare such as Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945), and major Ameri-
can works such as The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942), and that
she was recognising their significance and understanding their complexities.
Thirdly, she recognises the specific abilities and potential of the cinema as dis-
tinct from the other arts, of which she more frequently writes in her philoso-
phy. The essay is no more than 1,000 words, and I am going to examine it in
detail here, so as to open out a range of possible encounters between the cinema
and Murdoch’s thinking about cinema as art in 1956.

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 INTRODUCTION 9

‘ON THE CINEMA’

Murdoch begins by setting out her stall in relation to film:

I was told at school that the cinema resembles the Cave in the Republic of
Plato: a dark hole into which one retires in order to escape from reality
and be entertained by shadows. Perhaps for that reason, and feeling too
that shadows have their place, I used to expect films to resemble dreams,
and was disappointed. (‘On the Cinema’ (OTC): 98)

Already, a philosophical link with the chained prisoners and deluded shadow
play of Plato’s cave is established. Several books and articles have emerged in
the last twenty or thirty years that overtly make this connection, but Murdoch
was contemplating this link as a school child.8 The implications of this similar-
ity are clear: that the cinema is a place of delusions, escape and entertainment.
Entertainment is true. But ‘escape from reality’ is something that this book dis-
putes, and indeed Murdoch does not maintain that early outlook. The idea that
‘shadows have their place’ is an insight into the realm of art and imagination
in which Murdoch is interested, and yet she finds that they do not resemble
dreams. Does this mean in fact that they resemble reality?

I make the assumption that the art of the cinema is visual, and that its
task is to delight and enlarge the imagination by the creation of visual
images. How should a film achieve this? I speak, of course, as an outsider
with strong prejudices and no expertise. (Ibid.: 98)

Here Murdoch states a clear understanding of cinema as more than a storytell-

ing medium, and also as a field which has a measure of expertise.9 Film should
‘enlarge the imagination by the creation of visual images’: this sounds like a
tall order, but one that perceives cinema as having lasting value beyond mere
entertainment, and indeed beyond the cinema theatre. In order to understand
how film does do this, Murdoch interrogates the medium further.

The film is, for better or worse, the medium which can most exactly
reproduce the moment-to-moment vagaries of the human conscious-
ness. It is in fact the most natural image for the consciousness, which
Locke, for want of this example, likened to a magic-lantern show. The
film presents an animated visual picture, observed from a certain point
of view and experienced in a non-reversible order. From a painting we
can stand back, with a novel we can pause and ponder, but a film is as
near to us as our own self-awareness, and comes over us with the inevi-
tability of time itself. One result of this is that the film can be the most

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 10 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

profoundly boring and demoralizing of all art forms. What can compare
with the feeling of blunted dreariness with which one leaves a bad film,
especially if one has been unwise enough to visit it in the afternoon?
(Ibid.: 98)

Here Murdoch aligns the art form with human consciousness by engaging with
the element of time: film can show time moment by moment, making it ‘the
most natural image’ for consciousness. Again forging a link with the endeavour
of philosophers to capture this visual element of human thinking, she reminds
us of Locke’s use of the example of the magic lantern, or camera obscura,
which he likened to the human mind.10 Murdoch then captures the formal
essence of the art: ‘an animated visual picture, observed from a certain point of
view and experienced in a non-reversible order’. This phrasing encompasses
the cinematic specificity of movement, vision, direction and experience, as well
as the inevitability of time passing as we watch a film. Just as Virginia Woolf
had teased out the differences between experiencing a film and reading a novel
in her essay on cinema thirty years earlier, Murdoch here differentiates the film
from the distance we can impose on a painting, and the controlled consump-
tion we have of a novel (Woolf 2009: 172–6). We experience film on a plane akin
to our own self-awareness, or how we experience the world we look at, and its
passage through time – even if it is the film’s time, rather than the real time in
which we live it – is out of the control of our hands and minds. Murdoch then
cuts to the fact that, seeing as our experience of the world can be dull, so can
the experience of a film, and indeed it can demoralise. This is undoubtedly
true: and it is interesting that Murdoch chooses not purely to celebrate cinema
in this essay but to pursue her analysis of its likeness to human experience of
the world. In the delightfully evocative vignette one can imagine a demoralised
Murdoch leaving a disappointing matinee, having been taken on an unhappy
experience: but an experience nonetheless. She goes on to refine her thinking
about film in relation to narrative:

A good story will always benefit a film, though a weak one will not neces-
sarily ruin it. The Magnificent Ambersons is admirable in spite of its story,
but what makes Seven Samurai mythological in the memory is that in
addition to its other merits it is a great archetypal tale. (OTC: 98)

This is strikingly insightful in that Murdoch here acknowledges the formal and
visual attractions of the Welles film aside from its tale of a family’s fortunes.
She goes so far as to say that the story fails to hamper the film, clearly indicat-
ing that the attractions of the film are seen on the screen, not in the story. Then
to describe Seven Samurai as ‘mythological in the memory’ conveys the power
of the film’s images to stay with the viewer, and to resonate with the stories of

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 INTRODUCTION 11

the ages which film has the power to evoke. But clearly Murdoch sees film as
being about more than evocative storytelling.

Now what can the movie camera do which nothing else can do, and
what should it therefore busy itself doing? It can present to us human
drama and feeling in the form of momentary awareness. A film should
not attempt objectivity; it should not be ‘as if we were there ourselves’
(why are most travel films so depressing?). It should resemble, not a
vague detached awareness of things going forward, but a tense height-
ened awareness, such as we have in dreams or moments of emotional
vision. After all, this is a form of Art. Therefore, objects in films
ought never to look normal, since objects do not do this in ordinary
life in our moments of most acute observation. A film should show us
a strange and startling world, disintegrated and distorted, and full of
dramatically significant objects. Compare the surrealist painter, who
attempts by curious juxtapositions to revive our jaded awareness of
our surroundings. (Ibid.: 98)

The language of this passage shows Murdoch fully engaged with the experi-
ence of cinema. She describes the emotional impact through talking about
‘human drama and feeling’, but also understands how these are conveyed ‘in
the form of momentary awareness’: the form of the content is unique, and
it moves from moment to moment. In another comment redolent of Woolf,
Murdoch’s consideration of moments recalls Woolf ’s discussion of the value
of a moment in her novel Mrs Dalloway (1925), as emphasised in the novel The
Hours (1998) written by Michael Cunningham and conveyed so exquisitely in
the 2003 film adaptation (Bolton 2014). In The World Viewed (1979) Stanley
Cavell discusses the significance of a moment in a film, and of returning to
that moment again and again (Klevan 2011: 53–5). Murdoch prefigures this
line of scholarship, drawing attention to this temporal, formal and experiential
element of film. With her comment about objectivity she identifies the bland
voiceover of the travelogue as the type of film she finds depressing. This com-
ment reveals that she is not interested in film’s ability simply to record and
relay images from other places in the world. Murdoch is keen to see film show
life as only it can: ‘a tense heightened awareness, such as we have in dreams
or moments of emotional vision’. Here Murdoch links explicitly the images
we can see on-screen with the images we see in our own minds and imagina-
tions, thereby signalling the kinship between the content of both. She then
states, unequivocally, ‘after all, this is a form of Art’ (capital A!). This is a vital
insight into Murdoch’s thought, as so much of her work is concerned with the
power and meaning of art, and here we can see that cinema might be included
in those conversations. There is then an unexpected foray into the idea that

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 12 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

objects should not ‘look normal’, which she clarifies by saying that objects do
not look normal in everyday life when we study them ‘in moments of acute
observation’. This links with her thinking about attention to art, which will be
considered at length in this book, and also the notion that acute observation
distorts and changes perceptions. So the sharp focus of the camera can and
should alter the appearance of its object just as our directed attention changes
what it focuses on. The description of the film world Murdoch desires sounds
like the surrealist films she admires: strange and startling, disintegrated and
distorted, full of dramatically significant objects. This reveals that Murdoch
sees cinema as a realm of immense creativity and invention, which is for-
mally equipped to use focus on objects as a way of changing their significance.
She then makes the comparison to surrealism explicit, invoking the surrealist
painter who uses ‘curious juxtapositions’ (sounds like ‘montage’) ‘to revive
our jaded awareness of our surroundings’. This is a way of thinking about
the filmmaker in terms similar to those of Cavell nearly twenty years later:
our reality as reshaped and given back to us in ways that challenge our under-
standing of our surroundings (Cavell 1979: 199). This is Murdoch speaking
about form and aesthetics in 1956 in ways that resonate with the film and
philosophy debates of the 1990s and 2000s. Murdoch then again reveals her
preference for the sharp focus on objects.

I am tempted to say that the cinema is an art of indoors. Few outdoor

shots linger in my memory except as reminders of other landscapes;
and perhaps the most totally depressing, as well as one of the most
common types of cinema-going experience is to be presented with a
sunny field of waving corn to the accompaniment of mediocre music.
(OTC: 98)

While this may bring to our minds many epic outdoor sequences we love, and
specific scenes from Ratcatcher (Lynne Ramsay, 1999), Gladiator (Ridley Scott,
2000) or Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978), Murdoch is not talking here
about exterior arable images per se. Bear in mind that when she is writing, she
may not have seen films made in CinemaScope, which was invented in Holly-
wood in the early 1950s. Landscapes would probably not have appeared to her
in their full cinematic beauty using panoramas, CinemaScope or VistaVision.
She recalls her dislike of the simple recording of other landscapes from the
comment about travel films, but the real problem for her here is lack of mean-
ing. ‘Sunny field of waving corn’ suggests cliché and banality, accompanied
by ‘mediocre music’, which again fails to forge a new path or drive home an
original insight. This is a bland image of reality mechanically reproduced and
conveyed, not focused or reshaped in the way that film can do. It is now that
Murdoch begins to make clear what she does see as cinema’s prime ability.

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 INTRODUCTION 13

There is, however, one natural object with which the cinema is
supremely concerned, and that is the human body, and more especially
that ‘most interesting surface’, the human face. Here we can find trag-
edy and comedy made minutely concrete in the movement of a muscle,
and human character on display at the point where spirit and matter are
most intensely fused. If cinema could do nothing but present faces it
would have enough material to be a major art. (Ibid.: 98)

Cinema’s forte is in the realm of focusing on the human, and the face in par-
ticular. Murdoch’s description of finding ‘tragedy and comedy made minutely
concrete’ conveys the human embodiment of emotions and themes, and indeed
archetypes, to use Murdoch’s term about Seven Samurai. This sentence con-
veys the idea that cinema can show the archetypal genres of the ages, tragedy
and comedy, and through its ability to focus in extreme close-up can convey
the human experience of these phenomena. The facial close-up is one of the
most intense and affective shots in cinema, and can yield great plaudits for the
performers of such moments. The labile emotions on Connie Sumner’s face
in Unfaithful (Adrian Lyne, 2002), as she travels back on the train from her
lover to her husband, was a feature of Diane Lane’s Oscar-nominated perfor-
mance in 2003, as was the agony wreaked across Fantine’s face in Anne Hatha-
way’s performance in Les Miserables (Tom Hooper, 2012), for which she won
an Academy Award. Murdoch’s description of the face as ‘where spirit and
matter are most intensely fused’ inspires me to write in detail about faces in
this book, and indeed explains the cover image of Lotte (Patrycia Ziolkowska)
from The Edge of Heaven/Auf der anderen Seite (Fatih Akin 2007), which will
be discussed further in Chapter 5. The fusing of spirit and matter is a descrip-
tion that conveys how the image on-screen can convey interiority, or inner life,
as Murdoch would more likely say. This in turn enables the face to be a means
of affective and cognitive connection with the viewer, conveying far more than
the story or even the reaction of a character, but rather their internal battles,
responses and experiences. Murdoch recognised this and its potential, while
declaring that presenting faces in the way it does means film has ‘enough mate-
rial to be a major art’. Murdoch’s understanding of art, and the role it plays in
moral philosophical thinking, will be explained and explored in Chapter 2, as it
forms a major part of her philosophical writings. In this short essay for Vogue,
however, Murdoch makes it clear that she takes cinema seriously.

It follows from all this that I admire Cocteau and Orson Welles: that
frankly dream-like quality of the former, the everyday grotesque qual-
ity of the latter. The conversations in the dark house in The Magnifi-
cent Ambersons, for instance, overwhelmingly create an image of despair
which is at the same time a delight to remember, a piece of intensified

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 14 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

consciousness transformed into the material of art. These scenes also

illustrate a careful combining of vision and sound. (I do not go so far as
to lament the disappearance of the silent film; but how often the addi-
tion of sound merely makes for facile story-telling, and how rarely it is
treated seriously as an aspect of the image.) (Ibid.: 98)

Murdoch returns to The Magnificent Ambersons to clarify her thoughts on the

film. The form, the darkness, the oppressiveness, ‘create an image of despair’: a
visual depiction of an emotional state, or, in Murdoch’s words, ‘a piece of inten-
sified consciousness transformed into the material of art’. And indeed this is not
just visual, as Murdoch notes the efficacious combination of vision and sound,
when used to create such an evocation. Again, this observation on the misuse,
or waste, of sound and the need for its serious consideration demonstrates
Murdoch’s nuanced, thoughtful and medium-specific attention to film. But she
does not take it all entirely seriously as she does recognise the humour in delight-
ful slapstick: ‘Such a grotesque intensity of presentation need not, of course, be
alarming; it can also be funny, as we see from the films of Chaplin, and from
The Italian Straw Hat, which is perhaps the funniest film ever made’ (Ibid.: 99).
The fact that Murdoch liked Chaplin films, and the sight of a horse eating a
straw hat, shows that she is not ignoring cinema’s function as entertainment,
and indeed takes pleasure in it. In some of her correspondence she reveals great
enjoyment of films (and some irritation, which I set out below). In fact, perhaps
cinema brings out some of the romantic in her:

It follows, too, that I like emotion minutely expressed. What a commen-

tary on the dramas of love would be possible here! Yet films too rarely deal
with love. The love scene in which tensions, ambiguities, calculations and
hopes appear in minute signs – this is not often to be found. Examples that
occur to me are the touching scene in the café in Brief Encounter, where
the doctor begs the girl to see him again, and the scene in the conservatory
in Le jour se lève. I don’t think there are many others. (Ibid.: 99)

It is unusual to hear these scenes discussed without the names of Laura (Celia
Johnson) and Alec (Trevor Howard), or Francois (Jean Gabin) and Clara
(Arletty) being mentioned, but Murdoch here is talking about the emotions
that these scenes evoked rather than recalling the details of the characters or
actors. It is of course the case that ‘tensions, ambiguities, calculations and
hopes appear in minute signs’ in Brief Encounter, where the passionate adul-
terous love that Alec and Laura feel for each other is concealed under English
etiquette as well as by the necessity of their situation. Murdoch clearly enjoyed
the suppressed emotion in these scenes, and sees the potential for many more.
She is not thinking of the fairly staple cinematic scenes of romantic declara-
tion, but rather the more deeply affecting scenes of conflicting emotion and

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 INTRODUCTION 15

repressed passions. She sees the lack of such scenes as a matter of regret, as
does she see images of beauty:

Add to this the screen tendency to prefer vacuous regular faces to

irregular and interesting ones. For a serious treatment of the face we
turn to Japan, where perhaps the cinema is aided by a dramatic tradi-
tion which interested itself in facial expression. Even in the surely not
impossibly difficult task of presenting the magic of feminine beauty the
cinema has not often succeeded, and for all their undeniable charms I
would exchange the whole pack of Italian gamines for the memory of
Lee Miller in Le Sang d’un Poète. (Ibid.: 99)

Murdoch clearly sees the conventional faces of the movies as uninteresting,

and lacking in emotional depth. The Japanese faces to which she refers, and
perhaps she is again thinking of Seven Samurai here, would have seemed exag-
geratedly theatrical to most, but Murdoch yearns for evident emotion. Simi-
larly, she sees convention and predictability in the depiction of female beauty,
thinking, it would seem, of Italian actresses of the era, such as Alida Valli,
Marina Berti and Adriana Benetti. Her preference is for the striking androgyny
of Lee Miller, standing in as the Venus de Milo in Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet
(1932) (Figure 1.1). Miller also contributed an essay on the cinema for the
same issue of Vogue, which begs the question as to whether this prompted
Murdoch’s praise for Miller in the film.

Figure 1.1 The face of Lee Miller, in The Blood of a Poet/Le sang d’un poète, directed by Jean
Cocteau, 1932.

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 16 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

There are interesting connections here with the biography of Lee Miller,
who was acquainted with both Charlie Chaplin, whose films Murdoch has
expressed a liking for, and Raymond Queneau, whom Murdoch regarded as a
mentor.11 In a letter to David Morgan from 1964, Murdoch again mentions the
Cocteau film as being ‘one of the two or three films in the world that I love – at
least I love certain images from it. The face of Lee Miller is really beautiful, not
like most film stars.’12 Clearly this image of beauty stayed with Murdoch long
after seeing the film. She does then go on to say to Morgan that, ‘It’s years now
though since I stopped going to films. Do they mean much to you?’ Sadly, then,
it seems that Murdoch’s examination of cinema in the Vogue essay did not lead
to a lifelong engagement with films. There are, however, some other mentions
of films in Murdoch’s correspondence which are of note.

MURDOCH THE CORRESPONDENT

The Iris Murdoch Archive held at Kingston University holds many letter runs
between Murdoch and her multiple correspondents, including Brigid Brophy,
Philippa Foot and Raymond Queneau. I do not assert that the following is
comprehensive coverage by any means; it is simply intended to show some evi-
dence of the role that cinema played in Murdoch’s thinking about life and art.
A photograph of canine film star Rin Tin Tin on a postcard to Brigid Brophy
(undated), says on the reverse, ‘Dear old pal! How nice films were then – primal
innocence’ (Figure 1.2).13

Figure 1.2 Iris Murdoch’s thoughts on Rin Tin Tin on the reverse of a postcard written
by Murdoch to Brigid Brophy. From the Iris Murdoch Collections in Kingston University
Archives. Copyright Kingston University. Photograph is author’s own.

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 INTRODUCTION 17

In a letter to Raymond Queneau, dated 28 October 1946, Murdoch writes,

‘I was glad to hear you are venturing into the cinema. In France anyway, a most
honourable region of art, judging by the excellent French films we’ve been see-
ing over here lately.’14 In an undated letter to Philippa Foot, Murdoch writes
‘By the way, see if you can the excellent German film “The Murderers Are
Amongst Us” [sic]. It suddenly occurred to me that I’d never met Germany. A
whole universe to discover.’15 Writing to Brophy, it is clear that Murdoch was
looking forward to seeing the film made by the Beatles: ‘Someone has given me
the Beatles latest record, and tells me the Beatles film is super, the show stolen
by Ringo. That is all that I hoped.’16 And in another letter to Brophy, she writes
‘Sorry I missed the Tallulah film, it sounds marvellous!’17 These comments
show an enthusiasm for some films and that, at this stage in her life, they were
still part of her cultural experiences.
However, Murdoch expresses a very negative view of cinema in a letter to
Brigid Brophy (no date). Murdoch is clearly in a bad mood, due to a postal
strike, and the fact that

My military brother-in-law is here, hewing down trees and laying

pavements, and doing other things suitable to a huge taciturn man who
cannot communicate with the human race by the usual channels, and
he seems to control all the forms of transport. Though actually J and I
escaped briefly this morning.

She then pronounces that ‘Films hold my attention but too much. That is
one reason why I detest them. I just undergo them, and as they are usually
rotten . . .’18
These items of correspondence show some ambivalence towards cinema,
but I am inclined to set the comment about ‘detesting’ film in the context of
that bad-tempered letter, which finds the prolific correspondent frustrated by
a postal strike, inducing ‘postal despair’, and aggravated by the presence of her
brother-in-law. The majority of the opinions expressed elsewhere are positive,
even praiseworthy and idealistic, suggesting that perhaps Murdoch had higher
hopes of cinema than her subsequent viewing enabled her to sustain.
A couple of other comments are of note before proceeding. Once, in inter-
view in 1985, Murdoch was asked why she is so interested in images associated
with water, and she concedes that there is water in all her books. She then
says, in relation to the drowning of one of her characters in her novel The
Philosopher’s Pupil,

one image printed on my mind is from a film that I saw a hundred years
ago, Les Enfants du Paradis, where there is a murder in a swimming
bath (though the character in the film is not drowned but shot I think).
(Dooley 2003: 127)

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 18 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

(In fact, the character Lacenaire kills the Count in the Turkish baths, but it is
not clear how.) Another passing reference reveals that Murdoch also watched
Leni Riefenstahl’s films of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, and the swimming
movies featuring Esther Williams. In her review of the book, Haunts of the
Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero, she discusses the inspirational role that
water and swimming can play for a novelist, and she refers to Esther Williams
and the fact that she ‘scorned to wear a bikini’ (Murdoch 1993).
These scattered references to stars and scenes in cinema show that Mur-
doch knew of popular American film and European cinema. This brief survey
of some of the mentions in Murdoch’s non-fiction writing, including personal
correspondence, simply aims to reveal that she saw film, was interested in it,
and was genuinely struck by some lasting images and moments. It is the work
of this book to develop the conceptual and philosophical connections between
Murdoch’s work and the cinema, as an experience of art but also within the
artworks themselves.

M U R D O C H A N D C O N T E M P O R A RY F I L M S

This book will examine Murdoch’s thinking in relation to contemporary

films from a range of countries and genres, including art cinema and more
mainstream works. All the films have been released in the last ten years, since
2008. The reason why contemporary cinema is the focus is because part of
this project is to demonstrate the relevance of Murdoch’s philosophy to
film experiences now, and to our critical thinking and contemporary society.
Through the connections forged, and methodology conducted, I aim to show
the rigour and relevance of Murdoch’s philosophical thinking, as well as to
celebrate her originality and to demonstrate how her unique voice can con-
tribute to the field of film philosophy.
Just because Murdoch uses the terminology of transcendence, metaphys-
ics and morals does not mean that her thinking is outmoded. On the contrary,
this book will show how contemporary cinema is increasingly occupied with
the questions that occupied Murdoch, such as how to become a better person,
how to act justly and how to learn from experience. The selected films demon-
strate political, social, moral and artistic concerns that merit analysis in light
of an open-minded approach to moral vision, and to learning by watching, that
Murdoch called for and promoted. For Murdoch, paying attention to art is a
way of learning about morality and goodness, and she spoke about these ideas
in language that uses a great deal of visual metaphors, such as attention, sight,
vision and pictures (Blum 2014: 307–23). These concepts can be fruitfully
and excitingly applied to film in ways that not only further our understanding
of the moral value of cinema as an art form, but also in relation to the moral

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 INTRODUCTION 19

messages and operations of individual films. This book will examine the idea
that film itself can be part of our individual moral training as Murdoch envis-
ages art can be. This is not just a question of relationships to and within the
text, but also as part of the experience of the film that we take with us into the
world, and of, in Murdoch’s words, growing by looking.
The book’s approach is to examine concepts that are related between the
films and Murdoch’s philosophy in the next seven chapters, thereby picking
out the main themes in Murdoch and some fundamental themes in contem-
porary cinema. Through the selection of films that make philosophical con-
tributions to the debates raised by Murdoch, the book will forge an original
pathway in the field of film philosophy, bringing a new philosopher into focus,
highlighting a set of questions about goodness that have been overlooked by
contemporary work on film and ethics, and offering a fresh set of film readings
to the discipline. I propose that the films themselves are the type of philosophi-
cal work that Murdoch believes good art can be. Murdoch talks about art as
painting, sculpture and novels, including her own novels. Indeed, many of the
interviews with Murdoch – both on YouTube and in print – are at least partly
concerned with the question of the difference between novels and philosophy,
and how philosophical her novels are. Some Murdoch scholars may say that
you cannot appreciate Murdoch’s philosophy without including the novels;
that what is referred to as ‘her’ philosophy is contained as much in the novels
as it is in her overtly philosophical texts. My project refocuses Murdoch’s phi-
losophy onto films that I consider to be examples of her philosophical think-
ing in action. My fundamental questions are, can films be the type of art that
Murdoch considers constitutes philosophy, and, if so, how does this work?
Where is the philosophy found? And, ultimately, how does this help us more
fully understand what the films are doing?

NOTES

1. Kingston University, London, holds archives of Murdoch’s correspondence, books,

photographs and other materials (<https://www.kingston.ac.uk/faculties/faculty-of-
arts-and-social-sciences/research/iris-murdoch-archive/> (last accessed 17 December
2018)). Murdoch’s Sartre notebook is listed in this way: Murdoch, I. Notes on a lecture
given by Jean Paul Sartre: Brussels Oct 24 1945 ; [Notes on works by Sartre: Equisse
d’une théorie des émotions; L’imaginaire; L’être et le néant]. The Archive reference is
IML 682.
2. Iris Murdoch: ‘Waiting on God’: A Radio Talk on Simone Weil (1951), with a Prefatory
Note by Justin Broackes. The text of the talk is set out in Broackes (2017: 8, 10–16). The
talk was discovered in typed form by Justin Broackes, who has produced this printed
version, with a prefatory note and commentary article, for the Iris Murdoch Review.
3. See Justin Broackes’s comprehensive account of Murdoch’s philosophical trajectory in his
introduction (2012: 21–92).

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 20 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

4. Why Iris Murdoch Matters, 13–14 November 2015; The Philosophy of Iris Murdoch,
16 June 2016; Moral Perception in the Work of Iris Murdoch, 28 April 2018. The In
Parenthesis project has a blog, <http://www.womeninparenthesis.co.uk> (accessed
18 October 2018).
5. Terry Eagleton described MGM as a ‘rambling, repetitive ragbag of a book, the
philosophical equivalent of Murdoch’s devotion to the loose baggy monster of a novel’.
‘The good, the true and the beautiful’ (a review of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals by
Iris Murdoch, The Guardian, 20 October 1992).
6. On Tuesday 17 May 2016, <http://www.vogue.co.uk/article/vogue-archive-article-
iris-murdoch> (last accessed 20 February 2018).
7. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a short story by James Thurber which appeared in the
New Yorker in 1939, and which has been the basis of two Hollywood film adaptations:
one starring Danny Kaye in 1947, and one starring Ben Stiller in 2013. Walter Mitty is an
ineffectual man who daydreams about himself as a hero in an array of fantastic situations.
8. See for example Renzi and Rainey (2006); Andersen (2014); Smith (2004).
9. It is interesting to speculate which film experts Murdoch might have been aware of in
1956: perhaps British film critics such as Iris Barry, Paul Rotha or Ernest Betts, or perhaps
later figures such as C. A. Lejeune. For further reading about this period, see Lowell
MacDonald (2016).
10. John Locke (1690) writes about pictures in a dark room resembling the understanding of a
man. This is explained and analysed further by Francis J. Broucek (1991: 142–3).
11. Correspondence between Queneau and Murdoch over a period of thirty years is
considered in depth by Avril Horner and Anne Rowe in Living on Paper (2015).
12. David Morgan was a pupil of Murdoch’s at the Royal College of Art in the 1960s. They
formed a close and tumultuous relationship, which Morgan sets out in his memoir
With Love and Rage: A Friendship with Iris Murdoch (2010). This letter is reproduced in
Horner and Rowe (2015: 278).
13. Kingston University and Archives Special collections (KUAS) 142/7/51.
14. KUAS 70/1/32.
15. KUAS 100/1/123. The film Murdoch refers to is Murderers Among Us (Wolfgang
Staudte, 1946).
16. KUAS 142/6/141.
17. KUAS 142/5/176.
18. KUAS 142/6/71.

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 CHAPTER 2

Film as Art, and Cinema as a

Hall of Reflection

If cinema could do nothing but present faces it would have enough

material to be a major art. (OTC): 98)

A great work of art gives one a sense of space, as if one had been invited
into some large hall of reflection. (‘Literature and Philosophy’ (L&P): 28)

Good art . . . provides work for the spirit. Of course morality is quite
largely a matter of action, though what we look at profoundly affects
what we do . . . art remains available and vivid as an experience of how
egoism can be purified by intelligent imagination. (F&S: 453)

B efore progressing to explore how film can be the type of moral training in
which Murdoch considered we are all engaged, I need to tackle a funda-
mental question: is film the right type of art for Murdoch? By which I mean,
when Murdoch speaks about the role that art can play in our moral lives, and
describes painting, sculpture, certain novels and moments in nature, could the
cinema in general, and an individual film in particular, be the type of art she
contemplates? For Murdoch, paying attention to art is a way of training oneself
in the objectual attention required to address issues in our own moral think-
ing about others. But a certain state of mind is required; a certain distance and
attention. The photograph in the frontispiece is a light-hearted representation
of Murdoch paying attention to art. This chapter will address the question of
whether watching and thinking about film can be the type of experience of art
which Murdoch envisaged, and I will argue that it is not only a perfect example
but also is a more efficacious and affective one than some of the other art forms
Murdoch discusses. In order to assess this, we need to turn not only to what
Murdoch herself says about cinema, but also what the objections might be to
considering film as ‘the right type’ of art. Clearly the epigraph from Murdoch’s

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 22 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

essay ‘On the Cinema’ suggests she considers that film has the potential to be a
major art; but has it achieved that potential in Murdochian terms?

W H Y M I G H T F I L M N O T B E A RT ?

The principal objections to discussing film as art are mainly to do with a

concern that to do so denies, or ignores, the amount of labour that goes into a
film, and the cultural and industrial contexts. To call film ‘art’ might be more
consistent with the idea that a genius auteur produces the film rather than it
being an industrial product, the existence of which is dictated by a plethora
of factors. The other traditional objection to film as art is focused on the
way in which it reproduces reality, mechanically and technologically, rather
than offers an interpretation by an artist using creative materials. Walter
Benjamin’s 1935 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Repro-
duction’ (2007) examines these ideas, and we know that Murdoch read this
because her annotated copy is available in the archives.1 Murdoch has under-
lined the sentence that notes that photographic reproduction, ‘with the aid
of certain processes, such as enlargement or slow motion, can capture images
which escape natural vision’ (Benjamin 1968: 222). Benjamin explores the
reproducibility of art, in terms of the loss of what he calls the ‘aura’ of the
original artwork, and the changes in the way people perceive and receive art
once it is technologically reproduced. He then attends to filmic reproduction
in particular, and observes that ‘the painter maintains in his work a natural
distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web’ (ibid.:
233). Murdoch has underlined this sentence, suggesting that she is interested
by the notion of the manipulation and creation of images in the film-editing
process. (We know from OTC that she is interested in the juxtaposition of
images.) Murdoch also underlined Benjamin’s point that film has deepened
apperception in society ‘for the entire spectrum of optical, and now also
acoustical, perception’. Benjamin argues that ‘filmed behaviour lends itself
more readily to analysis because of its incomparably more precise statements
of the situation’ (ibid.: 236). This volume of Benjamin’s essays, Illumina-
tions, was published in 1968, and Murdoch’s copy is dated April 1973, some
seventeen years after her essay on cinema. All that we can glean from the
annotations is that Murdoch retained an interest in film and the type of art
that it is, particularly in relation to performance and politics.
Analytic philosophers have long been concerned with the question of film
as art, and whether film qualifies to be considered as art at all. Cynthia Free-
land develops Benjamin’s comparison of cinema to avant-garde art in its ability
to broaden human perceptual power in the ways that the surrealists such as
Buñuel and Dali had done (Freeland 2001: 180). She also notes Benjamin’s

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 FILM AS ART 23

approval of the distancing effect of cinematic acting, which he perceived would

prevent the absorption of the false reality, as might happen in the theatre; and
also his optimism about the democratic nature of cinematic culture. However,
Freeland does not share Benjamin’s optimism about films in light of the dis-
tinction between high and mass art that persists in cinema (ibid.: 181). For
Freeland, the nuanced appreciation of great work in cinema is confined to the
experts, and ‘cinematic features praised by critics and other directors might
not be recognised by audiences’ (ibid.: 184). She also imposes a reality check
on what she perceives as Benjamin’s naïvety in relation to cinema’s political
potential by drawing attention to those who use and control cinema today, and
how films are consumed, referring to vast corporate complexes like Time-
Warner or Disney-ABC (ibid.: 185). Freeland expects that audiences will be
excited by the rape scenes in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) rather
than consider the novel’s message of ‘how mind control reins in individuality’
(ibid.). These low expectations sound elitist. Her distinction between high and
mass art cannot prevent serious consideration of a filmic text that might fall in
either camp. She cites Benjamin’s observation that ‘the public is an examiner,
but an absent-minded one’ (2007: 241), as a reason for concern, saying, ‘An
absent-minded public is dangerously close to a public with a vacant mind, or a
controlled mind’ (Freeland 2001: 185). This resonates with Murdoch’s com-
ments in Sartre: Romantic Rationalist about an ‘extreme of self-forgetting’ in
the cinema; but I propose that this comment is overstated and indeed may be
far from the truth. Murdoch writes that, according to Sartre,

The work of art, depending as it does upon the reader or spectator

for its existence, is an appeal, a demand . . . The imagination must be
enchanted, but, I think Sartre would agree, not too enchanted. An exces-
sive detachment or suspicion will fail to create the work at all; an exces-
sive self-forgetfulness will break down its objective contours and blend it
with private fantasy and dream. In the latter case novel-reading becomes
a drug. (It is characteristic of the art of cinema to encourage, by its very
form, this extreme of self-forgetting.) Our delight in a work of art is our
sense of the imaginative activity involved in creating and maintaining it,
as it were, just at the right distance from ourselves. (SRR: 97)

The suggestion that cinema may be too absorbing to allow conscious engage-
ment is potentially a stumbling block here if it is to be a form of art that
enables the cultivation of Murdochian attention. However, if ‘unselfing’ is
the aim, to be taken out of oneself, then this does not seem incompatible. As
Murdoch writes, the film is ‘the most natural image for the consciousness’,
and that its task is to ‘delight and enlarge the imagination’ (OTC: 98). The
suggestions that Murdoch comes up with are in relation to the showing of

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 24 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

objects, the human face, and emotions minutely expressed: and the films I
am going to explore in this chapter certainly use all of these elements in their
film worlds.
For Katharine Thomson-Jones, ‘the art status of film has long been secure’,
but ‘there is still a philosophical self-consciousness to the tradition of film stud-
ies’ (2008: vii). She ascribes this to the role of technology in the art, and how, at
its inception, ‘film had to earn art status in the face of considerable technopho-
bic scepticism’ (ibid.: vii). Such scepticism does still exist in some quarters, and
the suggestion that film is art, let alone philosophically laden, does still meet
with some resistance. Thomson-Jones conducts an investigation of terminology
and concepts in this field, referencing Seven Samurai as a cinematic masterpiece
that goes to the establishing of film as art. (Clearly Murdoch would have agreed,
as her analysis of the film in her article on the cinema demonstrates.) Thomson-
Jones examines Roger Scruton’s philosophical objections to film as art, based
on his argument that photographic reproductions cannot be art and that this
applies to film by extension. Thomson-Jones draws on Arnheim’s analysis of
the limitations of filmic reproduction of reality as an argument for its artistic
status. In other words, space, time, perspective, size and many characteristics of
the pro-filmic material are distorted by their filmic reproduction, and indeed its
exhibition on flat screens limited by the frame only furthers these distortions.
And it is of course in editing that the work of distinguishing film from ‘real life’
becomes most apparent. Although Arnheim was writing about the creation of
silent film, these basic elements of difference and creation still apply. Concen-
trating on what film cannot do is hardly a positive methodology for accounting
for its specificity, which should be, according to Thomson-Jones, showing ‘that
film has its own methods for creating a world on screen for the viewer to enter
in imagination’ (ibid.: 14). She cites Alexander Sesonske, who observed that,
‘when we view a film, our experience of space, time, and motion, differs from
any other context of our lives’ (1974: 54, in Thomson-Jones 2008: 13). We can
jump from place to place and time to time, while remaining in our cinema seats,
and editing gives moments and elements particular focus, size, proximity and
duration.
When we watch a film, we perform a variety of cognitive functions, such as
making sense of narratives, recalling and revisiting earlier information – both
intra- and extra-textual – evaluating actions and interpreting outcomes. Cogni-
tivists such as David Bordwell (1989) are concerned with how we understand
what we see, and analytic philosophers such as Noël Carroll (2008) are inter-
ested in how we categorise and evaluate the films we watch. Victor Perkins
proposes that film should be judged as film: we should ‘look for coherent pat-
terns of interrelationship’, and judge ‘on the degree of meaningful interaction
within the elements of the film’ (Perkins 1972: 193). All these thinkers have

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 FILM AS ART 25

demonstrated how the viewer of a film is a thinking viewer, not simply a passive
receptacle of ideology as suggested by 1970s apparatus theory. And of course
each of us brings our own lived experience to our viewing. We are thinking and
feeling viewers, and the field of film phenomenology, including Vivien Sob-
chack’s work on the film body and Laura Marks’s discussions of haptic visuality,
has enabled a new vocabulary of film interpretation and understanding (Marks
1999, 2002; Sobchack 1992, 2004). Emotional and bodily affect is an integral
part of the film experience, and indeed filmmakers appeal to these elements
as significant conveyers of meaning, sometimes replacing dialogue and action,
as I have considered elsewhere (Bolton 2009, 2014, 2015a). The question of
empathy with a character, and identification with them, is an important one
in a Murdochian context. There is far more going on in the eyes, mind and
body of a filmgoer than a simple ‘self-forgetting’: for a film philosopher this
could not be further from the truth! But do we unself sufficiently? Does Mur-
doch’s concept of paying ‘loving attention’ apply to the viewing of a film in the
same way, or as much, as the making of and looking at a vase or sculpture? And
are our responses of empathy and evaluation the type of moral progress that
Murdoch says we should be making? If so, then her concepts constitute a sig-
nificant intervention in film aesthetics and ethics, and open out a new way of
conceptualising film’s moral and ethical possibilities.

M U R D O C H O N A RT A N D P H I L O S O P H Y

Martin Puchner observes,

For Murdoch, the importance of art lay in the fact that it could serve as a
symbol of the good. This is so because art as Murdoch conceived of it is
primarily antipersonal or, in the parlance of modernism, impersonal or
depersonalised. Art, she held, is the most powerful experience we have
of being taken outside ourselves. And since the good requires leaving
behind individual desires and desire for individual bodies . . . art is the
best training for goodness. (2010: 176)

Murdoch not only emphasised the importance of art for ethics but also rec-
ognised an artistic dimension in philosophy itself. She discussed Sartre’s
novels in this light with Bryan Magee, along with works by Tolstoy, Dickens
and Shakespeare (L&P: 3–30). She spoke of a dramatic form of thought in
philosophy, from Hegel to Sartre, and repeatedly discussed Plato as an artist,
using characters, scenes and stories to convey philosophical ideas. One of the
questions Murdoch is faced with in most interviews, and something which

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 26 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

continues to occupy many scholars, is how her literary works and philosophi-
cal works are related; in particular, how intentionally philosophical are her
novels (Altorf 2008; Conradi 2001; Forsberg 2013; Leeson 2010). This is
relevant here because it probes whether Murdoch sees fiction as a suitable
medium for conveying philosophical ideas. Anne Rowe has examined the role
of visual arts in Murdoch’s novels, arguing that paintings and images in the
fiction often function to engender sensory experience. For Rowe, there is a
sensory phenomenology demanded by Murdoch’s writing, and the visual arts
relate to this evocative spirit.2 For Marije Altorf, there initially seems to be
a strong relationship between Murdoch’s philosophy and her novels, in that
characters in the novels use vocabulary taken from Murdoch’s philosophical
essays (2008: 1). And Murdoch writes about art and literature in her philo-
sophical essays, demonstrating how important their role is in her moral phi-
losophy. Altorf notes Murdoch’s use of the nineteenth-century novel as more
able to demonstrate ideas than philosophical vocabulary, and observes that,
for Murdoch, ‘Art thus indicates what an exemplary state of consciousness
can be like, but also shows more common states of mind’ (2008: 2). Murdoch
remained resolutely opposed to the idea that her novels should be read as
philosophy. In conversation with Brian Magee, she argues,

In general I am reluctant to say that the deep structure of any good lit-
erary work could be a philosophical one. I think this is not just a verbal
point. The unconscious mind is not a philosopher. For better and worse
art goes deeper than philosophy. (L&P: 21)

For Murdoch, art does not need to have philosophy inserted into it deliberately
in order to be philosophically valuable: it is by its very nature a philosophical
process.

I think good art is good for people precisely because it is not fantasy
but imagination. It breaks the grip of our own dull fantasy life and stirs
us to the effort of true vision. Most of the time we fail to see the big
wide real world at all because we are blinded by obsession, anxiety, envy,
resentment, fear. We make a small personal world in which we remain
enclosed. Great art is liberating, it enables us to see and take pleasure in
what is not ourselves. (L&P: 14)

For Murdoch, seeing is fundamental to our being as moral agents. Seeing art,
attending to art, engenders ‘true vision’ as it literally takes us out of ourselves
and engages us with the world of others. And here, in the presence of art,
and, I suggest, in the engagement with a film world, we can understand what

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 FILM AS ART 27

Murdoch means when she says that ‘A great work of art gives one a sense of
space, as if one had been invited into some large hall of reflection’ (L&P: 28).
Cinema as a ‘large hall of reflection’ is a suitably spacious, yet contained, and
visually resonant metaphor for the moving images and affective sounds on the
cinema screen.
The distinction between saying and showing is pertinent here. Scott H.
Moore argues that ‘Murdoch believes that fiction can show what philosophy
can only say’ (2010: 101). Moore is writing about the lives of fictional philoso-
phers in Murdoch’s novels as conveyors of what Murdoch calls ‘philosophy,
as such’ (in conversation with Jack I. Biles, in Dooley 2003: 58), and is explor-
ing how these fictional lives put Murdoch’s moral philosophy into action in
their daily lives (or fail to!). For Niklas Forsberg this distinction prompts the
question ‘how can a piece of language – be it a philosophical text or a literary
one – carry enough sense so as to show something that cannot be said?’ (2013:
53). Forsberg ventures to develop the role of language and speaking in fiction
when he considers The Philadelphia Story, and he analyses the complexity of
communication in the film, concluding that ‘it is not merely a question about
what is being said, but it is also about what it means to listen’ (ibid.: 141). The
medium of film matters here, as Forsberg explains, because ‘we learn this
by watching a movie rather than by reading arguments and theses’ (ibid.).
Forsberg argues that we know a great deal about Tracy and the men who
love her, and how they all see her, because we have experienced the full film.
Forsberg observes that Tracy’s situation is ‘in a sense, unique or particular’,
and without knowing all about her situation the ideas expressed in sentences
alone would not have had the same meaning. So, Forsberg proposes, and we
cannot but agree,

this is one reason why philosophy might do well in going to the movies
. . . If the philosophical point lies in the artwork as a whole, then the
watching of the film or the reading of the book are philosophical activi-
ties in their own right. (2013: 141)

Although there is so much scholarship on the philosophical content of Mur-

doch’s novels, it seems in keeping with her philosophical intentions that the two
should also stand apart, so that the philosophy can be kept discrete. Murdoch’s
play ‘Art and Eros: A Dialogue about Art’ (A&E), is a discussion between Plato
and his friends who have just come from the theatre. They consider the merits
of art, with Plato maintaining a quiet distance. They discuss the role of the audi-
ence’s imagination, how the audience is moved, and the purpose of theatre, won-
dering can it just be fun? They also discuss different types of art, and Socrates
wonders ‘if sculpture is a better art than painting’ (A&E: 469). They consider

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 28 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

the idea that art is simply copying reality. Acastos says, ‘good art is deep wise
thinking. And bad art is bad because it’s stupid or depraved thinking . . . I’m
sure good art tells us something. It isn’t just a dose of emotion. It’s like vision –
insight – knowledge –’ (A&E: 472). Socrates says

Isn’t it the nature of art to explore the relation between the public and
the private? Art turns us inside out, it exhibits what is secret. What
goes on inwardly in the soul is the essence of each man, it’s what makes
us individual people. The relation between that inwardness and public
conduct is morality. How can art ignore it? (A&E: 475)

Plato, by contrast, keeps his counsel. He is quiet and withdrawn, until he mut-
ters ‘Art is lies, it’s fantasy, it’s play, it’s humbug, it’s make-believe, the theatre
is rubbish, it’s . . .’ (A&E: 484). Plato argues that art makes people believe they
have understood something when in fact they haven’t gone deep enough; it is
deluding. He talks about living in a cave, with people living their lives in dark-
ness, ‘seeing nothing but flickering shadows and illusions, like images thrown
on a screen’ (A&E: 488). Socrates persists in defending art and says that ‘the
language of art is the most universal and enduring kind of human thought’
(A&E: 493). Plato, as Murdoch writes him here, is an artist: he is writing poetry
and trying to be a great poet, and, Socrates says, he speaks with ‘poetic elo-
quence’ (A&E: 494).
Murdoch mentions Plato’s concerns elsewhere, when considering the
dangers of art. She refers to Plato’s cave story as ‘instructive pictures’ (MGM:
10), but acknowledges the dangers of becoming ‘lazy sentimental spectators
of fictional dramas’ (MGM: 13). This view of the possible dangers of art
leads her to distinguish between what she considers to be good and bad art.
While writing about the use of the visual arts in Murdoch’s novels, Anne
Rowe notes that, for Murdoch, celebrating art is only part of Murdoch’s per-
spective: ‘art must work, too, by being difficult, deliberately incomplete and
imperfect; it must defy any consolatory function and present an unflinching
picture of evil’ (2002: 19). Rowe continues, ‘whilst readers watch characters
undergo a spiritual experience, they undergo one simultaneously by being
shown the utter particularity of another consciousness, and by being expe-
rientially induced to feel love and tolerance for it’ (ibid.: 23–4). This, writes
Rowe, is how ‘characters and readers alike participate in salvation by art’
(ibid.: 24). This notion is pertinent to my consideration of how a film can
simultaneously work as an engaging story, causing immersion in, and reflec-
tion upon, the particularity of another’s consciousness and moral vision, and
at the same time affect our own consciousness and moral vision, submitting
us to a personal, ethical experience.

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 FILM AS ART 29

G O O D A RT A N D B A D A RT

Murdoch frequently refers to art as being either good or bad, and it is impor-
tant to address this issue before examining specific films. In conversation with
John Haffenden in 1985, Murdoch responds to the questions of what she
thinks is the true function of art: is it consolation, education or pure pleasure?

The phrase you’ve used – pure pleasure – is good, I think. One should
live with good art and not get addicted to bad art, which is demoralis-
ing and disappointing. Good art is a pleasure which is uncontaminated,
it’s happiness. One also learns a lot from art: how to look at the world
and understand it; it makes everything far more interesting. It’s a mode
of reflection, and this is why it’s a terrible crime for totalitarian states
to interfere with artists . . . Art is a great hall of reflection . . . It’s a
mode of thought, a mode of knowledge. Good art can’t help teaching
you things but it mustn’t aim at teaching. (Dooley 2003: 137–8)

It sounds rather pious to prohibit art from intentional didacticism, particularly

as it is the aim of many artists to be provocative and encourage reflection. But
the emphasis on learning how to look is vital to the understanding of film as
Murdochian philosophy: it is a focused, attentive looking and experiencing,
and the description of this as a ‘mode of thought, a mode of knowledge’ con-
veys the idea that it is a sustained practice, not a brief exposure or reaction.
This is not a matter of a one-off or instantaneous response, but rather a state of
being that a film can engender and encourage, both within the cinema theatre
as ‘a great hall of reflection’, and beyond as we carry our experience of the film
out into our contemplations, our conversations and our worlds.
In another conversation, with William Slaymaker in 1985, she says:

I think art is good for people. Good art is good for people because it
takes them away from themselves, and enables them to see many aspects
of human life in detail, and all kinds of particular things, instead of
being trapped inside their own fantasy, which is one of the opposites of
freedom. (Dooley 2003: 141–2)

This idea again lends itself to the cinema, as two hours experiencing an engag-
ing, challenging film does indeed expose us to scenarios and worlds that are
not our own, but which offer the opportunity to see stories and exchanges
that might challenge and develop our thinking. Murdoch concedes, ‘we can
also understand why Plato was suspicious of art, because art is a great place of
illusions and magic as well as a place of liberation’ (ibid.: 142). What Murdoch

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 30 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

means by good art is art that does not console us. She explains this repeatedly
across the body of her work, but makes it crystal clear here: ‘Good art accepts
and celebrates and meditates upon the defeat of the discursive intellect by the
world. Bad art misrepresents the world so as to pretend there is no defeat’
(MGM: 88).
The danger of art is consolation and fantasy. This will be explored in the
chapters that follow, but it is important to note here that for art to function as
Murdochian moral philosophy there needs to be sufficient distance for obser-
vation and contemplation, and the experience of the art should not be deluded
consolation. Returning to the Sartre quote about the ‘self-forgetting’ encour-
aged by the cinema, it is useful to consider Thomson-Jones’s analysis of the
cognitive and emotional work done by viewers. It is not so that all films blend
with our private fantasies. There are of course films that are founded on fan-
tasy. Perhaps one might fantasise of being able to fight like Lorraine Broughton
(Charlize Theron) in Atomic Blonde (David Leitch, 2017), but a character such
as Jenny Davin (Adèle Haenel) in The Unknown Girl (Jean-Pierre Dardenne
and Luc Dardenne, 2016) commands attention, evaluation and empathy, as
will be examined in Chapter 7. The films I analyse in this book are examples
of contemporary films that provoke, unsettle and challenge us to examine our-
selves: they are far from consoling fantasies.
In ‘The Sovereignty of Good’, Murdoch speaks about the need to pay a
‘patient loving regard’ to the other, and how both nature and art can work to
get us thinking like this. Her most famous example is of the kestrel:

I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of

mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage
done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a
moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has
disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. (SGC: 369)

Here, nature can bring us out of ourselves and we find the possibility of a focus
on something else, which dilutes our ego and improves our vision of the world.
Art also can act as practice in this way: in other words, we can hone our moral
thinking through art as a type of practice.
Murdoch’s article on the cinema shows that she saw particular abilities and
qualities in film, but the article itself and her later comments in correspondence
as recorded in Chapter 1 suggest that she felt not all cinema was significant in
this regard. Her prime interest is in a vision resembling a dream, or ‘emotional
vision’, as she says, ‘After all, this is a form of Art’: ‘A film should show us a
strange and startling world, disintegrated and distorted, and full of dramati-
cally significant objects’ (OTC: 98). And the prime object is us – human beings
– our bodies and our faces, which she sees as being able to be expressed and

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depicted in the most minute emotional detail. Rudolf Arnheim wrote about
the place of the human body among cinematic objects in Film as Art in 1957:

A broken windowpane may be as good as a quivering mouth, a heap of

dead cigarette stubs as the nervous drumming of fingers. Once again
the classification – so characteristic of film – of man as one among many
objects is plainly revealed. The traces of human strivings are as visible
on inanimate objects as they are on the body itself. (Arnheim 1957: 121)

Arnheim draws on similar films to those referred to by Murdoch in Vogue,

such as Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet and Chaplin, in a consideration of visual
perception and close attention to form, including how it can distract as well as
inform. Film possesses the ability to close in on an object using the close-up
shot, which, as Mary Ann Doane writes, ‘has inspired fascination, love, horror,
empathy, pain, unease’ (2003: 90). Doane cites Epstein’s essay ‘Magnification’,
which, as she puts it, ‘verges on the obscene’ in the way he writes so intensely
and hyperbolically about the human face in close-up (ibid.). Doane also cites
Hugo Münsterberg from 1916, where he aligns the close-up with ‘the mental
act of attention’ (ibid.: 91), thereby naturalising it rather than reifying it as
Epstein does with his focus on its cinematic specificity, describing it as ‘the
soul of cinema’ (Epstein 1977: 9). Doane focuses on the significance of the cin-
ematic face, and how it is transformed by the close-up into something gigantic,
monstrous and overwhelming (2003: 94). Doane highlights the phenomeno-
logical experience of the close-up as being both a presence and a sign demand-
ing to be read, which she sees as ‘inside or outside the cinema, the inevitable
operation of the face as well’ (ibid.: 94). It is, as Doane notes, ‘barely possible to
see a close-up of a face without asking: what is he/she thinking, feeling, suffer-
ing? What is happening beyond what I can see?’ (ibid.: 96). These assessments
of the close-up face recall Murdoch’s interest in film’s abilities, as they gesture
towards what she was concerned with: the focus of attention, the intensity of
experience, but also the realisation that there is work to be done by us when we
look at the close-up on the human face. It is difficult to be an absent-minded
spectator in the face, literally, of such a shot.
How does film make an object, or a face, appear in this way, so laden with
meaning? There are a couple of examples that are instructive here. Firstly,
the scene of emotions ‘made minutely concrete’ on the face of Anna (played
by Nicole Kidman) in Birth (Jonathan Glazer, 2004). In a simply constructed
scene, Anna is watching the orchestra playing Wagner and yet we are watching
her face, as conflicting emotions of shock, fear and hope, play out across her
features in a close-up that zooms in and is held for two minutes (Figure 2.1).
Secondly, in Innocence (Lucile Hadzihalilovic, 2004), there is a moment where
two of the schoolgirls, Bianca (Bérangère Haubruge) and Iris (Zoé Auclair), are

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 32 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

Figure 2.1 Anna’s (Nicole Kidman) complex emotions on display, in Birth (2004), directed
by Jonathan Glazer.

walking through the forest and they come across a fawn. This moment can be
likened to Murdoch’s kestrel, in that it halts us – and them – in our tracks and
challenges our thought. We have been absorbed by the menace and the peculiar
threat of the film’s woodland mise en scène and tinkling piano music. When the
girls pull up with a start we expect a sight of something horrific or frighten-
ing; in fact it is a spectacle of something gentle and delicate. This image inter-
rupts our perception and confronts us with our assumptions. However, with
Anna’s face in Birth, the effect is less equivocal. The scene focuses our close,
and patient, attention on this particular face, evidencing the complex emotions
that she is experiencing in light of her extraordinary circumstances (a young
boy has appeared in her life claiming to be her dead husband in some way, and
is convincingly accurate about intimate details).
This close-up compels our attention, and draws us in to her consciousness
and the complexity of her emotions as she begins to wonder if the boy’s story
could possibly be true. In both of these examples, the Murdochian resonances
with emotion and attention are clear, but the ethical lessons require explica-
tion. Surely the position of these moments in the narrative of the film is signif-
icant, and how we analyse the experience of the character, and our experience
of either the same spectacle that they see (the deer or the concert), or of them
regarding the spectacle. There may be a moment in the film that is just for
our eyes, not for the characters. Clearly performance is integral to the image,
and our relationship to a star face is mediated by the extra-textual elements of
that star’s image. We might think of Cate Blanchett as multiple characters in

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 FILM AS ART 33

Manifesto (Julian Rosefeldt, 2017), or Jake Gyllenhaal and Amy Adams as Tony
and Susan in arrestingly beautiful close-ups over the dinner table in Nocturnal
Animals (Tom Ford, 2016). These star faces, along with Kidman’s in Birth,
raise the question of how the film world can be interrupted by the spectacle of
a familiar star face. In his famous essay ‘The Face of Garbo’, Roland Barthes
writes

Garbo still belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human
face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy, when one literally
lost oneself in a human image as one would in a philter, when the face
represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither
reached nor renounced. (1993: 56)

Discussions of Murdoch alongside Barthes, Benjamin and Epstein might

suggest that her thinking about film belongs to their earlier era. However,
Murdoch’s approach to film is not naïve, or founded in awe of the medium.
She is interested in human faces, not ‘vacuous regular faces’, but the place
where ‘we can find tragedy and comedy made minutely concrete in the move-
ment of a muscle, and human character on display at the point where spirit
and matter are most intensely fused’ (OTC: 98). Murdoch is looking for
meaning in the faces, not bathing in their aura or stunned by their mechani-
cal reproduction.
In the second half of this chapter, I will discuss films that relate to Murdoch’s
ideas about film as art: the significance of the face, the question of distance and
fantasy, and the importance of sound. Firstly, I will examine the ideas expressed
by Murdoch in relation to the human face and what it is able to convey by look-
ing at Jackie (Pablo Larraín, 2016). Then I will examine the way in which we
can be engaged in a film and yet kept at a distance, unsure of what to believe, by
Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley, 2012). And then I will look at how film can make
objects look and sound strange, including the human face and the world around
us, in Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013).

T H E FA C E O F J A C K I E

After the production company motifs, the screen is black, and we hear an
extraordinary dropping, sliding note, conveying the sinking into darkness
and destruction of a mood. The film’s opening shots are a close-up of Natalie
Portman, her shoulders and head, as we acclimatise ourselves to seeing her as
Jackie Kennedy. The soundtrack’s sliding note climbs up a little, conveying
her attempt to ‘pull herself together’ for the interview to come. This drooping,
sinking sound is repeated throughout the film’s score, written by Mica Levi,

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 34 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

and powerfully conveys the falling heart and stomach of the grief-stricken, as
the recollection of loss hits her again and again. These close-ups are interesting
in relation to the star face, as we are so familiar with Portman’s tense face and
tearful eyes from the relentless intensity of her other performances, notably in
Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky, 2010). That performance was highly praised
and rewarded with awards, and her face has become a striking image from the
film’s poster and artwork, adorned as it is with exquisite stage makeup and
ballet costume-jewellery. Here, Portman’s face is familiarly tense and tearful;
her delicate bone structure and symmetrical features lend themselves well to
the period makeup of the 1960s, and her dark eyes and bouffant hair recall the
iconic trademarks of Jackie Kennedy without being a distracting imitation. She
is clearly Natalie Portman, performing Jackie Kennedy, and the emphasis from
the outset is on this character’s state of mind, grief-stricken and burdened with
the public nature of her family tragedy. An intertitle then tells us it is Hyannis
Port, Massachusetts, 1963. Her tiny figure, silhouetted against a huge leaded-
light window, sees a taxi pull up the drive, and a reporter (Billy Crudup) get
out. Their terse exchange on the doorstep, filmed in stark shot reverse shot,
sets up the duel that is to come. This is to be Jackie Kennedy’s assertion of her
version of what happened.
Portman’s voice seems peculiarly sing-song, but this is a necessary evocation
of Kennedy’s vocal intonation and delivery. This is made especially evident in
the recreation of the tour of the White House documentary, containing footage
from the actual film, as well as recreations using Portman.3 The soundtrack
appears to be, at least partially, that of Kennedy’s own voice from the 1962
film. There is a contrast between the nervous artifice and self-consciousness of
Kennedy’s performance in the documentary, and her sure-footed confidence
with the journalist. Here she is very confidently beginning the story that will
come to be the history of the Kennedys, or what she will name as Camelot.
An earlier classical music concert in the White House focuses on the pre-
siding image of the immaculate Jackie, flanked by brothers Bobby and Jack,
as the shot slowly closes in on her satisfied, almost transported face; confi-
dent that – as the voiceover of the documentary has established – everything
in the White House is the best. Flashbacks to the day of the assassination show
the amount of work and preparation that Jackie put in to her public events,
practising greetings and preparing her appearance. Their arrival is greeted by
huge crowds, and a tight close-up on her face shows her being slightly over-
whelmed by the noise and activity on all sides. Cutting back to her face as she
recounts what happened to the journalist in the present, her ability to recount
the gory details of what happened when her husband was shot (a piece of his
skull in her hands, blood and brains in her lap) is captivating. Her breathy,
strange voice is strong and deliberate as she crafts the narrative that will be

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 FILM AS ART 35

committed to history, even though she says ‘don’t think for one minute that
I’m going to let you publish that’. She describes how his head and his mouth
were beautiful, and his eyes were open. In extreme close-up we see Jackie’s
face after the assassination, as she gasps with tears and wipes splatters of thick
dark blood from her face. She is looking at herself in the mirror as she does
so, but we are tightly close in on her face. The most striking thing is that she
is alone. She has nobody really close to help her. She is still splattered with
her husband’s blood as Lyndon B. Johnson is sworn in as President. Her face
is dazed and silent, watching these emergency proceedings. In a strikingly
realistic gesture, as Jackie turns away from the swearing-in party, she looks
perplexed and amazed, and, as the repeated sinking musical swoon conveys
her falling insides, she jumps: this conveys a jolt of reality as she is sidelined
and the next presidential couple are feted. She sits alone on the plane back to
Washington, but then she begins to try to discover as much information as pos-
sible, asking about the size of the bullet. She is determined to be present and
visible, not brushed aside, but the strength of her voice and attitude appears
awkward because of her diminutive size compared to the tall uniformed men
standing around her, who find it so difficult to look her in the eye.
An extreme close-up on Bobby Kennedy’s (Peter Sarsgaard) face as they ride
with the casket shows he is upset but also concerned about Jackie’s persistent
questioning of the driver and the nurse in the car about what they remember about
presidents who were assassinated. In her room, in private at last, she removes her
suit, her stockings, all covered in blood, and close-up shots enable us to see this in
detail. We hear the sound of her crying and breathing, and we see the sight of her
husband’s blood: she has to scrub her nails, and shower it off her. She looks very
thin and small. There is a tight close-up on her face as she plans the funeral. She
says with conviction, ‘Must get this right – it has to be beautiful.’ As she is chal-
lenged about things such as the guest list, a close-up on her tense face captures her
awareness of the magnitude and complexity of what is happening.
Throughout the film, Jackie is constantly linking herself and JFK with his-
tory, especially Lincoln, but she is also worrying about needing to sell furniture
to put John and Caroline through school. She speaks harshly about her own
life, saying, ‘Nothing is mine, not to keep anyway; a first lady must always be
ready to leave the White House, it’s inevitable’, as she smokes cigarettes and
defiantly utters her self-penned ‘script’ to the journalist. She’s determined to
march with the coffin at the funeral for eight blocks. She persuades Bobby, she
fights for it. But she is shown as being very alone, as tracking shots follow her
walking though the high-ceilinged cavernous White House, looking at all the
ornaments, photographs and furniture, and putting on the record ‘Camelot’,
sung by Richard Burton.4 We follow her small body, in a familiar Jackie-style
shift dress, and see her trying on her different dresses, drinking, taking pills,

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 36 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

rearranging photographs, and then sitting, looking into the distance, crying,
with ‘Camelot’ playing. We see her horror at having to pack all her clothes and
belongings, to tape them up in boxes. She struggles to remove her wedding
ring, looking at herself in the mirror, as if looking at how she appears to the
outside world, or trying to work out if she looks different.
This is an emotive concoction of images, objects, sounds, music and refer-
ences, which serves to create an intimate encounter with a cultural personal-
ity during a defining period in US history. In her discussions with the family
priest, close-ups on her face combined with her recounting of mixed-up mem-
ories, about herself, and her marriage, convey an emotionally complex state.
Speaking to her friend Nancy (Greta Gerwig) in an intimate conversation, she
wonders if Nancy had been jealous of her, and what they will both do now.
Jackie here is tearful and confessional; and yet there is an iron will on display
too, fuelled, it seems, by anger at the destruction wrought upon her family
by the presidential office. She demands that photographs taken at the funeral
‘should record the truth – two heartbroken fatherless children are part of that’.
She wants to ensure that there are ‘children on full display for the world to
see’. A striking close-up of her looking out of the car window, with the crowds
reflected in her face, captures not just the character of Jackie Kennedy, but
her public office too (Figure 2.2). By this stage in the film, the presence of
Portman has been overtaken by her performance of the embodiment of Jackie.
The close-up on her face, so recurrent and affective, accompanied by intense,

Figure 2.2. Jackie Kennedy (Natalie Portman) sees the crowds lining the streets, in Jackie
(2016), directed by Pablo Larraín.

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 FILM AS ART 37

emotive music, depicts a powerful woman surrounded, at this particular period

in her life, by men who are not fully free to fight her as they might wish to
because of her circumstances, which are both uniquely tragic and uniquely
privileged.
She explains to the priest, ‘I never wanted fame, I just became a Kennedy.’
She asserts that she can remember everything, and there is a close-up on her
face as she recalls being driven at speed to the hospital, with her dead hus-
band’s head in her lap. She tells the reporter that every night she prays to die:
‘Oh God let me be with my husband.’ Just as she is consciously recounting
how she wants this period to be remembered, so the sympatico reporter reas-
sures her, ‘You left your mark on this country the last few days. Decades from
now people will remember you.’ It is then that she instils in him the idea of
Camelot, thus creating a cultural legend out of her personal tragedy. She cre-
ates a family grave, which includes their babies who died, but she is shown
still to be solitary. The film ends as she is driven through town and she sees
shop models going into the store window with her fashion ‘look’. She sits back
a little, and her face settles into a look which may be one of satisfaction, but
certainly conveys a mixture of emotions. She will indeed be remembered. The
film’s final shots are as she recalls happy times with her husband, dancing in
the White House. Jackie’s face has dominated this film, capturing conflicting
emotions, but also fusing spirit and matter with nerve-jangling intensity.

A RT A S U N T RU T H : S T O R I E S W E T E L L

Sarah Polley’s film is a moving and personal investigation of her family his-
tory, which interrogates the way in which we use images to concoct our own
stories of our past, even relying on them as evidence for our imaginations.
Through the use of actual footage and staged recreations – and the withhold-
ing of disclosure of the difference – the film provokes us to question our belief
in what we see and the role of artistic representations in the formation of our
thinking. It also gives the lie to the idea that watching film is an easy experi-
ence of ‘self-forgetting’ or ‘absent-minded’ examining. This film undercuts
our comfort and our trust in what we see and believe both on-screen and about
ourselves.
The film begins with a sweet and simple piano melody, redolent of a child
haltingly playing a tune, and footage of a train travelling through snow, fea-
turing a woman on the train looking out of the window, and a man’s voice
telling us that ‘when you’re in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all . . .
it’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all, when you’re
telling it to yourself or someone else’. We are looking at what appears to be
home movie footage of a family, in the kitchen, at parties, and the images

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 38 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

and sound appear to be linked, as if the man is giving his opinion on the
stories we are going to hear. Then we are shown that his words are a quote
from Margaret Atwood’s novel Alias Grace, not a homily of wisdom straight
from the speaking man himself.5 A hand scribbling notes on paper, followed
by the film’s title ‘Stories We Tell’ in Courier font, looking like typewritten
words, establishes that the film is to be about memoirs. The director, Sarah
Polley, is then shown setting up microphones with a series of interviewees,
who are her family members, including her elderly father Michael who is in
a recording studio, and her siblings Joanna, Susy, Mark and Johnny. We are
shown black and white footage of her beautiful mother Diane, before Polley
asks each interviewee to tell ‘the whole story, from the very beginning to the
very end, in your own words’. They all react with surprise at the extent of
the task. One of the sisters, says, ‘who cares about our stupid family?’ They
begin recalling their mother, saying how enthusiastic and fun she was, how
vivacious, how loud, and how productive she was too. We see footage of her as
people remember her, running ahead of them, fooling around, working and
acting. There is footage of her father and mother meeting as young actors,
and we are told how her father bought a Super 8 camera to record family life.
The scene is set for us to watch the family footage and learn from it, as it
seems contemporary and intimate.
As the interviews progress, and the circle of interviewees widens, discrep-
ancies creep in to people’s accounts of Diane. One person says she was secre-
tive, another says she was not at all private. The marriage to Michael is revealed
to have had its problems. One of the sons says that his father told him that his
mum wanted to have sex a lot more than he did. Michael says he was good at
contributing, and providing, but not good at loving Diane. One of the sisters
says Michael did nothing to care for the kids or around the house and that
Diane was frustrated by his wasting his talent for writing and acting. When
Diane got an offer to do a play in Montreal, she accepted it, and Michael says
he was secretly ecstatic to have a break from each other. We then see footage of
the play and the group of actors, and her friends, all working and socialising
in Montreal. Michael goes to visit her, and the absence has reinvigorated their
sex life so that they have a romantic weekend. She returns to Toronto, and
discovers she’s pregnant, at the age of forty-two. She thought she should have
an abortion because there were risks of Down’s syndrome. She arranged to go
to the hospital for an abortion, but changed her mind on the way there. Then
Sarah is born, with a surprising shock of red hair.
The interviews then turn to Diane’s illness and death from cancer. Some
say she and the whole family knew she was dying, others say ‘she never fully
realised’. Her female friends say how much she fought, and break down
in tears. Michael says ‘she didn’t know’. The siblings say that they think
Michael became depressed after Diane’s death, and he sat around smoking

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 FILM AS ART 39

and playing solitaire. Michael then talks about this as becoming a ‘great
period in my life’, due to the concentration of his relationship with Sarah,
as it was just the two of them living in the house for four or five very close
years. We then start to look back over what happened around Diane’s preg-
nancy with Sarah. Footage of Diane on the telephone which we have seen
before is now replayed as the eldest son Johnny describes how he overheard
her on the phone crying, saying she was pregnant and that she didn’t know
who the father was. So we wonder then whether that footage was of some-
thing Johnny actually saw, and we now see it in a different light. It then
emerges that Johnny managed to get the information about their mother
having had an affair years later from her friends.
It emerges that the identity of Sarah’s father began to come up as a family
joke: they all used to say she looked nothing like Michael, and play who could
her father be? They would take guesses as to which of the three actors in the
play in Montreal it could be: Tom, Wayne or Geoff. Most people, it seemed,
thought it was Geoff Bowes, so Sarah decided to investigate a bit more, tele-
phoned him and they met. We see him interviewed, as Sarah in voiceover says
she felt he was hiding something, by saying he and Diane just had friendship.
Another contact said that Sarah might want to meet up with producer Harry
Gulkin, who knew her mother at that time, so she contacted him and they met.
Sarah and Harry are shown having coffee, as we are told that they got on well,
and she felt so comfortable with him that she asked him if he knew whether
her mother had an affair in Montreal, and whether somebody else could be
her father. He said ‘it’s possible it’s me’. We see this conversation on-screen,
so clearly it is a re-enactment. Then we see footage of him much younger, in
an astrakhan hat, and it looks like him, but we are perhaps puzzled as to how
this footage of them meeting exists, and how Sarah has it. Harry tells of how
he developed huge passion for Diane, and asked her to move to Montreal and
bring her children. We then learn that Diane was married before Michael, and
we see footage from that wedding. We hear about how controlling her first hus-
band was, and then how she fell in love with Michael and left her husband; and
how she went back for the children the next day and the husband had changed
the locks. He applied for custody, and the court ruled in his favour. Her desire
to escape from her husband, and to pursue her career, cost her dearly. At this
point, the adult sibling interviewees all become distressed, mainly because they
recall seeing their mother only once a month, and having successive horrible
stepmother characters who hurt them. We see footage of her apparently at the
time, acting, but looking sad, as we hear that this must have made her sad every
day. The inference is clear: here she is, at that time, looking serious. Do we
assume she is feeling sad about her children?
Harry talks about how she felt guilty over the loss of her children, and says
that she was thrilled at being pregnant by him. He says their affair was ‘pretty

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 40 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

open’; her friends say it was secret. We return to footage of Diane’s funeral,
but now see that Harry was there – did we miss him the first time round?
Sarah watches a documentary about Harry, and we see footage from the film
too. Then we also see footage of the family at Michael’s house, conjuring up
the same family vibe as the older home videos. Sarah and Harry conduct a
DNA test and it proves that Harry is her biological father. He is delighted.
Sarah continues to call Michael ‘dad’. Sarah meets her half-sister Cathy, and
we are told that they share the same gummy grin, which we can see too as they
are both shown smiling. Although initially only telling her siblings, and not
Michael, she does eventually have to tell him because a journalist is threaten-
ing to publish the story. All three sisters got divorced following the revelation,
whereas Mark, the younger son, started his own family. Mark admits that he
was critical of Diane’s irresponsibility in terms of birth control, but older gay
son Johnny is not critical at all.
We see Sarah visit Michael, who has shorter hair than in the supposedly
‘current’ footage, and we see her mouthing the words to him about her pater-
nity. Again, it is hard to believe that this is the actual footage of Sarah telling
Michael that he is not her father. Sarah is seen to say, ‘It doesn’t make any
difference, does it?’, which is what Michael is recalling that she said. So here
we have information being conveyed by a voiceover, and being ostensibly sup-
ported by images, but the provenance of those images is at best questionable.
Who was filming this conversation? Michael’s reaction is that he thought it was
a great story, and he says that it awoke an obsession in him to tell the story to
anyone who would listen. We see him writing, getting thoughts down on paper.
He is concerned that Diane should not have any blame, revealing that he’d
always told her to take a lover at any time she felt he was inadequate. Michael
entertains the possibility of having lived with the ambiguity of Sarah’s parent-
age had Diane told him about her affair. We see Diane sitting on a bed, as if
talking to Michael, who says ‘Why do we talk and talk but not say what we’re
really like?’
It emerges that Harry also wanted to write a memoir of what he considered
to be a strong story that could be told in many different ways. Sarah suggested
they each write up their own versions, then show them to each other. Harry
writes it up and wants to publish it, which upsets Sarah greatly. Harry says
‘I felt constrained in my relationship to you, because of the private way you
were dealing with it.’ He felt that ‘the atmosphere got a little heavy’ and he
backed off. All these different takes on the ownership of the story are emerg-
ing, and Sarah then says she wants to document it through filming everyone’s
point of view. We see Sarah filming. She asks Harry, ‘What do you think of
this concept of giving everyone’s point of view equal weight?’ Harry replies,
‘I don’t like it.’ He says it is woolly, and ‘we can’t touch bottom with it’. He
sees all narratives as being shaped by people’s various interests and loyalties,

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 FILM AS ART 41

and he declares that the crucial function of art is to find the truth, to tell
the truth. What this means, in practice, is that he just wants to tell his story!
Michael also raises the issue of truth, saying to Sarah that they are engaged in
a ‘farcical theatrical exercise’, and that her selection of moments and excerpts
is part of editing the truth. He claims that if she had just let a camera run
and record it all, that would be closer to truth: ‘But your editing of it is turn-
ing it into something completely different.’ Of course, any filmed footage has
creative decisions that prevent it from just being a simple recording of ‘the
truth’, but what seems to bother Michael and Harry is that theirs won’t be
the only version.
The eldest brother Johnny seems to be serious when he asks Sarah what she
would say this documentary is really all about. Sarah says memory and the way
we tell the stories of our lives. He interrupts by saying, ‘Is this a good angle for
me?’ making her laugh and call him an asshole. So, he interrupts the serious-
ness that he seemed to seek from Sarah, and she has chosen to leave it in: this
serves to highlight the multiple perspectives and investments in the film. One
of the main focuses is the discrepancies, how similar stories can have large and
small details that vary. Where is the truth if we are all recalling different details
and asserting them as facts, and how are we as viewers of this film to react to
the plethora of perspectives and opinions on display?
At this point, we are shown that Sarah has been recreating the ‘siblings’
around the dining table using actors; we see young ‘Harry’ in makeup, and
‘Diane’ being directed. These people we have been watching have been played
by actors. But not always: there is some real family home movie footage too.
Sarah’s sister Joanna says that those memories, of what kind of person their
mother was, are just illusory. Harry declares that only two people can tell the
essentials of what took place (although of course this is only what took place
that involved him). We continue to see Sarah filming on her hand-held camera.
Harry announces that ‘The story with Diane, I regret to say, is only mine
to tell, and I think that’s about it; my recollections may be faulty at times but
I’m not gonna lie.’ Joanna says she was really happy to hear about her mother’s
affair, that she found love from Harry, and had been loved that much, even
though it was Michael she really wanted the love from. Michael comes across
as an unemotional man, withdrawn and self-contained. He questions Sarah’s
motives, and her need to make the film. Sarah says, in voiceover,

Every time I feel I have my footing I lose it. Have I totally lost my mind
trying to reconstruct the past from other people’s words? Trying to
form her? Is this the tsunami she unleashed when she went, and all of
us still flailing in her wake, trying to put her together in the wreckage,
and her slipping away from us, over and over again, just as we begin to
see her face?

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 42 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

Figure 2.3 Footage of Diane Polley from Stories We Tell (2012), directed by Sarah Polley.

This is clearly a personal voyage into loss and a degree of trauma for Sarah
Polley, but these words resonate with anyone who has lost a loved one. We
might envy her all this real video footage of her mother, or find some of the rec-
reations somewhat peculiar, but the experience of loss is acute for all the family.
Sarah cuts to the bone when she asks her father what he said to Diane at the
very end. Accompanied by colour footage of her sunny, swimsuit-clad mother
heading into the sea, Michael is heard to say, ‘What?’ in response to Sarah, as
Diane turns round and mouths ‘What?’ at the camera (Figure 2.3). This is a
visual and visceral fusing of Michael and Diane and their shared experience.
Michael says in a slightly offhand way, ‘Dunno, probably that I would miss her,
that we loved her, we’d never forget her – that’s about all.’ He fights crying, but
finally Sarah has broken Michael down and he shows emotion as he confesses
that when somebody ‘has given your life much of its meaning for twenty-five
years . . . it’s awful hard to lose them’. Shots are then held on each family mem-
ber in turn, then friends, as they think about Diane at the end, and they are
emotive and revealing of a truth: the pain of their loss. Michael immediately
tries to lighten the mood, by saying to Sarah, ‘That’s a dire line of question-
ing, you must find a way of making it more funny. What are you, some kind of
sadistic interviewer?’
There is then some footage of a student film that Sarah made, where she
asked Michael to submerge himself in a freezing cold swimming pool, wearing
a dinner jacket. He recalls, ‘You see what a vicious director you are?’ Here, the
memory, a less emotive one, and a more humorous one, is indeed captured on
film, and the event is beyond question: it is evidenced by the film. Regarding

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 FILM AS ART 43

Sarah’s paternity, Michael concludes that the whole question has become an
unimportant part of the past for him. He says, ‘so don’t feel sorry for me. If
you have pity have some for Harry, who loved and lost Diane.’ This is poten-
tially remarkably generous, but then Michael can afford to be in a way as Diane
stayed with him. In another gesture of seemingly extreme generosity, Michael
thanks Harry for loving Diane, as Sarah would have been different if she had
been his: and the one she is, is the one he loves.
As Michael is reading these emotional words in the recording studio, from
his own notes, Sarah asks him to stop and go back over a really emotional line.
The apparently genuine emotion is interrupted: Michael quips, ‘I was being
so real; I completely convinced myself.’ Once again, humour has undercut
apparently sincere emotion. This looks like making a revealing comment on
the filmmaking process, or Sarah’s emotional resilience, but this is hard to be
sure of. How general a point is the film making about the sharing of emotions
with others, and the possibility of having distance from even intense emotions
about love and loss, and how specific is it to this family and these individuals?
Michael says that he wrote this story because it really says so many interesting
things about the human condition. But then concedes ‘perhaps deep inside I
suffered more of a shock than I would openly admit. Something inside has for
the rest of my life changed: a certain cord that runs between Sarah and me has
been severed, and I am powerless to join it together.’ Ultimately, Michael says
the final revelation and its aftermath brought Sarah and him closer together,
and resulted in him writing volumes, as Diane always wanted him to. It has
given him a new lease on life. He appears to have the final words, when he
asserts, nobly, ‘Never ask why Michael – just accept the sentence. I will go on.
I will go on.’ The image fades to black, as if it is the end, and all the secrets are
out. A honky-tonk version of ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’’ gets going, and the credits
roll, but then we see a cut back to the interview with Geoff Bowes. We see
Sarah telling him that actually Harry Gulkin was her father, but she found it
puzzling that so many people thought it was him. Bowes says, ‘Well, I’ll have
to tell you that we did sleep together once.’ So, even in the interviews, face
to face and on camera, there is no guarantee that ‘the truth’ has been told.
Perhaps Bowes was anxious about being named as Sarah’s father, and didn’t
want to reveal it until he was sure that wouldn’t happen. But in any event,
when he said that he and Diane had had a ‘friendship’, and Polley included that
footage in the film, he wasn’t being completely truthful. Casting a light over
the preceding film, the credits read ‘Michael’s narration, written by Michael
Polley’. There is very little of Sarah’s own story, remembered by herself, in
there, and we have indeed been taken on a puzzling visual, aural and senso-
rial journey into the realm of images and personal memories. We have seen
emotions minutely expressed on many real human faces, not star perform-
ers or masks, and we have been profoundly challenged to assess the veracity

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 44 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

and value of what we have seen and heard. This film is a documentary about
personal fantasy in some ways; pitched as being about how we tell ‘differ-
ent’ stories, there is evidence of self-delusion on-screen. When Harry recalls
attending Diane’s funeral, he tells of how he went to embrace Michael, to
comfort him, and Michael stiffened, leading Harry to conclude that Michael
knew about the affair. When Sarah puts this to Michael, he is surprised to
know Harry was even there, and has no recollection of him at all. One of them
has constructed a consoling fantasy for themselves.
This challenging film creates a viewing response of assessment of truth
and wondering about different people’s perspectives almost throughout.
The sight of Sarah’s filmmaking work, her camera and her booms, keeps us
aware of the project she is carrying out, but the footage constantly shows us
a mixture of possible recordings of reality, actual footage, and illustrations of
memories. It is not an option to be an absent-minded spectator, but rather a
great deal of imaginative activity is involved in immersing and reflecting on
the status of the images we are shown, and the emotions behind the stories
we are told.

‘A S T R A N G E A N D S TA RT L I N G W O R L D , D I S I N T E G R AT E D
A N D D I S T O RT E D ’ : U N D E R T H E S K I N

In Jonathan Glazer’s uniquely shot film from 2013, the camera is akin to an
alien eye, viewing the world around it from a non-human perspective, which in
turn creates a morally challenging disconnect from the film world for the spec-
tator. This calls attention to the specificity of our human ethical view, which
is evoked through the film’s formal and artistic mode. There are moments in
the film of shock, horror and beauty, and the challenge of the film is that it
demands a degree of callousness on our part but refuses to allow us to consider
it as such. The film’s confrontational stance asks us to view humans with a
non-human eye. Glazer has stated how he attempted to convey an alien view
on the world – that’s how he chose to make a film of the book – and he does so
in a profoundly affective way (Leigh 2014). In Michel Faber’s novel Under the
Skin (2000), the reader follows protagonist Isserley as she picks up hitchhikers
and despatches them for extra-terrestrial purposes. As the novel progresses,
we realise that the humans are actually being farmed: they are mutilated and
turned into distended, butchered, nameless beings that are processed into
prime cuts of flesh and more dubious minced products, and shipped off to be
alien cuisine. The book subversively reproduces factory farming as an indus-
try that you as a reader could fall foul of. It renders human beings disgusting,
and suggests that humanity is repugnant and callous. Jonathan Glazer distilled
the novel and bravely leaves many questions unanswered. He uses cinema’s

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 FILM AS ART 45

ability to affect our senses and bodies, and to confound our thoughts, in order
to convey the experiences and impressions of his earthly looking unnamed
alien, played by Scarlett Johansson. As the alien moves through the streets of
Glasgow in her white van, or through the forests and the beaches on foot, it is
the film’s depiction of sounds and sights that enables the viewer to encounter
her chillingly observational perspective, on a world full of objects and people
‘made strange’.
Johansson casts her eyes over a bustling ant in the same way as she takes
in the image of a baby facing death (and who she could easily rescue). The
colour palette and sound design ensure this film’s landscapes and sound-
scapes are not human-centric. The sound design is by Mica Levi, composer
of the affective and emotional score for Jackie. In Under the Skin, the musi-
cal score is both eerie and unnerving, as upward intonations seem to ask
questions about what is being shown, undercutting confidence in our under-
standing. Sounds seem to be of equivalent volume and detail, speech does
not dominate, and people are seen as inhabitants of the urban and rural envi-
ronment, singular but not noteworthy, sometimes in faceless groups. Skin is
the currency of this film in several ways. Laura Marks’s work on intercul-
tural cinema is a way of approaching this inter-species film. Skin, between
the alien and the human, is similar to what Marks describes as ‘an interstitial
space of the fetish’ (2000: 90). And this interstitial space is also between the
film and us. The fetish space is created by the encounter between two, and
is built on incomprehension. We are confronted by what it is for our skin to
be a commodity. There is tactile experience of skin here, but it is all jarring.
Marks talks about memory being awakened by the feel of fabric or image of
skin (2000: 112). This film fetishises skin as an object but not in a way we
can affectionately relate to. We see skin under water, or ripping apart on the
aliens’s body, or we have an image of the famously desirable body of Johans-
son completely naked in a way that could be described as flagrant, even
forensic. The perspective on skin is not a familiar or reassuring one. This
creates the difficulties of relating the spectator’s eye to the protagonist’s eye
when that eye is not human.
There are various ways to approach the film: a feminist analysis of penetra-
bility and power of the female body, with questions of allure and entrapment,
tapping into the conventions of the femme fatale. Or a star-based analysis cen-
tring on the impact of the naked star body of ‘Scar Jo’ – it is quite strikingly
deployed and has a currency that lends the film extra-textual elements. There
are naked male bodies of unnamed characters, with erect and flaccid penises,
so the significance of the star body becomes even more pronounced. We could
approach the film as post-human, or ecological, possibly even post-colonial
(featuring the viewpoint of a predatory, exploitative species); or in terms of
production, as so much of the filmmaking was essentially guerrilla-style, with

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 46 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

cast and crew capturing events that were not staged, enticing passers-by into
scenes where they did not know this was happening. What is important for this
Murdochian perspective is the film’s creation of an alien view on our world,
the objects within it and the affective experience of it. The film means to dis-
concert as it confounds the humanity of our phenomenology of the film: so
how is the alien’s view created?
The film begins with a point of light in the centre of the screen, and then
circles and discs of light appear around it, that construct an eye; at the same
time the soundtrack is a voice learning vowel sounds and enunciating conso-
nants: ‘fail, fails, sell, sells’. So the camera begins inside the eye of the alien
and hearing vocal chords inside its head. We then see an earthly landscape that
looks strange, as night-time shots of running rivers cut to similarly shaped
but man-made zig-zagging roads. The images are accompanied by sounds, like
harsh violin strings and electronic pulses, not music and not recognisable noise.
A motorcyclist collects a girl’s body and slings her over his shoulder. We next
see a totally naked Scarlett Johansson on all fours clambering around the girl’s
prone body, stripping the clothes off her. Johansson’s body is lit harshly in
an almost blue and very revealing light, in unflattering motion as she crawls
around the girl, her breasts swaying. We see Johansson dress in the girl’s clothes
and stand over her, vaguely appraisingly. A tear roles out of the girl’s eye: she is
not dead. She is paralysed in some way, and we don’t know how this happened
or what her fate is. Then Johansson finds the ant crawling in the girl’s belly
button. She picks it up on her finger and twists her hand and wrist to follow the
ant’s bustling progress, more transfixed by this little creature than the living,
weeping body at her feet.
What the film is creating here is the perspective of a non-human, on
humans. A scene where this perspective is chillingly conveyed is when the alien
sees a baby crying on a windswept beach as its parents are drowning. The baby
sits and cries, now orphaned and most likely about to be swept into the ocean,
but the alien passes the child as she secures the object of her desire, the young
fit body of the surfer who attempted to rescue the parents. As the alien crushes
his skull with a rock, and leaves the terrified baby to its imminent death, the
point is driven home that human beings have a particular value to this crea-
ture, and we do not know what it is. The motorcyclist comes to the beach
that evening to collect a piece of evidence left behind, seemingly clothing. The
baby is still sitting on the beach, crying. The motorcyclist pays it no attention
at all, and leaves it there. The emotional value we attribute to the screaming
orphaned baby is not felt by the alien. To further emphasise this, we see the
alien reminded of that baby’s cry by a cry emanating from another baby in the
car next to her in a traffic jam. But no sooner is this slight recognition evident
than the sound and image of an aeroplane overhead and a nearby car horn
take precedence. No significance is given to the alien’s association between

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 FILM AS ART 47

the crying of the two children; there’s no realisation that the sound might be
linked to distress. But we are aware of the connection made, through the film’s
immersion of us in the series of shots which reveal the connections made by the
learning – if not feeling – alien.
The alien drives around Glasgow in a white van and picks up single men.
The camera surveys a range of men walking around the city. These sequences
offer a gaze on anonymous men as prey that is appraising and a very unusual
on-screen sight. She offers lifts, asks questions, enquires where they are going,
whether they have a girlfriend waiting for them, establishes whether they are
suitable for her purposes, then says ‘I have a place a few miles away.’ When
they arrive, the alien does a slow striptease as she walks into the house, the
entranced men following her. The alien turns towards the men and audience,
backing away in her underwear. As she walks across the glistening floor, the
men step down through the floor into a black, treacly enveloping fluid until
they disappear. The unearthly soundtrack accompanies the surreal image, as
the men do not panic or protest but simply submerge.
One scene takes place under the surface, and it is a sensory immersion into
a realm of annihilation. The sound design here is such that it combines the
silence of being underwater with the sounds of the movement of fluid, but
also with a sound of cracking and breaking under pressure, as if you can hear
your own bones squeaking and disintegrating. A shape that was a person but
which appears to be in a state of melting or emptying moves towards the more
recently submerged man. They touch hands, and the more deformed shape,
whose skin we now see is loosening, is extinguished in the visual equivalent of
an underwater ‘pffft’. The emptied skin floats like a plastic bag. There follows
a shot of a slow moving conveyer belt covered in thick blood-coloured matter
moving towards a trapdoor of some kind. This is pure cinematic horror: by this
I mean that the connections between the images and sounds that we experience
could not be conveyed with such economy and such physical, sensorial impact
in any other medium. Rationale is not made explicit, but rather we are faced
with a watery realm in which we would be out of our element, unable to move,
speak or react as we would in our normal environment, being sucked of our
innards, reduced to a membranous epidermal sack.
This sequence reminds me, perhaps surprisingly, of Woolf ’s 1926 essay
on cinema (Woolf 2009). In this precise and thoughtful engagement with
the specific experience of cinema, Woolf discusses her experience of see-
ing The Cabinet of Dr Caligari at the cinema. Describing a moment where
a black shadow creeps across the screen, she says ‘for a moment it seemed
as if thought could be conveyed more effectively by shape than by words.
The monstrous quivering tadpole seemed to be fear itself, not the statement
“I am afraid”’: terror, for Woolf, ‘burgeons, bulges, quivers, disappears’
(2009: 174). This is affective cinema, then, and it invites analysis in terms

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 48 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

of skin, touch, sound, humanity and inhumanity. But I suggest there is even
more going on than this, requiring analysis from a Murdochian perspective
on the appearance of objects and attention to another.
A few things begin to make the alien aware of what is under skin: she pricks
her finger on a rose, drawing unexpected blood, then she picks up the young
man David (Adam Pearson), who is facially disfigured. She encourages him to
touch her face, then her neck, and says he has beautiful hands. He descends
into the fluid depths, but is spared from the watery death for some reason: we
do not know if she pities him, or if he is rejected. She looks at her face intently
in a mirror, and then releases David, and goes out into the world again. She
tries to eat human food – a piece of cake – but retches and has to spit it out.
These experiences suggest that she is becoming interested in humanity, and is
also exposing her vulnerability. She sets off on her own, walking the country-
side. She is not aware of her own violability. She begins to make love with a car-
ing man who has offered her shelter and taken care of her; but as he attempts
to penetrate her she leaps out of bed to examine her genitalia, having not expe-
rienced that feeling before or indeed been aware that there was an orifice there.
It is after this that she roams off into the forest, where she is brutally assaulted
by a forest worker, and as she escapes her assailant she essentially begins to
disintegrate. Her alien body is revealed, as her skin tears, and her assailant sets
fire to her. Images of her burning body are incorporated into shots of stunning
natural beauty, conflating ash and smoke with falling snow. These shots are
poetic and metaphysical, blending visions of the earthly world with elements
of fire and water, with other-worldly images of the alien looking at her earthly
face, which still blinks and shows life (Figure 2.4). As the burning alien runs
and falls to the snowy ground, the smoke from her burning body rises, as snow

Figure 2.4 The alien looks at her own ‘human’ face: Scarlett Johansson in Under the Skin
(2013), directed by Jonathan Glazer.

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 FILM AS ART 49

falls down, and they meet somewhere in the middle. The film shows us images
that perplex and mystify: what is the relevance of this physical disintegration
to our understanding of the film?
Sarah Cooper discusses the concept of the soul and its presence throughout
a century of film theory (2013). Many of the thinkers mentioned earlier, such
as Epstein, Arnheim, as well as Woolf and indeed Murdoch, have wrestled with
defining the ineffable element of the art of cinema. In one passage, about the
films of the Lumière brothers, Cooper considers Edgar Morin’s thinking about
the soul in relation to objects in the cinema, and this resonates with the world
of Under the Skin. Rather than maintain the ideas of Balázs, Epstein, Pudovkin
or René Clair, that the capturing of objects in film imbues them with ‘atmo-
sphere’ or ‘soul’, Cooper explains how Morin identifies the role of spectatorial
response in this creativity. For Morin, writes Cooper, ‘the soul sits thus on the
boundary between the interior and the exterior, between object and subject,
image and spectator, emotion and its transfer onto the contemplated object as
the viewer watches the film’ (2013: 92). Cooper writes that, by the mid-1920s,
‘cinema itself becomes what Morin terms the apostle of animism’ (or the idea
that non-human objects or entities can have souls). Morin writes, ‘Inanimate
objects, now you have a soul in the fluid universe of the cinema’ (Morin 2005:
227, cited in Cooper 2013: 92–3). As Cooper explains, here, ‘the soul is set up
as a semi-fluid, semi-reified residue of the magic of cinema’ (2013: 93).
There is physical affectiveness in Under the Skin, and also an interest in
kindness and glimpses of transformative encounters, perhaps encapsulated in
the swift moment when David, having been asked by the seductive alien if he
wants to come back to her place, secretly pinches the skin on his hand to see
if he is dreaming. Under the Skin depicts alien distance in its perspective on
the human race, but through its flickering fascination with the mutability of
human nature, and its celebration of the earthly natural world in a painterly,
occasionally surreal, style, the film creates a particularly confounding cine-
matic encounter that just might be elucidated by a consideration of its soul.
Examining Under the Skin in terms of its alien phenomenology paradoxi-
cally highlights the humanity of the film. The alien’s face is a complex mix-
ture of familiarity, masquerade, flirtation and impassivity, as it makes its way
around the city hunting for prey. But the vulnerability and humanity on its
face in the film’s final sequence begins to display the risks and frailties of being
a woman (Osterweil 2014: 50). Murdoch’s views on the emotional complexity
of the human face might be confounded by the alien who we view, and whose
eyes we view the world through, but in fact they serve to draw our attention
to the humanity missing at the alien heart of the protagonist, and enable us to
be keenly aware of how gestures towards humanity begin to build and lead to
the film’s violent conclusion. It is perhaps the development of a moral vision,
aroused by David, which leads to her flirtations with humanity. Although the

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protagonist is not a person building their moral vision, they do perhaps come
to be what Murdoch might consider a moral agent, albeit at an early stage.
The alien certainly comes to know the reality of kindness and cruelty before
her earthly time comes to an end. In the next chapter, I will demonstrate how
Murdoch highlights the ways in which stories, and pictures, can function to
assist us in the development of our moral vision, and argue that cinema power-
fully involves us in this process.

NOTES

1. Murdoch’s copy of Benjamin’s essays, Illuminations, is in the Iris Murdoch Library held at
Kingston University, reference IML 494.
2. Rowe writes, ‘paintings, images, tableaux, and aesthetic and synaesthetic narrative
strategies, can be analysed for the way they encourage character and reader to perceive
reality more accurately and, on the reader’s part, the moral evaluation of the repercussions
on character becomes, somewhat paradoxically, a valid mode of moral/aesthetic criticism
of her novels’ (2002: 15). See also my interview with Anne Rowe (Bolton 2017d).
3. The film is called A Tour of the White House with Mrs John F. Kennedy, and was broadcast
on 14 February 1962 on CBS and NBC. The film is available on YouTube: <https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=9myrArq-1h8> (last accessed 1 January 2019).
4. Richard Burton sang this version in the original Broadway production of the Lerner and
Loewe musical Camelot in 1960. Jacqueline Kennedy invoked the comparison between
Camelot and the Kennedy presidency in the 1963 interview for Life magazine on which
the film Jackie is based. See Oline Eaton (2017).
5. The line from Alias Grace is ‘When you are in the middle of a story, it isn’t a story at all,
but only a confusion’ (Atwood 1997: 345–6). Polley discusses her use of this quote in
light of her production of a mini-series based on the novel (Alias Grace, TV mini-series,
directed by Mary Harron, Canada: Halfire Entertainment, 2017) (Onstad 2017).

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 CHAPTER 3

Film as a Moral Fable

That moral improvement involves suffering is usually true; but the suf-
fering is the by-product of a new orientation and not in any sense an end
in itself. (‘On “God” and “Good”’ (OGG): 355)

We need more concepts in terms of which to picture the substance of

our being; it is through an enriching and deepening of concepts that
moral progress takes place. Simone Weil said that morality was a mat-
ter of attention, not of will. We need a new vocabulary of attention.
(‘Against Dryness’ (AD): 293)

I n this chapter, I will explore Murdoch’s thinking about art as morally

instructive, and the idea of the morally relevant fable, as opposed to a fable
that is merely decorative. The three films I will focus on in depth are Margaret
(Kenneth Lonergan, 2011), Blue Jasmine (Woody Allen, 2013) and Compliance
(Craig Zobel, 2012). Moral thinking is really the driving force behind most of
Murdoch’s philosophical work and so I will draw on a wide range of her writ-
ings. It is important to address the matter of terminology here: morality, moral
philosophy and moral thinking – why not ethics? Film philosophy has talked
mainly about ethical relationships (Downing and Saxton 2010), exploring eth-
ics through film (Teays 2012), the ethic of the image (Wheatley 2009) and
cinematic ethics (Sinnerbrink 2016). Dan Shaw’s book Morality and the Movies
is subtitled Reading Ethics through Film (2012). For Peter Singer, the words
‘ethics’ and ‘morality’ can be used interchangeably: he also notes, however, that
‘some people think that morality is now out of date’ (Singer 1979: 1).

They regard morality as a system of nasty puritanical prohibitions,

mainly designed to stop people having fun. Traditional moralists who
claim to be defenders of the morality, when they are only defending

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 52 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

one particular moral code, rather than morality as such, have been
allowed to pre-empt the field to such an extent that when a news-
paper headline reads BISHOP ATTACKS DECLINING MORAL
STANDARDS we expect to read yet again about promiscuity, homo-
sexuality, pornography and so on, and not about corporations bribing
government officials, or the puny amounts we give as overseas aid to
poorer nations. (Ibid.: 1–2)

Singer is writing in 1979, and the attitude towards morality has developed to the
extent that contemporary concerns are more to do with the treatment of minor-
ity groups, the use and abuse of animals, particularly how they are farmed for
food, questions concerning the end of life and voluntary euthanasia. Alasdair
MacIntyre examines the development of morality and ethics in his influential
book A Short History of Ethics (1998). Singer himself has developed his work on
animal rights and global poverty. However, there are still groups and communi-
ties where questions of sexual practice are regarded as moral issues, especially
same-sex marriage and parenting, and the question of legal abortion is still part
of contemporary public moral debate. Singer usefully asserts what ethics is not.
Firstly, he argues, it is not a set of prohibitions concerned with sex: ‘sex raises no
special moral issues at all’ (ibid.: 2). As Singer sets out, there may be questions of
honesty, probity, concern for others or self-care that are raised by sexual behav-
iour, but no more than – to use Singer’s example – by driving a car, which in fact
raises more serious issues to do with safety and the environment. Secondly, ethics
is not an ideal system, but more a case of ethical practice: this is a question that
concerns Murdoch fundamentally. Thirdly, for Singer, ethics is entirely inde-
pendent of religion. Murdoch is deeply concerned with the tenets of Christianity
and Buddhism, but her moral thinking does not depend upon either religion for
its concepts or its practice. And fourthly, Singer denies that ethics is relative or
subjective. For him, ‘Ethics takes a universal point of view’ (ibid.: 11). Murdoch
does not argue for universalist morality. For Murdoch, the notion of practice, of
attending to others and growing in understanding of one’s own moral vision, is at
the heart of moral philosophy, rather than the proscription of judgements from
which we can extrapolate universal rules.
Murdoch sets out some of her arguments on these points in ‘Vision and
Choice in Morality’. The most pertinent idea for film is that of Murdoch’s
thinking in relation to a fable that can be ‘morally relevant’ and not simply
‘morally decorative’ (VCM: 85). Analysing the films in this chapter will inves-
tigate how we may actually learn about our personal moral vision through
experiencing a film, and may in turn take that moral learning or changing into
our interactions with the world around us. For example, the moral discombob-
ulation caused by the experience of Margaret leads us to realise the complexity

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 FILM AS A MORAL FABLE 53

of the questions asked by the film and forces us to resist making moral judge-
ments of the characters. In turn, do we then think about our neighbours and
our family with more tolerance? Does the way in which Blue Jasmine offers us
the option to view Jasmine with some sympathy enable us to change our mind
about how we judge her? And does Compliance challenge us not simply to be
drawn into a ‘what would you do’ conundrum, but actually think through the
stage at which we would intervene, or in other words how strongly developed
our moral vision is in relation to others?
Murdoch’s moral philosophy is concerned with the individual and with
individual consciousness. She is opposed to the idea that morality is some-
thing that can be decided upon in isolation from the real world and the real
people in it. Murdoch argues that facts are decided upon within the frame-
work of the individual consciousness of the moral being. So ‘morality is bound
up with our deepest conceptual attitudes and sensibilities about the world,
which determine the facts from the very beginning’ (Antonaccio 2000: 38). As
Murdoch writes, ‘We differ not only because we select different objects out
of the same world but because we see different worlds’ (VCM: 82); and see-
ing our moral world ‘should be the prime task of the individual moral agent’
(Blum 2014: 307).
Now, this idea of seeing different worlds, and the way in which Murdoch
describes this, provides a link to the way in which films can offer visions of
worlds in which moral journeys take place. Not simply engaging narrative
arcs, but transformative moral experiences: for the characters within the
diegesis, usually, but also for us as we experience the film. What I am doing
here, then, is drawing upon Murdoch’s analysis of moral visions in my anal-
ysis of film, and then extending this to the relationship that we might be
able to understand having with the film world and the real world around
us. In Cinematic Ethics, Robert Sinnerbrink considers film as a medium of
ethical experience, and argues that ‘this ethical potential is important to
recognise if we are to appreciate why cinema matters today’ (2016: 185).
For Sinnerbrink, film ‘is a medium with the aesthetic power to evoke ethical
experience – through affective response, emotional engagement, and cogni-
tive understanding – that invites, indeed in some cases demands, critical and
philosophical reflection’ (ibid.: 185). This book is developing a similar per-
spective on film following Murdoch’s reflections, and the films in this chap-
ter do indeed provoke such an ethically challenging response. In the next
section, I will bring together Murdoch’s moral philosophy with the moral
agency of Lisa in Kenneth Lonergan’s 2011 film Margaret, in an investiga-
tion of how film can be a moral fable that is relevant to our understanding
of the development of another’s moral vision, and how it inculcates moral
development in us.

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 54 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

‘THE WORLD AS I SEE IT’: MARGARET

Teenage protagonist Lisa (Anna Paquin) has a very certain view of the rights
and wrongs of her melodramatic world. When faced with the ramifications of
a tragic accident, Lisa is forced to realise that the question of what is right is
not as simple as she thinks. Through the unfolding of the film’s narrative and
its formal entanglements, we are also forced to appreciate the complexity of
Lisa’s – and perhaps our – moral world. Margaret was shot and completed in
2007, but was not released until 2011 due to legal disputes with the studio, Fox
Searchlight and the producers. It was originally conceived of as a three-hour
film, released into cinemas as a two-and-a-half-hour cut, with the extended
cut available on the DVD (Gardner 2014). Joel Lovell of The New York Times
described it as ‘a big, messy, problematic film’ (2012), and Peter Bradshaw of
The Guardian called it ‘a sprawling neurotic nightmare of urban catastrophe’
(2011). Many critics and bloggers refer to the film as being operatic, and this
impression is plainly founded on the highly charged emotions of the central
character, as well as the somewhat overdetermined operatic soundtrack. Lisa
wrestles with the dramas and demands of being a teenager with divorced par-
ents, living in New York City and going to an exclusive high school. Following
a road accident for which she is partly responsible, Lisa holds a severely injured
woman during the last minutes of her life, coming face to face with the immi-
nence and immediacy of death. The rest of the film is concerned with how Lisa
resumes life after this incident: the decisions she makes to tell certain untruths,
her pursuit of particular people in order to resolve her confused and conflicted
feelings, and the volatile, self-centred maelstrom of emotion that surrounds
her. The film explores Lisa’s attempts to make good choices, and the reasons
why she might be considered to make bad ones.
The film gives us an experience of the lead-up to the accident that aligns
with Lisa’s perspective. Lisa is out shopping for a cowboy hat to wear on a horse
riding trip which has been promised to her by her absentee, unreliable father.
While looking in shop windows, Lisa spies a cowboy hat such as the one she
wants on the head of a man driving a bus. Lisa runs alongside the bus, trying to
get the driver’s attention, and he flirts with and teases her, repeatedly taking his
eyes off the road ahead. He points to his hat and laughs at her. While doing so,
he misses a red light and runs down a woman who is crossing the road in front
of him. Their flirtatious encounter has resulted in the woman being killed. The
death scene is one of the most traumatic and distressing death scenes I have
ever seen on film. As Lisa holds the woman in her arms, we and Lisa realise
that parts of her body are left under the bus in the middle of the road, that she
has no chance of survival, but she is not yet dead. We are confronted with the
last moments of her life. The woman speaks: she asks if her eyes are open or

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 FILM AS A MORAL FABLE 55

closed; she mistakes Lisa for her daughter; she is filled with panic and confu-
sion. Lonergan says of the scene:

that single incident drives the entire film and drives the entire journey
of Anna Paquin’s character, and it’s a long film. And I knew that if that
accident wasn’t extremely awful – as awful as humanly possible – then
there’d be no movie. You don’t see any flashbacks of it. It’s got to stay
in your mind the way it stays in the character’s mind. (Lonergan 2012)

This is an acute instance of the need for the impact of an incident on-screen to
have an effect on the viewer. The impact of witnessing this death creates a gut-
wrenching connection with the magnitude of Lisa’s situation and the severity
of the fear of the consequences that might ensue from her cheeky exchanges
with the driver. On the spot of the accident, as they are being interviewed by
police officers, the urge to cover up their innocent but reckless complicity is
excruciatingly intense (Figure 3.1). The driver looks over at Lisa with terror-
stricken eyes. Was the light red or not? Was it the pedestrian’s fault or the
driver’s? The police report hangs on Lisa’s word, and she covers up for the
driver. She says ‘I guess it was green.’
Lisa returns home, covered in the dead woman’s blood, and washes herself
clean. Her life resumes, in all its melodramatic intensity, as she argues with
her classmates, clashes repeatedly with her mother, engineers the loss of her
virginity and seduces her teacher. As her days pass, she becomes increasingly

Figure 3.1 Lisa (Anna Paquin) looks at the driver and says ‘green’, in Margaret (2011),
directed by Kenneth Lonergan.

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 56 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

concerned to connect with the dead woman’s past. She introduces herself to
the woman’s best friend and tries to build connections and community with
the woman’s life. As a result of this, her perspective on the accident shifts,
and she decides to speak to the bus driver about what happened. It seems
she is seeking a more honest account of the blame for the accident. We set
off on the journey with Lisa in her operatic bubble of personal quest, and it
appears understandable that she should want to speak to him to help her ease
this nightmarish guilt and pain she is suffering. Only they – and we – know
what happened at the scene. But the film challenges our conviction that she is
doing the right thing. As Lisa emerges from the subway, we enter the Italian
district; we see families going to mass, in a more densely packed and lower-
class neighbourhood than Lisa’s. We see the stars and stripes flag outside the
driver’s door, we see his house – his home. When we arrive, alongside Lisa,
we see a woman answer the door, look puzzled, and invite Lisa in. A cruci-
fix hangs on the wall behind the door. We hear his children playing noisily,
we are confronted by his family domesticity, and we realise what he has to
lose. Through her conversation with the driver, we learn what he has been
through since the accident, and what the ramifications might be – both in
that room and in the light of the wider institutions and networks that govern
their lives – if he admits a different version of the accident, and we – like
Lisa – falter. He is angry to be contacted by Lisa, he flatly denies her account
of them looking at each other, and he demands her phone number. The
situation becomes quite hostile, and we wonder what his perspective might
be, realising that this is not all Lisa’s to dictate. Perhaps she needs to leave
him alone. In this scene, Lisa confronts the realities and complexities of the
issues surrounding her seeking acknowledgement from the bus driver about
what she considers ‘really happened’: and our appreciation of the rights and
wrongs of this situation – already uneasy – is now confounded.
This is the way the film works to unsettle our moral certainty. Lonergan
has stated that he wanted to make a film about the way teenagers transition
into an adult world. The film is called Margaret after a poem called ‘Spring
and Fall’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1880). This poem is about a young
girl’s realisation that the passing of things is sad: in the poem this is the fall
of leaves from a tree and the onset of autumn. The poet observes that the
girl is realising the sadness of death and will come to understand mortality
and loss. The film, then, is partly the telling of Lisa’s existential lightning
bolt and her realisation that the world around her is too tired or resistant
to bother with her concern about the truth. But it also works as an obstacle
course of moral reasoning and analysis for the spectator, and it is here where
I turn to Murdoch.
In ‘Vision and Choice in Morality’, Murdoch is teasing out the position
of her contemporary moral philosophers and where they locate the material

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 FILM AS A MORAL FABLE 57

for their moral philosophy. For Murdoch, moral philosophy can be seen as
‘a more systematic and reflective extension of what ordinary moral agents
are continually doing’ (VCM: 83). What she means is that universal rules
and models are not suited to understanding the complexity of everyday life
and the inner lives of individuals. Under objective models, questions such
as ‘what is my morality?’ and ‘what is morality as such?’ are addressed by
descriptions of choices expressed in specific language. ‘On this view’, she
says, ‘the moral life of the individual is a series of overt choices which take
place in a series of specifiable situations’ (VCM: 77). Moral concepts are
‘roughly an objective definition of a certain area of activity plus a recom-
mendation or prohibition’ (VCM: 77). For Murdoch, this objectivity is a
problem. She is concerned with the ‘inner life’, which she clarifies as ‘in the
sense of personal attitudes and visions which do not obviously take the form
of choice-guiding arguments’ (VCM: 80). She asks us to consider ‘moral
being as self-reflection or complex attitudes to life which are continuously
displayed and elaborated in overt and inward speech but are not separable
temporarily into situations’ (VCM: 81). Murdoch thinks about moral dif-
ferences not as differences of choice, but rather differences of vision. She
writes, ‘We differ not only because we select different objects out of the same
world but because we see different worlds’ (VCM: 82). A term such as ‘good’
cannot have the simple empirical meaning, Murdoch argues, as does ‘red’.
There are more complex regions that lie outside actions and choices, and we
need to attend to these areas or visions, which we may not always be able to
understand. In this way, we can see more clearly what she means by saying
that moral philosophy is ‘a more systematic and reflective extension of what
ordinary moral agents are continually doing’ (VCM: 83).
This discussion, of how moral insight differs from moral performance,
links clearly with Lisa’s situation in Margaret. Lisa comes to see how a moral
life is far more complex than whether one traffic light was red or not. Even
though the ramifications of this event may be far-reaching, the morality of
the surrounding circumstances cannot be dictated by one objective act. It is
not as simple as saying that her decision to lie was wrong and her decision to
come clean is right. She cannot console herself by deciding to give a differ-
ent account of the accident now. Lisa’s moral maze can be seen as creating a
filmic moral philosophy along the lines Murdoch describes: a vision of the
self-reflection Lisa has to experience in order to come by her own vision of
a moral world. This moral world is created by what happens to her and what
she chooses to do, but far more than this, it is also affected by the behaviour,
choices, problems, conversations and happenstances that circulate around her
and satellite off in different directions. The film conveys this through unfin-
ished conversations, snippets of overheard dialogue, unresolved ambiguities
and unsatisfactory non-conclusions.

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Murdoch can help us further in understanding how the film might con-
tain or convey moral philosophy by her consideration of the value of a moral
fable. She asks, does a morally important fable always imply universal rules?
And how do we decide whether a fable is morally important? Murdoch talks
about two types of moral fable: the one that is morally relevant, the other that
is purely decorative. (This idea seems to exist at the heart of the question of
the significance of the film and its status as film philosophy: is film simply
an illustration of an idea or can it actually be philosophical?) Murdoch talks
about parables of widely held religions, which have the concreteness of per-
sonal fables, but which may have universalisable implications: that is, always
do this in these circumstances. Is this then the test for value, that such a fable
should have universal reasoning? For Murdoch, personal reflection is mor-
ally important in that it constitutes a person’s general conceptual attitude and
day-to-day ‘being’, which in turn connects in complex ways with their more
obviously moral ‘acts’: including a person’s meditation upon their own lives,
such as that which lies ahead of Manley Hopkins’s ‘Margaret’ or Lonergan’s
‘Lisa’. I want to take this a step further and consider whether our experience
of the film Margaret can be considered to be Murdochian moral philosophy. Is
the film a morally important fable, without being a universalisable model, or is
it simply a purely decorative moral tale?
Again Murdoch helps us, as she moves on to consider the relationship
between art and morals. For Murdoch, ‘a moral agent may explore a situa-
tion imaginatively and in detail and frame a highly specific maxim to cover
it, which may nevertheless be offered as a universal rule’ (VCM: 87). This
would suggest that the experience of watching – or exploring – a film such
as Margaret might well be sufficiently universalisable to satisfy the more
behaviourist moral philosophers among us. After all, one can meditate and
explore the ‘mysteriousness and inexhaustibility of the world, but mean-
while one has continually to make judgements on the basis of what one
thinks one knows, and these, if moral, will claim to be universal’ (ibid.).
But, Murdoch argues, ‘why should we blot out as irrelevant the different
background of these choices, whether they are made confidently . . . or ten-
tatively?’ (ibid.: 88) Might not attending to the details, and inexhaustibil-
ity of them, induce humility rather than induce paralysis? (ibid.) And, she
argues, this needs to be done in ways other than in language. She considers
the limitations of language when it comes to serving us creatively, and that
‘the task of moral philosophers has been to extend, as poets may extend, the
limits of the language, and enable it to illuminate regions of reality which
were formerly dark’ (ibid.: 90). Calling for ‘not a renewed attempt to specify
the facts, but a fresh vision which may be derived from a “story”’ and which
‘represents a “mode of understanding”’ (ibid.: 91), Murdoch suggests that

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 FILM AS A MORAL FABLE 59

moral freedom ‘looks more like a mode of reflection which we may have
to achieve, and less like a capacity to vary our choices which we have by
definition’ (ibid.: 95).
Experiencing the long, tormented and disturbing three hours of Margaret
creates a fresh vision derived from a story, but also from the very cinematic
telling of that story. To return to the scene at the bus driver’s house, the sight
of the wife and the sound of the children convey the bus driver’s home situa-
tion in ways that force us to make the realisation that he has a lot at stake. The
come-down from the set-up of Lisa’s operatic quest, accompanied by La Tra-
viata and images of post-9/11 New York City, brings us sharply down to earth
too: we do not expect him to put up such a brick wall of denial. We gather
the information that there have been disciplinary proceedings and no finding
of fault. In the context of the film we are unnerved by the conversation that
fails to deliver the atoning liberation Lisa craves, and proceed to be challenged
at every turn by the quandaries and frustrations Lisa creates and confronts:
befriending the dead woman’s family, seducing her teacher, fighting with her
mother, dealing with her disappointing father. The web of individuals with
their own inner lives and moral frameworks is complex and connected, and
not only through the main narrative events. This complexity, as well as the
film’s long duration and slow pace, afford unusually multi-layered engage-
ment with events on-screen, and the truly traumatic early accident serves to
sustain the attention required in order to experience the moral discombobula-
tion that the film inflicts.
By bringing Murdoch and Margaret together in an exploration of the
moral decision making of the film’s protagonist and our assessment of her
choices, we can learn more about the idea of film as a morally important fable
rather than a fable that is purely decorative. Vitally, we do not have to learn a
universalisable lesson from watching the film. Neither do we have to decide
whether Lisa did – or did not do – the right thing. The film thwarts our
attempts to identify ‘the right thing’ on-screen – it cannot be reduced to the
red light – and instead creates a maelstrom of people making moral decisions
tentatively, confidently, against a range of backgrounds, many of which are
suggested, without being developed, serving to stress the multitude of moral
agents with their own inner lives. As Lisa arrives at a state of distressed but
reflective realisation of the uncertainties and brutalities of social living, then
we – as distressed and hopefully reflective participants in the film’s moral
philosophy – cannot help but recognise a moral fable that constitutes what
Murdoch might call ‘philosophical pictures of morality’ (VCM: 98). Margaret
shows how film can do more than just tell a story – a moral story – and can
create an experience that is relevant and affects us as moral beings. But can it
also affect our judgement of another?

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‘LOOKING T H E O T H E R WAY ’ : B L U E J A S M I N E

Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) is portrayed as selfish and morally corrupt, but I

suggest that by Murdoch’s notion of paying ‘loving attention’ to Jasmine’s
experience and countenance, we are able to appreciate the suffering and tor-
ment that Jasmine feels, thereby adjusting our judgement of her to be more
compassionate. Blue Jasmine is about a woman who lived a very affluent life
married to a property broker who has turned out to be crooked. They lost
all their money, her husband was convicted and hanged himself in prison,
and her stepson no longer speaks to her. With nowhere to go, she turns to
her working-class sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins), who willingly takes her into
her home. Jasmine and Ginger are sisters but not related by blood – they
were both adopted. They state this a few times, and their differences are
very marked, not only in terms of aspiration and education, but also passions
and desires. Ginger always says that Jasmine had the good genes. Jasmine
is a shocking snob and bore, who drinks too much and despises her sister’s
entire life – her choice of man, her children and her home. Ginger works
in a supermarket, loves her home, and has a steady boyfriend, Chili (Bobby
Cannavale). Jasmine makes it clear that she despised Ginger’s ex-husband,
as well as her new boyfriend, sees them both as losers, and thinks her life and
home are dreadful. Ginger is tolerant and caring, and receives her sister’s
acerbic criticism with indulgent good humour. She defends Jasmine to others
and does her best for her.
It emerges through a process of flashback and dialogue between the sisters
that Jasmine’s husband lost the lottery winnings of Ginger and her ex-husband
by persuading them to invest in a dodgy deal. We also see flashbacks of Jas-
mine talking derisively about her sister and dreading her visits – she describes
Ginger to her friends as not very smart, and makes up excuses to not have to
see them or have them stay at her house. In the present day, Jasmine is trying
to improve her current prospects by taking a course in computing, and getting
a job as a dentist’s receptionist, a job she considers terribly demeaning and
for which she lacks the skills. She and Ginger go to a party, where they both
meet men: Ginger meets a seemingly middle-class man who pays her lots of
attention and seems to fall for her hard; Jasmine meets a smooth operator with
political ambitions who believes Jasmine when she tells him she is an interior
designer (which is what she is actually hoping to become). The relationship
proceeds on this deceit, and gets more serious, leading to a proposal of mar-
riage. Ginger discovers that her new lover is in fact married, and when Jasmine
is spotted on the street by Ginger’s still furious ex-husband her duplicity is
revealed to her staggered fiancé. So once again Jasmine’s world is in ruins, and
now she’s lost the support of her sister due to her derision of sensitive working-
class Chili who is now back on the scene.

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 FILM AS A MORAL FABLE 61

There are several factors that determine the way in which we might judge
Jasmine. Firstly, in a flashback we see that it was news of her husband’s infidel-
ity that prompted her, in a rage, to make the phone call to the FBI that turned
him in, suggesting that she must have known of, or been wilfully blind to, the
illegality of his business while enjoying the riches he produced and fleecing her
sister of her winnings. Secondly, we see Jasmine come across her estranged step-
son, Danny (Alden Ehrenreich), working in a second-hand musical instrument
store. He has got his life together, come off drugs, has a girlfriend and loves his
job – and hates Jasmine. He tells her as much and says he never wants to see
her again. Within the parameters of the snobbery, deceit, self-centredness and
avarice that we have seen Jasmine operate, these final revelations confirm her as
a person perceived by many as beyond the pale. The film ends with her sitting
on a bench muttering to herself, with nowhere to go.
Now, some of the film’s moral messages are clear, if not overdetermined:
relationships based on deceit will founder; financial irregularities will catch
up with you; a simple honest life is the key to happiness. But the character of
Jasmine is not entirely unsympathetic, and this suggests that another view of
her might be possible. This is what I want to explore in relation to Murdoch’s
notion of ‘loving attention’, but we need to take care to understand why we
might have sympathy for Jasmine, which could be for very cinematic reasons.
Firstly, she is played by Cate Blanchett who gives a fabulously sensitive perfor-
mance, with humour – almost slapstick in the dentist’s office as she wards off
his unwanted advances – and desperation. Blanchett’s star turn was rewarded
with award after award for best actress in a leading role, including the Academy
Award, the Golden Globe and the BAFTA. Secondly, there is the resonance
with Blanche Dubois (Vivien Leigh) in A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan,
1951), which was noted by many critics at the time (Chagollan 2014; Feinberg
2013; Handy 2013; Pinkerton 2014). Disturbed, vulnerable and desperate, liv-
ing in a fantasy world of halcyon days that were in fact founded on deceit, she
cuts an almost mythic tragic figure.
Woody Allen describes Jasmine as having a tantrum when she makes the
FBI phone call (Shoard 2013). The view of Allen, and the journalist interview-
ing him, Catherine Shoard, is that she brought it on herself. Shoard writes that
Blue Jasmine ‘is a bruiser of a movie, a Greek tragedy that dispatches a Park
Avenue princess with a massive slap’ (2013). Shoard sees the film as a character
assassination, pivoting on what Allen describes as Jasmine’s ‘tantrum’. He says

she could have gotten a divorce, forgiven him, had a talk with him,
moved out of the house. But she just hit the ceiling blindly and went
on a rampage that brought destruction upon her whole household. She
never stopped to think about the consequences of her raging moment.
(Shoard 2013)

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This is a staggeringly one-sided view of the film. Another view is that Jas-
mine gave up her anthropology degree to marry Hal, she supported his career
through her wifely devotion, she loved him; and he has not only repeatedly slept
with many women of their acquaintance to the knowledge of everyone except
her, but now proposes to leave her for the teenage French au pair. Jasmine has
a panic attack, she cannot breathe, and is clearly suffering from an acute stress
reaction, facing the prospect of – yes, her high-class life – but also her marriage
to the man she loves, being in ruins in a desperately painful and humiliating
way. So, she turns him in to the authorities, and that phone call is followed by
his arrest, their financial ruin, his suicide and her desperate state. But, it wasn’t
her phone call that caused that: it was Hal’s illegal business affairs. And despite
Jasmine displaying offensive snobbery and callous self-centredness, I suggest
that it is possible to see her in a more compassionate light.
This is where Murdoch’s metaphor for generous thinking comes to my
mind. In ‘The Idea of Perfection’ from 1964, Murdoch writes her most famous
philosophical parable about a mother and a daughter-in-law. A mother, M, feels
hostility towards her daughter-in-law, D. She finds her quite a good-hearted
girl, but that she lacks refinement and is somewhat unpolished. D can be juve-
nile and brusque, and M doesn’t like how she dresses. Basically M feels that her
son has married ‘a silly vulgar girl’ (IP: 312–13). M is a very ‘correct’ person
and behaves beautifully to the girl throughout, not allowing her real opinion to
surface. And in order to ensure we consider that what Murdoch is concerned
with is what is happening in M’s mind, she says we may now assume that the
couple have emigrated or even that D is now dead. As time passes, M could
settle down with a grievance. But, Murdoch says, M is an intelligent and well-
intentioned person, capable of self-criticism, and of giving careful and just
attention to an object that confronts her: ‘M tells herself, “I am old-fashioned
and conventional. I may be prejudiced and narrow-minded. I may be snobbish.
I am certainly jealous. Let me look again”’ (IP: 313). M then reflects deliber-
ately about D, until gradually her vision of D alters. The change is not in M’s
behaviour, but it is in M’s mind: ‘D is discovered to be not vulgar, but refresh-
ingly simple . . . not tiresomely juvenile, but delightfully youthful, and so on’
(IP: 313). Murdoch explains that M might be moved by various motives, such
as a sense of justice, attempted love for D, love for her son. Some may say ‘she
deludes herself ’, others may say she was moved by love or justice. M’s motives
and actions don’t matter; it’s all about how she perceives. We could be hypo-
thetical, as in, if she were to speak her mind to D now it would be different.
But in the interim she has been active – what Murdoch calls, ‘morally active’
(IP: 313–4). M is attempting ‘not just to see D accurately but to see her justly
or lovingly’ (IP: 317). There is a necessary fallibility built into this idea – it is
potentially an endless task.

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 FILM AS A MORAL FABLE 63

This is where Murdoch uses the word ‘attention’, which she says she is
borrowing from Simone Weil, to express the idea of ‘a just and loving gaze’
directed upon an individual reality: ‘I believe this to be the characteristic and
proper mark of the active moral agent’ (IP: 327).

As moral agents we have to try to see justly, to overcome prejudice,

to avoid temptation, to control and curb imagination, to direct reflec-
tion. Man is not a combination of an impersonal rational thinker and a
personal will. He is a unified being who sees, and who desires in accor-
dance with what he sees, and who has some continual slight control
over the direction and focus of his vision. There is nothing, I think,
in the foreground of this picture which is unfamiliar to the ordinary
person. (IP: 332)

She describes this outlook as a sketch of a metaphysical theory, a kind of incon-

clusive non-dogmatic naturalism, and she says it must be judged ‘by its power
to connect, to illuminate, to explain, and to make new and fruitful places for
reflection’ (IP: 336). It demonstrates Murdoch’s thinking about inner vision,
not action, and the emphasis on focusing our vision in order to see in a more
moral way. This is something we all do: moral philosophy is the stuff of our
everyday lives. Being terribly English, M’s actions towards D don’t change.
She’s always polite. But her inner view changes. Now, sadly, the parable does
not apply directly to Jasmine in the film. In fact the reverse happens to Ginger
as she comes to see Jasmine in a worse light by the end of the film. Jasmine fails
to make any effort to improve her own moral vision; her values are all about
her status.
But what about us? At its most simple, our actions can’t change: we either
keep watching the film, or we turn it off, or walk out of the cinema. But we
do assess Jasmine from a moral perspective. The film is a profoundly relevant
contemporary morality tale, calling attention to illegalities in high finance, in
a world post-Bernie Madoff and other high-profile, white-collar criminality
over the last few years. But the film is far more than this, and the concept of
Murdochian attention can help us to identify how. The following five scenes
call for our attention and develop our view of Jasmine.
First, the discussion of Hal’s death. It has been strongly suggested in the
film that Jasmine either knew of Hal’s illegal business or was wilfully blind.
Similarly, she seems laughably blind to his organising of his infidelities. But it
is the film that knows all this – Jasmine does not appear to. She says to Ginger
(who has seen Hal kissing Jasmine’s friend), ‘Oh Hal’s not the roving type.’
Ginger says of her sister, ‘When Jasmine doesn’t want to know something she
has a habit of looking the other way.’ Well, this delusional state is shattered

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 64 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

by Hal’s death in his cell, which Jasmine describes in frank and brutal detail.
When Chili and his friend ask what happened, and suggest that death by hang-
ing results in strangulation, Jasmine puts them straight. She says, ‘No, no, it
wasn’t strangulation; when you hang yourself your neck breaks . . . a lot of
people are under the misapprehension that you strangle, but your neck snaps.’
This scene shows how Jasmine’s delusional state is shaky, and that what hap-
pened to Hal has forced her to confront something truly awful that she may
consider to be the consequence of her action. This burden must be an unbear-
able one, and offers a glimpse of the true trauma that Jasmine experiences,
rather than simply the loss of her jewellery and fine lifestyle. It also conveys
the effort involved in her artifice, and that there may be more effort on show
than delusion.
The next scene to consider is when the dentist makes a pass at her. Jasmine
has been working in the dentist’s office, and, while not doing a brilliant job, she
is trying and learning. The dentist scolds her for reading her college work on
the job, forcing her to apologise and promise not to do it any more, and then
declares his lust for her. He says he finds her clothes arousing and congratu-
lates her, saying that she should be happy she’s made a conquest. This shows
some of the problems that a woman in her current position might encounter;
Jasmine is probably not used to the power imbalance in this situation, or the
arrogance of the dentist and his assumption of power over her. She resists, so
she loses her job.
Thirdly, there is the scene when she receives the phone call from her
potential new beau, Dwight (Peter Sarsgaard). In this scene, the importance
of the call from Dwight is heartbreakingly but subtly illustrated. We can see
how Jasmine is entirely obsessed with Dwight’s phone call, as she commands
the use of the telephone in Ginger’s apartment. We also see the level of arti-
fice that goes into the conversation and the arrangements, as she lies about
being busy having meetings and injects deliberate pauses as if she is checking
her diary, and then we see the vulnerability and relief once she puts down
the telephone (Figure 3.2). The camera lingers with Jasmine long enough
once the receiver has been replaced to see the exhalation after the effort it
has taken to conduct that phone call. This also conveys how significant the
opportunity is for her, and how much she is depending upon this new man
to rescue her.
In another scene, Jasmine reveals her history of mental health problems.
When babysitting Ginger’s boys, and a few martinis to the wind, Jasmine
describes her history of psychiatric treatment, including electric shock therapy
and drug therapy. This shows her as a person with vulnerabilities, dating back
into her past, and it sheds light on her reaction when told about Hal’s infideli-
ties, her need to self-medicate with martinis and Xanax, and the toll that her

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 FILM AS A MORAL FABLE 65

Figure 3.2 Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) breaks down after Dwight’s call, in Blue Jasmine (2013),
directed by Woody Allen.

experiences have taken on her. Importantly, being told about this involves the
viewer without any attribution of blame: we can only think of her rather than
assess whether or not she ‘deserves’ to suffer in this way. After all, she says,
‘There’s only so many traumas a person can withstand until they take to the
streets and start screaming.’
The final scene I want to focus on is the conversation with Danny, which
does several things. It shows how, perhaps unfairly, she has received more vit-
riol than Hal from Danny, and this is particularly interesting in light of how
women often seem to receive extra or misdirected fury (Downing 2013: 58). It
also shows how Jasmine’s values have not changed: she sees money and posi-
tion as the desirable outcomes and any other source of satisfaction is inconceiv-
able to her. And it shows how she has nobody now from her own family unit:
she had no child of her own, and Hal’s son blames her.
There are many more such elements and moments in the film that call for
our attention, such as the relationship with her parents, with her old so-called
friends, and more painful and brutal exchanges with Ginger. Like her cin-
ematic predecessor, Blanche Dubois, in her exchanges with the men her sister
introduces her to Jasmine is quite tough and resilient, displaying a steeliness
and worldliness that show her to have backbone combined with indepen-
dence. This suggests either that it is only now that these qualities are being
called upon, or that she is transforming, developing harder layers, and moving
further and further away from the social butterfly she once was. By paying
attention to Jasmine we see more, and Murdoch might propose we ‘grow by
looking’: for example, at the scenes where Jasmine is crippled with shame and
horror at herself, not just her economic and social situation, but her place as
the bearer of all the blame for Ginger and Augie’s lost money, and the death

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 66 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

of Danny’s dad. And, indeed, she assumes this guilt. After the confrontation
with Augie in the street, when Dwight is raging at her lies, seeing his political
prospects tumbling around him, she says, ‘I brought it on myself again.’ Here
is a woman who talks to herself, holding the conversations she wishes she had
been able to have, saying the things she wishes she had been able to say, but
couldn’t for various reasons. She’s left sitting on the bench, talking to herself,
berating her dead husband for sleeping with the au pair, conceding that even
the lyrics to the song that was playing when they met – ‘Blue Moon’ – are now
‘all a jumble’.
If I am M, and Jasmine is D, my time with D is over once the film is over,
and I can choose to condemn her as the prevailing opinion of many will do,
or I can look again, and pay attention to all that is there, not just the cut-and-
dried legal or even moral framework of the film. I can try to think about the
options that Jasmine has had available to her, the specific realities of her mental
and emotional life, her vulnerabilities and her choices, and pay what Murdoch
might call ‘patient attention’ to lead me to a view of ‘just discernment’. This
might not be accurate, and this need not be complete, but it may come close
to what Murdoch might consider ‘goodness by proxy’ (SGC: 371). Murdoch
also writes about how, pursuant to Weil’s commitment to attention, ‘moral
change comes from an attention to the world whose natural result is a decrease
in egoism through an increased sense of the reality of, primarily of course other
people, but also other things’ (MGM: 52). This is something that we can all do
and in Murdoch’s opinion should be doing:

We do not have to have a theoretical interest in morality. There is indeed

a kind of (instinctive) orientation or certainty which is rejected if we
emphasise free will and individual decision. Are there however some
ways in which, if we reflect about moral value, we cannot properly avoid
picturing the world? (MGM: 55)

Murdoch here means that we can go about our daily lives without thinking
too much about our choices and what we should be doing, because, if we have
been paying attention to reality in a Murdochian sense, we are probably fine
to follow our instincts. But, if we do examine moral value – the things we con-
sider to be right and wrong – we must look at the way the world is and how
people live in it. Murdoch was concerned to argue that the distinction between
fact and value, as propounded by her predecessor G. E. Moore, was abstract
and erroneous. She saw this as stripping metaphysics out of ethics, suggesting
there was no naturalistic or metaphysical structure: ‘it is presented simply in
terms of exhortations and choices defended by reference to facts’ (M&E: 63).
As Cora Diamond notes,

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 FILM AS A MORAL FABLE 67

Murdoch argues that oversimplification in moral philosophy derives not

only from the philosophical will to impose a rational unity but also from
the force of our own particular moral pictures, which she sees as leading
to an overemphasis on the role of choice in moral life and a denial of the
significance of vision and understanding. (Diamond 2010: 53)

Diamond highlights Murdoch’s point that ‘Moral concepts do not move

about within a hard world set up by science and logic’ (IP: 321). It isn’t that
Murdoch is not concerned with action, but rather that ‘she took action to
come out of true and just vision’ (Diamond 2010: 66). The role of attention,
then, is in continuous work on our individual moral vision, which equips
us for taking the right action when the time comes. Here, again, Murdoch
indicates how fictional imaginings or scenarios may inform our moral vision:
‘Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble
the picture. This is the process which moral philosophy must attempt to
describe and analyse’ (M&E: 75). The role of pictures and images here is
clearly so important, as language has been used by the linguistic philosophers
around her in such a reductive way. Murdoch is interested in a broader spec-
trum of values and behaviour:

We were too impressed by words when we assumed that the word ‘good’
covered a single concept which was the centre of morality. We were not
impressed enough when we neglected less general moral words such as
‘true’, ‘brave’, ‘free’, ‘sincere’, which are the bearers of very important
ideas. (M&E: 73)

It is in these other concepts and values that Murdoch sees the richness of
our individual moral visions and the range of possible differences. The
concept of ‘good’ may be less difficult to share or explain than others, for
example,

the concept of ‘truth’ . . . contains tangles and paradoxes the unravelling

of which would show us really interesting features of the modern world.
It is in terms of the inner complexity of such concepts that we may dis-
play really deep differences of moral vision. (M&E: 73)

And ‘to analyse and describe our own morality and that of others may involve
the making of models and pictures of what different kinds of men are like’
(M&E: 74). This concept of a range of values, and range of different moral
visions, is explored in the third film in this chapter, which is certainly a con-
temporary moral fable.

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 68 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

H O W FA R I S T O O FA R ? C O M P L I A N C E

In this affective and shocking film, based on true events, a prank call to a
supermarket leads to one of the employees being poorly treated, assaulted and
sexually abused by co-workers, who comply with the instructions of the caller
believing him to be a police officer. The film disquiets the viewer through dis-
belief and revulsion and then implicates us in the process of questioning how
we would behave in this situation. This raises the question of moral strength,
which the film depicts so painfully in its collective weakness.
The film begins with these words on the screen:

In 1961, a psychologist carried out the now-renowned Milgram Experi-

ment: a study that proved people behave immorally if instructed by an
authority figure.

From 1991 to 2004, people’s compliance with authority was exploited

multiple times with disturbing consequences. The following story is so
shocking, it’s hard to believe it’s true.

Nothing has been exaggerated.

Then, in screen-filling capital letters, to drive the matter home, ‘INSPIRED

BY TRUE EVENTS’. The film begins with a bad-tempered encounter
between the regional manager of an outlet of the fictional fast-food chain,
Chickwich, and her delivery driver. The manager Sandra (Ann Dowd) has
had to order in extra bacon, because somebody failed to close the freezer door
properly, and the delivery driver is very angry and critical of her. She says she
doesn’t appreciate being spoken to like that, and he reveals that his kid has ‘a
big game tonight’ and he’s fifty miles away, so we start from the point of view
that everyone has their own concerns going on that day which affect how they
see the world.
We then see a man shouting into a payphone. This man will go on to play
the driving role in the film, but we are quickly returned to Chickwich, and the
camera passes over all the paraphernalia in such a chicken food store, then to
the staff in uniform, awaiting briefing for the shift. The manager tells them
about the freezer door, and says, ‘We’ve gotta be by the book tonight; we poten-
tially have a franchise quality control person coming, a secret shopper’: so
everything has to be just right in terms of portion sizes, the order of assembly,
and ‘clean, clean, clean’.
Some of the staff are chatting about boyfriends, and one says that
another has ‘got like three dudes’. Sandra looks a bit put out, and joins in
the conversation, saying, ‘My man sexts me sometimes – he knows what to

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 FILM AS A MORAL FABLE 69

do to get me worked up.’ When she leaves them, the others exchange com-
ments and laugh at her, which Sandra overhears. So some tension is estab-
lished between Sandra and the younger staff, especially the women. Sandra
is shown discussing their milkshakes with the caretaker, Harold (Stephen
Payne), and stresses proudly there is a lot of choice, displaying herself to be
a ‘company person’. The film takes some time in order to show that the food
is highly processed, repetitive and unnatural: close-up shots of the ends of
fries in cartons, burned and orange, shards of breadcrumbed chicken pieces
put in paper cases, fizzy drink coming out of the pump and spraying all
over the hand. This is not attractive food. But at the same time, there are
shots of ordinary people sitting and eating, chatting with their friends and
families, enjoying this food. So the set-up is established as very workaday
and unremarkable.
Then Sandra receives a telephone call from a man who claims to be a police-
man called Officer Daniels. He asks for the manager’s name and says he has the
regional manager with him. He begins to ask about a young blonde woman who
works for her, and Sandra says, ‘Who, Becky?’ She thereby provides the name
of her employee to this man, who goes on to say that he has a customer with
him who says Becky (Dreama Walker) stole some money from her.
Sandra says she finds it hard to believe, but instantly accepts that she must
do what ‘Officer Daniels’ tells her to. She takes Becky out to the back into
the storeroom. The Officer says he has a woman who describes her exactly,
and that it is backed up by surveillance. Becky denies it. Following the offi-
cer’s instructions, Sandra searches Becky’s pockets and handbag. She holds
Becky’s arm in a slightly restraining way. Sandra says, ‘If you did I’m going
to have to fire you on the spot.’ When Becky denies it, Sandra says, ‘Then
why do I have a police officer calling me, telling me your name, telling me you
stole from a customer?’ It was Sandra who provided Becky’s name, but that
has slipped her mind.
The man tells Sandra she is going to have to keep hold of Becky until he can
get there. He cajoles Sandra by saying he needs her to assist the authorities, and
that ‘Wouldn’t it make sense that she would try to hide it from you?’ Appeal-
ing to Sandra’s ‘jobsworth’ character type succeeds in getting her to follow the
instructions, and when he asks to speak to Becky his tactic is to wear down her
resistance. He threatens Becky and diminishes her power in the situation, say-
ing, ‘I’m gonna need you to address me as sir or officer understand? You don’t
realise what kind of trouble you’re in’ (Figure 3.3). Through this technique of
cajoling Sandra and threatening Becky, he gets Sandra to strip search Becky,
check her underwear, remove her clothes and handbag and take them to the
car in the car park, leaving her naked in the storeroom. The caller’s next step
is to ramp up the seriousness of the alleged crime, by saying they are investi-
gating Becky and her brother, and her clothes could have forensic evidence.

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 70 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

Figure 3.3 Becky (Dreama Walker) knows there’s nothing she can do, in Compliance (2012),
directed by Craig Zobel.

The soundtrack music is steady and slow percussion, then choppy cello notes,
slightly comic in tone, but also ominous.
Sandra’s attention is returning to the running of the business now, and she
agrees to the caller’s suggestion to get a male employee to watch the naked
Becky. Cut to chips frying furiously with a rumbling, thunderous soundtrack.
We now see the parallel activity: a muffled male voice on the phone, a pen nib
making notes, toying with a cigarette, the back of a man’s head on the phone.
We become aware that there is a man conducting this phone call, and he does
not look like a policeman. Sandra says to Becky’s friend and co-worker Kevin,
‘There’s some upsetting news about Becky. She stole from a customer and she
may be in some trouble with her brother.’ He doesn’t believe it, and refuses to
accept what the caller says, especially when he is told he will have to inspect her
body. He leaves, saying, ‘You can’t make me do that. Becky is my friend. When
the cops come I don’t want anything to do with it.’
We now see the caller making a sandwich, squirting mustard, and blatantly
lying about being a police officer not able to spare one officer to come out to
Chickwich. He cajoles Sandra into talking about having a fiancé and to ask
him to come by and help, saying, ‘It would really help me out.’ Two shots of
ice and snow break the stress briefly, but then Sandra’s fiancé Van (Bill Camp)
arrives. We see a full restaurant outside, with people eating, burgers being
made, the till collecting all the money. Sandra tells Van that he has to watch
Becky, and he says, ‘Do we really have to do this?’ to which Sandra replies,
‘Honey it’s not up to me.’
The caller speaks to Van, now left alone to watch Becky, and establishes
some details about him, then tells him he is going to have to inspect Becky’s
body: ‘You believe everything a thief says? You think a naked girl doesn’t have

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 FILM AS A MORAL FABLE 71

a place to hide money?’ Again, the caller intimidates Becky too, saying, ‘You’re
the one that is causing all the problems. Allow the person that I authorised.
You can go to jail or you can let this guy inspect you.’ When he tells her to give
the phone back to Van, he is laughing to himself, presumably at the ease with
which he is succeeding to control them, and he asks Van to describe what her
chest looks like, the size of her nipples, to know identifying marks. He then gets
Becky to turn around and bend over, for a ‘standard cavity search’, and then
to do jumping jacks ‘to shake it out’. Van looks up her vagina with the torch
on his phone, and then spanks her for disobedience, until the caller persuades
Becky to ‘Do something nice for him’, and perform oral sex. The sordid nature
of these events is bolstered by close-up shots of dirty sink water, and a visual
double-entendre of a dog-leg in a plastic drink straw. Becky’s lower legs and
feet contort on the floor, as she is clearly kneeling in front of Van. Throughout
this excruciating episode, Van’s face has been hard to read. He does not appear
lascivious, he is hesitant, but embraces the opportunity to act in this way. When
asked to place the telephone close to the spanking so that the caller can hear,
he comes up with the idea, ‘You want me to lay the phone on her back?’ This
is followed by a cut to the caller laughing in disbelief at Van’s enthusiastic
acquiescence.
There are fleeting close-up shots of the plastic straw, globular chicken,
gnarly fries and a disgusting sink. Kevin reveals that he has texted his friend
and Becky’s brother isn’t even in town. Sandra is rude and dismissive to Becky
by now, telling her not to talk to her. Van leaves quickly, clearly disturbed, and
calls his friend to say, ‘I did a bad thing.’ Several people now clearly disagree
or suspect, but they all fail to intervene or make efforts to protect Becky, who
is by now dazed and simply staring at the CCTV. When Harold the factotum
comes back to the store and asks what’s going on, Sandra says to him, ‘Becky
stole something, we had to strip search her’: she entirely accepts the allegation
and legitimacy of the consequent actions. She enlists Harold to watch Becky
now, and passes him over to the caller, who begins his line of instruction again.
Harold, however, is having none of it. He says to the caller, ‘I don’t know who
you are but I don’t think it’s right to see a lady like this in the buff.’ When the
caller says that the decision is not up to Harold, he replies, ‘I’ll be damned
if it isn’t.’ He then tells Sandra this is not right, ‘This is not policemanly.’
Sandra checks and finds that the regional manager was off sick today, not sit-
ting alongside the fictitious Officer Daniels. Sandra realises he was not real,
and falls silent. Kevin calls the police.
The truly agonising previous hour and twenty-five minutes has been an
escalation in outrage, veering between disbelief, fury and dismissal for the
spectator. We cannot help but be incredulous at the ways in which Sandra
complies with the caller, and critical of the fact that none of Becky’s friends and
co-workers intervenes to protect her. And yet, the film tells us, these events

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 72 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

happened not once but seventy times between 1992 and 2004. Assurance of
basis in fact is often a technique used by filmmakers to bolster the impact of
on-screen events, and such an assertion needs to be handled with care as the
veracity of events can vary greatly from their ‘real world’ inspiration. However,
some superficial internet research swiftly confirms that Compliance is indeed
based on almost identical events in a McDonald’s restaurant in Kentucky in
2004 (Koehler 2012: 55).
Hannah McGill observes how, ‘As can so often be the case, real life here
supplies extremes of human behaviour that might well be thrown out of a fic-
tion-film script meeting for lacking credibility’ (McGill 2013: 82). The film
attracted a lot of critical attention after it was shown at the Sundance Film
Festival in 2012, with Laura Kern (2012) calling it ‘the most polarising film’ of
the festival, and Amy Taubin considering it to be ‘the most abhorrent , classist,
sexist movie of the festival’ (Taubin 2012: 62). As Kern observes,

it’s one squirm-inducing viewing experience . . . And every time you

think there’s no way this could ever happen – and that thought most cer-
tainly pops up a lot – just remind yourself that a similar incident actually
did take place (more than once!). (Kern 2012: 65)

This basis in truth does not let director Zobel off the hook in Taubin’s eyes,
however, who still criticises his specific script and casting choices in relation
to his deployment of the ‘gullibility and moral failure of an overweight, mid-
dle-aged woman who’s been stuck in a shit job in a fast-food restaurant for
her entire working life’ (2012: 62). For Taubin, the casting encourages a sense
of superiority in the viewers who she takes to be ‘a lot of upper middle class
white guys’ (2012: 62). I think Roger Ebert’s review is closer to the mark,
however, when he observes that one of the reasons for the film’s effective-
ness is because ‘we feel we know people like this’ (2012). For Ebert, when
addressing the fact that people were seen to be walking out of the film, these
walk-outs ‘aren’t because it’s a bad movie, but because it’s all too effective at
exposing the human tendency to cave in to authority’. As Ebert observes, ‘If
the stunt worked seventy times, they must prove something – perhaps that we
are afraid of authority’ (ibid.). As Robert Koehler writes, Compliance ‘con-
tains within it the most profound questions generated by the largest human
tragedies of the twentieth century . . . What makes a decent and generally
intelligent person obey an authority to commit evil?’ (2012: 56). For Koehler,
this Chickwich is a ‘human hell’, staffed by a range of people, who each have
their moment to make a stand and choose whether to comply with the caller’s
instructions, or to act in a different way. This is perhaps what is most striking
about the film: that not one of them actively intervenes. The challenge to us

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 FILM AS A MORAL FABLE 73

as viewers then, is not simply to think ‘what would I do?’ or ‘what should they
have done?’, but at what point would I actively intervene? This is the unusual
moral challenge of this film, that sets it apart from the more straightforward
moral conundrum movies such as Indecent Proposal (would you let your wife
sleep with Robert Redford for a million dollars?), The Box (would you accept
a million dollars if the price was that somebody you didn’t know would be
killed?) or Good People (would you keep a bagful of cash you found left behind
by your old tenant, even when it is clearly ill-gotten gains?).1 It is more than
a universalist assessment of right and wrong in this situation, as it compels
us to question our tendencies to susceptibility and to assess qualities such
as strength of character, care for another and fearlessness, which Murdoch
would undoubtedly call moral qualities (see again her thinking on ‘brave’,
‘true’ and ‘free’ at M&E: 73). These are the character traits that go towards
what ‘in the ordinary sense, a person “is like”’ (VCM: 80). The range of very
ordinary people, just like us and people we know, makes the magnitude of
these questions acutely relevant. Also, the dynamics of the relationship to the
characters compels us into a similar impotence to that of Becky: neither of us
can escape this situation, except – as apparently many did – by walking out of
the cinema. It demands a thoughtful response of not just what one might do
but precisely when: at what point does one’s moral responsibility require one
to take action on behalf of another?
Murdoch insists that we are compelled because ‘at crucial moments of
choice most of the business of choosing is already over’ (IP: 329). The work
we do on our moral vision and our moral thinking means that we come to
decisions on the basis of this ongoing work. And art is part of this work.
Art contains ‘moral insight’ and represents ‘moral achievements’ (IP: 332).
And it is in terms of vision that Murdoch conceives this perspective: ‘true
vision occasions right conduct’ (OGG: 353). As Michael Schwartz writes, ‘for
Murdoch, great art allows us to see things as we had never perceived them
before’ (2009: 320). He draws attention to Murdoch’s belief that ‘freedom
is not strictly the exercise of the will, but rather the experience of accurate
vision . . . [as] . . . by the time the moment of choice has arrived the quality of
attention has probably determined the nature of the act’ (OGG: 354). Art is
therefore a place of ‘fundamental insight’ (OGG: 360). In MGM, Murdoch
writes that, for Plato, ‘value is everywhere, the whole of life is movement on a
moral scale’ (MGM: 56). This idea of a moral scale is apt for approaching the
range of responses to Becky’s situation in Compliance. As Elizabeth Dipple
notes, discomfort ‘is part of (Murdoch’s) moral thrust’ (1982: 90); and the
discomfort we feel while watching this film compels us to assess our very
particular set of priorities and weaknesses, and how much we value the experi-
ence of Becky, or Sandra, or Van.

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 74 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

Having examined the ways in which film can act as a moral fable, which
challenges our tendencies to judge and simplify, as well as to examine our
own moral vision, in the next chapter I will analyse three protagonists whose
varying qualities of attention prepare them for different moral choices in very
particular ways.

NOTE

1. Indecent Proposal (Adrian Lyne, 1993); The Box (Richard Kelly, 2009); Good People
(Henrik Ruben Genz, 2014).

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 CHAPTER 4

Film and the Existential Hero(ine)

One might say, broadly, that the logical analysts describe ordinary lan-
guage, and behaviour so far as it illuminates this, the existentialists
describe a range of psychological phenomena connected with private
personal experience, and the Marxists describe man’s behaviour as a
social being. (‘The Existential Political Myth’ (EPM): 132)

I agree that what the age requires is a refurbished Marxism. Existential-

ism has perhaps some contribution to make. But its appeal as a philosophy
is at present through its most non-Marxist aspects – its dramatic, solip-
sistic, romantic and anti-social exaltation of the individual. (‘Existentialist
Bite’ (EB): 153)

Sartre’s man is still at the stage of thinking perpetually of himself.

(SRR: 134)

It has been assumed that moral argument always takes the form of point-
ing to facts, rather than the form of analysing or explaining concepts . . .
But our freedom is not just a freedom to choose and act differently, it is
also a freedom to think and believe differently, to see the world differ-
ently, and to see different configurations and describe them in different
words. (M&E: 72–3)

T his chapter will engage with Murdoch’s work on existentialism and her
analysis of Sartre in a consideration of how films address the question
of what gives life meaning, how free we are, and where characters turn to
find guidance about the right way to live. The three chosen films explore how
characters develop their rationale for living when they have either lost some-
thing that defines them, or are faced with a dilemma that will have lifelong

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repercussions for themselves and others. At that moment of solitary decision

making, where does a character turn, and how does film convey the isolation,
desperation and significance of these decisions and these lives?
Actress Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) in Clouds of Sils Maria (Olivier
Assayas, 2014) faces a professional opportunity and a personal loss that throw
her life into crisis. She turns to others and to memories of her younger self, but
these serve her unreliably. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan,
2011) takes place in the bleak Anatolian landscape as a group of policemen
drive a captured killer to find the body of the man he has admitted to killing.
The men experience different emotions and conflicts on the journey, culminat-
ing in an unforeseen dilemma for the doctor who carries out the autopsy on
the victim. In Graduation (Cristian Mungiu, 2016), a father tries to do what
he thinks is best for his daughter, but his choices lead to complication of his
already messy life. Approaching these three protagonists from the perspec-
tive of Murdoch’s analysis of the existential hero enables us to see how their
difficulties arise and to assess the values and visions that guide their choices
and actions.

MURDOCH AND EXISTENTIALISM

Murdoch’s relationship with the existentialist movement is lengthy and fluc-

tuating. As stated in the introduction, her first book was on Sartre, in which
she critically analyses his novels and assesses his approach to consciousness
and freedom. While clearly welcoming and respecting the emphasis on the sig-
nificance of the individual consciousness, Murdoch finds that Sartre fails to
account for, or even be interested in, the variety of human existence. Murdoch
does not mince her words: ‘The rationalism of Sartre is not geared on to the
techniques of the modern world; it is solipsistic and romantic, isolated from
the sphere of real operations’ (SRR: 106).
Murdoch appreciated how brilliantly Sartre understood ‘the psychology of
the lonely individual’ (SRR: 106), but solipsism made the characters in his
novels, and the Sartrean existentialist thinker, egocentric, and ultimately con-
soling for the thinker and the reader:

It is patent that what many readers of Sartre find in his writings is

a portrait of themselves. A likeness is always pleasing, even if one is
not handsome; and to be told that one’s personal despair is a universal
human characteristic may be consoling. But this is not to say that what
we are offered here is nothing but an irresponsible caricature of a mod-
ern mood. (SRR: 111)

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 FILM AND THE EXISTENTIAL HERO(INE) 77

Murdoch’s encounters with existentialism occur throughout her philo-

sophical writings, and have occupied many scholars who have teased out
her adoptions and rejections of various tenets and notions. Maria Antonac-
cio explains how Murdoch ‘developed an ethics of vision built on the fun-
damental analogy between art and ethics, where moral rationality is more
like the perceptive vision of the artist than the rational objectivity of the
scientist’, and how this undermined one of the cornerstones of analytic eth-
ics – its assumption of logical and ethical neutrality (2012: 161). Although
Murdoch’s opposition to the linguistic analytics was overt, as Antonaccio
asserts, ‘no serious reader of Murdoch’s philosophy could deny that existen-
tialism was one of her “principal opponents”’ (2012: 164). Antonaccio sug-
gests that Murdoch’s attitude toward existentialism remained ambivalent
(2012: 164).1 She understood the appeal of existentialism to a devastated
post-war Europe, questioning what gives life meaning and who to turn to
for guidance:

the heroic consciousness, the individual self, inalienably and inelucta-

bly free, challengingly confronted the “given”, in the form of existing
society, history, tradition, other people. The war was over, Europe was
in ruins, we had emerged from a long captivity, all was to be remade.
(SRR: 9)

This was a picture that resonated with many people in Europe in the aftermath
of the war, such that ‘Existentialism was the new religion, the new salvation’
(ibid.: 10). Murdoch was, however, acutely aware of its limitations.
Peter Conradi writes that both existentialism and Anglo-Saxon philosophy
came to seem ‘equally facile’ to Murdoch, because both ‘evacuated inward-
ness through dignifying a romantic voluntarism or cult of the will’ (Conradi
1994: 332). He writes how Murdoch’s philosophy and fiction was ‘in strong
revolt against this world-view and of the popular “hero-of-the-will” to whom
Existentialism had given birth in mid-century fiction’ (ibid.: 333). Murdoch,
as we have seen, was turning to Weil, who was helping her deepen her under-
standing of Plato. Conradi explains that Weil also drew on the Christian mys-
tics and on Buddhism, and ‘saw morality as a form of un-selfing through the
discipline of attention’ (ibid.: 333).2 Conradi explains that Murdoch’s reinter-
pretation is that

human beings inhabit a cloud of egoistic fantasy, designed to protect the

psyche from pain . . . The power of imaginative attention alone can –
albeit with difficulty – cut through this fantastic reverie and start to reveal
the world and its inhabitants more accurately. (Ibid.: 333)

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So, unlike the existentialist hero, occupying a world of his own and choosing
whatever he wants, real freedom is ‘the total absence of concern for Self, the
energy of which is burnt up in its strenuous effort to proceed towards the Good,
which is to say the Real’ (ibid.: 333). The transcendent good will be looked at
in detail in the next chapter, but here it is vital to note the difference between
Murdoch and Sartre’s existentialist project in this respect. As Ana Lita writes,
Murdoch ‘wishes to renew our sense of the difficulty and complexity of the
moral life in dealing with particular persons’ (Lita 2004: 1), whereas Murdoch’s
understanding of Sartre’s existentialism pictures ‘the fearful solitude of the
individual marooned upon a tiny island in the middle of a sea of scientific facts,
and morally escaping from science only by a wild leap of the will’ (IP: 321).
This description stresses isolation, reliance upon science, and freedom to charge
off in any direction desired. This is not the kind of individual that Murdoch
believes we are. For Murdoch, we are far more situated and embedded in rela-
tion to others: ‘The individual life must be shown to be related to its historical
surroundings, by a continuous to and fro mediation by various paths between
the general and the particular, which would reveal the place and nature of free
choice’ (SRR: 27). Murdoch is concerned with an individual who is in relation
with others, but who is decentring. As an example, Murdoch favours the idea
of ‘de-individualised individual of Buddhism or mystical Christianity’ (MGM:
352). As Julia Meszaros explains, in Kierkegaard, Murdoch finds ‘a particularly
formative and existentially relevant conversation partner’ (Meszaros 2016: 41).
Meszaros continues,

His insistence that thought must serve life, and that we cannot speak of
faith (or, in her case, goodness) in impersonal terms, is close to her own
concerns. By his life and art, Murdoch finds, Kierkegaard is an example –
outdone only, perhaps, by Simone Weil. (Ibid.: 42)

This is indicative of the complex situation of the Murdochian individual:

she or he is historically and socially situated in relation to others and their
times, but is selfish and deluded. This delusion, however, can be overcome
by following the path to the ‘true and full selfhood’ through the relation with
the transcendent Good – with which we are already in relation (ibid.: 44).
Our freedom, therefore, is related to our obedience to the transcendent, and
our moral lives occur and develop in the actions of waiting and attention, as
emphasised by Murdoch repeating Weil’s claim that ‘we should pay atten-
tion to such a point that we no longer have the choice’ (‘Knowing the Void’
(KV): 159). Murdoch argues that ‘until we become good we are at the mercy
of mechanical forces’ and that ‘we make advances by resisting the mecha-
nism: but there is no reward’ (KV: 158). She directly adopts Weil’s notion of

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 FILM AND THE EXISTENTIAL HERO(INE) 79

attention and hence of love as ‘an orientation, a direction of energy, not just
a state of mind’ (Meszaros 2016: 52).
It is important to appreciate that Murdoch does not adopt Weil wholesale.
She distances herself from the ‘extremism’ that Weil practised in her own life
(MGM: 247). Murdoch writes that the personality which emerges from Weil’s
writings ‘is not always attractive, but it compels respect’ (KV: 159–60). As Sabina
Lovibond notes, Murdoch is ‘well disposed towards a notion of rights’ (Lovi-
bond 2011: 34), whereas Weil rebukes the notion of rights (Weil 2002a: 4). Weil
was committed to solidarity with the poor and the afflicted, but Murdoch was
also concerned about happiness. Murdoch believed that ‘There are worse ends
than the pursuit of an unexacting happiness’ (MGM: 86). And she described
how ‘a Benthamite utilitarian conception of happiness must not . . . be eroded
by high-minded considerations about quality of happiness or by theories which
make happiness invisible’ (MGM: 483). As Meszaros notes, then, ‘despite her
great respect for Weil, Murdoch thus ultimately senses the need to balance
Weil’s understanding of love as selfless attention with a greater and more worldly
concern for the individual, and his needs, desires, and happiness’ (Meszaros
2016: 53). Meszaros continues,

Murdoch carves out a path between Sartre and Weil that avoids the one-
sided extremes of both. Arguing that we best affirm ourselves by lov-
ing the Good, she rejects Sartre’s notion that we can affirm ourselves
single-handedly. Yet she does so without uprooting erotic desire from
the human person and her love, and without devaluing the human self,
its individuality, and its potential for personal growth. (Ibid.: 176)

So, although not seeking reward, or attaining reward from others, ‘selfless love
may in fact build up the self ’ (ibid.: 176).This objectual attention, or direction
of thought towards the other, in our daily lives and complex social networks,
thereby enables the recognition of the other as they are, and with respect. As
Murdoch writes,

This picture of cognition which ‘favours the object’ also favours con-
ceptions of truthfulness, of sacredness, of respect and duty and love
which belong to ordinary traditional morality and might be more clearly
expressed (as they are by Simone Weil) in ordinary-language reflections
without the compulsory use of Hegelian-Marxist terminology. It sug-
gests a philosophy better suited to a world in which respect for rights
(human rights, rights of citizens, rights of blacks, rights of gays, rights
of whales) has made innumerable places for the meeting of theory and
practice. (SRR: 37)

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This is old-fashioned language perhaps, but it demonstrates the contingency

and variability of Murdoch’s moral thinking about our lives as individuals and
our duties to others in their variety. This in turn signals the contemporary
relevance of Murdoch’s thought, and the possibilities for it as a mode of ethi-
cal looking at contemporary films. Lovibond highlights the fact that a central
idea in Murdoch’s thinking is that ‘we have to work at removing the impediments
to correct thinking, these impediments arising from an improper influence
exerted on judgement by “the appetitive part of the soul”’ (Lovibond 2015:
243). Murdoch writes that ‘in the moral life, the enemy is the fat relentless ego’
(OGG: 342), and moral philosophy is concerned with its defeat. Lovibond
summarises thus: ‘This is a freedom that moves towards the ideal limit of per-
fect responsiveness to reality, and hence, paradoxically, of “obedience” (to the
objective requirements of one’s situation)’ (ibid.: 244). This is encapsulated
in Murdoch’s pronouncement, ‘If I attend properly I will have no choices and
this is the ultimate condition to be aimed at’ (IP: 331). We will now think about
how making such moral progress, or remaining a fat relentless ego, can be seen
in cinema. Murdoch describes a particular hero that we are all familiar with:

We know this novel and its hero well. The story of the lonely brave man,
defiant without optimism . . . whose mode of being is a deep criticism
of society. He is an adventurer. He is godless. He does not suffer from
guilt. He thinks of himself as free. He may have his faults, he may be
self-assertive or even violent, but he has sincerity and courage, and for
this we forgive him. (D. H. Lawrence, E. Hemingway, A. Camus, J. P.
Sartre, K. Amis . . .). (E&M: 225)

For Murdoch, this is the hero of the existentialist novel. She distinguishes him
from the hero of what she calls the mystical novel:

Whereas the existentialist hero is an anxious man trying to impose

or assert or find himself, the mystical hero is an anxious man try-
ing to discipline or purge or diminish himself. The chief temptation
of the former is egoism, of the latter masochism. The philosophi-
cal background or protective symbolism is fairly clear in each case.
The first hero is the new version of the romantic man, the man of
power, abandoned by God, struggling on bravely, sincerely and alone.
This image consoles by showing us man as strong, self-reliant and
uncrushable. The second hero is the new version of the man of faith,
believing in goodness without religious guarantees, guilty, muddled,
yet not without hope. This image consoles by showing us man as frail,
godless, and yet possessed of genuine intuitions of an authoritative
good. (E&M: 227)

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 FILM AND THE EXISTENTIAL HERO(INE) 81

These two types are helpful for teasing out the elements of the journey
of a protagonist and what the source of their moral vision is, as well as the
values that guide their choices. Elsewhere, Murdoch differentiates between
‘ordinary language man’ and ‘totalitarian man’. For the former, ‘a man is what
he observedly does’ (‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’ (SBR): 268),
and for the latter, virtue is ‘the unillusioned exercise of complete freedom’
(ibid.: 268–9). Both of these figures are solipsistic: ‘Neither pictures virtue
as concerned with anything real outside ourselves. Neither provides us with
a standpoint for considering real human beings in their variety, and neither
presents us with any technique for exploring and controlling our own spiritual
energy’ (SBR: 269). For Murdoch, this is ‘an empty lonely freedom’ (IP: 321).
This type of hero, which Murdoch is identifying mainly as being in novels, is
not an example for us as they are not what we are like: ‘what place, one might
ask, is left in this stern picture of solitary all-responsible man for the life of
emotions?’ (SGC: 366). Our emotions are significant and important to under-
stand as potential impediments to just thinking: ‘We are anxiety-ridden animals.
Our minds are continually active, fabricating an anxious, usually self-preoccu-
pied, often falsifying veil which partially conceals the world’ (SGC: 369). The
classic existential hero of film noir has survived across the decades in many
forms, and indeed, in 2015, Rowan Righelato declared that an existential hero
comeback was in full swing in the hands of filmmakers such as Michael Mann,
Paul Schrader and Sean Penn (2015). The three less conventional film pro-
tagonists I am going to consider contain elements, in various configurations, of
all the heroes that Murdoch outlines. I want to argue that the films enable us to
see how they construct their moral worlds and to come to understand, through
our close attention and understanding, how they make the decisions that they
do. In this way, the films not only illustrate some of Murdoch’s ideas, but the
protagonists act as objects for us to learn from. Through the ethical challenges
presented by these individuals to us, we are able to reflect upon the bases for
their actions, and the principles that guide them. This in turn may affect or
develop our own moral contemplations.

A FAT R E L E N T L E S S E G O : C L O U D S O F S I L S M A R I A

Maria (Juliette Binoche) is a successful actress, who is self-centred, temper-

amental and a demanding employer of a long-suffering personal assistant,
Valentine (Kristen Stewart). Her journey, as such, is not one from self-cen-
tred egotism to decentring; rather the film acts more as a morality tale about
remaining on a cloud of egoism. The protagonist therefore more resembles
Murdoch’s understanding of a fat relentless ego, veiled and impeded from
thinking of others, than a straightforward existential hero or heroine. The

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film opens on a train, with Val on the telephone managing Maria’s work
arrangements, making apologies for her, liaising about diary commitments
and divorce papers: in other words, fielding Maria’s stressful encounters, and
having stress of her own with poor mobile reception. Val buys her coffee and
water, so is caring for her personal needs too. She enters Maria’s train com-
partment, and Maria instantly says, ‘Did you read this article about Google
and how it uses private information? It’s disgraceful, they’re too powerful.’
She is relaxing and thinking about world events, while her assistant manages
her life. She is rejecting action roles, saying she doesn’t want to do any more
‘hanging from wires and acting in front of green screens – I’ve outgrown it’.
She checks arrangements for an interview, but barely bothers to remember
the interviewer’s name. She is happy with her agenda, but she wants to run
through the first draft of her speech. It is about her old friend and mentor
Wilhelm to be given at an awards ceremony for him, but also about her and
his importance in her life. He gave her the famous role of Sigrid in the play
and the film, and ‘everything she needed to build a career on – my career’.
She wants help from Val, but she does say, ‘It is my tribute to him I have to
find my own words.’ Then she agrees to take a phone call from her husband’s
(‘Creep’s’) lawyer about her divorce. While she is speaking, Val takes another
call. She looks worried and goes to find Maria, who won’t talk to her; the call
is to tell her bad news. She shows Maria a sign saying ‘Wilhelm has died’. So,
the celebratory event will now be very different. Val says, ‘Who could do him
justice better than you – you love him’; Maria says ‘I love him. I know so little
about him.’ Rosa (Wilhelm’s widow) calls, and she tells Maria they think it
was a heart attack. We see the frozen body being loaded into an ambulance.
As Maria arrives at the station she says she is going to head right back to the
hotel, as she says, ‘I have to think it over, everything is hitting me at once.’
As she arrives in the hotel room she sits down and manages the room without
doing anything herself: ‘Can we turn this off, and no fruit thank you.’ This
is a woman who is used to telling people what she wants and expects to get it.
She does not ask after other people, or consider the needs of others; rather
she expects attention and to be the focus of the situation.
We see Maria picking out jewellery and clothes for a fashion shoot, as we
see Rosa leave the morgue on her own, arrive home on her own, and burn
notebooks from Wilhelm’s desk. Their experiences of this man’s death are very
different: Rosa is having to think of Wilhelm; Maria needs only to think of how
the man’s life and its loss relates to her. When they speak, Rosa tells Maria that
Wilhelm had an illness, and so he killed himself.
Maria arrives at the tribute event. Her ex-lover Henrik is going to be inter-
viewed about his plays before he will also pay tribute to Wilhelm. Maria is
angry with him because they had an affair when she was eighteen and she

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 FILM AND THE EXISTENTIAL HERO(INE) 83

didn’t hear from him again until she was famous. We see Maria follow Henrik
on stage to applause, say thank you, and then we cut to Maria arriving at the
post-event reception. She gets out of the car (ignoring the person who opens
the car door for her), and says coolly but charmingly to the host, ‘It’s great
that you celebrate his work, especially today.’ There is a new director here who
wants to persuade Maria to play a role to which she has already said no. Val asks
permission to go and meet the photographer from the shoot, which is met with
gentle teasing by Maria.
Klaus (Lars Eidinger), the new director, wants Maria to act in the play
that she did for Wilhelm when she was eighteen years old. The play is about
two women, the young Sigrid, and the older Helena who falls obsessively
in love with her. Maria played Sigrid when she was eighteen, and says, ‘In
some way I am still Sigrid . . . Sigrid is free, beyond everything, and . . .
destructive, unpredictable, and right or wrong, I’ve always identified with
that freedom – it’s a way of protecting myself.’ Now, Klaus wants her to play
the older woman, Helena. Maria says, ‘Helena is forty, she runs a company,
she falls head over heels in love with a girl who doesn’t love her and drives
her to suicide – yes, she’s completely the opposite.’ Maria concedes that
she is Helena’s age, but that doesn’t mean she can play her: ‘Time’s gone
by and she can’t accept it – me neither I guess.’ For Klaus, however, ‘Sigrid
and Helena are one and the same person. That’s what the play is about.
Because you were Sigrid only you can be Helena now.’ A young actress,
Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloë Grace Moretz), who is a scandal-hit A-list celebrity,
apparently admires Maria and is willing to pull out of other commitments
to play the role. Maria answers, ‘I’ve listened carefully. But to be honest, the
role scares me. Helena scares me. I’m in the middle of a divorce, I’m vulner-
able – probably too vulnerable to do this.’ The director Klaus tries emotional
blackmail, saying that not playing it will be a missed opportunity, ‘especially
for Wilhelm’. But Maria also has another reason. The actress who played
Helena opposite her Sigrid died in a car accident a year after, and she admits
she is superstitious about it. Klaus brutally says, ‘Her conventional style
of acting highlighted the modernity of your performance; you should be
grateful to her.’ Klaus is unsentimental, and clearly determined to persuade
Maria to play the role in his production. At dinner, her ex-lover Henrik,
who she has tried to avoid, is seated next to her. He also discusses the role
of Helena and has some insights, but Maria disagrees with him. She says
the play is about what attracts the women to each other, and that the impos-
sibility of their relationship is as cruel for Sigrid as it is for Helena. Henrik
insists that Helena is not used to being turned down: ‘She discovers her own
frailty and she can’t accept it.’ Maria is clearly beginning to consider playing
the role. Henrik strokes her hand and asks her if she wants a nightcap, but

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she laughs at him. As they part, however, she gives Henrik a piece of paper
with her room number and he looks surprised. Back in her room, she drinks
miniatures from the minibar and she searches for Jo-Ann Ellis on Google,
so we know she’s hooked.
An intertitle announces this is ‘PART TWO’, which is set in the Alps.
Maria has a short cropped haircut. Val is driving, as Maria has her eyes shut.
They pull into a garage, and Val fills up the car with petrol. Maria wakes up,
and Val apologises for the fact that she went wrong on the journey, but Maria
is lost in herself. Maria says she had a dream, they were ‘already rehearsing,
the past and the present were blending together’. So she has clearly accepted
the role, but she is already saying, ‘I shouldn’t have said yes to Klaus.’ Val says,
‘He is a sick director, Jo-Ann’s a superstar. It pays well’; she responds, ‘I don’t
need the money.’
The Alpine scenery is exquisite, and they arrive at a beautiful house, meet-
ing Rosa there. Of course, Val handles the bags. Rosa likes the fact that Maria
is working on the role of Helena here in Wilhelm’s house, which is where it was
written. As they walk in the mountains, they emerge as small figures within
hills, before the lake where Rosa tells Maria that this is where Wilhelm killed
himself, saying, ‘but that stays between you and me’. This is the Maloja Pass,
and they discuss the snake-like cloud formation that apparently foretells bad
weather. Then, back at the house, we see a film of the Maloja Snake from
1924.3 As they watch it on the television, Rosa says Wilhelm was fascinated
by this film, and that the true nature of the landscape revealed itself in these
images. For Maria, however, there is a block between her and the film. She says
that the black and white creates a distance, which says the passing of the time.
Rosa says it is almost a century old, that actually it comes from very far away,
and that that is the beauty of it. Rosa then leaves them at the house, and gives
Maria something that belonged to Wilhelm.
Val and Maria get drunk over dinner, and Val grills Maria as to whether any-
thing happened with Wilhelm. Maria says he chose her for the part so he must
have felt something but it remained unspoken. Maria says it isn’t important,
and laughs, as Val says, ‘If that isn’t important what the fuck is important.’
This is peculiar, as, outside Rosa, Wilhelm and Maria, it really doesn’t seem
that important. This shows how much Val is part of the circle surrounding
and supporting Maria, shoring up the sense of her importance. As Val pushes
her, Maria concedes that she ‘was attracted to Wilhelm but it’s normal. I was
fine with just feeling attracted and with the intimacy.’ When Val says she was
in love with him, Maria replies, ‘Stop oversimplifying, it was less than that . . .
maybe I only remember what I want to remember.’
Val goes through Maria’s work offers which do not sound like a range of
great roles: opening a shopping mall, modelling eye glasses (only in Latin
America, she says), playing a mother superior in a Spanish horror film with

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 FILM AND THE EXISTENTIAL HERO(INE) 85

werewolves; an interview with an Italian magazine tackling ‘active women’s

seduction after forty’, on the cover, shot by Mario Testino. Maria is not inter-
ested in any of them. Jo-Ann Ellis wants to meet and so they discuss her celeb-
rity and reputation: stories about getting wasted, having a gun, shooting up her
boyfriend’s place, needing to be subdued. As Maria says, this is ‘not exactly
how Klaus described her’. It seems she has been to rehab to get out of going to
prison: Val says she has a theatrical background, but jumped off the rails and
went wild. Maria says to Val that she could have told her, but Val says, ‘I love
her, she’s not completely antiseptic like the rest of Hollywood.’ Maria can’t see
her cigarettes even though they are right in front of her, and Val hands them
to her. They argue about Jo-Ann, until Val says she’s probably her favourite
actress, which brings Maria up short: ‘Ah, you mean more than me.’ Maria is
offended. She sulkily challenges, ‘I’m more conventional, boring, I can’t reach
her intensity.’ Val says she didn’t say that, but Maria goes to bed and watches
videos of Jo-Ann on YouTube. These videos show her in a press conference
saying in an offhand but malicious way that she’s in a play with Maria Enders,
who plays the older woman and ‘I’m the younger woman who drives her to
suicide’ with a sadistic grin. Maria roars with laughter at the girl’s attitude,
suggesting shock but also confident amusement.
The next day, Maria and Val begin rehearsing the play. Maria makes a mis-
take and has a crisis, saying there are too many memories of Susan Rosenberg,
the woman who played Helena opposite her, and the disgust she feels ‘as she
was slipping into the skin of this defeated woman’. Maria feels that everything
in the play is weighted to make Sigrid look good. Val reassures her, saying,
‘I didn’t read it like that; I see her arrogance, her cruelty, and Helena’s human-
ity; she’s able to talk about her own pain, it’s moving.’ Val acts as an interpreter
of the play, but also a coach and a conscience.
When Val wants to go to meet Burt the photographer, she worries about
whether Maria will be alright alone. Maria, in turn, worries that Val will be
safe on the mountain roads at night. Val says Maria is jealous, of her thoughts
and her time. Maria says that is not the case and that she is glad she has a boy-
friend, as there haven’t been that many and she burns through them pretty fast.
This relationship is increasingly blurred in terms of the boundaries between
employer and employee, co-workers, friends, even parent and child. When Val
goes out, Maria runs upstairs and watches her drive away. Then we see her
spending some time on her own. She writes ‘Maloja Snake’ on a pad. Then we
see her FaceTiming her agent complaining about the play, saying she cannot
play Helena, because, ‘I wanna stay Sigrid’; he says ‘Sigrid is twenty.’ She asks
her agent to get her out of it and he says it won’t be cheap.
As Val is driving home in the daybreak, accompanied by a Primal Scream
track, ‘Kowalski’, she pulls over to the roadside and vomits. She smokes,
and she’s distressed: she clearly has not had a good date. At this time, we

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are treated to a vision of the Maloja Snake. To the same incongruous music,
we see the cloud formation wind its way through the pass, the ‘head’ of
it rearing up, the ‘body’ moving through in a stately, stunning, formation
of natural wonder. This scene is for us alone. Val is hastening home, hun-
gover and miserable, Maria is undoubtedly asleep back at the house. So, as
film viewers, we are treated to this spectacle; and it works to take us out of
the hothouse of Maria and Val’s relationship, and the self-centredness of
Maria’s concerns, and shows us, and involves us, in this moment of exquisite
natural beauty. This is the film’s Murdochian ‘kestrel’ moment, and I will
return to discuss its role more fully at the end of this section. Back at the
house, we see Maria’s feet creeping down the stairs to see Val crashed out on
her bed.
The next day Maria and Val go to see Jo-Ann’s latest film, which is a
science fiction adventure. They go to a casino afterwards, have a few beers,
and discuss the film. Maria says she could feel her brain cells dying, and it’s
such a stupid character. Val says she’s fascinating, and begins to talk about
the character’s superpowers, at which Maria bursts out laughing. Val tries
to convince her of the merits of the film, but Maria can’t stop laughing at
Val’s argument, so she gives up. At the gambling table, they relate more like
a couple, as Val queries, ‘All of it?’ when Maria puts all her money down.
And then outside, as they drive away, Val crashes into a car: they are both
drunk, and Maria says, ‘Go, go, go!’ They make it home and Maria forces
Val to discuss Jo-Ann. She wants to know what she has to do to make Val
admire her more: clearly the comment still rankles, as a slight to Maria’s
ego. We might be reminded of Murdoch’s ‘damage to my prestige’ that she
is resentful about before she is taken out of herself by the kestrel (SGC:
369). Val says that you can’t be as accomplished as Maria is and still hold
on to the privileges of youth, to which Maria replies, ‘So I’m allowed to not
be old so long as I don’t wanna be young, is that it?’ Val says, ‘Yah, I don’t
know, I guess so, totally, well put’, and goes to bed. Maria wants to carry on
talking, and to hear about the date with Burt, but Val says she does not have
the energy. There is increasing evidence that Val is growing tired of the ego-
flattery that Maria demands. Maria seems to be clinging to her own past, the
past of the play and the role she played in it, and her stature as being at the
top of her profession. She does not want to admit that these are in the past
now, and seems to struggle with the idea of ageing and that older things, like
the Maloja Snake film, are of value.
The next day the pair walk in the Alps, rehearsing a scene. They sit in the
spot where Wilhelm killed himself. Their conversation has some echoes of
their relationship, crossing over between their job and their personal life, but
there is no suggestion of sexual attraction between Val and Maria. Val knows

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 FILM AND THE EXISTENTIAL HERO(INE) 87

the role and has brought sandwiches; she physically teases Maria with the
sandwiches by holding them out and pulling them back, like one might do
with a child. Maria complains that she doesn’t believe the scene; it is too theo-
retical and phoney. Val offers her interpretation, but Maria does not agree.
They fall asleep, and are woken by a goat! They need to head off, as the sun is
going down. Maria says she knows a steep way, Val disagrees, but Maria takes
no notice and keeps going. Relations now appear to have deteriorated between
the two. Val says,

You don’t have to keep me on if you find my ideas simplistic . . . If

you find my point of view uninteresting, I don’t know what I’m doing
here . . . you hate the play, you hate her, you don’t have to take it out on
me. I’m just doing my job.

They travel back on the bus without speaking. They have more rehearsals and
discussion of the character, but they continue to disagree, and Val has had
enough of Maria’s intensity; she says she has her own interpretation of the
play which is just confusing things. Maria asks her to stay and hugs her, but
she says no.
In the next scene, we see Jo-Ann and her boyfriend at a music recital in a
high-class hotel, before they meet up with Maria and Val. Jo-Ann says things
to Maria such as, ‘I don’t think you know how much this means to me’ and
‘I’m incredibly intimidated to take on your role’; she also says it is incredibly
brave of Maria to take on the role of Helena. Jo-Ann drinks chamomile tea,
is dressed in a demure outfit, and seems sweet and respectful. Maria is totally
won over by the flattery, and says to Val when they leave that she thought
they were really nice. Val observes, ‘They spent the whole evening flattering
you’, to which Maria says, ‘That has nothing to do with it’, and Val replies,
‘Of course not.’ However, Val has seen the obvious display, and Maria has
been blind to it, believing the flattery, because it is precisely what she wants
to hear.
The next morning they are up at daybreak in the snow to see the Snake. As
they walk, they argue about the meaning of the play, and Val says, ‘The text
is like an object; it’s going to change perspective depending on where you’re
standing.’ They climb up to see the Snake, but Val doesn’t appear to make it.
Maria is there on her own, straining her eyes looking for the Snake but she sees
just mist, then she thinks she sees the Snake, then she’s not sure. For the first
time in the film she calls her assistant by her name, and says, ‘What the hell are
you doing?’ She goes shouting after her, but Val has gone (Figure 4.1). Val and
Maria both miss the Snake. We, however, see the Snake’s majestic progression,
to the suitable crescendos of Pachelbel’s Canon.

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 88 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

Figure 4.1 Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) realises Val has left, in Clouds of Sils Maria (2014),
directed by Olivier Assayas.

The next intertitle announces it is the ‘EPILOGUE’, in London a few weeks

later. Maria meets Klaus, and there is a big drama because Jo-Ann’s boyfriend’s
wife has tried to kill herself. Klaus says he has had a long conversation with
Wilhelm’s widow, Rosa. He’s seen Wilhelm’s last texts, which puts a new spin on
the play, and he wants to update the play, ‘to think like Wilhelm’. Jo-Ann comes,
and Chris the boyfriend arrives too, so their celebrity scandal totally takes over
the meal and Klaus hurries them out to a waiting car. Their car is all set to leave
without Maria, it seems, but she runs round to the other side and gets in. She
is certainly the least important person at the scene. Next we see her back at her
hotel, with a new assistant running her schedule. Maria has the offer of a new
role – the lead – of a hybrid, set in the twenty-third century. Surprisingly, Maria
says she’s interested. The new assistant offers to rehearse with her. She says of the
play’s new scenes – which she’s had for two weeks – that she wants to keep them
spontaneous. It’s how she prepared twenty years ago as Sigrid: ‘If he asks you, tell
him I think they’re very good.’ This suggests he has not asked Maria what she
thinks of them, because it does not matter to him.
At the theatre, Maria speaks to Jo-Ann and asks her to pause for a second
in the play at a certain point, and Jo-Ann replies, brutally and with relish, ‘No
one gives a fuck about Helena at this point right? I mean it’s pretty clear to me
this poor woman’s all washed up, I mean your character, not you . . . I think
they want what comes next.’ Maria says, ‘I think I’m lost in my memories . . .
you think you’ve forgotten your old habits, but they come back . . . I have to
break them.’ Jo-Ann says patronisingly, ‘I guess you do’, in a way that shows
she really doesn’t care at all. She has shown herself to be far more like the girl
in the online press conference than the demure flatterer at the hotel meeting.
In her dressing room, Maria sees the new director about the part of the
hybrid. She says to him, ‘When I read it I imagined someone much younger,

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 FILM AND THE EXISTENTIAL HERO(INE) 89

maybe me younger, but you’re seeing me in movies that were made years
ago – I’ve changed.’ He says of the character, ‘She has no age, or, she’s every
age at once, like all of us.’ Maria says, ‘Can I be frank – I was thinking about
Jo-Ann – she’s modern’. The director says his character isn’t modern, but
outside time, and that he doesn’t like his era. Again, the words of professional
flattery seem likely to work on Maria.
The final scene of the film is as the play is about to start, with Maria sit-
ting in her on-stage office as Helena. She sits still, breathing, waiting to start.
Maria arrives at the end of the film in some ways in a different state from what
she was at the beginning, being able to make comments about her age and
perspective with some insight, but it is hard to tell how much she has changed.
She has a new assistant, a replacement Val, and she appears to be acquies-
cent with her colleagues. Jo-Ann has confronted Maria with her lack of respect
for Helena, and by extension Maria herself, saying, ‘They want what comes
next’ – which is her, Jo-Ann. Because we see Maria in character as Helena
in the final shot of the film, it is difficult to assess her state of mind, but we
see from her conversation in her dressing room with the new director that
she realises she has changed. The progress of the film, and Maria’s journey,
recalls Murdoch’s analysis of Sartre’s heroes. Murdoch writes, ‘Sartre takes
his heroes up to the point of insight, realisation, despair – and there he leaves
them. They may fall back, but they do not know how to go on’ (SRR: 60).
What sort of journey has Maria been on during the film? Has she deepened
her vision and pierced the veil of her fat relentless ego? On top of the mountain
at Maloja Pass, crying out for Val, Maria is in a state of despair, and the film
leaves her there, for that section. She is looking for the Snake but cannot see
it. She has been oblivious to the presence of Val to the extent that she does not
even realise that she has left her. Maria is an image of isolated self-absorption:
with little insight into her own vanity and without the ability to pay attention
to others. Her love for Wilhelm remains focused on the role he played in her
life, choosing her for the role of Sigrid, setting up her career, and her distaste at
playing Helena reflects her unwillingness to confront ageing and vulnerability.
Her pique at Val’s admiration for Jo-Ann reveals her competitiveness and her
jealousy, and her response to Jo-Ann’s flattery reveals her willingness to be con-
soled. Maria is Murdoch’s description of a Sartrean hero(ine): ‘The individual
is the centre, but a solipsistic centre. He has a dream of human companionship,
but never the experience. He touches others at the fingertips’ (SRR: 63). The
companionship Maria has with Wilhelm is like a dream, and that with Val is
like touching at the fingertips. There seems to be a bond with Rosa, but she
says she may not come to London to see the play, and also shows Wilhelm’s last
texts to Klaus, not Maria. So that relationship is not as close as perhaps Maria
dreams it is. The scene where they all watch the film of the Maloja Snake is
telling, as Rosa is sharing this favourite of Wilhelm’s with Maria, who can only

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comment upon the distancing effect of the black and white film, rather than
the majestic, timeless majesty of the Snake, or the fact that Wilhelm loved
it so much. This suggests her concern remains preoccupied with a dislike of
‘old things’ and an inability to see beyond her own discomfort and interrupted
vision. So, Maria does ‘fall back’ and ‘go on’, unlike Murdoch’s expectation of
a Sartrean hero, but there is little evidence that she knows how to do so differ-
ently. It has taken an offensive and dismissive insult spoken directly to her face
by the current incarnation of her younger self to make her show some humility
about needing to break old habits: but whether she will, or whether she can, is
left to be explored beyond the film’s closure.

A F R E E D O M T O C H O O S E A N D A C T D I F F E R E N T LY : O N C E
U P O N A T I M E I N A NA T O L I A

This is a film that demands effort and attention from the viewer, showing us
scenes where unselfing does not occur, and where egocentric solipsism reigns.
The film also demands that we pay attention to the plight of another, Dr Cemal
(Muhammet Uzuner), and develop a moral view that strives to understand the
decision that he takes. The film begins with a direct focus on obscured vision:
looking through a window onto the life of others, perhaps in a cell, certainly a
scruffy room. A television casts a blue light in the corner, traditional Turkish
music can be discerned, three men clink glasses and eat together, drinking raki.
It looks convivial. In fact this encounter will end in the murder of one of the
men, and we next see the hunt for the body.
A long-distance establishing shot shows a still landscape interrupted by
looming car headlights, glowing like bulbs on a string, or glow-worms. The
cars pull up, as we will see them do several times over the course of the next
three hours, and thus begins the challenging, repetitive search in this barren,
unforgiving and featureless landscape for the site where the killer has buried
the body of the man he killed. The film is a police procedural, but not a who-
dunit – we know this from the outset – rather it is more of a ‘wheredunnit’.
Along the way, the group of men – for on the surface the film is almost exclu-
sively about men – negotiate their roles in the drama, and disclose their visions
and values.
The scenes inside the car establish the men’s roles and places in the systems
of local law enforcement and civil service. There are four men involved in the
conversation, in the course of their duties, two in the front, and two in the back.
Their tone is quite light and workaday; but between them on the back seat is
the gaunt criminal, the killer Kenan (Firat Tanis), hardly able to keep his eyes
open with exhaustion and horror. He has dark circles, a gash on his face, and
sits hunched and haunted. The camera moves in slowly, almost imperceptibly,

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 FILM AND THE EXISTENTIAL HERO(INE) 91

on this figure, as he struggles to stay awake, while the others talk about cheese
and yoghurt, and possible prostate problems, and how often they urinate.
It emerges that Kenan cannot remember where he left the body because he
was drunk and also because the landscape is so featureless, especially at night.
The quiet, observing, Dr Cemal is emerging as a slightly separate character.
He smiles along with the chit-chat, but stays behind the group at the scenes
where they look for the body. He has authority on the medical matters clearly,
and the others are identified as the prosecutor, Nusret (Taner Birsal), as well
as the policeman, Commissar Naci (Yilmaz Erdogan), local police and others
from the village, and the suspects. This is a gruesome journey, but there is
humour here too. When the policeman’s phone rings, his ringtone is the theme
from Love Story, and on the other end is his angry wife shouting at him, who
he calls ‘sweetie’. There is also banality, interspersed with moments that might
appear surreal or poetic. As Dr Cemal urinates next to a rock, there is a light-
ning flash that illuminates a vast face carved in the stone right next to him. It is
an incredibly surprising moment, which shocks Cemal and us, and its meaning
is unclear. Is the suggestion that with light you see what is really there? Or that
the past is always present in your life and will outlive you? The troop certainly
contemplate their place in time on their journey, comparing themselves with
Solomon who lived for 750 years, considering the recurrence of the rain, and
reflecting on how short life is. And they discuss how things change, including
the idea that these events with which they are now concerned will become a
story, saying, ‘You can tell it like a fairy tale’ (consistent with the film’s title).
There are intimations, therefore, that this is a story for the ages, not just of this
particular time and place.
There are slow-moving shots of extreme long-distance beauty, such as when
a train of lights passes across the desert, and exquisitely pictorial shots of the
vast landscape; but there are also small moments of contemplation seemingly
unrelated to the film’s main action. A beautiful apple rolls off a tree, bounces
down the hill, and floats along a stream, bobbing, then joins others caught up
on the rocks that are simply rotting. Is this an overdetermined metaphor? It is
certainly a shot that commands attention and it takes us out of the immediate
situation. Perhaps is it a comment on randomness, or the fate of an individ-
ual; perhaps it is an observation on loss of hope, or that everything is heading
towards death as soon as it is born.
The party stops in a village overnight and shares dinner with the locals,
hearing about the villagers’ problems, their worries about money, and mar-
riages. The mayor of the village has a young daughter, who silently serves the
men tea. She has a profound effect on each of the men, variously elicited by
her youth, her proximity, her silence and her beauty. This is an uncomfortable
and telling sequence, drawing attention to the repression and exploitation of
this young woman. As the prosecutor says to the doctor: ‘She’ll fade away in

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this godforsaken place’ – like the apple perhaps? Meanwhile, Commissar Naci
is effectively torturing Kenan by sleep deprivation. This whirling windy little
village takes on the appearance of an existential maelstrom, or a long dark
night of the soul. Prosecutor Nusret tells Dr Cemal a story about a woman
he knew who predicted when she was going to die. He spent hours, he says,
trying to get to the bottom of why ‘the gorgeous woman’ who had predicted
her death did die when she said she would. This supports the idea of women
as mystical, tragic and dangerous, which the film projects. The doctor asks
rational, scientific questions: ‘Why was there not an autopsy? No one dies
because they say they will.’ The prosecutor says there was nothing suspicious,
so ‘Why carve up a beautiful young woman for no reason?’ This story will be
returned to later.
The next morning they discover the body, and now everybody starts to play
the role they are employed to: practicality reigns. The prosecutor observes,
photographs are taken, they dig up the body, which has been hogtied. Naci
becomes angry with Kenan, and calls him a ‘sadistic shit’. He shouts at Kenan
that he is not human, and that he deserves to be tied up like the body. Dr Cemal
is called upon to comment for the crime scene report. The prosecutor says the
corpse looks like Clark Gable. He looks up and giggles, others join in, and he
says to the clerk, ‘Abidin, you got that?’ The clerk says, ‘You know you look
a bit like Clark Gable, Mr Prosecutor?’, and the prosecutor relays how he was
called Clark at college. He loves this recollection, and strokes his moustache,
indicative of his moment of vanity. This is one of the moments that, as Florence
Jacobowitz writes, ‘evidences the filmmaker’s aesthetic of humanist art’ (2012:
61). Commissar Naci says, ‘Whenever you find a can of worms, look for a
woman’, and Dr Cemal looks at him disbelievingly. However, it emerges that
the altercation leading to death happened because Kenan, the killer, is the real
father of the victim’s son. This is the revelation that leads to change in the
moral picture of Dr Cemal’s world.
They get back to town and as they arrive there is some disorder. Kenan
sees a woman and a boy, who throws a stone at Kenan’s face. This is Kenan’s
son, who believes Kenan has just killed his father, Yasar. The boy’s face is a
picture of rage and pain, and his mother puts her arm around him, looking
Kenan in the eyes. We then move away from the main business of the film, to
spend some time with Dr Cemal in his office. He turns on his computer, and
images fill the film screen: his ex-wife, him as a student with friends, as a boy
by the sea, then we see that he is looking at a bundle of photographs of the
people in his life. He looks out of the window at a cat, foraging around near
a bin, then he gets up to go over to the wardrobe. He looks up, and suddenly
looks us straight in the eye. The film breaks the fourth wall, in a direct and
stunning facial close-up. This is a gripping connection with this character
and his contemplations. He is looking directly at us, and he frowns slightly

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 FILM AND THE EXISTENTIAL HERO(INE) 93

Figure 4.2 Dr Cemal (Muhammet Uzuner) looks us straight in the eye, in Once Upon a Time
in Anatolia (2011), directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan.

(Figure 4.2). What does he see? He has seen his life captured in a few images,
moments, relationships. The look at us challenges us to think about his lot,
but also ours: what constitutes our life, what do we value?
Naci comes in for a prescription for his son, and reiterates that it looks like
Kenan is the boy’s father. He says to Cemal, ‘It’s the kids that suffer in the end.
The kids pay for the sins of the adults.’ Cemal goes to a hammam, wiping his
eyes, and peering through the steam. He watches people in the village, sweeping
the street, passing the houses. He sees smoke coming from a chimney, indicative
of domestic activity, and birds nesting in a gutter: he pays attention to the world
around him and is moved by it. He seems to have status among the locals, and
he speaks to some in a café about the case. This sequence has conveyed Cemal’s
reflection upon the case, his efforts to see clearly, to ‘really look’, and the report
he must file. Back at the hospital, he peeks in the kitchen and sees the boy eating,
so the chef has given him breakfast. Yasar’s wife is sitting outside in the corridor,
and her foot is bouncing with agitation: she is on edge, but nobody speaks to her
other than to get her to identify the body as her late husband. So what we are
seeing here is aligned with Cemal’s perception of the situation.
The impending autopsy weighs very heavily on Dr Cemal and Nusret:
but so does the death of ‘the gorgeous woman’ whom the prosecutor spoke
of earlier in the village. Nusret cannot believe how ‘sceptical’ the doctor is,
but it emerges, as the story develops, that the woman had caught her husband
with another woman. Nusret asks, ‘Would a person kill themselves to punish
another person?’ Dr Cemal replies, ‘Aren’t most suicides to punish another?’
The prosecutor says calmly, ‘Bravo. That’s what I thought.’ It was, of course,
Prosecutor Nusret’s wife, and this conclusion makes him weep. He has been
consoling himself with the idea that these events were mystical: that the woman

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possessed some special metaphysical power to ensure her death at the hour she
predicted. In fact, Dr Cemal has confronted him with the probability of his
wife’s suicide. Their world views were opposed, like Murdoch’s existential and
mystical heroes. The prosecutor’s vision of his own role in his wife’s suicide is
still obscured, as he says the infidelity was nothing, and that ‘some women can
be very ruthless’. The film has, however, drawn attention to his process of self-
delusion, his role in the harm done to another and his refusal to accept blame
for the suicide of his wife. But the film is not suggesting that the scientific,
medical mindset has all the answers.
The final sequence of events in the film concerns the autopsy. The morti-
cian complains about his equipment, saying he has recently seen another hos-
pital that has a fabulous morgue with great autopsy instruments, such as an
electric rechargeable saw. This demonstrates his workmanlike view on matters
and lack of emotional investment in the job at hand. They begin the dissec-
tion of Yasar’s body. They cut off his clothes, which are described in complete
detail. He is not wearing underpants, and the mortician and the clerk crack
a joke about him being ‘ready for action’, but Dr Cemal expresses his disap-
proval. The sounds of the body being dissected are viscerally realistic, with
loud cracking and squelching noises. There is intense medical detail concern-
ing the process, the thorax, taking the heart out, and then they find dirt in the
windpipe. This suggests he was buried alive.
The doctor looks out of the window and considers his report. He says, ‘No
abnormalilties.’ The mortician queries him, and exchanges a look with the
clerk, but Dr Cemal insists. They move on to dissect the stomach, and blood
spurts onto the doctor’s face. He is thereby affected by the dead man’s state
directly and physically. He watches the boy out of the window, kicking a ball
back to other children in the playground, with Yasar’s blood on his face, who
the boy assumes to have been his father. He studies the boy, contemplating his
future as he walks away and starts to run, and the doctor appears confident
he has done the right thing. The final shot ends on the window catch – open
– a permeable boundary between the boy and Dr Cemal. The story is unfin-
ished. But we finish the film transformed by the impact of Dr Cemal’s choice.
Its effects reach into the future. As things stand, his report will not lengthen
Kenan’s sentence for murder with the aggravating factor of this even greater
sadistic act; he has prevented making the boy’s future even more difficult by
knowing – as he surely would – either that the man he believes to be his father
suffered so terribly, or that his real father committed such a sadistic murder.
That detail – the burying alive – will be omitted from the boy’s future, and
Cemal has taken that decision upon himself.
As Florence Jacobowitz writes, ‘The film demonstrates that codes cannot
always perfectly accommodate human frailties. Life is not clear cut and a certain

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 FILM AND THE EXISTENTIAL HERO(INE) 95

amount of generosity and empathy is necessary to temper the rigidities of every

system’ (2012: 59). There are other such moments where Kenan is shown kind-
ness, offered a cigarette or a share of food, and given tea by the young woman,
which leads to his breakdown and the revelations about the paternity of his son
and what led up to the murder. But the significance of Cemal’s decision is that
he reaches beyond science, duty and procedure to make a moral decision on the
part of another.
Murdoch cites the enemies of love as social convention and neurosis
(S&G: 216). The characters in Anatolia show both of these through their
procedures, hierarchy and self-delusion. The film, however, does not. As
Nancy E. Snow writes,

When we look intelligently at art . . . we learn to focus and direct our gaze
in ways that heighten sensitivities. We become more aware of the nuances
of good and evil, of human weakness and strength, and one hopes, our
attention becomes informed and guided by compassion. Murdoch, after
all, thought that moral refinement of attention resulted in a ‘loving’ gaze,
a gaze which scrutinized the world with kindness. (2013: 21)

The implications of this notion of loving attention for the film are not only
a deeper understanding and appreciation of the form and style of the film,
the need for humanism and realism in the unfolding of the worlds of these
various characters, but also a fuller understanding of what leads Cemal to
decide to lie, and perhaps a broader consideration, beyond the film, of cir-
cumstances in which telling the truth is not the right thing to do. We are
left to assess this moral decision, made in the film’s closing sequence, which
comes at the end of a lengthy filmic journey through the moral visions of
several men. The film operates as Murdochian moral realism, not only as
art, on-screen, as Cemal feels compelled to act in breach of his professional
codes of conduct, but also as an exercise in unselfing for us as we are com-
pelled to recognise Cemal as a centre of moral meaning, and to see the world
that he comes to see. The film denies us consolation and fantasy, and acts as
a transformative ethical experience through its challenge to pay attention to
Cemal’s inner life. It is also an instance, perhaps, of true vision occasioning
right conduct. When Cemal arrived at the moment of choice, the quality of
his attention had determined the nature of the act. This is conveyed by the
measured, contemplative character of Cemal, the time taken to reflect upon
the case and his life, and the inclination towards thought for others, be it
Kenan, Nusret or the boy. In the next film, however, it is the quality of the
protagonist’s self-centred attention that leads him to make a different sort of
decision, for more questionable reasons.

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A N A N X I O U S , S E L F - P R E O C C U P I E D , FA L S I F Y I N G V E I L :
G R A D UA T I O N

The film begins with an establishing shot of an austere Romanian housing estate,
and then inside a family apartment. A brick comes crashing through the window,
and a man emerges from the right of the frame with his toothbrush in hand. He
goes out of the flat to see who did it, but finds nobody. The man, Romeo Aldea
(Adrian Titieni) lives with his wife, who appears to be unwell, and his daughter.
He drives his daughter Eliza (Maria Dragus) to college, and at one spot on the
journey he hoots his car horn a couple of times, for no apparent reason, but
which we later realise is a signal to his mistress, Sandra (Malina Manovici).
As Romeo and Sandra caress on the bed, it appears that she may have been
a patient of his: he looks at her scars and says that one has faded, and she says,
‘Is this standard treatment?’ He gets a telephone call to tell him that Eliza has
been attacked. We see that he is a doctor at the hospital, and that his wife,
Magda (Lia Bugnar) seems mentally foggy; she is also clearly suspicious of
Romeo’s whereabouts. Colleagues at the hospital are very helpful regarding
calling his ‘friend in the police’, asking about Eliza’s bank cards, and trying to
help. Magda asks the staff to leave them alone as she holds Eliza tightly and
comfortingly. In the corridor, Romeo and Magda sit far apart, so clearly they
are not close to each other and do not comfort each other. The outcome of the
assault is that Eliza has sprained her wrist. The examining doctor says that no
semen was found, as it seems the assailant did not get an erection. This men-
tions for the first time that the assault was an attempted rape. The doctor tells
her father that she has lost her virginity, and ‘not recently’.
In the next scene, Eliza is with her father at the police station, looking at
photographs of suspects. Her statement is taken but the policeman dictates
it for her. He says that a man held a knife to her throat, and said he would
kill her if she did not have sexual intercourse with him. The chief inspector
(Vlad Ivanov) takes her father out, saying, ‘She’s a grown up’, and then says
to him, ‘Don’t worry we’ll catch him.’ The father says, ‘Do you think that’s
all I care about?’ and the police say, ‘Well that’s all we can do.’ The father
wants Eliza to get to Cambridge University no matter what happens. He says
it is more civilised ‘there’ – in the UK – and that ‘Stuff like this happens all
the time here.’
The police artist who is called in to do the photofit sketch of the attacker
asks whether the doctor could put a word in for his godfather, Vice-Mayor
Bulai, at the hospital. Bulai needs a liver transplant, there is a national waiting
list, and the chief inspector asks Romeo to call a man in the ministry to ‘bump
his name up the list’. The chief inspector says he’ll die if the doctor doesn’t
help, and that his godfather, Vice-Mayor Bulai, has always helped everybody.
So the doctor says he’ll see what he can do.

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He brings Eliza home from hospital in the car. Eliza is wondering who
broke their window, and then the car hits a wild dog, who seems to run off, but
Eliza is shaken up and breathes heavily. There seem to be risks and dangers
all around them. When a workman comes to change the locks on their apart-
ment door, the man begins to talk casually about his cousin who was raped,
but Romeo stops him saying, ‘No, no, no, my daughter was not raped she was
assaulted.’ The doctor tapes up the broken window with some brown paper
and tape. He carefully peels Eliza an apple, cuts it into slices, and takes it into
her bedroom. Her mother is showering her. He looks, and exchanges a look
with his wife, but leaves the room. He asks Magda whether she knew Eliza
was no longer a virgin, and the mother says she had an idea, because she’s
her mother. They discuss the motorcycle instructor who Eliza is seeing and
disagree over his suitability as a boyfriend. Magda says that ‘Nowadays you
don’t have to marry the first boy you hold hands with’, and Romeo snipes, ‘As
if I was your first’, to which Magda replies, ‘Relax, I wasn’t thinking about
you. Not everything is about you.’ This is a bitter exchange, but issued with-
out temper. Magda is wan, stooped and seems exhausted. Romeo refers to
the assault as an accident, as if he finds the sexual element of the assault dif-
ficult. His main concern, it seems, is that she should still sit her examinations,
‘and that’s final’. Magda says it is time to let Eliza decide. The family is reel-
ing from this trauma, but its interrelationships are clearly fraught anyway.
Romeo says he will try to get the exam postponed as he is not sure if she can
write. That night, he hears Eliza crying in her room, and he goes in and holds
her. There is clear tenderness and love between father and daughter, but the
family is also in crisis.
In the morning the windscreen wipers have been pulled up on his wind-
screen. Taking Eliza to school again in his car, he hoots his horn at the same
spot again, and a cut to Eliza’s disapproving face shows that she suspects what
is going on. At the school, the invigilators object to her wearing her wrist cast
in case of fraud, but the father persuades the headmaster to let her in. Romeo
visits his elderly sick mother, and reassures her about her medications. They
discuss Eliza and she makes clear she does not want Eliza to leave to go to
university but rather she wants her to stay in Cluj. She also wants him to clear
grass from his father’s grave and pour concrete to make a proper grave. He
has said he will before, but he forgot. A picture is emerging of a professional
man whose private life is a complicated entanglement of domestic relationships
and obligations, most of which, it seems, he struggles to fulfil. His mistress
Sandra, who is the English teacher at Eliza’s school, offers support to Romeo
over Eliza’s attack, but also informs him that her period is six days late. Romeo
responds calmly, but this is clearly a further complication in his private life.
When Eliza is out of her examination she says that she did what she could but
did not have time to finish.

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As the risk to Eliza’s examination success becomes clearer, Romeo decides

he must take action. He goes to see the chief inspector, who calls Vice-Mayor
Bulai, and says, ‘My friend put in a good word about the transplant and we’re
hoping for a positive answer.’ He asks Bulai to help the doctor, and, noting the
doctor’s hesitancy, says, ‘Romeo it’s for your child.’ This is now a clear insight
into the corruption and compromises in officialdom in this town. Romeo is
getting pulled in by the chief inspector, as his needs in relation to his daughter
become greater.
Romeo sits in the playground, deep in thought, then goes to see Bulai, and
tells him the facts about the difficult liver transplant operation he needs. Bulai
offers Romeo money, but he refuses. Bulai says, ‘Come on doctor surely you
don’t live off your salary?’ Then he says to Romeo, ‘I hope you don’t think you
owe me for helping your daughter.’ Bulai tells Romeo that he called the exam
chief, and that he understands. Bulai helped the man once when his wife lost
her job, and ‘he’s been grateful to me ever since’. He says, ‘People should help
each other.’ This is seeming more and more like a corrupt system of quid pro
quo, where officialdom runs on a system of mutual favours.
Romeo sees Sandra and asks if Eliza could have longer to write her answer
in the next examination, but she says not really. Romeo sees her son, Matei,
and it is now confirmed that Romeo was the doctor who operated on her after
her accident. This is an ethically questionable basis for a relationship, and
again contributes to the picture that is developing of a lifestyle and environ-
ment that is less than morally scrupulous. Romeo goes to see Eliza’s examiner
and discusses how the paper grading will work, and offers to pay if they will
help Eliza. The examiner says nothing other than that, ‘Mr Bulai helped me,
I help you that’s all.’ But the deceit has to involve Eliza: she needs to identify
her paper by making a mark on it, so they know it is hers: she has to cross out
three words from the bottom line. Romeo clearly looks disturbed by this, and
the teacher says that if the doctor has any doubts he should say so now – ‘This
can only work on trust.’ Then Romeo looks at the examiner and says, ‘I don’t
do such things’, and the examiner says, neither does he, he does not doubt it.
Romeo leaves, but stops to look for the body of the dog he thinks he hit with
his car the other night. During his search, he is overcome with emotion, and
bursts into tears.
Back at the flat, Romeo has raised the matter with Magda, who says, ‘No –
that’s not the path I want Eliza to take in life’ and she challenges Romeo, ‘You
know in your heart of hearts it isn’t right.’ They discuss the rights and wrongs
of leaving Cluj, and cheating, and whether how you get away matters as well
as where you go. Romeo is desperate for Eliza to leave Cluj and to go to Cam-
bridge. It is increasingly consuming him, and he is convinced that it is best for
her. So he has the conversation with her that he needs to. He tells Eliza that,

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 FILM AND THE EXISTENTIAL HERO(INE) 99

‘In 1991 your mother and I decided to move back, we thought we’d change,
we thought we’d move mountains; we didn’t move anything.’ He is revealing
that his fears for her are based on their disappointments. He tells Eliza what
he wants her to do, calling it ‘a precaution for tomorrow’s exam’. He says,
‘Sometimes in life it’s the result that counts. We raised you to always be hon-
est: but this is the world we live in, and sometimes we need to fight using their
weapons.’ She turns away from him, her face wrought with disappointment.
He confronts her with one of her deceits. He says to her, ‘You can smoke – I
know you have some there.’
The next morning, his car window is actually broken. So they drive to
school with the window pushed out. As he beeps his horn as usual, for the first
time Eliza asks him why he always beeps at a certain place, even when there
are no cars. He lies to her. He says, ‘Just to make sure’ when it is plainly a sig-
nal to alert his girlfriend. The fact that Eliza asked him about this, suggesting
she knows full well what is going on, follows directly from their conversation
the night before. Now he has asked her to lie, she feels able to challenge him
about his lies. Romeo asks her if she has water and snacks, she sighs no; it is
he who is obsessed with this exam and her leaving Cluj. He tells her to eat
because ‘it helps the brain’. At the gate of the school, again he appears to be
the only parent there. He says good luck and take care but she does not look
back at him.
Romeo then goes to see the CCTV footage of the assault. In the ‘law of the
jungle’ the policeman’s brother is a funeral director who pays ambulance driv-
ers to tip him off to fatal accidents. Bulai comes in to the hospital because he
has to have another operation to remove polyps. He wants to pay Romeo with a
pile of notes, but Romeo won’t accept it. Bulai can see that Romeo is troubled
by what he has arranged for Eliza, and says to him, ‘But if you do something
earnestly, with all your heart, you don’t need to doubt it.’ Romeo says, ‘You
think so?’ As Romeo is waiting for Eliza after the exam, he sees Marius (Rares
Andrici), the motorbike instructor and Eliza’s boyfriend. They talk about how
he cheated at the sports college in his finals, and Marius takes delight in his
own dishonesty. Romeo asks Marius about the day of the attack, saying that
somebody called the police on a pre-paid SIM card. Marius seems to know
nothing. Eliza emerges, saying that the exam went well and she goes off with
Marius on his motorbike. Romeo revisits the scene of the attack and compares
it with photographs, then goes to his girlfriend’s flat for dinner. Sandra asks
him for help with finding a speech therapist for her son, Matei, and Romeo
does not help her. He says he can help when the issues with Eliza are sorted
out, but Sandra says it will be too late then. She is never a priority for him
and needs to make some decisions because ‘we can’t keep up this uncertainty’.
There is a ring at the door, and it is Eliza. She has come to get him because

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 100 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

Figure 4.3 Eliza (Maria Dragus) and Romeo (Adrian Titieni) have a frank conversation, in
Graduation (2016), directed by Cristian Mungiu.

‘grandma collapsed’. In a scene of high tension and activity, with a myriad of

sounds, from the radio, ringing telephones, neighbours and mobile phones,
everyone pulls together – Romeo, Marius, Eliza, a neighbour – and grandma
comes round from her fainting spell. Eliza asks her father to talk to her mother.
Clearly the request over the examination has pushed her beyond tolerating the
impasse that her family has reached. Romeo asks, ‘Can you imagine what we
had to do so you could live like this?’, but Eliza responds, ‘You shouldn’t have
done it if it wasn’t right.’ And Eliza tells him, ‘I don’t want to go to the UK any
more; I want to stay here with Marius.’ Despite his determined efforts, she is
rejecting his plan (Figure 4.3).
He goes home to Magda, and tells her about what happened tonight with
his mother and Eliza. Then he tells her about his girlfriend, Sandra. Magda
knows: but Romeo explains that he promised Eliza he would talk to her.
Magda says, ‘You shouldn’t have influenced her grade; after that, what does
all we taught her count for?’ She says that she will follow Eliza wherever
she goes, and tells him he has to move out: ‘You stop sleeping here from
tonight.’
The next morning, when he arrives at the hospital, there are prosecutors
waiting for him, with a warrant for Bulai. The prosecutors are clearly suspi-
cious of the doctor, and they say to him insinuating, entrapping homilies, such
as ‘You see a mote in your brother’s eye but not the beam in your own.’ They
say, ‘You have the reputation for being an honest doctor but everyone has a
weak spot’ and that ‘He who persists in illegality will probably have to pay for
it.’ They say that things could be unpleasant for him and his daughter. Romeo
refuses to let them speak to Bulai, and by now we are not sure if it is genuinely
because of concern for his patient’s health or because he is afraid for himself.

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 FILM AND THE EXISTENTIAL HERO(INE) 101

He goes to see the chief inspector, who tells him, ‘You need your stories to
match’, but Romeo won’t involve his daughter. The police want to find out
something about the prosecutors to ‘handle them’. So the mesh of corruption
is within the criminal justice system as well.
Romeo is becoming increasingly nervous, and now thinks someone is fol-
lowing him. He confronts Marius about Eliza’s assault, and accuses him of
being there, watching and doing nothing. He says he has identified Marius
from the screen grab and forbids him from seeing Eliza again. They fight and
Romeo ends up on the floor. Back at the flat, Magda asks him to hand over his
keys and to call first before he comes round. He asks his wife for forgiveness,
and asks how they have become such enemies, but Magda only cries. So now,
his daughter won’t speak to him, his wife sends him away, his job is under
threat and his girlfriend is possibly pregnant. He goes to see the examiner and
tells him a prosecutor came. The examiner says he did not find Eliza’s paper,
so clearly she didn’t mark it.
Romeo and Eliza go to the line-up at the police station, which is traumatic
for Eliza and the language the suspects are asked to repeat is brutal. She says
her attacker is not there. Afterwards, she and Romeo have a frank conversation.
She asks him how he can have thought that Marius would not have defended
her, and Romeo challenges her about not marking the paper. Eliza replies,
‘You don’t have to worry; I did what I thought was best.’ Ultimately, Romeo is
resigned, and confesses, ‘I’m glad you used your own head to decide. Do what
you think is best.’
By this stage, Romeo is like a wandering, raging and frustrated soul. His
mobile phone rings all the time, and we do not know if it is work, Sandra,
his mother, the prosecutors – it could be any of them, he has so many people
drawing on his time. He sees a man from the line-up on the roadside and gets
off the bus and follows him. Romeo looks for him but does not find him, and
one wonders what he would have done if he had. He goes to Sandra’s, to say
that he has found Matei a speech therapist. In the park Matei throws stones
at another child and is scolded. When he asks Romeo how he should have
behaved, given the other child should have waited his turn, Romeo replies ‘It’s
complicated – your mother will explain’: Romeo is not in a position to tell the
boy how to behave.
Romeo has to go to work and so takes Matei with him to the hospital and
tells him to wait in his office. Monsieur Bulai has had a heart attack. His
nurse assistant seems unable to look at him, her face displaying disgust or
disappointment, presumably because of the persistent presence of the pros-
ecutors or the neglect of Bulai. He speaks to Mr Bulai’s wife, who gives him
the wad of money that her husband wanted him to have. Also the prosecutors
are there to speak to him. He says to them, ‘Let’s keep the kids out of it’, and

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they reply, ‘Sure, we’ll see.’ He collects Matei and they go to Eliza’s school.
There are images in murals on the school walls of healthy clever children at
their books. The contrast with the grim reality of Eliza’s life in Cluj is appar-
ent. Matei sees an empty classroom, but then Sandra comes in and hugs him.
From her countenance, it seems she may have had an abortion while Romeo
looked after Matei.
Eliza tells Romeo that they let her write longer in the exam because she
started crying, so she did not need to do anything else such as mark her
paper. She joyfully joins her fellow students, and Romeo takes a graduation
picture. Many questions are left unanswered, and so what do these loose
ends mean? The fact that Eliza started crying may mean that she found her
own way of getting more time in the exam without involving her father in
any more dishonesty; whether or not the tears were genuine is impossible
to know. However, isn’t it fair in terms of natural justice that Eliza should
have been given some advantage as a result of the assault on her so close to
the exam?
Romeo thinks he is acting in his daughter’s best interests, and is pre-
pared to do so even if it involves compromises that affect his professional
career and liability to prosecution. If we think about his preparedness for
the choice he makes to engage in a moral and legal compromise it is pos-
sible to argue that his life is an array of compromises, from dishonesty to his
wife, lack of commitment to his girlfriend, failure to honour his mother’s
wishes about his father’s grave and failing to be honest with his daughter.
He is a different example from Dr Cemal of Murdoch’s proposal that ‘by the
time the moment of choice has arrived the quality of attention has probably
determined the nature of the act’ (OGG: 354). For Romeo, the background
of his childhood, marriage, country and profession affect his values and his
fears: he wants a better life for his daughter. We are given the opportunity
across the film to see how Romeo’s moral world is constructed, and the film
enables us to understand his fear for Eliza, but perhaps we baulk at his insis-
tence that she do so well in her examinations at all costs: particularly if it is
not what she, her mother or her grandmother want for her. By contrast, we
are given only a few moments of focus on Dr Cemal’s inner life, and these
are sufficient to convey that his action to conceal the truth is for the sake of
the boy’s future. He too has reflected on his life, but briefly; he has reflected
more upon the price children pay for the sins of the adults. In terms of
motivation, a Murdochian analysis would suggest that Romeo is motivated
by his desire to achieve what he wants for his daughter, whereas Cemal is
motivated by the particular circumstances of this boy to do what he consid-
ers to be the right thing, or something good. What Murdoch means by ‘the
Good’, capital G, in relation to moral life and love, is what I will now move
on to consider.

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NOTES

1. For an examination of Murdoch’s critique of consciousness in existentialism and linguistic

behaviourism, see Maria Antonaccio’s book Picturing the Human (2000), in particular
Chapter 3.
2. Weil focuses on attention in Gravity and Grace (2002b). For a clear account of her
thinking, see Mario Von Der Ruhr (2006).
3. The film is called Das Wolkenphanomen von Maloja, made by Arnold Fanck in 1924,
and is available on YouTube: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x51riLabuus> (last
accessed 20 December 2018).

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 CHAPTER 5

Film, Love and Goodness

How is one to connect the realism which must involve a clear-eyed

contemplation of the misery and evil of the world with a sense of an
uncorrupted good without the latter idea becoming the merest consola-
tory dream? (I think this puts a central problem in moral philosophy.)
(OGG: 349)

If one is going to speak of great art as ‘evidence’, is not ordinary human

love an even more striking evidence of a transcendent principle of good?
(OGG: 361)

The sovereign Good is not an empty receptacle into which the arbitrary
will places objects of its choice. It is something which we all experience
as a creative force. This is metaphysics, which sets up a picture which it
then offers as an appeal to us all to see if we cannot find just this in our
deepest experience. (MGM: 507)

God does not and cannot exist. But what led us to conceive of him does
exist and is constantly experienced and pictured. That is, it is real as an
Idea, and is also incarnate in knowledge and work and love. (MGM: 508)

I n the previous chapters, I have explored some fundamental elements of the

relationship between Murdoch’s philosophy and cinema: film as ‘the right
type’ of art; film as a moral fable; and film featuring Murdochian protago-
nists, with inner lives and states of moral vision. These chapters have all men-
tioned ‘the good’ and ‘goodness’, but I will now consider in more detail what
Murdoch means by ‘the Good’, capital G. This is the concept from which our
moral knowledge is derived, and which she suggests we are always already in

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relation with, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not. Murdoch speaks

about it in terms of transcendence, but it is not religious: it is, however, simi-
lar to elements of religion, including prayer and meditation. In this chapter, I
will set out what Murdoch means by the Good, both in form and content, and
then examine how film can depict goodness in an oblique way so that we might
come to realise what goodness looks like through the process of experiencing
the film. This is not necessarily in a straightforward way where characters are
clearly defined as right and wrong, good and bad, making choices and receiv-
ing consonant rewards, but rather perhaps when a film calls our assumptions
into question. Through close analysis I will demonstrate how film calls our
attention to form, mood, aesthetics and performance, and challenges our view
of the actions of others, thereby changing our moral vision of goodness, love,
the film and the world.
The film I will examine in most detail is The Edge of Heaven (Fatih Akin,
2007). In this film of multiple, connected narrative strands, matters of toler-
ance, generosity and hospitality are tested in the face of anger, politics, blind
passion and cruel accident. People are shown to be complicated and change-
able, but the reality of unexpected death is presented as a reason to choose
outward-looking honesty and tolerance rather than isolation and lingering
resentment. I will also look at two other films with Murdochian resonances.
In I’ve Loved You So Long (Philippe Claudel, 2008), a family struggles to cope
with the return of Juliette (Kristen Scott Thomas) after a lengthy absence
which is incrementally explained. The complex way in which her experiences
are revealed, both in the present and recalling the past, compel us to evaluate
her as a person with an inner life, and not on the bare facts of her behaviour
and melancholic comportment. And in We Need to Talk about Kevin (Lynne
Ramsay, 2011), young Kevin is depicted as difficult and malevolent, and his
mother Eva as both troubled personally and punished by her community.
Eva’s struggles as Kevin’s mother, and Kevin’s appalling behaviour, challenge
the spectator to feel empathy with either of them, but the film’s immersion
into Eva’s consciousness enables an identification with her that looks for the
humanity in her situation and even enables a moment of sympathy with a
frightened Kevin by the end of the film.

MURDOCH’S ‘AUSTERE A N D U N C O N S O L E D L OV E O F
THE GOOD’

Paul S. Fiddes writes, ‘Murdoch herself is on the quest for a Platonic coher-
ence in the transcendent Good, but she believes it can only be reached through
attending to the reality of others in the world’ (2012: 96). This worldliness is

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vital for understanding goodness and love in Murdoch. Heather Widdows

notes that ‘the good, like all moral values, is discovered in everyday life, and
its recognition is part and parcel of life’ (2016: 71). This does not mean that
it is easy to define – Murdoch does not define the concept, nor does she set
out a clear, systematic way to understand what she means by it – that is not
how she writes. For Murdoch, loving attention is the means by which to reach
goodness:

It is perfectly obvious that goodness is connected with knowledge: not

with impersonal quasi-scientific knowledge of the ordinary world,
whatever that may be, but with a refined and honest perception of what
is really the case, a patient and just discernment and exploration of what
confronts one, which is the result not simply of opening one’s eyes but
of a certainly perfectly familiar kind of moral discipline. (IP: 330)

This sentence contains the essence of Murdoch’s thinking about goodness.

Toril Moi stresses that this loving gaze is just, and as such is the essence of
realism in Murdoch’s thought: ‘The same just, dispassionate, unselfish, and
loving gaze, the same quality of attention, is required whether the object of
our attention is nature, art, or life. To learn to love is to learn to see reality
as it is’ (Moi 2014: 194). This places Murdoch in conflict with those Oxford
philosophers who argued that nothing is inherently good or bad, and that it
was human activity to endow something with the value of goodness. This is
where Murdoch sees metaphysics being stripped away from ethics, as good
was no longer considered to be something transcendent. In ‘Metaphysics and
Ethics’ she traces the line of this development through G. E. Moore, Charles
Stevenson and Gilbert Ryle, and cites Hare in his The Language of Morals as
saying that ‘a man’s morality is seen in his conduct and a moral statement is
a prescription of a rule uttered to guide a choice’ (M&E: 63). This ‘current
position’ (in 1957) means that ‘we are certainly now presented with a stripped
and empty scene’ (M&E: 63). For Murdoch, it is not at all a matter of human
beings working out what they think is right and wrong and arguing why others
should do as they say they should. Murdoch believes that as human beings we
already know what the good is, we are oriented towards perfection even if we
know we cannot achieve it, and so perfection exists as a transcendent aim for
our journey as moral pilgrims.

I have spoken of efforts of attention directed upon individuals and

of obedience to reality as an exercise of love, and have suggested that
‘reality’ and ‘individual’ present themselves to us in moral contexts as
ideal end-points or Ideas of Reason. This surely is the place where the
concept of good lives. ‘Good’: ‘Real’: ‘Love’. These words are closely

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 FILM, LOVE AND GOODNESS 107

connected. And here we retrieve the deep sense of the indefinability of

good, which has been given a trivial sense in recent philosophy. Good
is indefinable not for the reasons offered by Moore’s successors, but
because of the infinite difficulty of the task of apprehending a magnetic
but inexhaustible reality. . . . If apprehension of good is apprehension
of the individual and the real, then good partakes of the infinite elusive
character of reality. (IP: 333–4)

In this passage Murdoch makes clear that she sees goodness and love in every-
day reality, but also that it is something magnetic and inexhaustible, conveying
her perception of it as transcendent too. She argues for the ontological neces-
sity of the Good in ways that are similar to the ontological argument for the
existence of God, but for her there is no question of personification. Murdoch
makes it clear that she believes ‘we need a theology that can continue without
God’ (MGM: 511). Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker explain this pre-
cisely and account for the significance of Murdoch’ argument:

For her, the Good is a necessarily real, magnetic force which draws the
self beyond itself in moral concern for concrete other individuals. In
making this claim Murdoch not only reopens the question of the status
of the Good within the moral life, but also reasserts the importance of
the connection between morals and metaphysics. (1996: xiv)

This is a vision of a metaphysical Good, which is why Murdoch draws so heav-

ily on Plato’s image of the cave and the sun throughout her philosophical writ-
ings. The Good is like the sun, drawing us out of the cave and through stages
of a spiritual journey with the aim of becoming morally better. Murdoch also
recognises that images such as Plato’s cave, and the pictures and metaphors
that we use in our lives, help us to understand our moral journey. Heather
Widdows goes so far as to say that Murdoch’s philosophy is ‘an exegesis of, or
meditation on, Plato’s Cave’ (2016: 90). Widdows explains the importance for
Murdoch of the concept of the individual and their inner life, and their inner
activity, saying that ‘it is upon this belief in the individual’s consciousness
and personal (moral) experience that Murdoch’s moral philosophy is built’
(2016: 21). As with the moral activity of M when she reflects upon and recon-
siders D, it is moral change and inner, private activity which Murdoch is so
concerned with.1 And Murdoch believes this inner moral life is omnipresent,
and that we are all capable of seeing ‘a larger picture’:

The felt need for this picture, or field of force, is answered by metaphys-
ics and religion, and by general moral values, our sense of right and
wrong. This is not a matter of specialised isolated moments of moral

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choice, appearing in a continuum of non-moral activity. These move-

ments and responses are occurring all the time. The reality of the moral
requirement is proved by the world. (MGM: 297)

To summarise, the Good, capital G, is a transcendent light, guiding our moral

lives, but we are obscured from seeing it by our self-delusions and egoism.
Through the cultivation of a just and loving gaze at a focus other than our-
selves (art, nature, religion) we can increase our ability to perceive the Good
and make ourselves morally better. Vitally, this improvement in the quality
of our attention is with no eye on reward: ‘In the case of art and nature such
attention is immediately rewarded by the enjoyment of beauty. In the case of
morality, although there are sometimes rewards, the idea of a reward is out of
place’ (OGG: 354). This is a major difference from Christianity and the hope
of reward by a caring God, or salvation, or an afterlife. In fact, the search for
reward detracts from the potential of prayer: ‘Prayer is properly not petition,
but simply an attention to God which is a form of love’ (OGG: 344). The kind
of objectual attention that prayer or meditation can be works for Murdoch’s
moral progress, but not if it is to a deity asking for a reward. Murdoch asserts
‘This “Good” is not the old God in disguise, but rather what the old God
symbolised’ (MGM: 428). By this she means, that ‘God was (or is) a single
perfect transcendent non-representable and necessarily real object of attention . . .
moral philosophy should attempt to retain a central concept which has all these
characteristics’ (OGG: 344). This is what the Good is for Murdoch: ‘Good
represents the reality of which God is the dream’ (MGM: 496).

W H AT D O E S T H E G O O D L O O K L I K E ?

The image of the Good as a transcendent magnetic centre seems to me

the least corruptible and most realistic picture for us to use in our reflec-
tions upon the moral life. (OGG: 361)

Although this talk of goodness can sound idealistic, Murdoch is not saying
that we are all innately good, rather that we are all innately selfish, and that ‘it
is surely in the tissue of life that the secrets of good and evil are to be found’
(OGG: 343–4). There is nothing dreamy or deluded about being good: it is a
form of realism.

The idea of a really good man living in a private dream world seems
unacceptable. Of course a good man may be infinitely eccentric, but he
must know certain things about his surroundings, most obviously the

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existence of other people and their claims. The chief enemy of excel-
lence in morality (and also in art) is personal fantasy: the tissue of self-
aggrandising and consoling wishes and dreams which prevents one from
seeing what is there outside one. (OGG: 347–8)

The Good itself is not visible, but Murdoch says that ‘beauty appears as the vis-
ible and accessible aspect of the Good’, in art and nature (ibid.: 357). Good ‘is a
central point of reflection’, ‘the focus of attention when an intent to be virtuous
co-exists (as perhaps it always does) with some unclarity of vision’ (ibid.: 356).
Although Plato wrote that the good man will eventually be able to look at the sun,
it is not quite so for Murdoch. She believes that ‘we can certainly know more or
less where the sun is; it is not so easy to imagine what it would be like to look at
it’ (ibid.: 357). It seems that a good man may know what this looks like, but we
need our egoistic vision to be unimpeded enough to be able to see it. Loving the
particular is one way in which Murdoch envisions the practice, whether it is a
carpenter dealing with his wood, tools and measurements, or a girl tending her
potted plant or loving her cat who is ‘a free being, a friend, a privilege to live
with’ (MGM: 497). These everyday instances of loving each other and cherish-
ing other beings are full of imagination and art, and this makes them apprehen-
sions of morality and goodness. This is something we are all able to do:

On the road between illusion and reality there are many clues and sig-
nals and wayside shrines and sacraments and places of meditation and
refreshment. The pilgrim just has to look about him with a lively eye.
There are many kinds of images in the world, sources of energy, checks
and reminders, pure things, inspiring things, innocent things, attract-
ing love and veneration. We all have our own icons, untainted and vital,
which we, perhaps secretly, store away in safety. (MGM: 496)

With these ideas of looking about with lively eyes, and storing our own secret
icons, it is time to consider how these concepts can be seen in films. I will begin
by examining how The Edge of Heaven interlinks many ideas about love and
goodness, before looking at even more challenging scenarios of attending to
goodness in I’ve Loved You So Long and We Need to Talk about Kevin.

T H E D I S C I P L I N E D O V E RC O M I N G O F S E L F :
THE EDGE OF HEAVEN

This film has been approached from many critical angles pursuing its themes
of globalisation, the lives of Turkish-German guest workers, and transnational
complexity including protest, activism and migration. But the film conveys

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these vast global issues through the particulars of the lives of a small group of
connected individuals. The film begins with a young man, Nejat (Baki Davrak)
stopping his car at a petrol station. In the shop, he hears music on the radio by
a singer he doesn’t recognise. The man in the shop tells him the singer is dead
now, even though he’s young, from radioactive poisoning from fallout from the
Chernobyl disaster in 1986. Nejat takes notice but seems different from the
men in the garage, perhaps a bit of an outsider or a different social class. We
learn later that he has been living in Germany, which is the setting of the first
of the film’s three sections.
An intertitle appears, announcing that this coming section of the film is
called ‘Yeter’s Death’. We go straight to a protest march in Bremen, Germany,
and Ali (Tuncel Kurtiz), a Turkish man in his sixties or seventies, who is
Nejat’s father, smiles at the protesters benignly as he walks past on his way to
find a prostitute. He walks along the street of the red-light district, surveying
the sex workers, and selects a woman who tells him her name is ‘Jessy’ (Nursel
Köse). He is soon ashamed, however, when he finds out her real name is Yeter,
and that she is also Turkish. They speak in a matter-of-fact way about their
transaction, she calls him ‘grandad’, performs fellatio and then they part. As
Ali leaves, they speak in Turkish and she is overheard by two Turkish men
passing by, who look threateningly at her, and she closes her blinds quickly.
We then see Nejat arrive at his father Ali’s home, and Ali cooks him din-
ner. Nejat gives Ali a book, by Selim Ozdogan – Demircinin Kizi (Daughter of
a Blacksmith, 2007) – about strained relations between a girl and her father.
They drink raki, chat, discuss a racing tip and Ali puts on a bet. Even though
it is an outsider, Ali wins! And at odds of 70/1, he has won 700 euros. They
say goodbye at the station, and Nejat goes back to Hamburg. We next see Nejat
at work, lecturing on Goethe at the university. He seems a lethargic and unin-
spired lecturer, speaking about German literature to a half-full lecture theatre.
We then cut to a girl at the back of the room, with her head on her arms, fast
asleep on the desk, which seems to confirm the suspicion that Nejat’s lecture
is not very dynamic.
Ali goes back to Yeter, and, after another sexual transaction, he asks her
to move in with him, saying that he would pay her what she earns there at
the brothel but she would sleep only with him. She asks for time to think
about it. When she is travelling on the metro, the two threatening Turkish
men come and intimidate her about her lifestyle. Their threats clearly influ-
ence her to accept Ali’s proposal. When she meets Ali at the betting shop,
she says she is left with 3,000 euros a month, and he says, ‘All I want is for
you to live with me and sleep with me.’ Yeter agrees, and they go out for
dinner happily.
Next we see that Yeter has moved in, and meets Nejat over dinner at Ali’s
house. We learn along with her that Nejat’s mother died when he was six

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 FILM, LOVE AND GOODNESS 111

months old. Ali married a widow with a son but it didn’t work out. Yeter dis-
closes that her husband was shot in Maras in 1978, the occasion of a massacre
by neo-fascists.2 They have shared some of their backgrounds and losses, and
are getting on well. The three of them argue over who goes up to the kitchen
to get every course, in endearing attempts to be hospitable to each other. When
Yeter is in the kitchen, Nejat tells Ali he is drinking too much, as he is becom-
ing loud and a bit aggressive. Yeter and Nejat put a drunken Ali to bed, and
have a chance to speak. Yeter tells Nejat she is a hooker, which takes Nejat
aback, but he responds fairly calmly. Ali, meanwhile, has a serious heart attack
and is rushed to hospital, where he has heart surgery. Yeter tells Nejat that she
has a twenty-seven-year-old daughter who thinks she works in a shoe shop.
Yeter says, ‘I’d do anything for her, I don’t want her to be uneducated. I wanted
her to study and become like you.’ A warm look between them conveys under-
standing and shared values. Ali is bad-tempered in hospital, saying that getting
old is evil and there is nothing good about it. He instructs Yeter to water his
tomatoes, and Yeter says they are ready to be plucked. Nejat says they should
take Ali some of his beloved tomatoes. Nejat’s love for his father makes Yeter
start to cry. She confesses she misses her daughter and has not heard her voice
for a long time, and that she cannot get hold of her for some reason. Nejat
comforts her.
Ali comes home from hospital and is very difficult to live with. Yeter is
sleeping in his bed and cooking for him, but he is constantly rude to her. He
asks Nejat, ‘Did you screw her?’, and Nejat does not dignify it with an answer.
Yeter has made borek for Ali, but he sends it away, shouting that the doctor
said he is not to have pastry, but then he smokes, and Nejat points this out. He
is nasty to Yeter, saying, ‘I have my life and you have yours.’ As she is saying
goodbye to Nejat, she gives him the borek, and Ali shouts after her, ‘Get me a
raki girl.’ Ali asks Yeter, ‘Did you screw him?’; she says he is drunk. He gropes
her, shouting ‘I own you!’
He is disrespectful and obnoxious, and Yeter says she is leaving, saying to
Ali, ‘I’ve seen plenty like you.’ She pushes him several times and he hits her
once, hard. She falls and hits her head, and is killed. Ali cannot believe this and
cries over her. The next we see is that Ali is put into prison, in a small cell with
a toilet and a narrow bed. Yeter’s body is flown back to Turkey. Nejat oversees
this, and goes to the Turkish funeral, meeting Yeter’s family. But her daughter
Ayten is not there. Nejat says that he will stay in Istanbul until he finds Ayten.
He goes to the police to ask about her, and a police officer asks him why he
wants to find the girl, and he says he wants to finance her studies, ‘because
knowledge and education are human rights’. The police officer asks why he
does not want to help a Kurdish orphan, and Nejat does not have an answer.
This is not a selfless moral action, it is a personal matter of reparation in some
way, because he knew how much Ayten’s education meant to Yeter. Nejat puts

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up pictures of Yeter around town asking people to get in touch with him. He
puts up a picture in a German bookshop and sees a sign that the shop is for
sale. He speaks to the bookshop owner a short while, about Germans having a
bookshop in Istanbul, and then he offers to buy it. The current owner finds it
amusing that Nejat is a Turkish professor of German literature in Germany,
buying a German bookshop in Turkey; but Nejat says that ‘maybe teaching
isn’t my calling’, and looks really happy in the shop. He also completely disso-
ciates himself from Ali, saying to his cousin that ‘a murderer is not my father’.
In this way, Nejat is aligning himself more with Yeter’s familial relationships,
staying in Istanbul and searching for Ayten, and appears to have cut ties with
Germany and his Turkish father in prison there.
This is the end of the film’s first section, and it demonstrates several
aspects that connect with Murdoch’s thinking. Nejat is a scholar, but perhaps
not suited to teaching. Ali killing Yeter, albeit unintentionally, has incidentally
given Nejat purpose and enabled him to start again. He is freed from caring for
his father, because he has effectively disowned him, and is instead committed
to doing something that he is perhaps more able to do: take care of Ayten’s edu-
cation. However, this is also a fantastic journey, in that he does not know how
to find Ayten, or whether she is interested in education at all. So, at this stage
of the film, Nejat appears to be comforting himself with a somewhat deluded
quest. He is pursuing what he believes to be the right thing to do, what Yeter
said she wanted to happen, but he does not know whether this aim is realistic
or fanciful, or even achievable. It is questionable, therefore, that his vision is
clearly aiming for the Good, but rather is still self-focused and is somewhat
consoling and delusional.
The film’s next section is introduced with the intertitle ‘Lotte’s Death’.
This section also begins with a protest, but a more ill-tempered one, in Istan-
bul, where a gun is used and then dropped. Another person picks it up, runs
away and is pursued. They drop their phone, losing all their contact numbers,
and they cannot get into where they want to go. They pull off their hood and
show themselves to be a young woman to a resident in the apartment block who
lets her through and up onto the roof, where she hides the gun. She catches
the ferry from the European side of Istanbul to the Asian side, and when she
arrives home she sees that police are raiding her hideout. As the police drag
young women from the building they shout out their names, so that onlookers
know who they are in case they cannot be found. The local people clap with
approval, however, as they are taken away.
The woman flies to Hamburg and is met by a man who shows her where
she can sleep, and gives her a hundred euros. She is then seen on the tele-
phone, speaking in English, trying to find her mother. She gets an address,
and looks up shoe shops, where she thinks her mother works, and we realise
that this is Yeter’s daughter, Ayten (Nurgül Yesilçay). She doesn’t pay the

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man back his money, he gets angry and he throws her out. She sleeps in the
university behind a vending machine, and then the next day we see her asleep
at the back of Nejat’s lecture. So the first connection in the film is made clear:
she was the sleeping student we saw earlier, and now Nejat is in fact looking
for her. Ayten washes in the university toilets, and then asks a tall blonde girl
for money. The girl, Lotte (Patrycia Ziolkowska), says she can pay for her
lunch and doesn’t want the money back, saying, ‘Next time we see each other
you can invite me.’ They get lunch in the university canteen and sit together.
Ayten says she studies social science, Lotte studies English and Spanish.
Ayten says she is from Istanbul, and then says to Lotte, ‘Do you really want to
know?’ Lotte says yes, so Ayten tells Lotte the truth about her situation: but
she says her name is Gul.
Lotte takes Ayten home to her mother’s house, and introduces her. She
says, ‘This is the kitchen, you can take whatever you want, any time.’ She says
to her mother, ‘This is Gül, she’ll be staying with us for a while.’ She shows
Gül her room, then tells her she has been three months in India. Gül says she
had to escape so all she has is these clothes that she is wearing. Lotte gives Gül
clothes, some of which she rejects because of the American symbol on them.
Lotte’s mother Susanne (Hanna Schygulla) says Lotte is very generous, and
Lotte says with conviction, ‘We have to help her.’ Susanne says that she doesn’t
even know her. They argue about asylum and harbouring illegal immigrants,
but Lotte is unmoved, and says to her mother, ‘Would you be kind enough to
make her bed?’ Lotte and Gül go out drinking beer and dancing; they smoke
a joint, and then kiss; and they roll in drunk and giggling in the early hours,
watched by Susanne from an upstairs window. They have a huge breakfast,
using what looks like the entire contents of the fridge, and leave the mess to go
off to the bedroom. Lotte strokes her lovingly, and Gül reveals her real name
is Ayten.
Later that day, Ayten comes down to the kitchen where Susanne is shelling
pecan nuts. Susanne asks her what she is escaping from. Ayten explains that she
is ‘a member of political resistance in Turkey; fighting for 100 per cent human
rights, 100 per cent freedom of speech, 100 per cent social education’. Susanne
suggests that things might be better for Turkey once they join the European
Union, but Ayten says the EU is led by colonial countries and swears. Susanne
says, ‘I don’t want you to talk like that in my house. You can talk like that in your
house. OK?’ Ayten is charmless and angry, and Susanne is offended and barely
conceals her disapproval with her superior put-down.
Ayten sits on the steps of the house crying, and asks Lotte to help her find
her mother. Lotte agrees, with eyes alight, and drives her off immediately to
where Ayten believes the shoe shop is. They drive to Bremen, and as they drive
along the road, the train alongside them has Nejat and Yeter on it in an ago-
nisingly proximate coincidence. Lotte and Ayten get pulled over by the police

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because Ayten is not wearing her seat belt. As the police begin to check the
car’s credentials, Ayten leaps out of the car and runs away, but is caught by the
officers, and shouts, ‘Asylum!’ She is put in an asylum centre, and they are told
that Lotte can stay three nights a month. Lotte says it’s not so bad, and people
are nice, but Ayten asks Lotte to lock the door, and they sit opposite each other,
as Ayten reaches out and they hold hands.
At Ayten’s court hearing her appeal fails, as, although sympathetic to her
plight, the tribunal cannot see why she would still be in danger if she returned
to Turkey. Lotte is enraged and desperate to follow Ayten to Turkey. At home
she rips out the contents of drawers and cupboards, and accuses her mother of
hiding her passport when it is actually sitting on her desk. Her mother says,
‘Look how blind you are’, but Lotte will not be deterred. She goes off in a
taxi, having hugged her mother, who says, ‘Take care of yourself ’ and looks
worried as she leaves. In Istanbul, Lotte urgently pursues Ayten’s case. She is
given the name of a pro bono lawyer, who says Ayten is considered part of an
armed terrorist gang and she could get fifteen to twenty years in prison. When
Lotte cries desperately, the lawyer says he could try to get her a permit to visit
Ayten in prison, but it could take one to two months, and she must not men-
tion Ayten’s name to anyone. Back at the hotel, Lotte argues with her mother
over the telephone about staying in Istanbul. Susanne asks, ‘What about your
studies?’, but Lotte replies she has had enough. Lotte says, ‘For the first time
my life has a purpose. For the first time I’m needed. I’ve got to help Ayten.’
Susanne challenges her, ‘Do you know what your girlfriend has cost me? Did
you ever ask yourself that? For a whole year I paid her solicitor’s fees. And
we lost.’ Lotte asks her to ask her father, but Susanne will not do that. She
implores Lotte, her voice softens, saying that she wants her to come back to
Germany. But Lotte refuses, saying she can’t. So, Susanne says angrily, ‘Fine,
then stay there. But see how you cope on your own. I won’t help you. From
now on you’re finally on your own’, and hangs up on her. Lotte shouts ‘Mama!’
down the telephone.
Lotte comes in to Nejat’s bookshop looking for accommodation, and pins
up her note next to photo of Yeter (Ayten’s mother). She asks to look at a
book on the Turkish legal system, and the shop assistant Cengiz (Emre Cosar)
makes tea for them both. Nejat has a room for rent and he takes Lotte to see it.
She wants the room, and tells Nejat about Gül, but doesn’t use her real name:
if she had, he would have known it was Yeter’s daughter, who he’s looking for.
Ayten meanwhile is in prison, being spoken to by her comrades, who tell her
they want the gun and threaten to kill her if she ‘messes’ with them. Lotte gets
a fifteen-minute visit with Ayten, who tells her that most of the women are
in there because they killed their husbands. Lotte says she wants to help her,
and so Ayten asks her to get ‘something’ for her, namely the gun. Lotte goes
and gets it, following the same trail as Ayten did, having to ask the women in

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the apartment to let her onto the roof. She takes the gun and puts it in her
handbag. As she is walking back through the streets, some young boys grab
her handbag. She runs after them, loses them, then comes across them rifling
through the contents of her bag. One of the boys, aged no more than six or
seven, says, ‘What do you want sister?’; he points the gun at her and shoots
her, fatally.
The police interview Ayten. They tell her Lotte has been shot dead, and
they ask her to help them. Lotte’s body is flown back to Germany, returning
home, like Yeter’s. The bodies of these two women, needlessly killed by casual
male violence, are repatriated in opposite directions, never knowing they were
connected by the love they share for Ayten. Lotte’s love, however, might be
considered by Murdoch to be ‘a form of insanity whereby we lose the “open
scene”: lose our ability to scatter our loving interest through the world’ (MGM:
346). Murdoch is writing about love that is self-centred, or unrealistic. From
this, she argues, ‘There can be a duty to fall out of love . . . Released, we return
to our friends, our work, our ordinary pleasures!’ (MGM: 346). She is captur-
ing here the selfishness of the lover who zealously prioritises the beloved in
the way Lotte does, abusing her mother’s generosity and losing perspective on
reality. Murdoch writes,

Successful obsessive love may be accompanied by intense joy, but also

by jealousy and fear of loss. There is a better sunnier happiness when
together with the beloved we are able to be aware of other things, other
people, other joys, illumined by secure mutual love, when we can stand
together and look at something else. (MGM: 346)

This ‘secure mutual love’ is something that Lotte and Ayten are not able to
achieve in the film, and it is perhaps difficult to understand why Lotte is so
unquestioningly devoted to Ayten from their first meeting. The duty that
Lotte feels that she – and Susanne – have to care for Ayten is perplexing, and
there is something immature or naïve about her commitment to looking after
her. Claudia Breger poses the question as to whether Lotte is exhibiting any-
thing more than ‘the proverbial gesture of the benign coloniser’ (2014: 82).
Breger suggests,

We may in fact be inclined to keep distancing ourselves from Ayten’s

harshness or Lotte’s naïveté. The latter in particular is explored more fully
in the doublings and crossings of Lotte’s relationship with her mother that
emerge with the further unfolding of the film’s narrative configuration.
Not only is Lotte’s generosity based on her privilege of maternal eco-
nomic support; as it turns out, her simultaneous post-adolescent rebellion
only repeats her mother’s own story. (2014: 82)

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In the telephone conversation with Susanne there are hints at a background of

feeling unsure, from allusions to an absentee father, to having been in India for
three months, or leaving her studies at the drop of her hat, as well as her saying
that this is the first time she has been needed or had a purpose. This suggests
that Ayten fulfilled a role for Lotte, and was a cause to support. In this way,
Nejat and Lotte shared the idea that Ayten was someone they should help, but
both thought about this in unrealistic ways.
The third section is titled ‘The Edge of Heaven’, which is the English
title for the film, originally called ‘Auf der anderen Seite’, or ‘On the Other
Side’. This title suggests several possibilities for the boundaries and borders
between the people in the film, including earthly life and the afterlife. Ali is
now out of prison and is at the airport being deported from Germany. At the
next ticket window is Susanne getting a plane ticket to Istanbul. She arrives at
the same hotel where we saw Lotte making the telephone call to her, and she
is shown to her room. Susanne does not speak to the porter, and seems to be
moving, and looking at the world, through a fog of grief. We then see her pass
the night and day in the room in the most evocative sequence of despair. She
drinks from the minibar, rents the curtains, and herself and her clothes; she
does not know what to do with herself, or how to be in her body, in this room.
We view her from the top corner of the room, as if a security camera, spying
on her grief. Cuts from one of her states to the next, wailing to immobility,
show the changing light outside the window and the sounds of daytime traffic
and night-time in the city. It is a realistic, honest depiction of the desperation
of grief and the sheer incapacity and impotence in the face of the death of a
loved one.
Susanne telephones Nejat, who comes to meet her at her hotel. As she
wanders around the hotel lounge looking for him, he stands up and signals
to her. She asks, ‘How did you know it was me?’ And he replies, ‘You’re the
saddest person here.’ This tender and honest moment shows Nejat’s abil-
ity to see Susanne: to really see her inner state. It suggests his attention to
her is sensitive and caring. It calls to mind Murdoch’s observation that, ‘The
task of attention goes on all the time and at apparently empty and everyday
moments we are “looking”, making those little peering efforts of imagination
which have such important cumulative results’ (IP: 334). Nejat’s observation
captures his effort and his imagination, and his caring connection to Susanne
does go on to have cumulative results. It is also clear how action is relevant to
moral progress too, in that Nejat’s open, welcoming, attitude to Susanne is
what Murdoch would call, ‘indispensable pivot and spur of the inner scene’
(IP: 334). Susanne asks him how well he knew her daughter, and he replies,
‘Well enough to like her.’ Susanne asks to see Lotte’s room, and Nejat takes
her to his flat. Susanne tells him that she had been in Istanbul thirty years
ago, and had gone hitchhiking to India, just as we know Lotte had done. Nejat

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shows her Lotte’s room, and she asks to stay. She opens the boxes of Lotte’s
things, smelling her leather jacket, and finding her diary. She lies on the mat-
tress and reads Lotte’s diary, which we hear in Lotte’s voice. Lotte says how
she feels she was taking very similar steps to her Mama, and wonders ‘perhaps
she sees herself in me’. Susanne’s eyelashes flutter, and she falls asleep, hold-
ing the diary to her heart. In the moments of her waking, as the camera pans
across the room from a brightly lit window, she – and we – see Lotte. In this
room full of light, there is a close-up on Lotte’s smiling face (the front cover
image), and then a shot of the room as we see Susanne reach for Lotte, in an
image resembling a religious tableau. She looks so real, and so vital: but no,
the next shot reveals she is not there. Lotte’s face is even more remarkable
than Murdoch’s idea of the face showing ‘spirit and matter . . . most intensely
fused’ (OTC: 98), as in this case there is no matter, only spirit. This beautiful
but painful moment in the film drives home Murdoch’s observation about the
absence of the dead. Murdoch quotes Weil’s Notebooks:

To lose somebody: we suffer at the thought that the dead one, the absent
one should have become something imaginary, something false. But the
longing we have for him is not imaginary. We must go down into our-
selves, where the desire which is not imaginary resides . . . The loss of
contact with reality – there lies evil, there lies sorrow . . . The remedy is
to use the loss itself as intermediary for attaining reality. The presence
of the dead one is imaginary, but his absence is real, it is henceforth his
manner of appearing (Weil 1956: 28). (MGM: 502)

Murdoch develops this idea of the absence of the dead one to argue that ‘We
must experience the reality of pain, and not fill the void with fantasy . . . We
console ourselves with fantasies of “bouncing back”’ (MGM: 502). The need,
according to Murdoch, is to face the loss and the pain. She says,

Here anything may help, any person, any pure or innocent thing which
could attract love and revive hope . . . We have (gravity, necessity) a nat-
ural impulse to derealise our world and surround ourselves with fantasy.
Simply stopping this, refraining from filling voids with lies and falsity,
is progress. Equally in the more obscure labyrinths of personal relations
it may be necessary to make the move which makes the void appear.
(MGM: 503)

This bold and painful suggestion, that making the move within personal rela-
tions may draw attention to the very loss and pain that we wish to hide from
ourselves, but that this may be effective, can be seen in Susanne’s actions to go
to see Ayten and decide to help her. As Breger points out, when Susanne ‘steps

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into her daughter’s shoes by identifying with Lotte’s mission to help Ayten,
Ayten helps herself ’ (2014: 85). We next see Ali sitting and reading under a
tree. He is reading the book Nejat gave him, about a daughter and her father,
and he is weeping. Nejat’s cousin tells him that Ali is out of prison and has
gone to Trabzon, and Nejat admits that nobody ever responded to Yeter’s pic-
ture. In an uncharacteristic display of emotion, Nejat punches a pile of books
onto the floor, and takes down Yeter’s picture, leaving a gap on the noticeboard
in the shop. He finds Susanne on the shop’s doorstep. She asks to stay with
him for a while, saying it did her good to sleep there. They go out to eat. When
they toast, Susanne says they will drink ‘to death’. This is a pivotal moment
in the film. Susanne seems energised and also realistic about death. The next
morning, as she leaves the flat and walks down the street, she says hello to
the men playing backgammon in the café opposite, just as we saw Lotte do.
This small gesture is indicative of looking outwards at others instead of staying
trapped looking in. Susanne goes to see Ayten, who says sorry. Susanne says
she wants to help her, because it’s what Lotte wanted. Susanne studies Ayten’s
face: her remorse appears sincere. Ayten courageously chooses to use her ‘right
to remorse’, which entails giving information to the authorities.
Susanne and Nejat stand in the window of his flat looking at the men going
to mosque on the first day of Bayram, the festival of the sacrifice of Abraham’s
son, Isaac (Figure 5.1). Nejat tells Susanne that he was afraid of the story as
a child. He asked his father what he would do, and his father said ‘he would
even make God his enemy in order to protect me’. Susanne looks at Nejat and
asks whether his father is still alive. Nejat looks meaningfully at Susanne, as he
realises the love that his father had for him, and what he himself must do now.
He asks Susanne to look after his bookshop for a few days, and then we are back
to the beginning of the film, as Nejat is on his journey to find his father. He
drives through the forest roads to the coast to Filyos, then keeps on, to Trab-
zon, where his father is fishing. Nejat’s decisions would seem to represent an
adjustment in priorities that Murdoch envisaged as moral progress:

A serious scholar has great merits. But a serious scholar who is also a
good man knows not only his subject but the proper place of his subject
in the whole of his life. The understanding which leads the scientist to
the right decision about giving up a certain study, or leads the artist to
the right decision about his family, is superior to the understanding of
art and science as such. (SGC: 379)

It may have taken Nejat a while to feel able to see Ali again, but this would
probably be seen to be ‘the right decision’ in Murdochican terms, in that he is
seeing his father with love and compassion.

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 FILM, LOVE AND GOODNESS 119

Figure 5.1 Susanne (Hanna Schygulla) helps Nejat (Baki Davrak) recall his father’s love, in
The Edge of Heaven (2007), directed by Fatih Akin.

As Ayten leaves prison, she is spat at by her fellow comrades for repenting.
She goes to the bookshop, and Susanne offers her a room. Susanne wrongly
pronounces the name of where Nejat’s flat is; Ayten corrects her, and Susanne
says it again. They embrace, and smile at each other. Humility on the part of
Susanne, and Ayten, is facilitating their connection. As they leave the shop, the
camera focuses on the space on the board where Yeter’s picture was. If Nejat
had not taken it down, Ayten would have seen the photograph of her mother,
and discovered she is dead.
These bold steps that Nejat, Susanne and Ayten have taken are related to
the difficult task of compassion and goodness. Murdoch writes,

The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is con-
nected with the attempt to see the unself, to see and respond to the real
world in the light of a virtuous consciousness. This is the non-meta-
physical meaning of the idea of transcendence to which philosophers
have so constantly resorted in their explanations of goodness. ‘Good is a
transcendent reality’ means that virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of
selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is. It is an empirical
fact about human nature that this attempt cannot be entirely successful.
Of course we are dealing with a metaphor, but with a very important
metaphor and one which is not just a property of philosophy and not
just a model. (SGC: 376–7)

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This work, of responding to and joining the real world, is difficult and does
not guarantee a happy ending. In the village, Nejat sees an old lady working
in the field, and she tells him that Ali has gone fishing. She says that the sea
is getting choppy, and so he’ll come in soon. Nejat moves to the shore, takes
off his glasses, looks out to sea, sits and waits. This is how the film ends,
without certainty that Ali will return or that they will reconcile, but with
Nejat’s decision to wait for him and to be open to seeing him. He has sought
out his father. Since Yeter’s death, the journey that Nejat has been on is one
of growing clarity of vision, from realising he was not suited to his job, to
accepting his failure to atone for his father’s sins by finding and paying for
Ayten’s education, to deciding to open himself up to his father again. The role
of Susanne facing Lotte’s death and deciding to embrace it and confront the
pain has inspired and enabled him in this vision. Their sharing of the story
of a cruel and demanding God with Abraham and Isaac, and Nejat’s memory
of his father’s devotion to him, has undermined the idea of God, and boosted
the idea of the Good: this is what goodness looks like. It may look like Chris-
tian forgiveness, but it is brought about by the clear vision of his father’s love,
and the preciousness of that, and it is certainly compassion for one’s family.
In terms of Susanne’s journey, she has determined to continue to do what
Lotte would have wanted to do, and Ayten has risked her safety and betrayed
her political comrades in order to enable that relationship to flourish. The
film has been described as privileging ‘humanist values over radical politics’
(Mennel 2009), but in terms of Murdochian morality this is a story of particu-
lars, and of individuals and their moral journeys.
I will now look at two films that also resonate with examples given by
Murdoch in her writing about goodness, and which challenge conventional,
simplistic images of right and wrong. The films thereby invite close attention
in analysing issues of love and goodness and how they affect our vision and
judgement.

L O V E A N D D E TA C H M E N T : I ’ V E L O V E D Y O U S O L O N G
(IL Y A LONGTEMPS QUE JE T’AIME)

Initially the most striking element of this film is the face of Juliette, played by
Kristin Scott Thomas. This famously beautiful star face is grey, wan and impas-
sive. She does not smile, and barely speaks, but simply smokes. She has been
in prison, and is collected by her sister upon her release. Her sister, Léa (Elsa
Zylberstein), has a busy, lively home, with a husband and two children, her
father-in-law living in the house too, and a demanding job as an academic. She
has to accommodate Juliette in her household, which includes assuaging the
concerns of her husband Luc (Serge Hazanavicius), who has never met Juliette

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but of course knows all about her. Juliette is not that easy to have around: she is
not used to speaking because she has been in prison for fifteen years for killing
her young son. She moves slowly, as someone who is not used to having to get
anywhere in a hurry, and she touches fabrics and stained glass in the house, as
if re-familiarising herself with the different textures of luxury. It emerges that
Léa never visited Juliette in prison. She says that she wrote at the start, but
their parents told her she didn’t exist. In this film, the sisters come to know and
love each other afresh through a journey of getting reacquainted, and actually
talking about the truth of what happened to Juliette’s little boy. Juliette, a doc-
tor, knew that her son was dying and would be in terrible pain, so she ended his
suffering and was convicted of his murder. The reality of re-entering society
with this history, but keeping the reason for her crime a secret, is made clear by
matters such as how she accounts for her absence from Léa’s life to her friends,
to how she explains her conviction to a potential boss, and how Luc feels about
leaving her with their children. The film progresses through Juliette gradually
being able to demonstrate her normality and her humanity, whether it is play-
ing piano with Léa and Luc’s daughters, or treating Luc’s dislocated shoulder
by manipulating it back into place. Her sexuality is reawakened. She goes to
meet her probation officer, and, as he speaks to her, she watches his mouth and
his eyes. She has casual sex with a man she meets in a bar, and starts to build
a friendship with Michel (Laurent Grévill) who is a colleague of her sister’s.
Her integration into social events is difficult, both physically, in relation to
crowds and spaces, and also in terms of conversation and questions. It isn’t
until Léa realises the truth about Juliette’s son’s illness by discovering the
results of medical tests, and that she keeps his photograph under her pillow,
that she confronts Juliette about what happened and the truth comes out. The
film ends with Léa’s view of Juliette changed, by the revelation of the truth. So
how might Murdoch’s thinking relate to this scenario? Well, Murdoch would
say that it is within the family that the moral work is done, and we have to do
some too. This is a site of the frailties and difficulties of family life. Léa does
not really know how to deal with the situation. Luc is uneasy around Juliette.
Juliette is isolated from her family, and we are encouraged to have interest in her
plight as she is clearly so damaged. We do not know ‘the truth’ about the death
of her son until Léa does. The revelation that she killed her son as a mercy
killing only confirms our tendency to view her with compassion and sympathy
– if not empathy. Empathy arrives in the final scene of her disclosure where
she breaks down and we become aware of the depth and magnitude of her tor-
ment. Her life has been characterised by isolation, intrusion and abandonment,
by professionals, family and husband (who divorced her). The particularities
of Juliette’s situation include her medical knowledge and her capabilities as a
doctor, as well as having an ill child. These all elicit more compassion from us
and from her sister. It emerges that Juliette did not speak during her trial. She

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could probably have helped herself by revealing the explanation for her actions,
but she tells Léa that she felt that she deserved the punishment for bringing
him into the world, let alone for killing him. This film certainly presents a
milieu of troubled motherhood: not one relationship is without difficulty, as
Léa and Luc adopted children because Léa did not want to give birth, and
Juliette’s own mother effectively disowned her. Natalie Edwards develops the
idea of the film’s critique of the supposed joys of motherhood by arguing that
the film shows ‘that a murdering mother is not beyond our understanding or
experience, but is beyond several illusory concepts that society would perhaps
rather not question’ (Edwards 2015). In this way, the film echoes Murdoch’s
proposals about family life, and where selflessness or goodness might be found.
Murdoch believed that family is an important area of moral work, involving
difficult adjustments and compromises. She writes,

True conceptions combine just modes of judgement and ability to con-

nect with an increased perception of detail. The case of the mother who
has to consider each of her family carefully as she decides whether or
not to throw auntie out. This double revelation of both random detail
and intuited unity is what we receive in every sphere of life if we seek for
what is best. (SGC: 379)

Léa constantly assesses how Juliette is fitting in, in the face of juggling the
needs of each member of her family. When returning to the idea of what good-
ness looks like, Murdoch suggests it may be found in the family:

The contingently existing saint who, if we were ever fortunate enough

to meet him or her, might stand to us in the guise of a demonstration
(to show it can be done), might be some quiet unpretentious worker, a
schoolteacher or a mother, or better still an aunt. Mothers have many
egoistic satisfactions and much power. The aunt may be the selfless
unrewarded doer of good. I have known such aunts. (MGM: 429)

This reference to the egos and powers of mothers resonates with all three films in
this chapter, and is a diversion of focus from the conventional image of mother-
hood as selflessness or unconditional love, to less obvious ones. Murdoch invites
us to look beyond the conventional images, and to really look for the good:

The possible saints, aunts, dissidents, social workers and so on, may or
may not have any sort of religious vision. How can one know anyway?
Some saintly figures are self-evidently ‘religious’, others may be invisible,
buried deep in families or offices or silent religious houses . . . At the high-
est level this is practical mysticism, where the certainty and the absolute
appear incarnate and immediate in the needs of others. (MGM: 430)

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 FILM, LOVE AND GOODNESS 123

Figure 5.2 Juliette (Kristin Scott Thomas) and Léa (Elsa Zylberstein) learn to live together, in
I’ve Loved You So Long/Il y a longtemps que je t’aime (2008), directed by Philippe Claudel.

The loving aunt in this film, Juliette, is also a mother, but her role in this fam-
ily household is to care as much as she is asked to, whether it is babysitting
or cooking, and to be that special extra relative in the house, who can keep
grandpa company or make playing the piano a treat (Figure 5.2).
There is an emphasis on women’s stories in Murdoch’s philosophical exam-
ples, which will be developed in detail in Chapter 7. She identifies women’s lives
as rich in moral activity, without explicitly claiming this as her aim. Simply by
including examples from everyday life, such as family dynamics or housework, as
well as female characters from novels, history and the Bible, Murdoch opens out
the realm of moral philosophy genuinely to include all of us. And, importantly,
the ordinary person can of course be exceptional, whether that individual is a
mother, or a dictator, or good man in a concentration camp.3 Perhaps we can see
Juliette’s love for her son as ‘the highest love’, in the following sense:

One cannot but agree that in some sense this is the most important thing
of all, and yet human love is normally too profoundly possessive and also
too ‘mechanical’ to be a place of vision . . . That the highest love is in
some sense impersonal is something which we can indeed see in art, but
which I think we cannot see clearly, except in a very piecemeal manner,
in the relationships of human beings. (OGG: 361)

Perhaps the idea of loving your child so selflessly that you are able to act osten-
sibly ‘impersonally’ and end his life is something that is very difficult for oth-
ers to see clearly if at all. And the basis for our compassion should lie in the
realm of experience, and what actually happens in people’s lives, rather than

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 124 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

assessments made in a vacuum or universal rules and principles. The guiding

principle, as always for Murdoch, is the Good, as it is found in lives.

The image of the Good as a transcendent magnetic centre seems to me

the least corruptible and most realistic picture for us to use in our reflec-
tions upon the moral life. Here the philosophical ‘proof ’, if there is one,
is the same as the moral ‘proof ’. I would rely especially upon arguments
from experience concerned with the realism which we perceive to be
connected with goodness, and with the love and detachment which is
exhibited in great art. (OGG: 361)

The last film we are going to look at in this chapter is one in which the mat-
ter of a mother’s love is central, as is the question of loving the ostensibly
unlovable.

T H E R E A L I S M O F C O M PA S S I O N : W E N E E D T O T A L K
ABOUT KEVIN

In Lynne Ramsay’s 2011 film adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s best-selling novel,

Eva Khatchadourian’s (Tilda Swinton) motherhood is constantly under the
spotlight. When Kevin is a baby, he is difficult to care for and to love, and, with
her, never seems to stop crying. When he is a child he is combative and unco-
operative, and as he gets older he is sadistic and manipulative to his younger
sister, and bitter and hateful to his mother. The film shows Eva trying to carry
on living after Kevin has committed a massacre at his high school, killing and
wounding many of his fellow pupils with a bow and arrow, and has also killed
his father and sister. For Eva, this entails holding down a job, cooking for her-
self and withstanding verbal and physical abuse, while consuming plenty of
wine and pills, and scrubbing abusive graffiti off her house and car. Eva con-
tinues to visit Kevin in the juvenile detention centre, despite his insults and
rejection. She looks at him with a mixture of disbelief and revulsion, and these
visits prompt us to ask why she continues to go: is it loving attention, or looking
for some glimpse of goodness in Kevin? Is it care for him? Fascination? Or is it
simply out of duty?
At the final visit we see in the film, Kevin shows a glimpse of vulnerability
as he is being readied for adult prison. But whether this is any kind of self-
knowledge or repentance, or is simply self-centred fear of what lies ahead of
him, is hard to decide. With a shaved head, and numerous scars, Kevin looks
like he has already received some rough treatment during his time inside.
The adult prison that awaits him, however, as he is about to turn eighteen,

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 FILM, LOVE AND GOODNESS 125

is clearly worrying him. On this, the second anniversary of his massacre, Eva
looks at him as intently as ever, and says, ‘I want you to tell me why.’ Kevin
seems to suggest he is beginning to get some insight, just by questioning, ‘I
used to think I knew, but now I’m not so sure.’ A flicker of pleasant surprise
can be detected on Eva’s face, as a weakening appears on Kevin’s. He looks
like he wants to say more, but their time is up. Eva and Kevin hug, and this
is significant because Kevin really grasps his mother as she cradles his head.
This does appear to be a shift. Is this perhaps because Eva has made him
realise he will leave prison at some point, and need to re-enter the world? Or
is there perhaps something in her refusal to be sent away and her tenacity
in visiting him that has, at long last, had an effect? In her chapter on love in
Murdoch, Susan Wolf considers whether this idea of a loving gaze is simply
‘the positive light conception’, or rose-tinted spectacles (2014: 371–3). This
is an important potential criticism of Murdoch’s language and description:
are we supposed to keep attending until we see every person as good? Wolf
reminds us that the gaze Murdoch says we should cultivate is both loving and
just, and that ‘even if love can be imagined to paint its objects in a rosy light,
justice cannot’ (2014: 372). This loving vision must be free from fantasy, and
any compassion must be real:

One might at this point pause and consider the picture of human per-
sonality, or the soul, which has been emerging. It is in the capacity to
love, that is to see, that the liberation of the soul from fantasy consists.
The freedom which is a proper human goal is the freedom from fantasy,
that is the realism of compassion. (OGG: 354)

Eva’s attention to Kevin exemplifies this. I suggest that she continues to visit
him to try to understand him, as well as out of a sense of duty, but also, frankly,
because they only have each other now. She has certainly never been blind to
Kevin’s sadism and indeed has frequently been the only person who could
see it. Her intelligence and strength are displayed through her persistence
and ability to maintain a sufficient distance to observe her son without being
clouded by emotion or judgement (Figure 5.3). In this way, Eva displays the
ability that Murdoch describes here: ‘The ability, for instance, to think justly
about what is evil, or to love another person unselfishly, involves a discipline of
intellect and emotion. Thought, goodness and reality are thus seen to be con-
nected’ (MGM: 399).
This film, and these ideas from Murdoch, challenge the basis on which
we see and relate to our nearest and dearest. Are mothers driven by their
egos, blind to their children’s faults? Wolf suggests a mother like Eva might
be, when she says: ‘The loving gaze of, say, a murderer’s mother, can hardly

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 126 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

Figure 5.3 Eva (Tilda Swinton) perseveres with realism and love, in We Need to Talk About
Kevin (2011), directed by Lynne Ramsay.

be identified with a “just” gaze in virtue of its highlighting the good quali-
ties in the murderer’s character rather than the bad’ (Wolf 2014: 380).
Speaking in 1967, so using out-of-date terminology, Murdoch offers a more
complex and nuanced understanding of family relations, however, when she
observes,

Our attachments tend to be selfish and strong, and the transforma-

tion of our loves from selfishness to unselfishness is sometimes hard
even to conceive of. Yet is the situation really so different? Should
a retarded child be kept at home or sent to an institution? Should
an elderly relative who is a trouble-maker be cared for or asked to
go away? Should an unhappy marriage be continued for the sake of
the children? Should I leave my family in order to do political work?
Should I neglect them in order to practise my art? The love which
brings the right answer is an exercise of justice and realism and really
looking. (SGC: 375)

Murdoch is saying that things are not so simple in families. The mother of a
murderer may well be able to form a just and loving gaze upon her son, with
work: ‘the background condition . . . is a just mode of vision and a good qual-
ity of consciousness. It is a task to come to see the world as it is’ (SGC: 375).
Eva’s work in visiting and studying her son, attempting to come to see him
as he really is, and to try to understand him, is part and parcel of her slow,
steady resilience, alongside her daily confronting of the reality of Kevin’s mur-
ders and the loss of her husband and daughter. In this way, she exemplifies
Murdoch’s discussion of ‘energy and discernment’:

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 FILM, LOVE AND GOODNESS 127

We act rightly ‘when the time comes’ not out of strength of will but out
of the quality of our usual attachments and with the kind of energy and
discernment which we have available. And to this the whole activity of
our consciousness is relevant. (SGC: 375)

The background to her relationship with Kevin is important here. Eva has
never been blind to Kevin’s faults. She recognises in him ‘the real existence of
evil: cynicism, cruelty, indifference to suffering’ (SGC: 380), and she has also
seen what is good, fun and interesting in the world, such as love for her hus-
band, the innocence of her daughter, and the intoxication of travel and other
countries. Like the other characters we have looked at in this chapter, she lives
with the reality of death on a daily basis. And this, Murdoch argues, enables a
clearer vision of virtue:

A genuine sense of mortality enables us to see virtue as the only thing of

worth; and it is impossible to limit and foresee the ways in which it will
be required of us. (SGC: 381)

Goodness is connected with the acceptance of real death and real chance
and real transience and only against the background of this acceptance,
which is psychologically so difficult, can we understand the full extent
of what virtue is like. The acceptance of death is an acceptance of our
own nothingness which is an automatic spur to our concern with what is
not ourselves. (SGC: 385)

This is a concept that is both reassuring and terrifying: essentially we cannot

know how we will need to be good, but all we can do is ready ourselves by aim-
ing for goodness as our way of life. And this is how Murdoch thinks we can
live our lives:

There is a place both inside and outside of religion for a sort of con-
templation of the Good, not just by dedicated experts but by ordinary
people: an attention which is not just the planning of particular good
actions but an attempt to look right away from self towards a distant
transcendent perfection, a source of uncontaminated energy, a source of
new and quite undreamt-of virtue. (SGC: 383)

This consideration of the contemplation of the Good by us all leads us to think

about the role played by films such as the ones analysed in this book in the
development of our inner lives and moral visions. I will now develop this by
revisiting the idea of films as moral fables which we looked at in Chapter 3.

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 128 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

O U R O W N PAT H T O T H E G O O D

Make no mistake about it, Murdoch means us to be doing moral work in

response to art and as part of our ‘daily struggle with the world’ (MGM: 427).
After all, although the role of attending to art is a way of training our mode
of attention, Murdoch’s point is that ‘Great art teaches a sense of reality, so
does ordinary living and loving. We find out in the most minute details of our
lives that the good is the real’ (MGM: 430). The unique role of film in these
respects is that it enables us to pay close attention to the lives of others on-
screen, watching them learning from their journeys, and also we learn our-
selves by close attention and perception. Film is able to show characters such
as Nejat, Susanne, Juliette and Eva, in their ‘daily struggle’, and also to consti-
tute this idea of contemplative perception for us:

The best picture of most kinds of thinking is perception, and the best
picture of serious contemplative thinking is serious contemplative per-
ception; as when we attend to a human face, music, a flower, a visual
work of art (etc. etc.). Such close mental attention involves the concep-
tion of ‘presence’. (MGM: 424–5)

By choosing to pay contemplative attention to films such as The Edge of Heaven,

I’ve Loved You So Long and We Need to Talk about Kevin, films with signifi-
cant and deep moral thinking, we enable their complexity and power to affect
us, and improve the clarity of our moral vision. For this to happen we need to
accept that these films contain examples of thinking and relationships that are
realistic and relevant, and then they can aid us in our overcoming of self. In a
paragraph that connects remarkably closely with these films, Murdoch con-
veys the usefulness of thinking about Nejat, Susanne, Juliette and Eva:

The energy of the attentive scholar or artist is spiritual energy. The

energy of the bereaved person trying to survive in the best way, or of
the mother thinking about her delinquent son (and so on and so on) is
spiritual. One uses this word with a certain purpose, to set up certain
pictures, to draw attention to similarities and to explain and clarify the
obscure by the familiar. (MGM: 505)

Murdoch’s discussion of the transcendent Good and its role in the everyday
is a way to include spirituality and metaphysics in the discussion of the moral
lives of individuals, as we struggle with work, families, love and death. This
is the stuff of life, and Murdoch grounds us in the realism of morality and
virtue. In the next chapter I will consider these concepts when viewed in more
extreme forms in art as comedy and tragedy.

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NOTES

1. See discussion of M and D in Chapter 3 at p. 62.

2. For further information about this massacre, this article is a useful starting point:
<https://anfenglish.com/kurdistan/turkish-state-s-open-secret-maras-massacre-17610>
(last accessed 15 August 2018).
3. Murdoch uses the example of the man in a concentration camp on several occasions. It is,
for her, clearly an example of an extreme moral situation. For example, she describes ‘the
best kind of courage’ as ‘that which would make a man act unselfishly in a concentration
camp’ (OGG: 346). She also considers how ‘merit in one area does not seem to guarantee
merit in another’, using as an example the idea that ‘the concentration camp guard can be
a kindly father’ (SGC: 379).

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 CHAPTER 6

Film, Comedy and Tragedy

Human life is chancy and incomplete. It is the role of tragedy, and also
of comedy, and of painting to show us suffering without a thrill and
death without a consolation. (SGC: 371)

What is absurd is very often funny, though it can be appalling too.

(MGM: 91)

Truth and happiness are ideally frolicking together, so that it is a

happy destiny when it’s working well. Works of art make you happy.
Even King Lear makes you happy, and yet it comes near to the edge
of the impossible – that you could be made happy by a work of art
which is about something terrible. (Interview in 1985, cited in Dooley
2003: 135)

I n ‘The Fire and the Sun’ (F&S), Murdoch proposes that we should ask
ourselves what we may properly laugh at, ‘even in our private moments’
(F&S: 398). This is not as pious as it may sound: many philosophers, from
Plato, to Henri Bergson and Simon Critchley, as well as Murdoch, have
been concerned with the mechanics of the joke and what makes us laugh,
and the moral questions that this raises. This chapter will examine the basis
of humour in The Death of Stalin (Armando Iannucci, 2017), the troubling
treatment of rape in Elle (Paul Verhoeven, 2016) and the desperation of
the void in Manchester by the Sea (Kenneth Lonergan, 2016), and consider
the roles of comedy and tragedy in the films in Murdochian terms. We will
assess the value of humour as a tool for dealing with difficult topics, the ade-
quacy of tragic art for depicting suffering, and the moral questions involved
in so doing.

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 FILM, COMEDY AND TRAGEDY 131

M U R D O C H O N C O M E DY A N D T R A G E DY

Murdoch was concerned with how the horrors of life appear to us in our con-
templations, conversations and imaginations, and how they are treated by art. In
her discussion of the ‘tragic fragment’, she conveys how we tend to extrapolate
moments or elements from a terrible story. This reduction, or pocket-sized piece
of information, Murdoch argues, is suitable for comedy, but less so for tragedy:

A joke is a joke however often repeated, it is portable and has its conven-
tional belongingness in life. But the ‘tragic fragment’ embarrasses and
disturbs us or begins to sound suspiciously and inappropriately like art.
There are stories which we hesitate to repeat lest we seem to be gloating
over horrors or trying to gratify unworthy emotions in ourselves or our
hearers. One might tell someone’s dying words to his mother, but not
repeat them at a dinner party. (MGM: 95)

This conveys the idea that by selecting and repeating fractions of a story about
suffering, we not only diminish it, but disrespect those who it involves, and this
reflects on us as tellers of the tale, both as to why we are repeating it and what
we are getting out of it. In this way, Murdoch sees art as being the more honest
and effective way of communicating tragedy, whereas conveying the terrible ‘in
real life’ is inevitably a matter of only glimpsing the horror:

Terrible events may be fiddled with by art, but as they appear in the stream
of life, in conversation, newspapers, television, informal or formal books
(and so on) these aesthetic ‘limited wholes’ tend to be unstable, so that we
may see through the tale into the horror beyond. (MGM: 96)

For Murdoch, ‘tragedy belongs to art, and only to great art’, and it is here that
the comic and the tragic may combine effectively: ‘Shakespeare’s tragic plays
contain comic and irrelevant matter’ (MGM: 94). King Lear is an example
Murdoch returns to as epitomising tragedy, but also, as she expresses in the
epigraph, a play which conveys pleasure and humour too. In further evidence
that Murdoch recognises the possibilities that film could convey mental states
and consciousness, she writes,

Lear could be imagined living on as an image of death which would be

more awful than the merciful end conventionally required. A clever cin-
ema director could perhaps end a version of the play by continued shots
of Lear, still alive, remembering, always growing older and older and
always thinking those terrible torturing thoughts. (MGM: 121)

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 132 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

The film that Murdoch imagines is one we can all envisage. What is inter-
esting here is the idea that Lear’s thought could be shown, and we could share
it: the medium of film, through its ability to compress time and convey silent
contemplation, is uniquely able to express this painful process. It is similar to
Dr Cemal’s memory-jogging trip while looking at his photographs, or the shot
of Jackie Kennedy’s face caught in the car window as she looks at the crowds
surveying her. These shots convey reverie, and through this the thoughts of
the characters are shown to us, not simply told. These kinaesthetic and synaes-
thetic images and gestures work to hold us in the on-screen contemplations,
which can impart or suggest insight and even revelation. Murdoch writes, ‘We
use our imagination not to escape the world but to join it, and this exhilarates
us because of the distance between our ordinary dulled consciousness and an
apprehension of the real’ (SGC: 374).
Attending to these images on-screen attunes our imagination with the
experience of the character, enabling it to affect our mental state, albeit not
necessarily to share it: ‘patient attention transforms accuracy without interval
into just discernment’ (SGC: 374). The suggestion here is that we may be
changed or improved by the experience of sharing the thoughts and experi-
ences of the characters and events on-screen, and that those changes may
have a lasting effect beyond the end of the film. In other words, this is not
just about how we experience the film at the time, but how our attending to
the film might improve the quality of our understanding, compassion and
discernment in everyday life. Murdoch sees this as a possibility engendered
by all art:

I should say at this point that I take my theory to apply to all the arts and
not just the literary arts. The notion of a loving respect for a reality other
than oneself is as relevant to making a vase as it is to writing a novel, nor
does the theory only apply to arts which involve, in the obvious sense,
imitation. The highest art is . . . tragedy, because its subject-matter is
the most important and most individual that we know. (‘The Sublime
and the Good’ (S&G): 218)

What makes tragic art so disturbing is that self-contained form is com-

bined with something, the individual being and destiny of human per-
sons, which defies form. A great tragedy leaves us in eternal doubt.
(S&G: 219)

These quotes encapsulate the excess spirit of a film, or the element that
exceeds the story and the images on-screen. This picks up on the idea of ‘the
soul’ that I looked at in Chapter 2, when discussing the evocations of which

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 FILM, COMEDY AND TRAGEDY 133

a film is capable, in that case Under the Skin. Murdoch here is describing the
conceptual, philosophical angst that a film, such as Margaret, Once Upon a
Time in Anatolia or The Edge of Heaven, can engender. These feelings are
aroused by film form, as well as performance, sound, light, pace and space,
and of course narrative. Being left in eternal doubt does not sound like the
most pleasurable way to finish a film, but this is something of which a film
is certainly capable. The way in which Murdoch describes tragedy as being
about the individual being resonates with her concern that philosophy should
be about particularity: individuals with specific lives, joys and problems, who
are as singular as we all are, and yet also in relation to others, and societally
and historically contextualised. Vitally, the tying up of narrative ends does
not appease all of the realisations and challenges that the story has brought
about, and in some ways the attempt to do so betrays the impossibility of so
doing. In this way, ‘tragedy in art is the attempt to overcome the defeat which
human beings suffer in the practical world’ (S&G: 220). The lack of consola-
tion may make tragedy more realistic, but it also shows how art is not a ‘safe’
or reassuring place.

L O O K I N G F O R S A F E T Y I N I M AG E S

Murdoch describes how we carry images or ideas with us which serve to reas-
sure us. She writes,

There are moral illuminations or pictures which remain vividly in the

memory, playing a protective or guiding role: moral refuges, perpetual
starting points . . . A Christian may think here of Christ upon the cross.
But at a simpler level the story of his birth, complete with shepherds,
kings, angels, the ox and the ass, may be a good thing to have in one’s
life. Buddhists speak of ‘taking refuge’. Such points or places of spiritual
power may be indicated by a tradition, suggested by work or subjects of
study, emerge from personal crises or relationships, be gradually estab-
lished or come suddenly: through familiarity with a good person or a
sacred text, a sense of renewal in a particular place, a sudden vision in
art or nature, joy experienced as pure, witnessing a virtuous action, a
patient suffering, an absence of resentment, humble service, persistent
heroism, innumerable things in family life and so on and so on. We are
turning here to an inexhaustible and familiar field of human resources.
Every individual has a collection of such things which might be indi-
cated by various names and images. I have already used some: refuges,
lights, visions, deep sources, pure sources, protections, strongholds,

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 134 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

footholds, icons, starting points, sacraments, pearls of great price. Our

moral consciousness is full of such imagery, kinaesthetic, visual, literary,
traditional, verbal and non-verbal, and is full too of images of darkness,
of stumbling, falling, sinking, drowning. (MGM: 335–6)

This lengthy quote describes how we have ‘refuges’ or comforting thoughts

that we turn to for reassurance, and that these originate externally, from reli-
gions, or work, or personal experience. They might be a favourite passage from
a novel, or a beach visited on holiday, or a scene from a film, that offers suc-
cour and reassurance. Perhaps the sight of Lotte’s smiling face might be one of
these; or a memory of a loved one, or a piece of family lore passed on through
generations. This is a realm that film can nurture, with moments that enrich
our thought and show instances of virtue or wisdom, and we each have our own
‘collection’. This is a pleasing thought in itself: the recognition that we have
something like a wardrobe of imagery that we can select from when needed,
and that film – especially for the more cinephilic among us – forms a signifi-
cant part of that wardrobe. This also shows how we can recall moments from
films, as part of our own experience, in a similar way to how we recall experi-
ences from real life. However, not all of this imagery is comforting, and we are
also no doubt well aware of the darker, vulnerable imagery of which Murdoch
speaks. These may also be fed by images from films that we wish we had never
seen, or indeed from the television news. These images are not exceptional, but
part of our everyday lives:

What happens every day is important, images can affect the quality of
our thoughts and wishes. The damage done to inner life, to aloneness
and quietness, through the imposition of banal or pornographic or vio-
lent images by television, is a considerable wound. (MGM: 337)

Murdoch is not impressed by television, or the way it invades our minds and
thoughts. Referring to it elsewhere as ‘the dictator’s best friend’ she worries
how it ‘already erodes our ability to read’ (MGM: 210). She perceives a need
for quiet contemplation in order to cultivate imagination and respect for others,
because ‘a moral philosophy should be inhabited’ (MGM: 337). She explains,

Simply sitting quietly and calmly can be doing something good; subdu-
ing unkind or frenzied thoughts certainly is. Morality, as the ability or
attempt to be good, rests upon deep areas of sensibility and creative
imagination, upon removal from one state of mind to another, upon
shift of attachments, upon love and respect for the contingent details of
the world. (MGM: 337)

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 FILM, COMEDY AND TRAGEDY 135

If we are to pay attention to the details of the world and their contingency,
then we unavoidably have to deal with horror. And this is not the fantastic hor-
ror of science fiction or the monster movie, but rather the human elements of
horror in their quotidian banality as well as their extremity, which shed light
on the world we live in. Murdoch talks about Kafka’s Metamorphosis, which is
indeed fantastic, where the father kills his son, who has become a large beetle,
and describes how we can ‘see through it the real horrors which lurk in life’
(ibid.: 340):

art can deal with both the high and low experience, turning the latter
into a kind of exhilarating though fearful surrealism: like the flying
apples in Kafka’s story. And in life too the absurd contingent, not the
waterfall but the broken crockery, may produce a surge of cosmic misery
and hatred, or may make us smile and turn the occasion into a sort of
rueful aesthetic pleasure: as when we say, unseriously, this is too much,
this really is the end! (MGM: 341)

Murdoch refers here to the way in which, in Metamorphosis, Gregor’s

father hurls apples to repulse him, which we can see as both a surreal night-
mare and also as a painful rejection of the son by the father.1 Murdoch also
recalls the waterfall of the Kantian sublime, and stresses that it need not be
something so majestic or vast in order to overwhelm us: ‘a burnt saucepan or
massive broken crockery accident’ could do it, and that we see that there is
some humour in this (MGM: 340). This is moral experience, not just emo-
tional, in that we assess and react and learn from what we see and what we
imagine. For Murdoch, ‘our moral experience shares in the peculiar density
of art, and in its imaginative cognitive activity’ (MGM: 341). And, as I exam-
ined in Chapter 3, Murdoch proposes that we are doing this moral work all
the time:

The struggle against evil, the love of what is good, the inspired enjoy-
ment of beauty, the discovery and perception of holiness, continues all
the time in the privacy of human souls. This process is more like eating
or breathing than a dramatic conflict with clashing swords and contra-
dictions. The word ‘tragic’ is out of place. Of course there are dramatic
moments and situations, but these are, if we look at the long threads of
human lives, intermittent. ‘Tragic’ is another comfort word. We invoke
the theatre of the tragic to help us to bear sufferings which it would be
too painful to consider in all their detailed structures of accident and
muddle. There is no deep analysis of terrible suffering. The horrors of
the world recede into darkness. (MGM: 458)

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 136 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

Here, Murdoch examines the place of the tragic in our lives, and sug-
gests that most of life is not in fact tragic, but, as set out in the epigraph
to this chapter, ‘chancy and incomplete’. This is a challenging proposition,
and implies that we exaggerate the horror or tragedy of an event or a situa-
tion in order to avoid the more banal reality. This is resonant with Hannah
Arendt’s 1963 analysis of Adolf Eichmann as embodying the banality of evil,
which attracted so much controversy upon its publication.2 It is also consis-
tent with the mindset of describing certain criminals as ‘monsters’, thereby
denying their humanity and inevitable connection to the rest of us. These
difficult issues are at the heart of the films in this chapter. They feature a
range of individuals: from those we – and history – might consider to be mon-
strously evil, to archetypes of sexual violence and fatal negligence. How are
we to experience these, particularly when we may be invited, or compelled,
to laugh at them? Do these films function to challenge our preconceptions
about the humanity, or lack of humanity, we expect to find in these characters?
Murdoch argues that, ‘If there is to be morality, there cannot altogether be an
end to evil. Discord is essential to goodness. Moral evil exists only in moral
experience and that experience is essentially inconsistent’ (MGM: 488). This
is a challenge to established boundaries of good and evil, asserting that these
matters are perhaps not as fixed as we would find comfortable, and yet Mur-
doch does not wish us to be too serious about it, which is why we must also
consider the role of humour: ‘Not all metaphysicians have a sense of humour.
Does metaphysics founder on the funny? Not necessarily – a little light and air
often improves the scene . . . Funniness mocks totality’ (MGM: 491).
This is precisely what The Death of Stalin aims to do: to mock the total-
itarian regime in Stalin’s USSR and those who were in control. This is an
interesting film to consider in relation to Murdoch’s thinking as she famously
began her political outlook as a communist but migrated further and further to
the right as she became increasingly disenchanted with the Soviet communist
experiment (Browning 2018: 23; ‘A House of Theory’ (HT): 173). What I will
consider here, however, is the role of comedy in this film about the brutal,
murderous regime and the individuals who sat at Stalin’s high table. The film
questions the morality of laughing at these caricatured individuals, when they
committed acts of such cruelty.

M O C K I N G T O TA L I T Y : T H E D E A T H O F S T A L I N

The film begins at a piano concert in 1953. An intertitle announces that ‘For
20 years Stalin’s NKVD security forces have imposed the great terror’, and
that ‘Those on Stalin’s list of “enemy” names are arrested, exiled or shot’.
The scenario of the piano concert is designed to show the grip of terror that

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 FILM, COMEDY AND TRAGEDY 137

the ordinary people are held in: when Stalin telephones the director of the
concert to ask for a recording, and the director realises the concert is not being
recorded, absolute terror strikes. The director has to get people off the streets
to come back in to the hall so the concert can be repeated and a fake audience
can applaud. There is an uneasy mixture of the comic and the horrific. The
director says, with faux reassurance, ‘Sit down, don’t worry nobody’s going to
get killed’, conveying how likely it actually is that people in this society would
get killed for minor infractions. This unease is bolstered by an old-fashioned
sexist joke. When the director Andreyev (Paddy Considine) tells his staff to get
more people in off the street for the audience, he says they should get fat ones
‘so we need fewer’, and the conductor says ‘I could get my wife – she’d deaden
the acoustic.’ This is an old ‘my wife’s so fat’ joke, which sets an off-kilter and
uncomfortable tone for the humour.
The pianist, Maria (Olga Kurylenko), refuses to re-play the concert, say-
ing that Stalin killed her father and brother. She says she won’t do it, ‘as God
is my witness I will not do it’; but Andreyev bargains with her, and she agrees
to do it for 20,000 roubles. The recording is made, and Maria slips a written
note in the record sleeve before it is taken to Stalin. We see Stalin (Adrian
McLoughlin) in his study going down his list of people to be executed. Stalin
has a little high cockney voice, and his Central Committee members appear as
boorish buffoons, with Georgy Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor), Nikita Khruschev
(Steve Buscemi) and Vyacheslav Molotov (Michael Palin) telling a story about
throwing grenades to keep warm, the actors performing in their familiar come-
dic styles. Head of security, Lavrenti Beria (Simon Russell Beale) goes to action
Stalin’s list, saying to the soldier he has tasked to do the killing, ‘Shoot her
before him but make sure he sees it’, and ‘Kill him, take him to his church
and dump him in the pulpit.’ These instructions convey the callous attitude
to killing and the express purpose of making an exhibition of the murderous
acts. The soldiers drag people screaming from their homes; these scenes are
more familiar from war films where homes are raided and families torn apart,
as a son identifies his father to the soldiers. By now we have a complex and
contradictory picture: there is cruelty and terror, fear and death, along with
gags and slapstick. Some lines of dialogue are cruel and horrific, others are
light and silly.
The committee members are hanging out with Stalin. They joke and leap
around, chest bumping in slow motion for maximum ludicrousness. Stalin says
it’s time for a cowboy movie, and asks, ‘Who’s in my posse?’ They all sit around
watching a western and then the cronies leave, drunk, cheering ‘Long live the
Communist Party of Lenin and Stalin; long live John Wayne and John Ford!’
It transpires that one of them, Molotov, has been put ‘on the list’. Khruschev
advises Malenkov to make a note when he gets home of everything he thinks
he said tonight, then he can go over it in the morning. So even after this night

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 138 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

of social drinking, movie watching and fooling around, their lives and liberties
hang in the balance.
Stalin, now alone in his room, gets the recording of the concert and puts
it on the record player, and he finds Maria’s note. It says ‘Josef Vissarionov-
ich Stalin, you have betrayed our nation and destroyed its people. I pray for
your end and ask the Lord to forgive you. Tyrant.’ He laughs, derisively, but
collapses, and appears to die on the floor of his study. In the morning, Sta-
lin’s breakfast is brought to him, and we next see a message being delivered to
Beria saying that Comrade Stalin is very ill. Beria is busy torturing someone for
names; as he walks down the corridor he gives instructions about someone else,
saying, ‘Have his wife moved into the next cell and start working on her until
he talks; make it noisy.’ He adds, ‘Some women will do anything to get their
husbands released.’ This exploitative, disrespectful attitude towards women’s
bodies runs throughout the film.
Beria takes charge of the scene in Stalin’s room, sending the housekeeper
away. Stalin has urinated on the note from the pianist, but Beria removes it and
keeps it. Malenkov arrives and is upset, knowing he must take Stalin’s place.
When they discuss calling a doctor for Stalin, Beria reminds them that all the
doctors have been put away for treason. Khruschev arrives and says he feels sick;
they cry and hug ostentatiously, with Stalin on the ground, ‘lying in a puddle of
indignity’. Others arrive, and they all try to avoid kneeling in the urine. They
lift him up, taking him first one way, then the other, in a style reminiscent of
classic slapstick, before getting him onto his bed. Since ‘all the best doctors are
in the gulag or dead’, they plan to call on a woman, Comrade Timashuk (Cara
Horgan), who has ‘a proven desire to survive and is good at fellatio’.
Khruschev and Kaganovich (Dermot Crowley) discuss the future of the
union, possible reforms and factionalism, as Beria and Malenkov discuss
this elsewhere in the same woods, observing each other from a distance,
and they all run to meet Stalin’s daughter Svetlana (Andrea Riseborough)
when she arrives, and try to curry favour with her. She is like an English
‘jolly hockey sticks’ stereotype, who asks for tea and buns to mop up her
brother Vasily’s (Rupert Friend) vodka. Svetlana wants a second opinion
on her father’s death, but all the doctors left are there in the room. There
is a farcical denial of Stalin’s death, and then he seems to be alive, but then
dead again, playing with the reactions of the committee, who do not know
whether to cheer or curse.
Beria changes the names on Stalin’s ‘list’, and says it is time to ‘reset your
watches’ as he is going to do things differently. A soldier goes straight into a cell
and shoots someone. Beria releases Molotov’s wife, Polina Molotova (Diana
Quick), who was imprisoned by Stalin. Khruschev goes to see Molotov and
tells him Beria and Stalin put him on a list. Molotov thinks Beria had his wife
killed, and he says in front of Beria that she was a parasite, but in fact Polina
is back and walks into the room with Beria, who announces, ‘I kept her safe.’

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 FILM, COMEDY AND TRAGEDY 139

In this farcical scene, Molotov then embraces his wife and welcomes her back.
This conveys the idea that their emotions are mixed up and related to loyalties
outside family, but that they are all at the mercy of the state’s operations.
Malenkov is having formal photos taken, and Beria teases him because he
is wearing a girdle, which he says is for his bad back. However, Malenkov has
turned tough, and says to him ‘Don’t you ever humiliate me again.’ Of the gir-
dle, he says, ‘Let’s make this a test of your discretion’: he has already assumed
the egotism of the leader and is commanding loyalty. At the committee meet-
ing, Malenkov is voted in as General Secretary, Khruschev is appointed as an
unwilling funeral organiser, and Beria announces he is halting some depor-
tations and pausing arrests and executions. Malenkov’s measures are carried
unanimously, despite people not actually agreeing, giving the lie to the pro-
posed ‘collective leadership’. We then see executions stopped halfway down a
firing line: one man is shot, the next now released. When the people come back
home having been released, the magnitude of feeling is on display, from the
wife’s joy to the discomfort with the son who betrayed him.
An extravagant funeral and laying in state is organised. The decorated war
hero Field Marshall Zhukov (Jason Isaacs) arrives, and is portrayed as a tough
guy with a Yorkshire accent and no-nonsense attitude. When Vasily shouts
obscenities, Zhukov kicks him. When he shouts, ‘I want to make a speech at my
father’s funeral’, Zhukov says, ‘I want to fuck Grace Kelly.’ This is all played
for laughs, as the characters become pure caricature. As mourners arrive,
Khruschev curses, ‘Jesus Christ it’s the bishops! I thought we’d banned those
freaks. Sneeze on the bastards as they go past’ (Figure 6.1).

Figure 6.1 Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi) and Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor) argue over who
invited the bishops, in The Death of Stalin (2017), directed by Armando Iannucci.

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 140 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

Beria speaks to the pianist Maria and lets her know he has her note to Stalin.
He has learned that Khruschev is associated with Maria, through her teaching
his niece piano, and confronts them both with the note. Beria says allegiance to
the party line was demanded, and that defiance of the party line would make
you a traitor. He says it is a new reality, but Khruschev objects, saying, ‘So
you’re the good guy now? You locked up half the nation, you raped them, you
killed them?’ And Beria responds, ‘And now I’m releasing them.’ He is buy-
ing popular support by appearing to soften and release prisoners. Khruschev
orders the trains into Moscow be reopened; the people come back in, and are
massacred by the NKVD. The committee members then start to fight over the
people they’ve killed.
As they carry Stalin in his coffin, the committee are planning to over-
throw Beria, and Khrushchev lies about Malentov being on board with the
plan. Zhukov bursts into the committee room as they are meeting and says
they are staging a coup and that the army is taking over. They lock up Beria in
the toilet, and Khruschev proclaims that the only choice they have is between
Beria’s death and his revenge. Malenkov, weakly, says, ‘I want it on record
that this was not my first course of action.’ Beria is accused of rapes and
perversion, in a hastily assembled court, and he is found guilty and sentenced
to be shot. He is dragged out and shot, and his body is burned. Khruschev
says over his burning remains, ‘I will bury you in history.’ This is a shocking
and bleak sequence, where the gags have been toned down, and the callous-
ness of the removal and execution of Beria is merciless. Now they talk about
Malenkov, and ask if they can trust him. To which Khruschev says, ‘Can you
ever trust a weak man?’ Khrushchev is now at the heart of the state and in
control. The film ends with the pianist playing at a concert, and the intertitle
announcing,

After Beria’s execution in 1953, the central committee took control of

the Soviet Union.

In 1956 Khrushchev moved to demote other members of the party,

including Molotov and Malenkov.

At long last he became head of Soviet Government and Commander in

Chief,

Until his removal in 1964 by Leonid Brezhnev.

Brezhnev (Gerald Lepkowski) is sitting behind him at the concert, looking

at the back of Krushchev’s head, confirming the idea that there is always
somebody plotting to take the leader down. The film’s closing credits are

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 FILM, COMEDY AND TRAGEDY 141

photographs of ordinary people, and cast members, with individuals being

rubbed out or cut out from the image. This is a fittingly cold-blooded
ending to a film that has pitched the horrors of the Stalinist regime as some-
thing between satire and black comedy.
The questions this film raises include whether the horrors of Stalinism are
a suitable subject for such comic treatment, what the purpose is of presenting
them this way, and, further, what our response to the film should be, and what
our actual response tells us about ourselves. Thinking about it in Murdochian
terms, one of the first questions we can ask is the purpose of the film. Is
it malicious, or is it in fact designed to ridicule but also demonstrate the
brutality of these people? Murdoch writes,

Of course any religious or moral view will be rightly critical of the kind
of humour which is fundamentally malicious. But on the whole we in
the west attach value, prudentially and morally, to the possession of a
sense of humour. It is an important fact, often neglected at a theoretical
level by philosophers and theologians, that the funny is everywhere to
be found. (MGM: 92)

The funny may be found everywhere, but the context and the tone is important
to think about:

‘A sense of humour’, often treated as an identifiable faculty all on its

own, needs to be looked at critically, even with suspicion. There is a
perfectly familiar distinction between amiable joking and malicious or
corrupt mockery. We must shun spiteful wit, yet not forget the social
uses of satire. (MGM: 325)

The Death of Stalin is certainly satire, in that it mocks and lampoons these men
in order to reveal the personal power games that lie behind the machinations
of state. It undermines their credibility and in fact their competence and his-
torical reputations, and it does so not only by suggesting their cruelty, but also
their weaknesses, and their disregard for human life, and women in particular.
Their attitudes towards women, especially Beria’s, offers a particular challenge
as the ‘humour’ is focused on how they see women only in terms of using them
for sex. This line of jokes weights the film more heavily towards something
that is not easy to laugh at. Particular performances, and lines of dialogue, are
very funny, but reflecting upon what we laugh at when we watch the film is
philosophically intriguing. Henri Bergson described the ‘spark of spitefulness’
that nature has implanted ‘even in the best of men’ (Bergson 2008: 93). This
spark enables us to laugh at things that are neither just nor kind-hearted. But
perhaps laughing at such reprehensible politicians serves a function for us in

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dealing with the politicians we see leading countries today. Anja Steinbauer
argues that,

Jokes about politicians and others in positions of power and influence

abound, possibly a token of trying to alleviate our sense of powerlessness.
Though jokes and satires can be tools of protest, they are often ways of
coming to terms with existing power structures and even oppression.
They can be symptomatic of resentment. (2015: 3)

Steinbauer repeats some sexist jokes, and says they clearly are not funny, but
asks where does the fun end? As she says, the ethics of humour are extremely
complex, and a lot depends on who is telling the joke. Murdoch suggests that,

There is a bad absurd (degrading, hurtful), but is there not also a good
absurd? Loss of dignity need not be loss of moral stature, can be sur-
render of vanity, discovery of humility; and a sense of the ludicrous is a
defence against pretensions, not least in art. (F&S: 450)

This suggests that laughing at those in power might not necessarily be as

destructive as it seems. Although Murdoch also concedes that ‘there is some-
thing anti-authoritarian about violent laughter . . . The frightened or guilty mind
will always wonder: what are they laughing at?’ (F&S: 450). Simon Critchley
writes that ‘the fact remains that humour is a nicely impossible object for a phi-
losopher. But herein lies its irresistible attraction’ (Critchley 2002: 2). By this he
means, partly, that there are many theories about why we laugh, from Hobbesian
superiority, to Freudian relief theory, and the incongruity theory that Critchley
sees in Kant, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard.3 A discussion of all these different
approaches is beyond the scope of this chapter, but Murdoch certainly engages
with some classical philosophical approaches to humour and the comic.
In ‘The Fire and the Sun’, Murdoch analyses Plato’s mistrust of the comic.
She describes how, according to Plato,

Images of wickedness and excess may lead even good people to indulge
secretly through art feelings which they would be ashamed to entertain
in real life. We enjoy cruel jokes and bad taste in the theatre, then behave
boorishly at home. Art both expresses and gratifies the lowest part of
the soul, and feeds and enlivens base emotions which ought to be left to
wither. (F&S: 391)

This sounds judgemental and puritanical, but, as Murdoch points out, Plato’s
comments about the results of the consumption of art are expressed in moral
and political terms. This is less a criticism of the art itself but more of the effects

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 FILM, COMEDY AND TRAGEDY 143

on the consumers. And Murdoch agrees that Plato is right to talk about the
‘cheapening and brutalising effect of an atmosphere where everything can be
ridiculed’ (F&S: 398). This is what leads Murdoch to suggest that we should
ask the question, ‘What may I properly laugh at, even in my private thoughts?’
(ibid.). Although Murdoch finds that Plato’s view of art as illusion is ‘positive
and complex’, she argues that images, as ‘valuable aids to thought . . . must be
kept within a fruitful hierarchy of spiritual endeavour’ (ibid.: 421). In other
words, we must work to consider the value and virtue of images, and in this way,
‘Good art . . . provides work for the spirit’ (MGM: 453). Murdoch believes that
‘what we look at profoundly affects what we do’, and that ‘art remains avail-
able and vivid as an experience of how egoism can be purified by intelligent
imagination’ (MGM: 453). But the dangers of art are real unless we realise
its role. Again drawing on Plato, and his highly cinematic parable of the cave,
Murdoch argues that the flickering light of the fire ‘suggests the disturbed and
semi-enlightened ego which is pleased and consoled by its discoveries, but still
essentially self-absorbed, not realising that the real world is still somewhere else’
(F&S: 423). But these cave images are not the same as film images in any direct
allegory of the cave; the cinema is less a display of unreal shadows than a hall
of reflection where ‘work for the spirit’ can be undertaken. Murdoch sees that
Plato’s objection to art is partly founded on the fact that ‘art is playful in a
sinister sense . . . a spiteful amused acceptance of evil, and through buffoonery
and mockery weakens moral discrimination’ (F&S: 443). If art is over-imbued
with philosophical completeness, there is a danger it may ‘become a magical
substitute for philosophy, an impure mediator professing to classify and explain
reality’ (F&S: 444). This is a vital step in Murdochian film philosophy: the
film may indeed be important, revealing art, but it is our reflection upon it that
makes such art philosophically valuable to us. We need to put that effort in to
attending and seeing the nature of morality as it is shown to us in art. If we do,
then Murdoch sees nothing wrong with challenging, absurd, comic art:

The absurdity of art, its funniness, its simplicity, its lucidity connects
it with ordinary life and is inimical to authoritarian mystification . . .
The absurd is the comic, as well as what defeats or teases the intellect.
(MGM: 90–1)

Comic art can be revolutionary and dangerous as well as carrying the

tender and the sentimental as far as they can be carried in good literature
(Dickens). (MGM: 91)

The Death of Stalin stages a jarring clash between cruelty and comedy, and
is thereby what Murdoch might consider to be ‘a juxtaposition, almost an
identification, of pointlessness and value’ (SGC: 372). In the face of this,

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our task is to cultivate ‘the ability to see it all clearly and respond to it justly’
(ibid.). Murdoch wonders whether ‘one of the greatest achievements of
all is to join this sense of absolute mortality not to the tragic but to the
comic’ (ibid.).
This is all very well, but this talk of cultivating just and clear attention
might be an outmoded or self-centred approach:

So it may be felt that not only ‘personal spirituality’, but also moral phi-
losophy and traditional theology are out of place in a world tormented
by poverty, misery and cruelty: that old-fashioned theoretical generalisa-
tions, or calm reflections upon inwardness, are too abstract and dreamy
and indeed selfish to be true for a post-Hitler post-Stalin over populated
nuclear planet. (MGM: 362)

After all, ‘History is indeed a slaughterhouse and this is in numerous ways an

inhospitable planet’ (MGM: 365). However, Murdoch believes that, ‘A good
(decent) state, full of active citizens with a vast variety of views and interests,
must preserve a central arena of discussion and reflection wherein differences
and individuality are taken for granted’ (MGM: 366).
Murdoch is concerned that we should reflect upon social lying, and that it
might lead to a more general indifference to truth. She asks us to keep in mind
what ‘malicious mockery’ looks like, remembering Plato’s warning that ‘mali-
cious merriment, apparently harmless, can foster more general and sinister
spiritual ills: cynicism, cruelty, hatred’ (MGM: 380–1). These considerations
are part of what Murdoch considers to be our process of moral discipline,
which is slow and steady, and therefore less likely to be a reaction to a gag in
the film, but more likely to be developed in our private thinking about the film
and our responses. Part of this learning is to distinguish ‘a tender smile from
a mocking smile’ (MGM: 385), and other terms and concepts that form ‘the
very texture of being and consciousness woven and working from moment to
moment in language’ (MGM: 385–6). This next film certainly requires us to
enter an arena of differences and individuality, and assess the nature of the
smiles of ourselves and those on-screen.

TEASING THE INTELLECT: ELLE

The film begins with sounds of panting, shouting, the crashing of china or
glass, and then the sound of a slap or hit. The first shot is of a grey cat’s impas-
sive face. We hear a man orgasm, and the cat walks away derisively: the spec-
tacle is over. Then we see the scene that the cat has been watching: a rapist
in cat burglar gear, including balaclava, wiping up his semen as a woman lies

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 FILM, COMEDY AND TRAGEDY 145

beneath him on the floor. He stands, pulls up his trousers, throws the semen
covered tissue on the floor, and leaves through the window. She gets herself up
slowly and looks around, with no emotion. She sweeps up the breakages while
still in her dress and shoes, with blood on her thigh. Then we see her put her
dress in the bin, and look in the mirror – she has grazes on her cheek. She lies
in the bath and a spot of blood from between her legs spreads into a patch. She
disperses it.
Next, she is ordering sushi on the phone, in her dressing gown, strok-
ing her cat, and checking what a ‘holiday roll’ is. This is perplexing, as she
seems to be genuinely alright. Her son arrives and asks if she is OK. She
says that the graze on her face is because she fell off her bike. They quarrel
over the son’s pregnant girlfriend and she says she will give the son three
months’ rent but wants to see their new flat first. She sees him off and looks
around a little nervously. She gets a hammer and checks the windows, and
then she sleeps holding the hammer. Next morning, she instructs all the
locks be changed.
What are we to make of this extraordinary opening sequence? This well-off,
middle-aged woman has been subject to a violent attack, which left her with
injuries, and she seems to be able to carry on without being affected in any seri-
ous or emotional way. She does not call the police, or tell her son, but, more
than this, she is able to order takeaway food, and discuss financial arrangements
with her son in a level-headed manner. The only impact on the evening appears
to be that she ordered food to be delivered rather than cook for them. It is cer-
tainly a disorienting and unnerving opening to the film.
The cut is to a violent video game, showing footage of a beast raping and
killing a princess. The woman we have seen being raped, Michèle (Isabelle
Huppert), adjudges that ‘the orgasmic convulsions are far too timid’; and the
other woman in the room, her friend Anna (Anna Consigny), says it is ‘as if
they’re scared of sex’. A young man, Kurt (Lucas Prisor) challenges her, say-
ing, ‘Your background in publishing and literature is completely inappropri-
ate for assessing playability.’ Michèle replies, ‘The fact is the boss here is me
and we’re six months behind.’ Referring to the content of the game, she says
the orc needs to feel thick warm blood. Another young man, Kevin (Arthur
Mazet) says to her, in smiling infatuation, ‘I love you.’ Michèle is tough, fear-
less at dealing with all these young men, and in charge of a company. She is also
sensible. She goes for a blood test and to get checked for sexually transmitted
disease. The doctor says he could prescribe a PEP (a post-exposure HIV drug)
but she says no, because there are too many side effects. She explains that she
has done her research on the drug, and she can’t miss any work. She concludes,
with a smile, ‘I guess we just roll the dice.’ This shows that she is not in denial
about the rape, and is aware of possible risks to her health, but does not appear
to be traumatised or distressed by it.

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She goes to a coffee shop, where she receives a telephone call from her
lover, wanting to meet. She tries to put him off, saying, ‘I have my period,
I’m not well’, but he persists, saying he’ll wear a condom, and that ‘a little
blood doesn’t turn me off ’. But she stays resolute and says she can’t meet.
At that point, a woman, who we have seen looking at Michèle, passes by and
pours her tray rubbish all over her, saying, ‘Scum! You and your father!’
Michèle gasps, but takes it without objection, as if accustomed to such public
abuse. This is baffling, but adds to the picture of Michèle that we are build-
ing: she is resilient, calm and composed, even in the face of assault, abuse
and attack. The mention of her father is intriguing, and we will discover
more about this in due course. In the meantime we meet her mother, who is
entertaining her young lover in her apartment. Michèle and she discuss the
fact that her mother pays for her sex life, and her plastic surgery. As the lover
leaves, Michèle says to him, ‘She’s HIV positive’; but her mother says, ‘I told
him you’d try that one.’ Then, she has a sip of her coffee, and says it’s very
good. Her mother asks what she would say if she remarried. Michèle replies,
‘It’s simple, I’d kill you.’ Her mother says, ‘You’re so selfish it’s frighten-
ing’; to which she agrees, ‘It’s true.’ This scene is comedic, but also chill-
ing. The brutality of the verbal exchanges between mother and daughter is
quite extreme, with cracks about HIV and murder, then praise for the coffee,
but also the mother’s behaviour is unusual and provocative. It seems that
Michèle’s father is in prison, and she won’t go to visit him. Her mother tells
her that he has a parole hearing coming up.
When Michèle arrives home, she meets her neighbours, an attractive young
couple, Rebecca (Virgine Efira) and Patrick (Laurent Lafitte). She shares a
smile with Patrick, who looks back at her as he walks away. The next morning,
the rapist comes back. She fights more this time, shouting loudly, but he hits
her, and hurts her, ripping her clothes and exposing her body. Again, the cat
watches. When the man has left, Michèle turns to the cat and says, ‘You didn’t
have to claw his eyes out but scratch him at least, I’m just saying.’ Michèle
gets a text message saying, ‘You were very tight for a woman your age.’ She
considers the message impassively. She remains practical, and goes to a store to
buy pepper spray and an axe. She then goes to meet her ex-husband Richard
(Charles Berling) for dinner and deliberately reverses into his car while she
is parking, as if just for mildly hostile fun. She asks him if he would say she
is ‘tight for a woman of her age’, and, unsurprisingly, he looks stunned. This
shows that she is dwelling on the content of the text message, rather than the
fact of it or any added level of threat its arrival on her telephone might mean.
Their friends arrive, Anna and her husband Robert (Christian Berkel). Once
they are all seated, Michèle says she has something to tell them, and says, ‘I
was assaulted at home. I guess I was raped.’ As the shock registers on Richard

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 FILM, COMEDY AND TRAGEDY 147

and Anna’s faces, the champagne arrives, and Robert says, ‘Ah very good’, then
looks around at the others and realises he is being inappropriate, and tells the
waiter to wait a few minutes before popping it. Anna asks if she is alright, and
Michèle says yes, and she’s seen a doctor, but that she didn’t report it. She says
she avoids the police ‘because I won’t ever deal with the police again’, again
insinuating that she has a troubled background in relation to the law. Richard
wants her opinion on his computer game idea, and when she points out that
somebody trashed his fender, he says ‘Somebody?’ He knows it’s her, and she
just smiles and says bye.
At their office the next day, Anna’s husband Robert has arrived but Anna’s
not there, and he knows it. He’s come to see Michèle, as he is her lover. He
closes all the blinds in her office. She says to him, you know I went through a
traumatic experience recently, but he says, ‘You acted as if you were soldiering
on like nothing happened. I’m sorry if I’m insensitive, that’s just me, right?’ He
starts to undo his belt and drops his pants. He says, sarcastically, ‘I know you’re
a wilting flower but surely you can touch it.’ Michèle gets the wastepaper bin
and masturbates him – so is prepared to please him, to accede to his demands,
even though she is not particularly in the mood. At 1.24am, when she is still
at the office, she receives another text from the rapist, saying, ‘I like the blouse
you’re wearing today. The cream colour. My sperm won’t leave a stain.’ This
is plainly a threat of a third rape, and she looks around anxiously. Kurt, the
young man she belittled earlier, is working late too, and she appears to wonder
if perhaps he is the assailant.
As Michèle has lunch with her mother she asks if she has experienced any
incidents, and her mother replies that a man threw a pizza at her. Michèle
wonders if it is ‘a new cycle starting’. So we are becoming aware that there
is a reason why members of the public might assault her and her mother,
and perhaps Michèle is considering whether the rapes are part of this. Her
mother says that a film about her father, called The Accused Will Rise, aired
on television last week, because of his imminent parole hearing, and that this
‘refreshes people’s memories’. Michèle’s mother wants her to see him, but
she says she would rather gouge her eyes out, and that she’ll never see him
again. She shows Michèle a picture of him; he looks like a very ordinary old
man. Michèle looks at it but says put it away, and her mother looks regret-
ful, and says that he’s just a man. Michèle adds, ‘Who also happens to be a
monster.’ So although Michèle and her mother speak quite calmly together
today, it is clear that they have been through something terrible with the
father.
We see the second rape again, but this time Michèle gets hold of a heavy
ashtray and smashes it over his head. A cut to her sitting at her desk, smiling,
reveals that she was reliving the rape but imagining her response to have been

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violent, and this pleases her. At this, a bird flies into her window, and, as it is
dying, the cat gets hold of it. Michèle is appalled by the cat and manages to
rescue the bird. She telephones the vet, as she carries the bird around on a pil-
low. There is a contrast between the human world, where she wishes to cave
in her attacker’s head with an ashtray, and this other world where she wants
desperately to save the life of this little creature. As she is walking around the
flat, she sees that the film about her father is on the television, and we learn
more about what happened. Footage of a quiet residential street is accompa-
nied by a solemn voiceover saying that it ‘bears no trace of the atrocities that
happened here thrity-nine years ago’. It goes on to say that the name of her
father, George Leblanc, is a name associated with a horror story: ‘an urban
folktale from another era’. The voiceover asks, ‘What drove George Leblanc, a
practising Catholic, loving husband and father, to commit such monstrous and
senseless acts? And what role exactly was played by his daughter Michèle?’ She
is faced with footage of herself as a ten-year-old girl, in her underwear, in front
of a fire. The voiceover says that after thirty years of psychiatric evaluations,
the questions remain, ‘as banal and chilling as ever – why?’
She puts the now-dead bird in a box and then in the bin; her neighbour says
I hope it’s recyclable, as Michèle watches a car pass her, go to the end of the
road, turn round and come back with its lights off. She goes into her flat, and
sees the car is still there, so she picks up the axe and pepper spray, runs around
the block, axes the car window and sprays the driver, who turns out to be
Richard, her ex-husband, worried about her. Back in her kitchen, this is played
for laughs, as Richard is moaning about the pepper spray and Michèle is splash-
ing his face with water.
At work, somebody has inserted her face on the rape victim in the computer
game and it is sent round the whole office. She tells Anna that other things
have been sent too, and Anna tells her to call the police, saying that ‘It’s dif-
ferent this time; you’re the victim.’ Michèle says, ‘I was the victim then’, but
no, she doesn’t want police involved. At the hospital, her son’s girlfriend is in
labour, and when the baby is born, it is clearly mixed race and not her son’s
child. The girlfriend, Josie (Alice Isaaz) looks defiantly at Michèle as she breast
feeds, revealing her tattoo of the name Eric: Michèle’s son is called Vincent
(Jonas Bloquet). Michèle tells the nurse how she and Anna both gave birth
here the same night. Anna’s baby was stillborn and she asked to breastfeed
Michèle’s baby. Michèle said fine, and Anna and Vincent have always been very
close. Michèle says she looks at Vincent and doesn’t know him. We gather from
this that Michèle did not have the strongest maternal feelings for Vincent when
he was born, and does not feel that close to him.
As the film progresses, a number of men continue to circle around Michèle,
creating an array of possible suspects. The handsome neighbour, Patrick, has
fought with a prowler near her flat, and sees her in safely, becoming flirtatious.

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 FILM, COMEDY AND TRAGEDY 149

Kurt at work is often staring at her. She asks Kevin to teach her to shoot.
Christmas is approaching, and Michèle watches her neighbours assemble
nativity figures in the garden. Michèle masturbates as she watches Patrick,
then goes and asks them to a party at her apartment. Anna helps Michèle with
preparation for the party, and Michèle says they should put a toothpick in her
ex-husband Richard’s girlfriend’s food. Anna jokes that they should just poi-
son her, and they laugh. However, during the meal, the girlfriend does indeed
remove a toothpick from her mouth, suggesting Michèle acted on her mali-
cious impulse! The meal is a tumultuous affair, with a sulky Josie, religious
Rebecca saying grace, and Michèle caressing Patrick’s crotch under the table
with her foot. Michèle’s mother announces that she and her young lover are
engaged to be married, and everyone claps but Michèle, who bursts out laugh-
ing riotously. Rebecca wants to put the midnight mass on television; Robert
is jealous of Patrick; Richard and his girlfriend leave. With the mass on the
television, Michèle says, ‘Damn him, close the book, ring the bell, blow out
the candle’: an incantation of excommunication. She explains to Patrick that
her father made the cross on her and local children until other parents asked
him to stop. Her father was offended, and went into every house on the street,
killing them all: ‘twenty-seven human victims, six dogs, a couple of cats, he
spared a hamster – you couldn’t make it up’. She then explains her role in it
all. ‘I was doing my homework when he arrived home, blood all over him.’
Patrick says that they don’t have to go over it, but she says it does her good
to talk. She recounts how her father decided to burn everything in the house,
and she helped to feed the fire:

We gutted the place, curtains, carpets, tables, chairs, all in the fire. It
was exciting, you get caught up in it. We were about to burn our clothes
when the police arrived.
Someone snapped a photo, bizarrely it’s that photo that stuck in peo-
ple’s minds. Me, half-naked, smeared with ash. The photo of a little girl
as psychopath, next to her father, the psychopath. My empty stare in the
photo is terrifying. Not bad, uh? Cognac?

She slaps him on the thigh. She has enjoyed shocking him, as if it is part of
her flirtation with him (Figure 6.2). Meanwhile, her mother challenges her
about how rude she was, says she’s cruel, and then collapses. In the ambulance
she asks Michèle to go and see her father. She’s had a stroke. Michèle seems
unmoved by this, and asks the doctor if she could be making it up, faking it.
The doctor is surprised by the question, and says there is a strong possibility
she might not wake up, but is stable for now. Michèle says to her unconscious
mother that she won’t visit her father, and that she doesn’t care for deathbed
requests, calling this stroke an abject stunt. She says to her mother that she has

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 150 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

Figure 6.2 Michèle (Isabelle Huppert) offers a cognac, in Elle (2016), directed by Paul
Verhoeven.

given up on morality, and is acting like a teenager. She adds, ‘This aneurysm
thing is just treachery. Disgusting.’ As she changes the television channel in
the hospital room she fails to notice that her mother is in cardiac arrest, from
which she does not recover.
Walking through a park with her family, looking for a spot to dispose of her
mother’s ashes, she has a showdown with Josie and Vincent over the paternity
of the baby, and just throws the ashes over the wall with no ceremony or emo-
tion. The identity of her rapist is still a mystery, but the relationships with
the various men in her life continue to develop. One windy night, while she is
working, Patrick comes over to help her to close her window shutters. They
touch in front of the window and embrace; he seems quite tender and hesi-
tant, but their relationship is certainly becoming sexual. At work, she checks
Kevin’s computer and finds out that he created the video game with her face
on it. She instructs him to drop his trousers, saying, ‘Show me your dick and I
might not fire you.’ She looks at his penis and says, ‘The guy I’m looking for is
circumcised.’ Later that day, the rapist breaks into her house again. He comes
from behind the curtain, and she fights him and stabs him through the hand.
She pulls off his mask – it’s Patrick – and she throws him out. The next morn-
ing, as she collects her post she sees him going to work with a bandaged hand.
So now she knows her attacker is her neighbour. She sees on the television
news that her father has been refused parole. She curses him on the television,
but then goes to prison to see him, only to discover that he hanged himself in
his cell the night before, in the knowledge she was coming. She stands over his
dead body in the morgue and says to him, with grim satisfaction, ‘I killed you
by coming here.’
As she is driving home, a stag leaps out in front of her car. She swerves and
crashes, shouting again, with raw, unfettered expression, like she shouted when

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 FILM, COMEDY AND TRAGEDY 151

raped. Michele has been injured. Her leg is bleeding and she is not able to get
herself out of the car. She calls Anna and Richard, but they are both on answer-
phone, so, surprisingly, she calls Patrick, who comes to help her. He pulls her
out of the car and helps her home, where he disinfects the wound and bandages
her leg. She studies him, closely, while he does it. She says, referring to his
rapes of her, ‘How was it? Was it good? Answer me, did you enjoy it? Why did
you do it?’ He seems embarrassed, and grumbles that ‘It was necessary’.
In the supermarket, Michèle and her son, who has been thrown out by
Josie, come across Patrick. He invites them for dinner that night as Rebecca
and her parents have gone to see the Pope. There is of course a pointed irony
in the fact that such a religious woman is married to this sex offender. It is yet
another element of this film, along with the paternity of Josie’s baby, and the
juvenile inadequacies of the men at Michèle’s workplace, as well as Richard
and Robert, that the film world is bizarrely blind to, replete as it is with abun-
dant self-centred delusions.
At Patrick’s that night, Vincent has too much to drink and passes out.
Michèle flatters Patrick about the work he has done on his boiler and effec-
tively seduces him into showing it off to her, in the basement. They go down
the stairs to the basement, Michèle with her walking stick, and they have a
rough sexual encounter. He threateningly declares that all the noise down there
is muffled by the door, then he hits her, throws her against the wall, and goes
to hit her again. She says, ‘Do it’, but he halts, saying it doesn’t work like that
for him. So she hits him too, and he violently penetrates her, as she shouts and
shouts. She shouts a lot after the sex too, and Patrick looks at her oddly, not
understanding her response.
The video game is finally complete and the team applaud Kurt. Anna tells
Michèle she knows Robert is having an affair. They have a launch party for the
game, and have put Vincent in charge of it. Patrick comes, Robert, Richard, all
the men in Michèle’s life. Michèle tells Anna it was her sleeping with Robert.
Michèle decides to leave the party, and Patrick drives her home. In the car she
says to him, ‘You don’t expect to get away with what you did to me? I’ll do what
I should have done. It’s about your wife, and others. I’ll go to the police.’ Back
in her flat, he comes over again with a mask on. She hits him over the head,
he rips her blouse and throws her around, hitting her. Vincent arrives and hits
Patrick over the head, splitting his head open. Patrick staggers up to his feet
and pulls off his mask, and Michèle smiles at him. He asks, ‘Why’, and dies.
Vincent cries. Michèle says, ‘It’s over.’ Police come, and ask questions, and say,
‘Who could imagine such a thing?’ The men in this film world seem to have no
idea about themselves or the world they live in.
Rebecca is moving out of her apartment, and Michèle goes over to her to
say she’s very sorry for all she has been through. Rebecca says, ‘I have faith . . .
what’s it for if not to get through the tough times. Patrick was a good man, but

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with a tortured soul. I’m sincerely glad you could give him what he needed,
for a time at least.’ This exchange reveals that Rebecca knew that Patrick was a
rapist but that she turned a blind eye to it. The mismatch between the religious
sentiments and the brutality of the rapist’s actions is extreme, and the fact that
the two women can talk is surprising.
Michèle repaints a room in her flat yellow. Vincent and Josie arrive in a
convertible, with Josie saying of Vincent, ‘He deserves it.’ The car seems to
be a reward for killing the rapist. As they head away from the car they realise
that they have forgotten the baby and go back for it. Their self-absorption
continues unabated. Michèle goes to the grave of her mother and lays flowers;
her father’s next to it has ‘monster’ scrawled on it in graffiti. Anna comes up
behind her, and they walk along through the cemetery together. Anna says she
has kicked Robert out, and apparently ‘he’s hit the bottle’. Anna asks Michèle,
‘What did you see in him?’ And Michèle replies, ‘It was just one of those
things, an opportunity, I wanted to get laid.’ Anna says, ‘That’s no excuse, it
was shabby’, to which Michèle replies, ‘Worse than that even.’ They have this
honest exchange about what happened, and are able to forgive and move on.
Anna announces that she’s going to sell her house and move in with Michèle
for a while. The film ends with the two friends laughing as they walk through
the graveyard.
Unsurprisingly, reception of this peculiar film was mixed. Nick James con-
sidered it to be ‘a serious revision, or subversion even, of the cinema of sexual
violence’ (James 2017: 28). This is true in some ways, but director Paul Ver-
hoeven says to James, ‘She starts an affair with the rapist, and accepts, in some
way, a sadomasochistic relationship with him’ (James 2017: 31). It does not
seem accurate to describe the peculiar campaign of investigation and destruc-
tion that Michèle conducts against Patrick to be an affair. Sight and Sound
staged a debate between Erika Balsom and Ginette Vincendeau, with Balsom
describing how the film shows that ‘sexist aggression, in varieties more and
less brutal, is an everyday experience’ (Balsom and Vincendeau 2017: 33) and
Vincendeau arguing that ‘the film and its reception are a demonstration of how
deeply internalized misogyny is, including by women’ (ibid.). While Balsom
sees the men in the film as ‘pathetic, all of them’, Vincendeau considers that
Huppert embodies the violent fantasies of two men (Verhoeven and Philippe
Dijan, who wrote the novel on which it is based) and the culture at large, and
that she ‘lends cultural legitimacy to a trashy movie masquerading as “post-
feminist” intervention’ (ibid.). For Molly Haskell the film ‘staggers – albeit
mesmerizingly – from one gratuitous moment of erotic-comic grotesque to
another’ (2016: 40). Haskell develops her analysis into an appreciation of this
‘cascade of mischief and evil’, and highlights an element of the film that strikes
at the heart of attempts to swathe it in ironic comment. Haskell writes, ‘Movies

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are visceral and rape is rape; the sight of a masked intruder brutally violating
a woman has a tendency to short-circuit the more contemplative parts of the
brain’ (ibid.).
Haskell’s analysis extends to the director and the star, Paul Verhoeven
and Isabelle Huppert, and she proposes that ‘you may see it as two people
exploiting their own dark talents to the point of self parody’ (ibid.). In other
words, this film, according to Haskell, is like the zenith of their career images,
in that Verhoeven’s ‘weaponised femmes fatales are extended sick jokes about
women’s empowerment’ (ibid.: 41), and Huppert has specialised in playing
women with dangerous erotic fantasies. Haskell refers to Huppert’s ‘sphinx
half-smile’ (ibid.) which is in evidence particularly in the scene where she tells
Patrick about her father’s crimes, shedding doubt upon the veracity of her
tale and questioning her reasons for telling it. There is certainly an amoral
alliance between Michèle’s day job and her personal life. By this I mean that
the young men in her company are indulging their fantasies, including her in
them, and producing sexually violent material. Similarly, Patrick and Robert
both live out their sexual fantasies by using Michèle, and she seems inured to
all of them. Huppert’s performance imbues her character with a disinterest in
the little things. As Margaret Barton-Fumo observes, ‘The intricacies of her
movements betray, fabulously, a woman who cannot be bothered with life’s
inconveniences: she may head a video-game company, but she repeatedly looks
down her nose at her cellphone, pointer finger raised, like a bored technologi-
cal novice’ (2017: 46). This is an accurate description of Michèle’s attitude to
the minutiae of life, but it is her response to the bigger events that attracts
the most attention. Her response to being raped is without emotional distress.
She is far from quiet during the assaults, and in fact yells loudly, with a deep-
throated shout, rather than a scream or cry. Each rape has a different dynamic
between Patrick and Michèle, and, as the other elements of the film develop,
it becomes what Dennis Lim describes as ‘a wry, almost-screwball comedy of
manners about one woman’s rather unusual response to a rape’ (2016: 66). Her
response, so unsettling, is hard to fathom, and her inscrutability, in relation to
this and other matters, makes it difficult to decide whether she is traumatised,
in denial, unperturbed, or something else.
As with The Death of Stalin, this film begs the question of whether these
matters are suited to the way they are presented. Whilst the rape scenes are
not played for laughs, there is humour in Michele’s odd reactions and her
exchanges with other characters. Lara Cox writes that a rape joke ‘will pose
a disempowering affront to the women in the audience in a way that men are
unlikely to experience’ (2015: 10). This is not what happens in Elle beyond
the opening rape scene, because Michele is not the focus of the joke for being
raped; rather it is her brutality that elicits humour. What is required on our

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part, to withstand the sight of repeated rapes, and the humour surround-
ing the death of her mother and father, is a more prolonged version of what
Bergson called, ‘a momentary anaesthesia of the heart’, which he said was
demanded by comedy (2008: 11). This is an evocative concept that conveys
what is required by some of the humour in Stalin and Elle, but Haskell’s obser-
vation accurately conveys how difficult this is when the scene is one of such
violent sexual attack. Our experience of what we see in a film is not momen-
tary, even if it is moments we remember. Watching a film is more immersive
than that. As Murdoch says, ‘aesthetic enjoyment is not a momentary quasi-
perceptual state of mind. That is, the art object is not just “given”, it is also
thought’ (S&G: 210). To borrow part of Murdoch’s analogy, we might receive
a picture of a rose with a single, momentary reaction, but not the whole of a
film, which has a mood and a journey of thought and emotion. That is the
sustained engagement of a film, which enables the attentiveness to art that
Murdoch calls for: ‘It is the apprehension of something else, something par-
ticular, as existing outside us’ (S&G: 216). And attending to the individual is
the particular task, which, if we are enclosed in our own fantasy world, means
we are ‘not grasping their reality and independence’ (S&G: 216). Elle chal-
lenges us to believe in Michèle as a very particular individual. Understand-
ing her as a character requires us to look beyond ourselves, and conventional
expectations, and think about her as a woman with a history and personality.
If we can look at her with a gaze that is a just and discerning one, then we can
see what Murdoch means when she talks about love which is art being ‘some-
thing deeper than our conscious and more simply social morality, and to be
sometimes destructive of it’ (S&G: 218). The rape scenes are shocking, they
are ‘intrusions’, and as such fit Murdoch’s description of how ‘the outer world
often enters the inward eye with an intensity of significance which punctuates
a reflective reverie which does not initially concern it’ (MGM: 266). Murdoch
says that these are not necessarily unusual experiences, but that ‘marvels are
happening all the time’ (MGM: 266). Well, the rape scenes may not be mar-
vels, but they are profoundly intense scenes that viscerally strike the viewer
and compel us to assess their impact. The film requires us to ‘switch’ from
what Murdoch describes as ‘ordinary awareness to aesthetic contemplation’
(MGM: 312). In other words, we need to think outside our own reaction to
such a scene and assess how it is working in this film. This enables us to
understand the uniqueness of this character and her milieu. As the child of
a mass murderer, who joined in with her father’s post-killing clean-up, she
has had a lifetime of abuse, rejection and reflection. Rather than suggest that
women in general can choose to not be upset by rape, the film shows how this
particular woman, with the experience and genes of a killer, can view her rap-
ist with interest and toy with him forensically, like her cat with a dying bird,

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 FILM, COMEDY AND TRAGEDY 155

and see events through to his destruction, understanding that it is because

of his weaknesses. Her indifference to the suffering and death of her mother
and her father demonstrates her heartlessness to humans, and the specificity
of her father’s crimes and her involvement in them makes Michèle unique.
In terms of morality this is a peculiar film world, but a Murdochian analysis
enables us to assess Michèle’s story without revulsion at the film’s contents,
or its treatment of them. It is a provocative idea about what a person needs to
be in order to withstand such horror. A more realistic picture of survival post-
catastrophe is portrayed in the next film.

T H E E X T R E M E H O R RO R S O F R E A L L I F E : M A N C H E S T E R
BY THE SEA

The film opens with establishing shots of a picturesque fishing village, and
then the Chandler brothers on a fishing boat, the Claudia Marie, playing with
the son of one of them. There is clearly a lot of love between them as they
are mucking about together. We next see one of the brothers, Lee Chandler
(Casey Affleck), at work, clearing snow, being a janitor at a block of flats, fixing
plumbing, mending a fan, clearing a drain. As he cleans his hands, he hears one
of the women saying she’s in love with him. Then another woman is really rude
to him about her repairs, and he says, ‘I don’t give a fuck’, and she throws him
out. He is hauled in front of the boss but will not apologise. He goes out and
gets drunk. He is not interested in attention from a woman who spills beer on
him, but rather he checks out a couple of men who are wearing ties, and goes
and starts a fight with them.
The next day, as he’s clearing snow, he receives a telephone call to say that
his brother Joe is in hospital, and he says that he’ll be there in an hour and a
half. By the time he arrives, his brother has passed away from a cardiac arrest
about an hour before. Joe’s friend, George (C. J. Wilson) was with him at the
time, at the boat, and is very upset. Lee asks questions, but then switches into
coping gear: call their uncle, call his wife (then corrects himself, ‘ex-wife,
Randi, sorry’). He seems quite dazed. We then see a flashback to Dr Bethany
(Ruibo Qian) telling Joe (Kyle Chandler) and the family about his congestive
heart failure, and that most people with this condition have a life expectancy
of five to ten years. His wife Elise (Gretchen Moll) responds to their stressful
family discussions with a bad temper and storms out.
The next scene is in the morgue where Lee sees his brother’s body. Lee’s
body language is tense with repressed sadness, as he looks at the doctor out of
the corner of his eye, then looks with scared eyes at his brother as the sheet is
pulled back. Lee touches him, hugs him, puts his head next to his, kisses his

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cheek, and cries; then wipes his face and pulls himself together. He is practical,
asking about procedure, and telling George they need to talk about the boat
and the website. He knows he has to go and tell Joe’s son, so signs for Joe’s
belongings, and then we see Lee remembering the boy in another flashback to
the brothers teasing the kid about there being sharks in the water, and the boy
catching a fish.
Lee drives through Manchester, which looks picturesque, sleepy and
innocent, with pretty houses, a church and a bell tower. Another flashback
to his earlier family life: his wife is in bed with a cold, a vaporiser filling
the room with steam. Lee comes home having been drinking, and shows
how he really loves his children, playing with them all and cuddling them.
He talks about his nephew Patrick’s face when he caught the fish being like
when they took the girls on the merry go round: ‘pure joy’. Now he has to
go to see Patrick at hockey practice to tell him his father’s died, while all the
hockey team are watching and waiting. One of them says, ‘So that’s the Lee
Chandler.’
Patrick’s (Ben O’Brien) friends hug him, and he leaves with Lee to go and
see his father’s body. Lee tells him that ‘he looks dead. He doesn’t look asleep
or anything, but he doesn’t look gross either.’ They have a few miscommunica-
tions and are quite bad tempered with each other, but then apologise. Patrick
asks his friends over, and asks for pizza, because ‘there’s nothing to eat here’.
He and his friends chat about his dad, and about memories of going out on the
boat, and about Star Trek. It is all quite sensitive and mature, and then Patrick
asks Lee if Silvie (Kara Hayward) can stay over. Lee says yes, and also agrees to
say that she stays downstairs if he speaks to her parents. Lee says to him, ‘Am I
supposed to tell you to use a condom?’ And Patrick replies, ‘It’s OK, we’ve had
the discussion – just let me know if we’re making too much noise.’ Lee looks
a bit perplexed by the confident teenage attitudes, but Patrick still calls upon
him for advice, asking whether he should call his mother Elise. Lee replies that
nobody knows where she is, and then they hug. Lee then has a flashback to
them all coming in to the house and finding her passed out on sofa, drunk and
naked. We then see Patrick in his room composing an email to his mother, so
clearly he is in contact with her privately.
In the morning, as Lee is talking to the morgue on the telephone about
‘the next steps’ for his brother, Silvie and Patrick get themselves break-
fast very noisily: rattling cereal boxes, metallic scrunching of tin foil, dishes
being put down on the table with no attempt to be quiet. Then Silvie says,
‘I don’t think Lee needs to be here for this’, so Lee gets up and leaves the
room. There is a generation clash here, between Patrick and his friends’ cool
confidence and self-centredness, and Lee’s role of having to handle practi-
calities and also seemingly to serve Patrick with transport, food, money and

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 FILM, COMEDY AND TRAGEDY 157

social indulgences. Patrick is clearly not fully processing the death of his
father. He tells his ice hockey coach not to take him off the ice because he
could really use the distraction, but the coach says the ice is not a distrac-
tion, and offers him support, which Patrick plainly does not want. In the
car, Patrick wants to put music on, and when Lee says they have to go to the
solicitor, Patrick is not at all interested. At the solicitor’s, Joe’s will is read,
and it says that Lee will be Patrick’s guardian, which Lee cannot cope with
at all. We then see into the heart of the film, and Lee’s background, which
explains why Lee is living the life he does and recoils at being made respon-
sible for Patrick.
Lee looks out of the window and recalls a night when he was drunk and
playing pool in his basement with his friends. Randi (Michelle Williams)
comes down and gives them a piece of her mind, saying it is 2am, and she has
children sleeping. She is tough talking and they apologise and leave. In the
present, Lee is overwhelmed with memories. He then recalls going out once
his friends have left, very drunk, to buy more booze from the mini-market. As
he stumbles back to his house, he sees that the house is on fire. He looks, with
onlookers, astounded: his house ruined. He then sees Randi, screaming, as they
try to get her into an ambulance, struggling with her and with the stretcher
mechanism. Lee is left, crying, his brother holding his arm. The firemen bring
out the little bodies of his children wrapped in sheets, as his brother holds him.
The soundtrack is the most melodramatically mournful music,4 as the horror
of these few moments is conveyed without words, but with images and incre-
mental realisations.
We see Lee telling the police that he and his friends had had beer, a joint
and some cocaine. He says he was cold and built a fire to warm up the house
while he went to the mini-market. He says that about halfway there he realises
he can’t remember if he put a screen on the fireplace, but he figures it’s OK,
so he just keeps going to the store, and that’s it: a log must have rolled out of
the fire. The fireman say they pulled Randi out as she had passed out down-
stairs, then the fires broke and they couldn’t go back in again. The officer
says, ‘Look Lee, you made a horrible mistake, like a million other people did
last night. We’re not going to crucify you. It’s not a crime to forget to put
the screen on the fireplace.’ Lee cannot believe he can just leave in light of
what he has caused. He grabs an officer’s gun from his belt and tries to shoot
himself but it jams. Officers and others grab him and get the gun. As Lee
emerges from this memory, Patrick’s state of mind is entirely different as
he’s playing on his phone. They exchange angry words about the boat, and
a passer-by (played by director Kenneth Lonergan) says ‘great parenting’,
leading to Lee shouting and swearing at him. Patrick and Lee argue about
Patrick seeing his mother, and going to the funeral parlour, and are generally

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snarky with each other. It transpires that the morticians have to keep Joe’s
body in a freezer until spring because the ground is too hard to bury him.
Patrick is unhappy about this, they both are, and they argue more: they can’t
find the car, Patrick expects to be driven around town, and doesn’t say thank
you. He has a different girlfriend too, Sandy (Anna Baryshnikov), who he
says he is ‘working on’; in other words, he’s trying to have sex with both girls.
Lee and Patrick are operating in different zones of concern, with Lee fully
facing the realities of his brother’s death, and Patrick doing his best to keep
everything the same. Lee sits in the car outside Patrick’s friend’s house while
they have band practice. The mum Jill (Heather Burns) comes and asks him
in for a beer, but Lee doesn’t want to go. Randi calls him to say she’s sorry
about Joe, and that she’s pregnant: Lee doesn’t know what to do with himself,
and says he’s got to go.
Joe’s funeral in shown in slow motion. Patrick hugs his friends, and Randi
arrives. She looks smart, her husband looks preppy, and Lee stares at him.
Randi hugs Lee, and he looks away. Randi turns back crying, comforted by her
new partner. In the service, Patrick’s mobile telephone goes off. It is just indic-
ative of his teenage life, but Lee’s face registers disbelief. Back at the house
Patrick is hugging everybody, and people look at Lee, as if assessing how he’s
coping or just what he is like these days. After the funeral, Patrick wants to ask
his girlfriend over, but Lee doesn’t want her to come.
Patrick argues his case for staying in Manchester, and we see a flashback
to when Lee moved away. Joe calls little Patrick to say goodbye to his uncle
Lee, and they have a hug. In the present, in the kitchen, Patrick opens the
freezer door, and food falls out, which he tries to push back into the freezer.
He bends down to pick things up, and then hits his head on the door, and has a
breakdown, crying floods of tears. Lee is shocked by Patrick’s tears, and flails
around trying to do the right thing: ‘Do you want me to get rid of the food?
Take you to hospital? Call your friends?’ Patrick locks himself in his bedroom
and Lee breaks it down. He asks Patrick if he is having a breakdown, and says,
‘I can’t let you have a breakdown with the door closed.’ Lee says, ‘And if you
are going to freak out every time you see a frozen chicken I think we should
go to the hospital – I don’t know anything about this.’ It becomes clear, when
Patrick says, ‘I just don’t like him being in the freezer’, that wrestling with the
freezer made him think of his father and overwhelmed him. Lee says he will
stay with him until he calms down, and Patrick says, ‘OK I’m calmer now can
you please just go away’, and Lee says, ‘No.’ This refusal to do what Patrick
wants reminds Lee of when Joe and Patrick visited his new room after he
moved away. Joe says, ‘OK let’s go get some furniture’, and Lee says, ‘Get off
my back.’ But Joe makes Lee go, and we see from Lee’s room later that they
did get furniture.

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 FILM, COMEDY AND TRAGEDY 159

Lee tells him they are moving but not yet, and Patrick is not happy about it.
Lee goes back to his flat to get some of his things, including photos of his chil-
dren, which he wraps carefully in blankets. He looks out of the window in his
brother’s house at the view of the town and punches the glass, cutting himself
quite badly. Patrick’s mother calls and Lee hangs up on her. Patrick challenges
him about this, and tells him that she’s nearby in Essex, and wants him to come
and have lunch and meet her fiancé. Lee admits that he hung up on her because
he didn’t know what to say to her, and he didn’t tell Patrick because he didn’t
know what to say to him. We see what Lee’s life is like in Manchester. He goes
looking for work from an old contact: the man is friendly, but his wife says, ‘I
don’t wanna see him in here again.’ He sits in the lounge with Sandy’s mother
Jill while Patrick and Sandy try to have sex upstairs, but he quite clearly just
cannot make small talk.
Lee takes Patrick to his mother’s house for lunch. Trying to find the house
they argue with each other, but he says, ‘Text me if anything gets weird.’ Lee
goes to the door and meets Elise and her fiancé, Jeffrey (Matthew Broderick),
but doesn’t stay. Jeffrey is stiff and authoritarian, and insists on saying grace.
Elise is very nervous, and says, ‘I know I’m gonna be a shock to you in lots of
ways, everything’s great. This is your home too, I want it to be.’ Her nerves are
so bad, however, that she leaves the table and goes into the kitchen and Jeffrey
goes to see what she’s doing in there, presumably worried she’ll be drinking or
crying. After the visit, Patrick describes them to Lee, by saying, ‘She was very
nervous and he was very Christian.’ When Lee reminds Patrick that they too
are a Catholic family, Patrick takes it to mean that Lee is still trying to get rid
of him. Jeffrey emails Patrick and says, ‘I’m going to ask you to write to me in
future to arrange any further visits.’ So living with his mother is clearly not
going to be an option.
Patrick and Lee watch television. Patrick is being quiet, still thinking that
Lee is trying to get rid of him. They go into Joe’s gun room, and Patrick asks,
‘Who are you gonna shoot, you or me?’ But Lee has an idea that they can sell
the guns and buy a motor for the boat, which they do. They go out on the boat,
with Sandy. She takes the wheel, the boat goes wild, and Patrick straightens
it up and teaches her. Lee really smiles to himself – a big toothy smile – and
swings his leg in a joyful kick. Chirpier music accompanies their outing: ‘I’m
beginning to see the light’, by The Ink Spots and Ella Fitzgerald. Later on we
see that Patrick and Sandy have had sex, and Patrick kisses her head lovingly,
suggesting this might actually be the beginning of something meaningful.
Lee meets Randi with her new baby by chance as they are both in town.
Randi’s friend leaves them to talk, and she introduces her baby as Dylan. She
asks to talk, even though she says she doesn’t have anything big to say, but then
wonders if they could have lunch. She says that she said a lot of terrible things

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 160 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

to him, but that ‘My heart was broken and it’s always gonna be broken and I
know yours is too.’ Lee shakes his head, unable to handle the conversation, but
Randi continues, saying, ‘I should fuckin’ burn in hell for the things I said to
you . . . I love you.’ Lee really cannot respond with a full sentence: he mutters,
‘I’m sorry I’ve gotta go’, ‘there’s nothing there’, ‘I gotta go’, even as Randi says
to him that he can’t just die. He is completely unable to cope with this confron-
tation of his past. So, he goes to a pub, and gets into a fight, and even though
George rescues him, Lee keeps fighting until he gets knocked out. When he
comes round at George’s house, the first thing he says is ‘Where’s Patrick?’,
and he finally breaks down and cries to George’s wife. For the first time, Pat-
rick actually thinks of Lee; he sees the photos of his kids, and asks, ‘Can I get
you anything Uncle Lee?’
Lee dreams that his little girls are sitting on the sofa next to him (Figure 6.3).
One of them says, ‘Can’t you see I’m burning?’, and he says to her ‘No honey,
you’re not burning’, but then he is woken up by a smoke alarm. He’s burnt the
sauce and the house is full of smoke. Nothing dramatic happens. Patrick says,
‘Uncle Lee what’s that smell?’ He says, ‘It’s OK I just burnt the sauce, every-
thing’s OK.’ But it shows how tortured his mind is by the death of his children,
and the constant reminders that he has. He tells Patrick that arrangements have
been made. He’s got a job in Boston, starting in July, and Patrick is going to live
with George: ‘Everything is staying the same except you don’t have to move.’
Patrick says but why can’t you stay, and Lee has to concede, ‘I can’t beat it, I’m
sorry.’ Patrick cries and he holds him.

Figure 6.3 Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck) dreams of his children, in Manchester by the Sea (2016),
directed by Kenneth Lonergan.

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 FILM, COMEDY AND TRAGEDY 161

At Joe’s burial, Randi’s baby is crying, so she passes it to her husband

who takes it away. Lee sees the grave with his parents’ and Joe’s names on
it. Patrick asks for money for ice cream and Lee tells him that he’s getting a
flat with a second bedroom, so that he can come and visit sometimes. As they
walk home, they bounce a ball between them, still with their slightly grumpy
banter: Patrick sarcastically says Lee’s throw is great. Lee says let the ball go,
Patrick doesn’t, they just trundle along. The final shot is of the two of them
fishing off the boat.
This film is an exploration of living in the void, or what Murdoch calls
‘real ordinary familiar despair’ (MGM: 504). Murdoch describes this as
‘An opposing companion to happiness’, and ‘something extreme: the pain,
and the evil, which occasion conditions of desolation such as many or most
human beings have met with’ (MGM: 498). Lee is existing in a state of
desolation. He would probably have felt better had he been sent to prison
and punished like Juliette in I’ve Loved You So Long, and of course he did
try to end his life, but in fact he has had to settle into living a life of sorts.
Murdoch writes,

It is not easy to discuss such a matter or to take it as a single subject.

Those who have experienced such black misery and recovered may
prefer to forget. Art, which consoles and to which we also return for
wisdom, tends to, or may seem to, romanticise despair. Innumerable
poems, stories, pictures, portray it in ways we are easily able to toler-
ate and enjoy. Christ on the cross is an image so familiar and beautified
that we have difficulty in connecting it with real awful human suffering.
(MGM: 499)

Thinking about tragedy in art in this way does pose the question of how it is
connected to such painful suffering in real life, and how we might relate to the
deadening daily half-life that Lee lives, which is a far more realistic depiction
of life after such horrors than high-pitched emotion. Life continues, and then
another sad event comes along, the death of his brother, and this still has to be
dealt with, despite Lee’s personal trauma. In this way the film is more of an
investigation of how to behave appropriately in relation to others, than it is a
story about a death or a tragic event. Murdoch believes that ‘really great art
gives us a mixed and sombre delight which is akin to our recognition of moral-
ity’ (S&G: 219). This seems to be an appropriate description of this moving
film, which is so tenderly insightful about the relationship between uncle and
nephew, and so unflinching in its confrontation of the practicalities of death
and bereavement. There are some genuinely funny moments in this film, such
as the sight of Patrick’s band practising wearing their hoodies and taking things
very seriously, and when Lee confronts Patrick about the frozen chicken. As

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we have seen from Murdoch’s thinking about tragedy in life, it is simply part of
every day, and might be over-egged in order to make it seem more exceptional.
Like the broken crockery that Murdoch speaks of, the frozen chicken and the
burnt sauce are as likely to cause a breakdown as the sight of Joe’s body in the
morgue.
Murdoch describes how,

The comic is often paired as an opposite with the tragic but the two
concepts are asymmetrical and different in kind. It is not that the comic
is unserious and the tragic serious. The comic is capable of the high-
est seriousness, in life and in art; whereas the attempted tragic or bad
tragic may be pretentious lying nonsense not capable of seriousness at
all. Indeed, fortunately for the human race, the comic is everywhere, it
is in the air which, as being every one of us an artist, we breathe. The
tragic is not the same as sorrow – sorrow, grief, of course is also in the
air we breathe. Tragedy belongs only to art, where it occupies a very
small area. One might even be puzzled by the high prestige which the
form enjoys, as if we needed for psychological reasons to inflate the idea.
There are extremely few good tragedies and, one may say, bad tragedies
are not tragedies. (MGM: 92–3)

In saying this, Murdoch sheds light on the role of Lee’s flashbacks of the fire
that he caused and that killed his children. It is a segment of memory, featuring
sights that struck him at the time – his wife being sedated, his children’s bod-
ies, his house destroyed – accompanied by an overwhelming soundtrack that
conveys the bleak horror of it all. It is a ‘tragic fragment’. Murdoch stresses the
artistry of such glimpses:

Real life is not tragic. In saying this one means that the extreme horrors
of real life cannot be expressed in art . . . We become accustomed, in the
technically perfect ‘art work’ of television, to structured glimpses, real
and fictional, of human misery. (MGM: 93)

This seems to describe the house fire scene perfectly. It is the ‘structured
glimpse’ that fuels the rest of the film, explaining why Lee has the tempera-
ment that he does, and also showing how he cannot stay in Manchester in his
brother’s house to care for Patrick. That is the subject of the film: the effects
of the circumstances of the death of his children, and not the ins and outs
of the circumstances themselves. In more exploitative works, perhaps ‘disas-
ter movies’, the minutiae of the disaster is the focus, as Murdoch observes:
‘Catastrophes are of course constantly made the subject of bad art, such as we
continually see on television or in the cinema’ (MGM: 94).

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Murdoch discusses the perceived value of tragedy as an art form. She writes,

We tend to feel that tragedy is connected with high morality and is

good for us . . . For this we should not simply see the virtuous man
overthrown or the bad man successful or the total villain destroyed,
but rather the not especially good man brought down, not by evil
or wickedness, but by some fault, frailty, or weakness of character.
(MGM: 99)

Well this would seem to be a precise description of what happens with Lee: we
see his life destroyed by a fleeting lapse of care. And that this fault results in
death is essential for the tragic to do what Murdoch says it must, which causes
us distress:

Its subject matter is contingency and death, the profound difference

between suffering and death, the connection of truth and justice with
the apprehension of death, the elevation of morality to the religious
level . . . In tragedy the compulsory nature of death is an image of its
place in life. Such are the solemn thoughts which a contemplation of
this great concept may inspire in us. (MGM: 117)

Murdoch talks specifically about the void which results from bereavement,
which I will quote here at some length:

There is . . . a guiltless remorse when some innocent action has pro-

duced an unforeseeable catastrophe. A common cause of void is
bereavement, which may be accompanied by guilt feelings, or may be
productive of a ‘clean’ pain. In such cases there is a sense of emptiness,
a loss of personality, a loss of energy and motivation, a sense of being
stripped, the world is utterly charmless and without attraction. Guilt-
less bereavement can occasion most intense pain, but is often followed
by recovery, when, it is said, ‘nature’ reasserts itself. Duties perceived
in this emptiness may be a source of healing. There is no one there, but
the pain is there and the tasks. In time the annihilated personality reap-
pears, the victim returns from the strange absolute country of death
which he has visited, and resumes his ordinary interests, which in his
grief he found senseless. He is made by merciful nature to forget what
it was like . . . Even extreme guilt may be clouded over as ubiquitous
nature prompts the conclusion ‘Why bother’ . . . But, it may be said,
surely in many cases something good can be retained or learnt from
the experience of emptiness and non-being? . . . There is nothing
that cannot be broken or taken from us. Ultimately we are nothing. A

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reminder of our mortality, a recognition of contingency, must at least

make us humble. Are we not then closer to the deep mystery of being
human? When we find our ordinary pursuits trivial and senseless are we
not right to do so? (MGM: 500–1)

This description of the deadened, numb indifference to daily tasks is an apt

description of how Lee is when we meet him, and yet Murdoch speaks here
of guiltless remorse, when Lee is in fact overburdened with guilt. And the
fact that he has a reputation in town, and difficulties finding work, shows
how it is a public belief, not just a personal one. Lee faces rejection and
isolation as well as his own torment. He may have reached the ‘why bother’
stage, but he certainly rises to meet his duties in relation to Joe and Patrick
as far as he can. The lesson that Murdoch writes about, that recognition of
contingency with which she is so concerned, is a difficult and challenging
lesson to learn, and this film shows us that pain in fact does not go away; but
also it does not stop you from being a decent person, and that people will still
love you even if you make terrible mistakes and feel lost. This calls upon us
to embrace what Murdoch calls ‘the sublime’, which is ‘the proud energetic
fear with which the rational being faces the contingent dreadfulness of the
world’ (MGM: 100): ‘Art can rarely, but with authority, show how we learn
from pain, swept by the violence of divine grace toward an unwilling wis-
dom’ (F&S: 458).
When discussing art, Murdoch says that it is ‘a special discerning exer-
cise of intelligence in relation to the real’. She goes on, ‘In the shock of joy
in response to good art, an essential ingredient is a sense of the revelation
of reality, of the really real . . . the world as we were never able so clearly to
see it before’ (F&S: 454). This shock of joy is something that we recognise
from realising the significance or insight of a film, and I suggest we feel it
even in relation to a film as moving as Manchester by the Sea. It would be
sentimental and unrealistic were Lee to be able to move back to Manchester,
where Randi has a new life, and to settle back in to the town where such
horrors happened. There is comfort in the fact that Lee dedicated himself
to doing the best he could for Patrick, and that he will keep him in his life,
with their fun and frank relationship, but that he also has faced his past and
knows that he is too damaged to live in its footsteps again. To revisit what
Murdoch writes,

We have (gravity, necessity) a natural impulse to derealise our world

and surround ourselves with fantasy. Simply stopping this, refraining
from filling voids with lies and falsity, is progress. Equally in the more
obscure labyrinths of personal relations it may be necessary to make the
move which makes the void appear. (MGM: 503)

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As with many of the characters in the films in this book who face up to their
losses, we see here that Lee faces up to his, making the void appear, but it can
be seen to be progress. He has a new job, a bigger flat and visits from Patrick
to look forward to. There are moments which convey the bleak stasis of Lee’s
world, such as when he puts his hand through the window, when he cannot
speak to Sandy’s mother, or his emotional reactions in the hospital. These
moments, captured and supplemented by the level of bodily and mental pain
that Affleck conveys through his performance, enable us, if we watch carefully,
to see more than we are told, and perhaps we can think of these moments in
Murdochian terms, as being where the frame does not fully meet:

I spoke earlier of situations where what is wholly transcendent and invis-

ible becomes partially, perhaps surprisingly, visible at points where the
‘frame’ does not quite ‘meet’. This image describes certain kinds of expe-
rience where it is as if, to use another image, the curtain blows in the wind
(of spirit maybe), and we see more than we are supposed to. (MGM: 505)

This is of course a beautifully cinematic turn of phrase, but it is also useful concep-
tually for thinking about the notion of excess of meaning, or feeling, or thought.
When we discern moral, philosophical notions in a film, they may be glaring, but
they may also need to be spotted, where the frame doesn’t quite meet.
This chapter has looked at how films can deal with extreme suffering. The
films I have chosen are, in turn, satirical, fanciful and brutally honest. As
Murdoch says, ‘human beings are remarkably good at surviving and people
make jokes in dark situations which would appal the outsider’ (MGM: 502).
Some may think my Murdochian analysis using the language of ‘lessons’ and
‘wisdom’ is overstated or stretched. Murdoch addresses the potential irrita-
tion of this attitude:

Someone may say, if you are always noticing images of God or Good or
seeing spiritual ladders, or being some sort of artist, you are very lucky.
Your view of spiritual refreshment as everywhere available is ridicu-
lously optimistic, even sentimental. It seems to neglect how miserable
we are, and also how wicked we are. (MGM: 498)

There can be no doubt about the misery of human life, and of the wickedness
and misery of the characters in the films in this chapter. And, as Murdoch says,

Extreme suffering, from one cause or another, is likely to be the lot of

everyone at some time in life; and innumerable lives are hideously dark-
ened throughout by hunger, poverty and persecution, or by remorse or
guilt or abandoned loneliness and lack of love. (MGM: 504)

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Murdoch’s non-theological take on suffering is both mystical and realistic.

She contemplates the metaphysics of the void, but also the fact that comedy is
everywhere: ‘Theological truth is abstract. Out on the battle-front of human
suffering people will use such devices as they have for survival’ (MGM: 504).
Murdoch’s analysis of the image of tragedy shows us both the inadequacy
of art for capturing the full reality of life’s horrors, and also the role that
‘structured glimpses’ can play for us when we view them with just discern-
ment, attention and thought.

NOTES

1. For a discussion of the oedipal significance of the relationship, see Meg Harris Williams
(2017).
2. See Arendt (2006: 250); and the introduction to the volume by Amos Elon.
3. Simon Critchley’s book On Humour contains discussions of a range of approaches to
the topic, and Noel Carroll’s Humour: A Very Short Introduction (2014) is an excellent
overview.
4. Adagio Per Archi E Organo In Sol Minore by the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

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 CHAPTER 7

Film and Women’s Stories

The point of liberation is not, and this is to differ with certain views of
women’s lib, to say we’re better, or we’re special, or we’re wonderful, but
just to be equal, to be ordinary, to join the human race, to be people, just
people like everybody else. (Interview in 1978, cited in Dooley 2003: 83)

M urdoch’s relationship with feminism is not straightforward, and needs

some clarification and explanation. Her philosophical thinking, how-
ever, is of great value in understanding how film can involve us in women’s
stories. In this chapter, I am going to set out some ideas about Murdoch, gen-
der and philosophy, before going on to examine three films in detail as stories
about women that benefit from thinking about them in terms of individual-
ity, honesty, compassion and morality. The films are Certain Women (Kelly
Reichardt, 2016), The Unknown Girl/La fille inconnue (Jean-Pierre Dardenne
and Luc Dardenne, 2016) and Girlhood (Céline Sciamma, 2014).
Iris Murdoch was born in 1919, the year after the publication of Marie
Stopes’s book Married Love, which challenged perceptions about women’s
sexual pleasure and equality between the sexes in marriage (Stopes 1919).
This was a highpoint of feminism’s first wave in the United Kingdom, but
that period would not be known as such until the 1960s, after the onset of
second-wave feminism arising in North America with works such as Betty
Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1997), first published in 1963. Iris Mur-
doch’s education was during the period between suffrage and the second
wave, and so, when we think of her in light of today’s discourses of feminism,
third-wave, post- or intersectional, we do have to keep in mind that, in Nora
Hämäläinen’s words, Murdoch’s ‘concerns were elsewhere, and her scene
was different’ (2015: 753). As Marije Altorf observes, ‘with the exception of
de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, it is doubtful whether Murdoch was familiar

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with existing feminist literature’ (2007: 177). Murdoch said in 1976 that ‘The
Second Sex is a very good book and makes me like her as a person, although
I’ve never met her’ (Dooley 2003: 32).
Murdoch is committed to gender equality, but is not convinced by siphon-
ing off interests or studies as ‘women’s interests’ or ‘women’s studies’. She
sees this as a mistake. Her reasoning is that women’s stories are human stories
and women’s studies are – studies. Murdoch consistently expresses passionate
belief in the importance of women’s education. In conversation with Michael
O. Bellamy in 1976, she said,

I’m not interested in women’s problems as such, though I’m a great sup-
porter of women’s liberation – particularly education for women – but
in aid of getting women to join the human race, not in aid of making
any kind of feminine contribution to the world. I think there’s a kind of
human contribution, but I don’t think there’s a feminine contribution.
(Dooley 2003: 48)

This neatly summarises Murdoch’s thoughts on women’s lib. She was forth-
right about her support for women’s education but less supportive of other
aspects of the women’s movement. These views were mainly expressed in
interview, and so not part of her philosophical writing per se. In conversation
with Jack I. Biles in 1977 she said,

I’m not interested in the ‘woman’s world’ or the assertion of a ‘female

viewpoint’. This is often rather an artificial idea and can in fact injure
the promotion of equal rights. We want to join the human race, not
invent a new separatism. (Dooley 2003: 62)

She was very concerned not to separate people or groups into ghettos based on
any aspects of their identity, but was focused on the significance of individu-
als. Harold Hobson, theatre critic of The Times, got into a sticky situation with
Murdoch over the fact that women were not admitted to the Athenaeum Club
which is where they met for their interview in 1962. Challenging Murdoch on
her assertion that men try to suppress women, she responded by taking him
up on the way he had ‘thanked heaven because women were kept out of the
Athenaeum’. She states,

Clubs are a special case. I suppose men can have the Athenaeum if they
want to. But the notion that women are inferior is deep, very deep, even
in our fairly sensible society, and it does nobody any good. Men and
women are still thought of as having stereotyped parts to play, regardless

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 FILM AND WOMEN’S STORIES 169

of their temperament. But any individual is a mixture of masculine and

feminine and would be best employed just being himself and treating
people as individuals, too. (Dooley 2003: 5)

This focus on the individual, in their fullest selfhood, is what Murdoch is

interested in. But she is also perfectly aware of her privileged position, saying
to Sheila Hale in 1976,

Women who think of themselves as something separate are joining a

kind of inferiority movement, like women’s clubs. I realize I am lucky.
I have never felt picked out in an intellectual sense because I am a woman;
these distinctions are not made at Oxford. (Dooley 2003: 32)

Murdoch is also committed to equality for homosexuals and her novels are
notable for their inclusion of characters who are gay or sexually ambiguous.1
She said to Jeffrey Meyers in interview in 1988,

I’m very much in favour of gay lib, and I feel very strongly that there
shouldn’t be any sort of prejudice against homosexuals, or suggestions
that homosexual love is unnatural or bad. I hope such views are tending
to disappear from society. (Dooley 2003: 233)

For a writer and thinker who was open-minded about gender and sexuality, it
is ironic that her gender has affected her reputation as a cultural figure, espe-
cially in the way that her private life has been the focus of attention over the
years (Bolton 2015b).2 A number of clips of Murdoch can be found online:
in discussion with Bryan Magee in 1977 about literature and philosophy (as
the only woman in a series called ‘Men of Ideas’); in conversation with Frank
Kermode in a programme for Sixth Forms, discussing her novel An Unoffi-
cial Rose (1962); in a discussion about determinism with David Pears, in 1972;
being interviewed by James Atlas for 92Y/The Paris Review Interview Series in
1990; and interviewing Jiddu Krishnamurti in 1984. What these clips show is
the philosopher at work. She is a public intellectual, known for her work as a
novelist and a philosopher, not her private life, or her later illness. What is usu-
ally discussed in these clips is the unique relationship she has to the disciplines
of literature and philosophy: she talks about art, the type of thinking that art
requires as opposed to science, and the metaphysical nature of the relation-
ship to art, involving love and choice, and change. These appearances show
her engaged in philosophical discourse, responding to, and asking, questions.
They enable the viewer to have a – limited – encounter with her as a thinker.
When we watch, and listen to her speak, we can hear her voice, see her facial

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 170 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

expressions, and notice what makes her laugh. Watched and studied along-
side the written words of Murdoch’s philosophy, these videos are a valuable
contribution to furthering understanding of her moral thinking, and a record
of her working that is suited to the discursive discipline of philosophy. These
issues pertain to the image of Murdoch as a philosopher, and to her presence
in contemporary culture; but what of the role of gender in the philosophical
work she produced?

T H E RO L E O F G E N D E R I N M U R D O C H ’ S P H I L O S O P H Y

This is an area that is open to contestation, and is well aerated by Sabina

Lovibond in her book Iris Murdoch, Gender and Philosophy (2011). On the
M and D parable, Lovibond writes that

the conclusion to be drawn is that some of our most valuable moral

accomplishments leave no trace in the public realm, and that an ethical
theory which does not know how to interest itself in anything outside
that realm will fail to honour such accomplishments. (2011: 24)

This is significant because of the ‘gendered’ character of the public–private

opposition, so Lovibond explains how

this vindication of the private is another feature of Murdoch’s moral phi-

losophy which has proved attractive to feminist readers, and the intimate,
domestic nature of the M & D story suggests that for Murdoch, too, the
blind spots of existentialist–behaviourist ethics may have something to do
with its masculine origins. (2011: 24)

One problem with this, however, for Lovibond, is that ‘much of the critical force
of feminism has been directed, precisely, against the excessive “obedience” or
compliance hitherto demanded of women’ (2011: 32). In other words, is unself-
ing not precisely the act that women have always done far too much, and should
they not be thinking more about how to put themselves first? Lovibond assesses
that, ‘There is . . . some difficulty in combining the event of claiming what is due
to you with that of the extinction of self-will’ (2011: 94).
Nora Hämäläinen considers that Lovibond argues ‘that Iris Murdoch’s
philosophical and literary work is covertly dedicated to an ideology of female
subordination’ (2015: 743). Hämäläinen does not agree with Lovibond, and
cites Altorf ’s reconstruction of Murdoch as a ‘woman philosopher’, focusing
on both her intellectual integrity as a philosopher and the intellectual ben-
efits of being an outsider (2015: 744). Hämäläinen argues that Murdoch was

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 FILM AND WOMEN’S STORIES 171

unhappy with the freely choosing agent of modern philosophy, believing it to

produce an overly narrow view of morality compared to the complexity of our
actual moral lives: ‘she wanted to supplant this thin understanding of the moral
agent with a richer idea of the moral person as a complex human being with an
inner life and morally significant movements of consciousness’ (2015: 744) (see
MGM: 171–2). The type of individual that Murdoch believes we should all be
aiming to become is perhaps associated with some qualities traditionally seen as
belonging to women, as Hämäläinen notes: ‘The inward, soulful, multifaceted
perspective on moral consciousness and her persistent emphasis on the good
person as “loving” and moral perception as “a loving gaze”, could perhaps be
seen as providing an ethics that is culturally coded as feminine’ (2015: 745).
Murdoch herself, however, does not attribute gender to any of these qualities.
Lovibond is not right, according to Hämäläinen, to argue that rehabilitating
Weil’s idea of attention is indicative of an attachment to female submissiveness
(ibid.: 746). As I have explored in earlier chapters, here Hämäläinen makes
clear how the figure of the good person that Murdoch evokes is ‘far from that
of the submissive mother, wife, or muse – it is the religious subject struggling
with suffering and opening up for grace. It thus occupies a space that is gen-
derless and always adversarial to habitual relations of power’ (ibid.). Christ
is one of Murdoch’s favourite models, and even when she strips him of deity
‘the notions of attention and obedience preserve this radical aspect’ (ibid.).
Whereas Lovibond sees Murdoch’s adoption of Weil’s unselfing as an action
that shows a lack of interest in ‘outer, judicial, social, structural consequences
of this kind of ethic’, Hämäläinen corrects this. She explains that,

The ‘self ’ that is exorcised in Murdoch’s act of attention is a very specific

entity: it is ‘the fat relentless ego’, which interferes with our capacity
to see things and people as they really are. Anxieties, desires, wishful
thoughts, hopes, fears, pride, and vanity are among the aspects of our ego
that blind us from reality, and in order to see more accurately, we need to
let these go. Unselfing is thus not to be understood as a wholesale self-
denigration but rather a kind of deliberate purification of the self that we
undergo in order to see more clearly. (Ibid.: 747)

Hämäläinen explains that Murdoch is not proposing we subjugate ourselves

in order to surrender to another, but rather that we work to let go of our own
ego so that we might see reality more clearly. In fact, Murdoch shows her
awareness of the type of asceticism and suffering of which Weil approves, and
does not go along with this herself. She believes, as Hämäläinen notes, that
‘extreme demands on oneself (even demands of self-effacement) can coexist,
in a life, with a thorough understanding of the mutuality and complexity of
moral and political life with others’ (ibid.: 748). The Murdochian individual

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is a social, historical and enculturated being, and this is how Murdoch’s con-
tribution to moral philosophy can be identified: ‘Through a creative secu-
larization of some of Weil’s core ideas, Murdoch achieves a perspective on
the dynamics of moral personhood that is unique in her own context of
Anglophone twentieth-century moral philosophy’ (ibid.). We can see more
clearly, therefore, how Murdoch is acutely aware of differences between
people, who see different worlds, which, as Hämäläinen points out, is simi-
lar to contemporary feminist and postcolonial thinkers: ‘Our very conceptual
frameworks, our patterns of attention, our capacities for understanding are
formed by both cultural and individual biases and limitations’ (ibid. 752).
This is similar to the concept of the lived bodies of feminist phenomenol-
ogy, described by Iris Marion Young as ‘always enculturated’ (2005: 17), and
Murdoch refers to our conceptual vision as well as our physicality. As Megan
Laverty writes, ‘“unselfing” involves an acceptance of one’s own perspective as
inherently limited – embraced as personal, historical, provisional and incom-
plete . . . if anything is abandoned, it is an illusion of the self as inviolably
important and master of everything that it surveys’ (Laverty 2007: 93). As
Hämäläinen explains, Murdoch’s unselfing is ‘a kind of work that the indi-
vidual person does in order to see what is in front of him (people, art, nature)
in a more truthful light’ (2015: 753):

Unselfing, in this sense, essentially involves the recognition of structural

bias, of privilege, of inequality as well as the recognition of personal
fault. Developing the structural criticism latent in the notion of unself-
ing requires only a tiny step forward: that of paying attention to the
social/structural roots of some of our biases. For us who are marinated
in post-structuralist feminism, this is an easy, obvious, and indeed nec-
essary step to take, but we must keep in mind that Murdoch’s concerns
were elsewhere, and her scene was different. (Ibid.)

Now Hämäläinen’s observation about Murdoch’s ‘scene’ becomes clearer, and

how we can think about her ideas in our current ‘scene’ becomes more accessible:

Turning attention away from the self is not submissiveness in a sociopo-

litical sense. It is not a matter of choosing an inferior position in search of
some obscure spiritual goal, but rather of overcoming both the ‘fat, relent-
less ego’ and the shackles of convention that bind us to given, biased, and
potentially oppressive manners of looking. A substantial conception of the
human being but not an inflated notion of ‘self ’; self-scrutiny without
self-preoccupation; self-forgetfulness without self-denigration – these are
elements of a complex economy of the self in relation to goodness and to
our surrounding reality. (Ibid.)

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 FILM AND WOMEN’S STORIES 173

Thanks to Hämäläinen’s argument, we can see how ‘both the inner world of
the individual and the collective world of society and politics are spaces for
moral/epistemic transformations’ (ibid.: 754). Although Murdoch was critical
of Derrida’s structuralism (MGM: 197–202), seeing this as another totalising,
domineering mode of thought which attempted to explain away individuality
and morality, it does not mean that she was not both aware, and critical, of
social structures and conventions which imprison us and proscribe our behav-
iour. For Hämäläinen then, Murdoch’s critique of convention is a structural
and historical critique ‘on a par with the feminist interrogation of patriarchy,
although its focus is on discernment and complexity lost rather than on sub-
stance and complexity gained’ (2015: 754). Her analysis sheds light on struc-
tural inequality and oppression, and conventions that restrict our moral world
views, and Altorf helps us to understand how Murdoch not only critiques this
state of affairs but offers alternatives and possibilities for thinking about things
differently.
Altorf agrees that Murdoch ‘demonstrates a keen awareness of sexual
inequality, yet this is something she never addresses in her essays’ (2007: 175).
For example, in conversation with Barbara Stevens Heusel in 1987, she says,

People sometimes ask, ‘Why don’t you write about women’s problems?’
Women’s problems are problems among other problems, and I write
about them also. I just don’t write only or mainly about them. Unfor-
tunately, it’s still a man’s world. A man doesn’t have to explain what it’s
like to be a man, but a woman has to explain what it’s like to be a woman.
(Dooley 2003: 207)

Murdoch’s inclusion of women in her philosophical examples, arguments and

parables, however, makes it clear just how much she does ‘write about them
also’, and highlights how women’s lives are missing from philosophical dis-
course generally. This is one of the most refreshing and enjoyable aspects of
reading Murdoch’s philosophy: her equitable consideration of lives, female,
male, animal and vegetal. From Isabella in Measure for Measure (MGM: 379),
to Maggie and her pagoda in Henry James’s The Golden Bowl (MGM: 306),
and to wondering who led the better New Testament life, Mary or Martha
(MGM: 332), Murdoch includes women as the objects of her attention and the
subjects of stories and images. Altorf draws on the notion of the philosophical
imaginary from Michele Le Dœuff to account for Murdoch’s imagery in a way
that demonstrates her potential contribution to philosophical thinking:

The philosophical imaginary expresses her engagement with imagery,

metaphors and myth, and in particular her research into the part a spe-
cific image, or imaginative idea, can play in a philosophical argument.

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 174 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

Philosophical imagery, Le Dœuff maintains, has arisen from the inter-

play between cultural, social elements and the constraints of philosophi-
cal writing. An image may appear once in a text, but it can also reappear
throughout an author’s oeuvre. (Altorf 2007: 183)

This describes how a philosopher has a range of images, metaphors and myths
that they like and find useful, and return to as tools for explaining their thought
and building their arguments. Murdoch undoubtedly has an array of these,
and they are indeed unique to her. The idea of the philosophical imaginary
highlights how, in her ‘philosophical struggle’, Murdoch is concerned with the
position of people who are outside philosophy. Altorf observes,

While Le Dœuff is mainly concerned with the exclusion of women,

Murdoch is more generally concerned with those outside philoso-
phy; they seem to have stepped out of the nineteenth-century novels
she favours so much: virtuous peasants, or ‘some quiet unpretentious
worker, a schoolteacher or a mother, better still an aunt’ (EM: 244)
[sic MGM: 429]. The virtuous peasant may be slightly problematic
because of a similarity to, for instance, the noble savage. Yet Murdoch
recognises that not all philosophy is universal when it does not allow
space for such mothers or aunts or for the supposition that ‘an unex-
amined life can be virtuous’ (IP: 299). (Altorf 2007: 184)

The point about the virtuous peasant is also picked up by Lovibond, who accuses
Murdoch of having a ‘sentimental cult of the “ordinary”’ (2011: 42). She is refer-
ring to Murdoch’s Weilian celebration of ‘the inarticulate but devoted carer for
others’ (ibid.) and the suggestion that such people might need no improvement.
Murdoch is not including the possibility, as Lovibond argues, that the aunt might
be a shop steward or a sociologist (ibid.). Murdoch’s work is, however, as Altorf
writes, ‘saturated with imagery’ (2007: 184), and I have drawn out many of these
so far in this book, such as caring for a plant or a cat, families facing decisions,
and, of course, M and D. And this book argues that we can increase our under-
standing of the relevance of Murdoch’s philosophical thinking by seeing how the
principles are at work in film through other images, and in the world around us.
This is not a matter of illustrating Murdoch’s philosophy, but of understanding
it in action, in our lives, all the time. For Le Dœuff, images don’t just illustrate
but ‘they simultaneously counter a quite different argument, thus adding voices
to the dialogue’ (Altorf 2007: 184). Murdoch’s voice has a lot to add to the film
philosophy dialogue!
Altorf concludes that assumptions about philosophy and feminism may
have deterred assessment of Murdoch’s philosophy from a feminist perspec-
tive. She argues,

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 FILM AND WOMEN’S STORIES 175

Feminism should not be thought of as more partisan than philosophy; it

is not necessarily the secluded thinking Murdoch takes it to be, any more
than philosophy is the universal quest for truth . . . her philosophical
writing shares important concerns with those of feminists like Alcoff
and Le Dœuff, more so than perhaps she herself may have allowed for.
(Ibid.: 185)

Altorf ’s work is central to understanding how Murdoch’s philosophy can relate

to women in film philosophy. Through appreciating Murdoch’s philosophical
imaginary, which features women as so many examples, from real-life scenar-
ios, literature and the Bible, we can open out our thinking to understanding her
concepts of just, discerning vision in many contexts. Alongside this is her lack
of deference to any male philosopher or academic, such as Ryle, Hampshire,
Sartre, Derrida or Freud, as she demonstrates how she is not in thrall to any
other thinker except perhaps Weil. Even Plato is rigorously examined.
In ‘The Idea of Perfection’, Murdoch states that she is interested in ‘the
fact that an unexamined life can be virtuous and the fact that love is a central
concept in morals’ (IP: 299). She explores this open and inclusive aspect to
moral philosophy, and goodness, through the parable of M and D. The aim
of the parable is to show that M ‘observes D or at least reflects deliberately
about D, until gradually her vision of D alters’ (IP: 313).3 This alteration
could, Murdoch explains, ‘be described in terms of M’s visual imagery’, so
how M sees D herself or D’s qualities (ibid.). This activity is happening in
M’s mind and is changing how she sees the world. It is not about M trying to
be a better person for the sake of a metaphysical witness. What Murdoch is
doing here is liberating morality and philosophy ‘from the domination of sci-
ence: or rather from the domination of inexact ideas of science which haunt
philosophers and other thinkers’ (IP: 320). Existentialism tries to solve this,
she argues, by ‘attributing to the individual an empty lonely freedom . . . to
“fly in the face of facts”’, and we have already seen what Murdoch makes of
that (IP: 321). Psychoanalysis, she claims, is a ‘muddled embryonic science’
that we need not be overwhelmed by: ‘even if M were given a full psycho-
analytical explanation of her conduct towards D she need not be confined by
such an explanation’ (IP: 321). Murdoch rejects these attempts and instead
tells us to learn from lives, not words:

Words may mislead us here since words are often stable while concepts
alter; we have a different image of courage at forty from that which we
had at twenty. A deepening process, at any rate an altering and complicat-
ing process, takes place . . . Knowledge of a value concept is something
to be understood, as it were, in depth, and not in terms of switching on
to some given impersonal network. (IP: 322)

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 176 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

As she mentions in ‘Vision and Choice in Morality’, a new type of language is

called for to understand how moral vision in the lives of individuals evolves and
develops (or doesn’t). As Murdoch explains,

As moral agents we have to try to see justly, to overcome prejudice, to

avoid temptation, to control and curb imagination, to direct reflection.
Man is not a combination of an impersonal rational thinker and a per-
sonal will. He is a unified being who sees, and who desires in accordance
with what he sees, and who has some continual slight control over the
direction and focus of his vision. (IP: 332)

Despite Murdoch’s occasional use of the image of the uneducated or inar-

ticulate person, her main concern is with ‘the ordinary person’ – all of us – as
differentiated from the professional philosopher. This is, as Murdoch explains,
a ‘general metaphysical background to morals’, and as such is not ‘a formula
which can be illuminatingly introduced into any and every moral act’ (IP: 334).
It is a stance that is not only oppositional, but also inclusive and egalitarian. It
is a philosophy of morals founded on love, and that is open to all: ‘It is in the
capacity to love, that is to see, that the liberation of the soul from fantasy con-
sists. The freedom which is a proper human goal is the freedom from fantasy,
that is the realism of compassion’ (OGG: 354).
Murdoch accepts that human beings are naturally selfish and that ‘we are
anxiety-ridden animals’ (SGC: 369). In art, we can see an image of human
beings that we can steadily contemplate, and this might be the only place where
we can see such an image.

Art transcends selfish and obsessive limitations of personality and can

enlarge the sensibility of its consumer. It is a kind of goodness by proxy.
Most of all it exhibits to us the connection, in human beings, of clear
realistic vision with compassion. The realism of a great artist is not a
photographic realism, it is essentially both pity and justice. (SGC: 371)

This is an interesting concept in relation to film. Richard Rushton argues that

‘films help us to shape what we call “reality”’ (2011: 2). Rushton stresses how
films create, rather than simply re-present, reality to us. This approach enables
us to conceive of how many of the examples Murdoch gives can be envisaged
as scenes or moments in films, and that perhaps we even know them already
from the films we have seen and/or the lives we have lived/known. Her call
to really look at real people enables the role of women’s lives to come to the
fore. Murdoch says we must reject ‘the dry symbol, the bogus individual, the
false whole’ and move towards ‘the real impenetrable human person. That this

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 FILM AND WOMEN’S STORIES 177

person is substantial, impenetrable, individual, indefinable and valuable is after

all the fundamental tenet of Liberalism’ (AD: 294).4
Certain Women, The Unknown Girl and Girlhood are all stories about girls
and women, their lives, and things that they do. Each film holds our attention
on these women as individuals, who we attend to through the particulars of
their carefully wrought circumstances on-screen. They also convey the women
as contemplative people, attending to others, reflecting on their lives, which
include aspects of their femininity as elements of their lived bodies and soci-
etal lives. These provocative, affective and intelligent films merit close analysis
of the form and content of the visions they present: not consoling, but chal-
lenging; not overly dramatic, but asking questions that are moral, political and
psychological.

C O N T E M P L AT I V E O B S E RVAT I O N S :
C E RTA I N WO M E N

This film features a certain point in four women’s lives, and their gender is
not foregrounded other than to show that it impacts upon their lives. These
are simply what Murdoch would call human stories, but they are stories about
women’s lives in a short period of time, in intense detail. The women are not
superheroes, nor are they experiencing extreme marvels or tragedies. The allu-
sive, incomplete tales offer glimpses behind the curtain of the lives of these
women. They are more than snapshots in a conventional portmanteau movie.
These vignettes look backwards and forwards around the screen time each
woman occupies, indicating the past experiences that have shaped them (legal
practice, marriage, manual work), and the acquired behaviours and practices
that inform their daily lives (frustration, imagination, loneliness).
The film begins with the authorial stamp – a film by Kelly Reichardt –
and a train crosses the Montana landscape, with a huge flat mountain back-
drop. Morning is breaking. In a screen split by a dividing wall between two
rooms, indicative of post-coital separation, half a naked man, Ryan Lewis
(James LeGros), is glimpsed on the right, pulling on his pants, and half a naked
woman, Laura Wells (Laura Dern), is glimpsed on the left, in bed, pulling on
her socks. The woman reclines, wearing her bra, and smiles with an inquisitive,
appraising, but loving, expression at the man as he finishes dressing. It emerges
that it is a lunchtime assignation, and the light outside seems oddly dark and
gloomy. She has to get back to work, but one of her clients has just turned up
wanting to see her. He wants to progress his case, but she needs to take him to
another personal injury lawyer for a second opinion since he does not accept
her advice that they have reached the end of the line. The client, Will Fuller

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 178 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

(Jared Harris), wants to talk and strategise, but she has to go to court so she
manages to get him to leave. She cleans her skirt with a lint roller, and rips off
the used sticky paper, like we all do, as she watches Fuller through the window.
He seems to have nowhere to go, and just stands by a lamppost.
The second-opinion lawyer is an older, white, bearded man. He explains
the legal situation in relation to Fuller’s claim: that the contractor was clearly
negligent but Fuller’s previous settlement precludes a tort claim now. Fuller
accepted what they offered and that cleared them of any further penalty, so
he can’t sue again. Fuller accepts this completely, with no discussion. Laura
looks at him incredulously. As she says on the telephone to Ryan, she has been
explaining this for eight months: ‘It would be so lovely to think that if I were a
man, I could explain the law and people would listen and say OK; it would be
so restful.’ They then begin a conversation about their relationship, with Ryan
referring to ‘his situation’ as a reason why they need to cool things, but Laura
has to go because Fuller has just got back in her car and does not want to leave.
He starts saying hateful things about his wife, wishing she would ‘lay down on
the highway’, and saying he is going to get a machine gun and kill everyone.
She tells him to get out of the car, but he promises to stop. Laura puts music on
the radio and he starts crying; she’s exasperated but doesn’t say anything. She
is having to deal with all the emotional fallout from his situation, and it is very
unlikely that the other lawyer would have to do this. Laura is seen as far more
approachable, and, in fact, she does not reject him.
At home, we see Laura lying on her sofa with a beautiful, large sleeping
dog, stroking it with her feet. She appears to be single, as she is spending the
evening at home with just the dog, and sleeps alone. Her telephone rings in
the middle of night because Fuller has started a siege at the court building.
At the scene, they fit her with a microphone (she remembers the cop from a
custody case) and they send her in to find Fuller. They say to her, ‘Keep him
engaged, like he’s been hurt, blame the system, make him feel like you’re
on his side.’ As they send her in, they say, ‘You’ll be great, atta girl.’ There
is a decided lack of care for Laura as they seem to just want her to solve the
situation. She goes into the building and finds Fuller, chatting away to him
as she looks for his court files. They have a normal conversation with the
security guard that Fuller is holding hostage, teasing him and saying, ‘Big
Man is a member of the Samoan Royal Family.’ Fuller asks Laura to read
his court letters. He’s very angry and on the edge: her telephone rings and
he brusquely tells her to leave it. When she has finished his letters, Big Man
says to him, ‘You got screwed’, and Fuller thanks him for the acknowledge-
ment. He is clearly desperate, asking what he can do now. Laura says he
should get physical therapy, and be nice to his wife. He lets Big Man go,
saying that he should tell the police that, ‘If they try anything I’ll kill the
woman: she’s my lawyer – I’ve got reason to kill her.’ He gives instructions

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 FILM AND WOMEN’S STORIES 179

to Laura to walk ahead of him, and she does what he says although she keeps
trying to get him to turn himself in. He wants her to pretend he has the gun
on her, but in fact he has headed out of the back of the building, telling her
to wait before she goes out of the front. She does, and when she goes out
she says he is unarmed, but he has been picked up by the police around the
back of the building. Nobody pays any attention to her, and Fuller is driven
off in a police car.
The power of this episode lies in the lack of drama. There are no moments
of extreme horror or terrible cruelty, just a level of sadness and unremitting
harshness. For Laura, this is manifest in Fuller’s lack of respect for her pro-
fessional opinion and his reliance upon her as a confidante. He is happy to
threaten her, however, when looking for someone to blame. As far as the police
are concerned, she is a handy conduit to Fuller, and they cheer her on with
vacuous sexist support, but they seem have no care for her. And her lover is
unavailable because of ‘his situation’, which we guess is a marriage, and we
soon find out we have guessed correctly.
The next story begins with Gina Lewis (Michelle Williams) walking
through the forest. She is very slim, wearing smart running gear: she looks very
‘city’ and professional. She stops to look at a plot of land where she wants to
build a house. She listens to the peace and the beauty of running water. As she
heads back towards the family campsite, she hears her husband and daughter
laughing. Her husband is Laura’s lover. She notices him texting somebody, and
she asks what they were laughing about. Ryan starts showing a silly skit that he
was doing, and she looks away, unamused. This is an awkward scenario, with
Gina plainly distanced from her husband and daughter emotionally.
In the car, Gina asks her daughter Guthrie (Sara Rodier) if she brushed
her teeth. Guthrie says yes but Gina doesn’t believe her and Guthrie snaps,
‘Why do you bother asking me if you don’t believe me anyway?’ When it is just
the two of them, Ryan says to Guthrie, ‘Let’s be nice to your mum today, cut
her some slack.’ Guthrie says, ‘Why, is she sick or something?’ He says, ‘She
works really hard, she does a lot for us. Neither of us would do very well with-
out her.’ Guthrie says, ‘You’re building her a house, how much better can you
be?’ Gina’s daughter clearly has hostile feelings towards her and is much more
relaxed with her father, who is having an affair.
Gina asks Ryan to speak to the man whose sandstone she wants to buy,
saying that they trust him. Guthrie is angry that this is going to take longer
as she wants to go home, saying that Gina lied about how long they would be.
Ryan tries to cajole her, and Gina says, ‘I don’t know why you indulge her.’
Ryan answers, ‘Well you did say it wouldn’t take all day’ and Gina says, ‘You
really can’t help it, making me the bad guy, always.’ Gina does not seem to like
Guthrie very much, or respect Ryan, and her role in the family is that of the
bad guy breadwinner.

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 180 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

They go to speak to the local man, Albert (Rene Auberjonois) who has a
pile of sandstone on his property that Gina wants for her house. Gina tries to
be kind to Albert, asking if he needs anything, then she asks him if he wants
to sell the sandstone in the garden and he ignores her completely. He will talk
to Ryan, who says the same things to Albert that Gina says, and says he will give
them the sandstone. Gina says she wants to pay him for it, but he just doesn’t
engage with her. Albert looks at Gina with suspicion and a lack of connection.
His look seems to say, ‘What kind of woman are you?’ They have a moment
where they bond slightly when they hear the call of the quails. Albert says it
sounds like they are saying, ‘How are you?’, and Gina, who smiles and looks the
most relaxed she has so far, repeats the intonation of the call saying, ‘I’m just
fine.’ She looks happy, and Albert looks at her with a softened expression. This
leads him to say to Ryan, ‘Your wife works for you?’, to which Ryan laughs and
says, ‘Ha that’s funny no she’s the boss actually.’ Albert remains perplexed.
As the family pulls away in the car, Guthrie disgruntled and surly, Gina
criticises Ryan for not helping with the negotiations with Albert, while Ryan
says he was giving Albert ‘wriggle room’. We then see them loading up the
stone on a lorry. She waves at Albert, but he doesn’t wave back. This mel-
ancholy segment conveys Gina’s strained isolation within the family unit,
and also suggests that she is a strong-minded individual with plans that she
needs to fulfil. She craves the peace and beauty of this landscape, looking most
relaxed when listening to the sounds of nature. There is tension between the
needs of the woman who works hard and has her own dreams, and her ability to
also have fulfilling loving relationships within her family. She is critical of her
husband and daughter. The picture is of a life that is torn, uneasily, between
work and leisure, individuality and family.
The final story begins in stables, early in the morning, with the horses being
released, fed and cleaned out by someone dressed up against the bitter cold in
thick layers and boots. The working boots belong to the rancher (Lily Glad-
stone), who has a little dog companion. She makes her food, eats it and watches
television, all on her own, and then drives into town. At the wheel of her car,
her beautiful face is serene and open. We have not seen her speak to another
person yet. She turns into the car park of the college, and sits and waits in the
car. Then she goes into the building, and into a classroom where there are three
others, who look at her and each other in silent comment and judgement. The
rancher looks around and settles in to a desk.
The young teacher, Elizabeth Travis (Kristen Stewart) arrives, slightly flus-
tered, saying she has never taught a class before. She asks them all to introduce
each other, and a woman says, ‘We all know each other’, but of course they
don’t know the rancher, and she doesn’t know them. In fact, nobody ever asks
her name, so we don’t know it. They say that they don’t know anything about

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 FILM AND WOMEN’S STORIES 181

the law, and interrupt her with self-serving questions about their pensions and
employment rights. The class stops at nine o’clock, and the rancher speaks
to Elizabeth. She isn’t registered for the class, and admits she just followed
some people in. We haven’t seen her read any documents, she simply sits at her
desk and watches. Elizabeth tells her that she has to drive back to Livingstone
tonight, which is a long way – four hours. The rancher shows Elizabeth where
the diner is and they go together. Elizabeth eats, but the rancher doesn’t. She
stares at Elizabeth, bashful, entranced, as she hears how Elizabeth took this
job before she finished law school, but she is still having to do it even though
she now has a full-time job in Livingstone. Elizabeth asks if she made a fool of
herself in class, and the rancher says no, that it was interesting, and that she
never knew a student had any rights. She explains that she cares for the horses,
and says it’s just a winter job, but we can’t be sure that it is. She offers to show
Elizabeth the ranch and the horses, but Elizabeth has to get back. She stands
and watches Elizabeth drive away, with a slight smile creeping across her lips.
She then buys a microwaved burger from the garage and eats it with relief: so
she was either too self-conscious to eat in front of Elizabeth, or the food in the
diner was too expensive for her.
The next morning, the rancher follows the same routine with the horses
and the dog. She talks to the horses, they come to her, and she walks them
gently, feeding them and caring for them. The animals are confident, they
trust her and rely on her. The little dog chases her on the tractor. The sun
comes up, and the landscape and the animals look beautiful. The only sounds
we can hear are horses whinnying and the clip-clop of their hooves, the trac-
tor engine and the busy little dog barking. We see the rancher lying in her
bed looking at the plaster lines on the ceiling: another day, another routine.
We see the thick coats on these horses, and the furry dog amuses itself by
playing and diving on something. The week passes and class comes around
again. Elizabeth starts, and passes out handouts. The rancher beams at her,
and looks at the handout, but doesn’t read it. Again the other students ask
questions about themselves, their pay and their parking spaces. After the
class, they go to the diner again, and Elizabeth shows she is clearly keen to
not have to teach this class, asking the rancher if she knows anyone who could
teach it. The rancher says no, and that she ‘don’t know anyone at all’. She
begins to open up, and tells Elizabeth that she broke her wrist breaking in a
horse, and tells stories about growing up with her brothers. Elizabeth also
confides that she was afraid she would go to law school and end up selling
shoes. They seem fairly easy together, but their interest in each other does
not seem equivalent: Elizabeth is hungry, and tired, and wants to leave town,
but the rancher never eats, even when offered some of Elizabeth’s food, and
just watches Elizabeth lovingly (Figure 7.1).

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 182 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

Figure 7.1 The rancher (Lily Gladstone) lovingly looks at Elizabeth (Kristen Stewart), in
Certain Women (2016), directed by Kelly Reichardt.

A close-up shot of a horse being groomed shows again the denseness of

their coat and the repetitive, attentive work that the rancher does for these
animals. Then she cleans her teeth, straightens her hair parting and brushes
her hair into a ponytail. The next shot is of her riding her horse into town, at
a gentle, steady pace. The rancher seems to be in symbiosis with the horses, as
if they understand they are safe with each other. After class again, it becomes
clear that the rancher has brought the horse to give Elizabeth a ride to the
diner. Elizabeth is surprised, and says it’s been a while since she has been on a
horse, but the rancher tells her not to think about it. Elizabeth mounts too, and
they ride off to the diner, slowly at a steady pace, with the moonlight catching
the hair on all three of them. This has a dreamlike quality, and conveys the feel-
ing that the rancher is truly happy. She is showing what she can do, and sharing
this most precious skill and relationship with Elizabeth, without words.
At the diner, the rancher returns to their conversation from the week before,
showing she has been thinking about it, and asks Elizabeth why she was afraid
that she would end up selling shoes. Elizabeth says that it is the nicest job a girl
from her family would ever have had. But, she explains, she is now a lawyer,
and she goes through her working routine, which certainly sounds exacting.
Clearly the drive to teach this class is too much for her. She says to the rancher,
‘It’s nice of you to bring the horse. Will you take me back to my car?’ The
rancher’s face is smiling and peaceful as Elizabeth holds onto her on the horse.
Back at the car, Elizabeth says thanks, to the rancher and the horse, and the
rancher watches her drive away.

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 FILM AND WOMEN’S STORIES 183

Another morning routine with horses, hay, stables and dog. She goes to
the laundry. She gets through the week until class again only to find it is a
different teacher: a man, who announces he is recently divorced, and who
practises law in town. The rancher walks out and drives straight to Living-
stone. She finds some law offices, and sleeps in her truck. In the morning,
she asks a grumpy man if this is the right office, but it isn’t. The secretary
helps her track down Elizabeth, as Laura Wells walks in with her dog. The
rancher drives to Elizabeth’s office and goes up to her in the car park, saying
she drove over to find her, that she’s sorry she stopped taking the class as she
looked forward to it. Elizabeth says she asked for a replacement because the
drive was too much. The rancher says, ‘I just knew if I didn’t start driving
I wasn’t going to see you again. I didn’t want that.’ This is a declaration of her
love for Elizabeth and yet it elicits no reply at all. After a pause, the rancher
says, ‘OK – well I have to go feed now. Animals be wondering where I’m at.’
Elizabeth says nothing.
They part, and the rancher looks back at the building, sighting Elizabeth
briefly in the lobby, who does not look back. As she drives away, the rancher’s
eyes widen in tears. The everyday noises of driving the truck, and the lack
of soundtrack music, strip away any sentimentality or melodrama from this
moment and emphasise the inescapabilty of her pain. There is no comfort. As
she drives, her head starts to nod, and she falls asleep. Her foot slips off the
pedal and she drives off the road into a field, travels for a few metres and then
comes to a halt. Nothing dramatic happens; there is no crash, and no explosion.
The car just stops, and silence reigns.
The two women in this segment have shared an incomplete interlude, where
not everything has been spoken between them. The character of Elizabeth is
fairly straightforward: a young woman who is achieving more than anyone in
her family before her, working hard, over-committed, but assertive enough to
get herself out of this job situation that is too much for her. It is not clear,
however, whether she feels any attraction to the rancher, or even anything like
burgeoning friendship. It is not suggested that she stopped coming to class
because of the rancher. She made it clear from the first week that this was too
much for her and she wanted to stop it. However, she is clearly not pleased to
see the rancher in the car park of her offices, and gives no response at all to her
efforts. This is ambiguous, and consistent with the circumstances. The rancher
appears to have developed a crush on Elizabeth, and this also is unsurpris-
ing given that she has no human company at the ranch, let alone female com-
pany of her own age. She has been brought up with boys, and is skilled with
horses, and does not have many accoutrements of conventional femininity. Her
individuality is conveyed through her work, her placid, loving personality, and
her warm gesture in thinking of, and sharing, the horse ride. Elizabeth’s silent
rejection of her gentle overtures is painful and moving, especially because of

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the journey she has made to open out to her and our knowledge of her isolation
back at the ranch.
The film ends with a brief revisit to all three women. Laura visits Fuller in
prison, bringing him a choice of milkshakes, which is greatly appreciated. She
asks him how he is getting on in there, and he says it is noisy, lonely and he has
no privacy. Also, that his wife has left him and gone to live with another man
who was in prison when they met, on a farm with forty cats and says she has
never been so happy. He fails to understand the appeal, and says, ‘I’m a guy in
prison, what’s wrong with me?’ He’s upset that Laura did not write back to his
letter, and she says that she didn’t know what to say. He tells her, ‘You could
talk about anything, talk about your day, just so you put it in an envelope and
put it in the mail’, as mail is so precious in prison. Again, the kindness of the
visit and the milkshakes is not enough. Laura is expected to be devoted and
caring too, and to send letters to ex-clients in prison.
Gina’s house is being built, and the whole family is there to help as she is
cooking food on a barbecue. Her daughter doesn’t say thank you for the food
or the napkin, and Gina doesn’t take any notice. Ryan tells her to stop work-
ing, then asks her to get him a beer too, but then says he was just kidding.
She wanders off on her own to the car, lights a cigarette, has a sip of wine and
looks at her plot. Her demeanour is quietly excited as she confidently looks
to the future.
The last shots are of the stables, as the routine goes on today as every day,
clearing out the hay and caring for the horses. As the film ends, the dedica-
tion comes onto the screen, ‘FOR LUCY’, which was the name of Reichardt’s
beloved dog, who played ‘Lucy’ in her earlier film collaboration with Michelle
Williams, Wendy and Lucy (2008). Murdoch would certainly have approved of
this, as she loved dogs and wrote about many dog characters in her novels, who
she considered to be ‘virtuous dogs’ (Brans 1985: 43).
This film is an insight into the lives of four particular, ‘certain’, women,
which is both subtle and razor-sharp. Wendy Ide called it ‘an unassuming mas-
terpiece’, describing how the film conveys ‘an ache of longing or a small stab of
triumph’ (2017). It could be said that not much happens in the film, except the
particularities of everyday life. One of the things that marks the film out is the
fact that all the women are working: as an established lawyer, a businesswoman,
a junior lawyer, and a rancher. Michelle Orange describes how isolated the
women are, and also how the film breaks familiar moulds of women characters
by refusing archetype and insisting on the individual: ‘that these are work-
ing women, negotiating vast and often hostile territory, is at once incidental
and the film’s strongest undercurrent’ (Orange 2017: 178). Murdoch consid-
ers work to be an important part of facing life and being truthful. When asked
about the question of levels of sophistication in life, and how this might affect
goodness, Murdoch says that ‘a simple person can be either good or bad, and

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 FILM AND WOMEN’S STORIES 185

obviously a sophisticated person could be either good or bad’ (Brans 1985: 46).
For Murdoch,

goodness at every level of sophistication demands the ability to face life

and be truthful, and the ability to be honest and faithful and loving, and
the ability to give help. Facing life honestly is important at every level of
sophistication. (Ibid.: 46)

This addresses Lovibond’s allegation that Murdoch sentimentalises the vir-

tuous peasant: in fact she applies the same standards to all. And part of this
‘facing life honestly’ is good work: ‘I think getting hold of work, which is
good, which you want to do, which you think you can do well, and which
you feel does something for yourself and perhaps for other people is impor-
tant’ (ibid.: 47). Although Murdoch knows that many people are not able to
find work, and she considers this to be tragic, she sees work as including all
learning, whether it is of a language or a craft, so her main concern is with
education. Work, she considers, is good: ‘And if you can find a work which
connects you with the world and allows you to use your talents, I think this is
quite a large part of the good life’ (ibid.: 47).
Laura, Gina, Elizabeth and the rancher are all working women, and the
only one we do not see at work is Gina, who appears to be needing a return to
nature for some honesty and succour. The role of work in the other women’s
lives is as varied as they are: we see Laura being challenged because she can
no longer help Fuller to get money for his injury at work, but he wants her to
help him through friendship and communication. Elizabeth is keen to carve a
path for herself in the law, so there is pressure and pride in what she is doing.
For the rancher, her work is solitary in terms of human contact, and demand-
ing in terms of responsibility and care for the animals. Of all the women,
perhaps it is the rancher who falls into a spell of delusion, seeing Elizabeth
as something she is not, but has to come back to reality when her fantasy is
shattered. In this film, it is the person with the least sophisticated lifestyle
who has to learn to face reality, and the contrast between one week’s experi-
ence when they share the horse ride, and the next, makes the realisation all
the more painful.
These portrayals of individual women, who incidentally brush up against
each other (through Laura’s affair with Ryan, and the rancher going to Laura’s
office), are specific and particular, filled with the minutiae of their lives. The
fact that they overlap, and are unremarkable in some ways, means that this level
of detailed attention could be paid to any one woman, anywhere. This film just
happens to be about these four certain women. We are not involved in detailed
ways with their thoughts and feelings, rather we are shown what their lives are
like, and invited to pay attention to what they do, how they respond to others

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and where they might be going. Murdoch talks about the information we
gather to see what a person’s vision is like:

The data in questions are all ‘events’ and ‘activities’ which are either
overt (conversation, story-telling) or if introspectible are identifiable
and in principle exposable (private stories, images, inner monologue).
Now activities of this kind certainly constitute an important part of
what, in the ordinary sense, a person ‘is like’. When we apprehend and
assess other people we do not consider only their solutions to specifi-
able practical problems, we consider something more elusive which may
be called their total vision of life, as shown in their mode of speech or
silence, their choice of words, their assessment of others, their concep-
tion of their own lives, what they think attractive or praiseworthy, what
they think funny: in short the configurations of their thought which
show continually in their reactions and conversation. (VCM: 80–1)

We study the configurations of the thoughts of Laura, Gina, Elizabeth and

the rancher, looking for ‘data’ to see what they’re really like. We see how they
conduct themselves, solve problems, and what they say and do not say. We also
see how they treat and are treated by others. Through this intimate, attentive
film, we observe these individual women who are not dramatically changing,
but who are all, internally, doing moral work. The way in which Gina craves
and appreciates nature is a sign of her individual journey towards a more hon-
est life, albeit that her family relationships are damaged in several ways. The
rancher’s care for the animals is, in Murdochian terms, a sign of virtue, albeit
that it does not seem to be leading to happiness for her at the moment. That all
the women are on journeys is an important element of the film’s contempla-
tive strength, and the incompleteness makes it good art in Murdochian terms:
‘There are times when it is proper to stress, not the comprehensibility of the
world but its incomprehensibility’ (VCM: 90).
The stories of Laura and the siege, Gina and Albert, and Elizabeth and the
rancher, are not all clear in moral terms. They are ambiguous, allusive and per-
haps, in Murdoch’s words, ‘they incarnate a moral truth which is paradoxical,
infinitely suggestive and open to continual reinterpretation’ (VCM: 91). The
examples Murdoch gives of such stories are from the New Testament: ‘the
woman who broke the alabaster box of very precious ointment, or the parable
of the prodigal son’ (VCM: 91). Murdoch describes how the fact that these
stories are both concrete and ambiguous means they provide ‘sources of moral
inspiration which highly specific rules could not give’ (VCM: 91). The stories
in Certain Women critique the social conventions that slight the women due to
their gender, and their race, in the rancher’s case as a Native American (seen
mainly in the attitudes of the other students at the first class). They are stories

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 FILM AND WOMEN’S STORIES 187

about women, and they compel our attention through the intense significance
of the smallest moments of their individualities. The film does not offer com-
plete answers, but in this way it answers Murdoch’s call for a ‘fresh vision’:

There are . . . moments when situations are unclear and what is needed
is not a renewed attempt to specify the facts, but a fresh vision which
may be derived from a ‘story’ or from some sustaining concept which is
able to deal with what is obstinately obscure, and represents ‘a mode of
understanding’ of an alternative type. (VCM: 91)

Such concepts might be ‘hope’ and ‘love’ (VCM: 91) and Certain Women shows
us fresh visions of both of these, and invites us to respond in kind. We see each
woman as an individual moral agent, wrestling and deciding, and moving for-
wards. As such, the film accords with Murdoch’s thoughts on incompleteness
in novels, pictures or music: ‘This too is art, an intimation of our mortality and
our limitation, a reminder of contingency, presented to us as a source of energy
and understanding and joy’ (MGM: 87–8).

WITHIN A WORLD WE CAN SEE: THE UNKNOWN GIRL/

LA FILLE INCONNUE

The Unknown Girl is a more fully explored but equally nuanced depiction of a
stage in a woman’s journey. The film begins with a young doctor, Jenny Davin
(Adèle Haenel), listening to a middle-aged man’s lungs with her stethoscope.
She says ‘listen’ to a young man in a white coat, Julien (Olivier Bonnaud), her
student. She tests him on the differential diagnoses. She’s efficient, diligent
and knows her work. A buzzer rings and she admits a caller: her workplace sys-
tem is established, and she is in control. She confirms the diagnoses of bron-
chitis, and arranges an X-ray using the university hospital.
There is then an emergency situation. A child is having a seizure. She tells
Julien to get a cushion for the child, but Julien stands rooted to the spot, star-
ing at the child fitting on the floor. The boy’s mother wipes his mouth and,
Jenny having soothed him and eased his way through the seizure, he finally
responds to his name. Jenny is cross with Julien. She says to him sternly that
she wants him to learn one thing: to make a good diagnosis. She says, ‘If a
patient’s suffering moves you, you make a bad diagnosis; a good doctor has
to control his emotions.’ He says, shamefacedly, that he couldn’t help it. She
takes a call on her mobile phone. The surgery door buzzer goes, and Julien
gets up to answer it. She instructs him to ‘Leave it, we’ve already overrun by
an hour.’ She adds, ‘Someone who comes this late doesn’t care how tired we
are.’ Julien worries that it might be urgent, but she says that if it was they

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 188 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

would have rung twice. Then she tells him, ‘You mustn’t let patients tire you
out, or you won’t make a proper diagnosis.’ She is still angry with him and he
walks out. She follows him as he leaves, getting on his bicycle. She challenges
him to explain himself, but he just looks at her angrily.
We next see Jenny in a different office as she is introduced to a new team.
She is taking over from someone who is leaving this practice. She is welcomed
warmly, and shown her name on the door of her new office. Her mobile phone
goes, and she ignores it. She says she’s very happy to join the team, and they
all toast with a glass of champagne. Her phone goes again and she answers the
call from a patient who wants to see her. She goes to his home straight away.
The patient is a boy who has written a song to thank her and say goodbye. The
words are sweet and moving, thanking ‘Dr Jenny’. She says that it is a lovely
song, ‘bravo’, and that since she is here she will examine him. Although moved,
she is still professional. And then she says that she will still be his doctor if he
wants her to be. We have been introduced to Dr Jenny Davin in quite a detailed
way: we have seen her diligence and professionalism, and that she can be angry
and caring. We have also seen how highly she is regarded by her seniors, and
that she is on the cusp of a new stage in her career.
Next day, police detectives stop her outside her surgery, and tell her that
a woman was found dead nearby on a building site. The police ask to see the
footage from the surgery surveillance camera, in case it shows anything of the
woman. Julien has not shown up to work, and Jenny calls and leaves a message
apologising for last night. She takes her coat off; she is wearing a plain jumper
in the same style as the day before, she puts her hair in a ponytail, has a quick
cigarette and gets down to work. She sees a patient who drinks too much and
needs antidepressants, and a man with a burned leg, whose interpreter tells
her that he hasn’t been to hospital because they will ask for a passport. She is
firm and kind with these patients, not flinching from telling them what they
must do.
The police return, having watched the security video. The dead girl is the
person who rang the surgery buzzer. Jenny is understandably upset, and her
face registers shock and disbelief. The police are not critical, and say it is nor-
mal not to open that late. Jenny watches the video, and the girl’s face on the
doorstep is plain to see. She was found with no identification, no mobile phone,
nothing to identify her. Jenny asks how she died, and is told it was an open skull
fracture: she either fell on the concrete bank or someone pushed her. Jenny
asks if there were any signs of violence, but apparently the external autopsy did
not reveal any. Jenny watches the video again. The young black girl, her hair
in bunches, appears agitated. She rings the buzzer, knocks on the door, looks
around her and then runs on. She is clearly running away from someone. Jenny
says, ‘She’s young.’ The police ask what could have made her come to ring the
bell, and Jenny says maybe the light from the waiting room. They thought she

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 FILM AND WOMEN’S STORIES 189

Figure 7.2 Ange-Déborah Goulehi as ‘the unknown girl’, the girl who rang, in The Unknown
Girl/La Fille Inconnue (2016), directed by Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne.

might have come to the surgery before. Jenny suggests they see Dr Habran,
who she replaced three months ago. They get her to watch the video again, and
they pause and zoom in on the girl. This forces Jenny, and us, to see her more
clearly: a young woman, with furrowed brow and pleading posture, in a metal-
lic padded jacket and short skirt (Figure 7.2).
As Jenny is driving along in her car she takes a call on her mobile. It is good
results from a scan on a patient, revealing there is no brain tumour and no
epilepsy. Jenny smiles at the news, and calls the family to tell them. She goes to
the building site to see where the girl died. The crane operator describes where
he found her, with her head on a block of concrete. She looks down at the
precise spot. The cars on the expressway continue to speed past, the building
noise carries on, the water continues to flow down the river Meuse: nothing has
actually changed here since the girl died, except the precise lump of concrete
has been taken away. Jenny looks at the space where it was, and where the girl
lost her life.
Jenny goes to see Julien and tells him about the girl. She shows him a still
from the video footage, but he does not know her. Jenny says that when the bell
went she felt like him – she wanted to answer. She says, ‘I don’t know what hap-
pened. I stopped you from going just because you wanted to: to get the upper
hand.’ He says nothing. She is clearly shaken, and asks for some water, so he lets
her in to his room. Julien announces that he is moving out and giving up medi-
cine. Jenny apologises for judging his emotions, but he tells her it is not because
of what she said. She asks if she can call him, but he says he will not change his
mind. She tells Julien she is sure he could make a very good doctor.

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 190 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

Jenny goes to see her predecessor, Dr Habran (Yves Larec) who is in hos-
pital and tells him about the girl. Habran says, ‘You couldn’t have known but
you should have let her in.’ This is realistic but hard to hear. Habran is caring
and sincere. He says with certainty that the girl never came to his practice,
although there is a possibility she could have as a child. He says he has ‘at least
forty African families on my books’. Jenny asks if she can tell the police so they
can check their names and he says of course. He asks Jenny to put up a notice
on the board at the faculty of medicine to see if any young doctor would like
to take over his practice, before he has to close it. Jenny has made the decision
to move to the Kennedy Centre practice. A nurse comes in to give Dr Habran
his injection, and he smiles welcomingly. He is shown to be a kindly man, who
cares about his patients and remembers them, and has spent his life work-
ing in public healthcare, as opposed to the Kennedy Centre where Jenny has
her new job.
Jenny calls Inspector Mahmoud to tell him of her conversation with Dr
Habran and asks if the internal autopsy had been done on the girl’s body.
Although we do not hear his response, Jenny says ‘so she struggled’ and looks
saddened by the news. She asks if the inspector will tell her when she will be
buried. Jenny goes back to talk to Dr Habran. She tells him that the girl had
haemorrhagic bruising on both wrists, from the attacker, as they either stopped
her from escaping or threw her down the bank. There was no sign of inter-
course. Jenny says she cannot accept that the girl will be buried with no name.
She says, ‘No one will know it is her in the ground.’ She adds, ‘If I had opened
the door she would still be alive, like me.’ Dr Habran sighs, and says that this
is true, but then again, Jenny is not the one who killed her. Then he gets on
with work, using one arm to type, as if he has had a stroke. Jenny looks at him
and says, ‘I’m going to take over your practice.’ He looks like he is going to cry
at the news, and says, ‘That’s good for my practice, but patients on medical
insurance rates aren’t what you wanted.’5 Jenny says she has changed her mind.
Clearly her conscience has been bruised by this experience with the girl. The
suggestion is that she feels she should atone for her error by working for those
who are needier and of lower social standing.
In the next scene, any naïvety about her patients is dispelled by an aggres-
sive confrontation with a patient and her partner who want a fake medical
certificate. She says Jenny signed one for her brother, but Jenny says he was
sick. The woman calls her a bitch and the man picks up her stethoscope to
steal. She tells him to leave it and he yells in her face, twice, forcing her back
onto the couch, breathless. They leave, but this is an unpleasant encounter
with patients, demonstrating that not all state insurance patients are genu-
ine and grateful, or ‘virtuous’. She treats a man’s ulcerated foot in his home,
and talks to him about his difficulties getting to the meter to pay for his gas,
and his worries that he will be cut off. She says she will call social services,

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 FILM AND WOMEN’S STORIES 191

and he says he will show people the photo of the girl if she emails it to him.
He seems to live in one scruffy room, with a rundown kitchen. Her duffle
coat seems at home here, and on the grey expressway, the building site and the
banks of the river: it is grey and blue and seems to be her only coat. He offers
her a coffee and she agrees to make it, using instant coffee in a saucepan on
the stove. Her next house call is the depressed woman who drinks too much.
She is feeling better, and has baked waffles, which she offers to Jenny. Jenny
examines her son, Bryan (Louka Minnella) and shows him the photo of the
girl. He says he hasn’t seen her. She calls Inspector Mahmoud, saying there is
nothing to report from the photos, and he realises he forgot to tell her the girl
was buried this afternoon. She asks which cemetery and he has to go and get
the file. She goes back to get her thermometer from Bryan which she says she
forgot: but it is actually because his pulse went much faster once she’d shown
him the photo of the girl, making her think he knows something. He won’t
say anything. Jenny tries to make him think of how he would feel if it was his
mother, but he just says no.
Jenny moves bedding and food into the accommodation at the practice. She
has waffles and tea, and looks out over the cars zooming along the expressway
and the Meuse, thinking about the girl’s fate. She goes to the cemetery and
buys a plot for the girl by a tree. It costs 420 euros, and lasts for ten years, but
she hopes that her family will come forward and want her buried somewhere.
She’s brought a large plant with yellow flowers. Back at the surgery, Jenny sees
an elderly lady, with a cough, who is scared of dying alone without ‘her Snowy’,
a little dog. Bryan comes to the surgery with his school supervisor, saying he
has indigestion. She gives him some antacid, and asks him again about the girl.
He vomits in the bathroom, she holds him, and says it is because of stress. He
should tell her what he knows and he’ll feel better. She cares for him, and says
she won’t tell anyone, and he says, ‘Not my mum or dad?’ He then tells Jenny
that he saw the girl, performing fellatio on an old man in a camper van, on the
night she was found. He and his friend had hidden and watched. He tells her
where the van is, so she goes to find it. The owner knows her from when she
came out to see his mother, who died a week later. He thinks she is there to
buy the van, and when she explains he gets angry, and says he’s never seen the
girl. She says she is not accusing him, but he is defensive. She says if anyone
is guilty she herself is: she just wants the girl’s name so she can let her family
know what has happened. However, he throws her out, shouting at her, and
saying he doesn’t like her attitude.
Jenny then goes to the hospital to visit the van owner’s father, Mr Lambert
(Pierre Sumkay). His son has told him not to talk to her, and while she is speak-
ing to him he has a seizure. She helps him sit down, and diagnoses a small
coronary spasm. She gives him his medication, shuts the door and checks his
pulse. He has pain in his arm and chest, but she says it should soon pass as his

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 192 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

pulse is steady. He begins to speak. It was him in the van. He says that the girl
said nothing about herself, but that she spoke French. His son brings him a
prostitute, ‘that’s all’, but that he is scared in case Jenny discovers his illegal
garage. Lambert tells her that he goes to Liege, Rue St Marguerite, because it
is handier, as they don’t have to go in to the city. They wait ‘in a place where
there are phone calls’. Then the son comes into the room, and gets physically
violent, threatening to hit the father and then Jenny.
Jenny leaves, clearly determined to follow the leads that she is collecting.
She goes to the cybercafé, to make a phone call to Julien, and leaves a message
saying she wants to visit him. She shows the girl’s photo to the woman at the
desk, and to the men in the café, but there is no response from anyone. The
next morning, Bryan’s father (Jérémie Renier) calls at the surgery very early,
while Jenny is still asleep there. He tells her that Bryan was trying to excuse
himself but it was actually just him watching the girl and the old man, and
that he was embarrassed. He thanks her for her care, and she tries to show
him the photograph, but he says he saw her picture in the paper and doesn’t
know her.
Jenny goes to visit Julien, taking a thermos of coffee from the lady at the
house, who is Julien’s grandmother. She hands over the coffee, and Julien
pours her some. They talk about the girl, and about her possible murder. She
asks Julien why he is giving up, if it isn’t because of what she said. She tells him
he can still change his mind, and reminds him that he had said he had always
dreamt of being a doctor. Julien then explains what happened for him when the
boy had a seizure. He tells Jenny that when he saw the kid fitting on the floor,
he saw himself as a kid when his dad used to hit him:

All I got from him was beatings. I wanted to be a doctor to treat him
or treat myself I don’t know. Or to be a better doctor than ours who
thought I bruised myself playing. I’m glad you yelled. I can’t be a doctor.
I think of my dad all the time. I’m sick of him being in my head.

Jenny makes no reply.

We then see Jenny getting called back to below a patient’s window to catch
a panettone! It is a feature of Jenny’s home visits that patients offer her food
and drink, as if she is a guest in their home. As she is driving along, a car pulls
alongside her, and one of the men from the cybercafé gestures to her to stop,
and, when she doesn’t, pulls the car over in front of her. He tries to force her
to wind down her window, and another man smashes her car windscreen with
a crow bar, then he says she is rude for not lowering her window. He threatens
her, telling her to stop asking about the girl, unless she wants them ‘to send her
some sick guys’. They drive away, and Jenny stays in the car. Her eyelids flutter
and she breathes heavily. This threatening encounter occurred very close to her

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 FILM AND WOMEN’S STORIES 193

face. She is about to get out of her car but then sees Bryan on his bicycle and
she follows him, catches him up, and finds him hiding in some derelict build-
ings. She asks Bryan about the girl again, he pushes her into a pit and runs
away. She shouts at him to help her out. After a while, he goes back and slides
a fence panel down into the pit so she can climb out.
Back at the surgery, she is drying her hair, and making a simple dinner,
chopping a tomato. Julien telephones to say he has decided to go back to medi-
cine, and this makes her happy. Her doorbell rings, and it is Bryan’s parents.
They have come to say she must stop seeing Bryan about the girl. They say that
they understand her feeling guilty but she can’t make their son ill over it, and
they are changing doctor. She says that she understands. She has a cigarette
out of the window – looking over the river again where the girl died. Later
she receives a telephone call from Bryan’s father, who had wanted to change
doctors. She visits him, in her duffle coat with the hood up. She goes in by
entryphone. He’s on the floor in a lot of pain. She places a pillow under his leg,
and says it might be a slipped disc. He says he can tell it’s like the last time this
happened, and doesn’t want an ambulance. She suggests that he knew the girl.
He shouts at her and denies it.
The inspector calls her and tells her off for showing the photo to the men in
the cybercafé, who, he says, have now become less cooperative. She apologises
and asks about cause of death, and he says, ‘None of your business doctor. We
know our business.’ But he does say he now knows more about the girl: ‘Her
name is Serena Ndong, dob July 3 1995. Libreville, Gabon.’ When she arrives
back at the surgery, cars zooming behind her on the expressway, Bryan’s father
is there, saying he’d like to talk to her. He’s emotional. He says he was driv-
ing home, saw the girl on the expressway, saw she was a prostitute and did a
U-turn. Bryan and his friend saw him. They decided to say he was alone so his
friend wouldn’t be questioned. She queries his saying, ‘We decided?’, but he
aggressively says, ‘Let me speak! Think this is easy?’ He explains how Bryan
had run after him, and when the girl refused him and began to run, he got back
into his car and followed her. He continues,
I wouldn’t have done it if Bryan had called out or I’d seen him. When
she rang your bell I’d lost her behind the parked cars. Then she ran
across the road to catch a bus. She missed it. So I stopped. I offered
her a deal. She accepted, provided she didn’t get into my car. We were
on the towpath. And I wanted more. Don’t look at me! Turn around!
Turn around! For pity’s sake. She ran to get away from me, towards the
Meuse. I followed her. She ran across the building site and tripped over
something. She fell down the bank.

Jenny’s calm attentive stare is too much for Bryan’s father, who cannot bear her
to look at him (Figure 7.3).

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 194 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

Figure 7.3 Dr Jenny Davin’s (Adèle Haenel) steady attention yields results, in The Unknown
Girl/La Fille Inconnue (2016), directed by Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne.

Jenny challenges the story and says that the autopsy says she had been
grabbed by the wrists. He says, ‘I did but before she ran off. When she turned
me down, I tried to hold her back.’ Jenny pushes him on his story, and why he
did not go back to check on her when she fell. He says, unconvincingly, that he
thought she had fainted and that she would wake up. Then Jenny tells him, and
we hear for the first time, that the autopsy says she didn’t die from the impact,
but from blood loss while unconscious. The realisation of what this means
becomes clear to him, as he says, ‘You mean I let her die?’ He then grabs Jenny
and shouts at her, then apologises, sits down and says he cannot sleep because
the girl is in his head all the time. He says to Jenny that if she had opened her
door this would not have happened, and she says she knows it: she’s in Jenny’s
head all the time too. Jenny tells him he must tell the truth to the police, but he
fears losing his job, his wife, and going to prison.
The man says, ‘Why would I ruin my life?’ Jenny replies, ‘Because she’s ask-
ing us to. The girl.’ He says, ‘She doesn’t care, she’s dead.’ But, Jenny replies,
‘If she was dead she wouldn’t be in our heads.’ The man goes into the bathroom
and tries to hang himself from a pipe, but it collapses. She gets him upright, and
he says she can call the police: but she says he has to do that himself.
In the next scene, Jenny is treating a baby for a throat infection and hap-
pily can reassure the parents that it is nothing serious and can be treated with
linctus. The woman from the reception at the cybercafé comes in to the sur-
gery. She says to Jenny that before going to the police, she wanted to thank
her for coming to the cybercafé and showing her the photo of the girl, who
was her sister. The woman weeps as she tells Jenny that because she came to

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 FILM AND WOMEN’S STORIES 195

the café, she felt ashamed and made up her mind. She says, ‘I was afraid my
guy would put me back on the streets. He gave a fake passport so the police
wouldn’t know he made Félice work. She wasn’t eighteen yet.’ Her name was
Félice Koumba. Her sister says she will claim her now and take care of every-
thing. She thanks Jenny, as the surgery buzzer goes off again and Jenny admits
another patient. The sister turns to Jenny and says, ‘I didn’t help my sister just
because I was afraid of my guy. I was jealous of her too. She lived with us. My
guy was attracted to her. When she vanished, I felt better.’ Jenny can offer no
words of comfort in response to this, but asks if she may hug her, and they hug
each other.
Without time to process this visit, Jenny goes back into the waiting room,
and helps an elderly lady to negotiate the stairs, offering to take her bag. She
says, ‘May I?’ and takes her arm. They go around the corner of the stairs, and
the film ends. Over the closing credits, there is no music, but the sounds of cars
on the expressway zooming past the practice. The ending of the film confirms
that all carries on, and we are left to ponder the meaning of Félice’s life, and
her death.
Murdoch writes how ‘much, in some cases most, of our spiritual energy
and understanding comes from non-reciprocal relationships with what is
beyond and other’ (MGM: 478). As with Susanne and her vision of Lotte,
this idea is not just about comfort for us, in fact it can be far from that. As
Jenny says, Félice is in their heads because she is demanding that they do the
right thing. This is not to suggest that Félice is somewhere sending out com-
mands, but rather that the circumstances that led to her death are calling to
be faced as is the realisation that many people share responsibility. What is
called for, here, is humility. And Jenny learns this starkly through the direct
consequences of her arbitrarily imposing her authority on Julien on the night
of Félice’s death. As Murdoch writes,

Freedom, we find out, is not an inconsequential chucking of one’s

weight about, it is the disciplined overcoming of self. Humility is not a
peculiar habit of self-effacement, rather like having an inaudible voice,
it is selfless respect for reality and one of the most difficult and central
of all virtues. (SGC: 378)

What Jenny, Bryan’s father and Félice’s sister come to learn is that they have
to face up to their own failings. For Jenny, this entails finding the family;
for Bryan’s father, confessing that he pushed her and left her to die, and for
Félice’s sister that she put ‘her guy’ ahead of her younger sister. In fact, meet-
ing one’s duty can be enough in such circumstances, as Murdoch proposes,
‘Duty can appear when moral instinct and habit fail, when we lack any clarify-
ing mode of reflection, and seek for a rule felt as external’ (MGM: 302).

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 196 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

Jenny is a still, calm character, who makes a serious mistake by angrily

misusing her authority. She uses calm attentiveness to listen to others and
observe their reactions, in order to get to the bottom of what happened. The
stillness of Jenny’s personality, and her tenacity both with helping Julien’s
predicament and finding out the identity of the girl, display resilience and
compassion, as well as recognition of the need for humility. The film affec-
tively conveys the physical intimidation that she faces, and that this is gen-
dered: the patient who shouts at her, the van owner, the pimp from the café
and Bryan’s father are all threatening towards Jenny, confronting her with
masculine aggression and adding a layer of physicality to her daily life that
might be absent, or certainly differently experienced, if she were a man. This
is a realistic way of conveying Jenny’s gender as part of her story, without
mentioning it verbally. In this way, the specificity of Jenny’s experience is
depicted, within her professional context, by showing what the consequences
are for her of being a woman.

C L E A R R E A L I S T I C V I S I O N W I T H C O M PA S S I O N :
GIRLHOOD

In Girlhood, we share the journey of Marieme (Karidja Touré), a young black

girl living in the Parisian banlieue, with her mother and sisters, and an abu-
sive domineering brother. Marieme’s prospects are poor as she does not have
good enough grades to stay on at school or go to college. Her mother does
not seem to have much interest in her, or indeed to have any time in which to
take an interest, and her brother Djibril (Cyril Mendy) is a bully, including
physical, and possibly sexual, assault. Marieme and her younger sister Bébé
(Simina Soumaré) care for the youngest girl Mini (Chance N’Guessan). She
finds friendship, attention and inclusion, by joining a local girl gang. They
bully, intimidate and steal from people, but she feels good by being included
and finds a forum where she has some skills and knowledge which are valued.
She straightens her hair to look more like the others, and becomes more physi-
cally confident and mature.
It is in relation to this film that perhaps we can most clearly see how Mur-
doch’s thinking about personal, individual moral pilgrimage, and human sto-
ries, might be in tune with contemporary intersectional feminism. Murdoch is
concerned with the rights of minority groups, including those so defined by
race, class and gender, and the inclusion of those who are normally excluded
from philosophical, intellectual and moral conversations. She is also, most of
all, passionately committed to the vital importance of education, especially
for girls. Marieme, therefore, is someone who Murdoch wants to include, and
wants us to understand.

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 FILM AND WOMEN’S STORIES 197

The film begins with a game of American football, with the players poised,
padded, protected and battling. As Sue Harris describes, ‘They roar as they
play, deafening us with yelling that segues into jubilant laughter as the game
ends and the helmets come off ’ (Harris 2015: 73). The footballers are revealed
to be young women, who are thrilled and excited, ‘revelling in the joy of their
own strength’ (ibid.). As they walk back to their homes in various directions on
the estate, however, they come across groups of boys, and their voices quieten,
their heads go down and their body shapes droop, as they go their own ways.
As Harris describes, this is a sobering illustration of how joyous and freeing
female solidarity is quashed and contained by the gendered social structures
and relationships that restrict their lives. Emma Wilson describes the intersec-
tional foundations of the film, and that it is concerned with ‘different struggles
against oppression’ (Wilson 2017: 11). Marieme and her friends embody these
different struggles, and the film conveys these in bodily, affective ways. For
Wilson, the director Sciamma’s feminist politics attend to pathos and hurt:

Attention to singular bodies, their sensory loveliness, their strength, and

their susceptibility to damage, to the full gamut of bodily feelings, risks,
and violations, is a means of claiming visibility and value. It is a way
of doing politics through sensuous cinema, through a relay of feelings.
The hurt Sciamma shows, and the vulnerabilities she exposes, sharpen
responses, deepening feelings. (2017: 12)

Wilson describes the blue, turquoise and green colours of the film’s visual envi-
ronments, as well as a ‘nauseous yellow’, seeing this careful crafting of sensory
overload as ‘a commitment to a filmic synaesthesia’, which carries these intense
feelings of hurt, rapture and sensation (ibid.: 12). The physicality of the film
is a powerful means for conveying Marieme’s experiences of herself and her
world. The film captures the physical exhilaration of sport and the joy of
dance, as well as the challenge and fierceness of fighting, the pain of assault, the
vulnerability to attack and the sensual pleasure of sexual encounters. Through
this array of bodily feelings, Marieme’s multi-dimensional, intersectional life
is conjured and conveyed.
In a scene that is strikingly static, Marieme is interviewed by her teacher
regarding her options. The camera stays on Marieme’s face for the whole take,
as she realises that her choices are shrinking, and her emotions are becom-
ing stronger and more desperate (Figure 7.4). She is told she can only take
the vocational training, but she wants to go to college. Her teacher insists
her grades are not good enough. When Marieme says, ‘It’s not my fault’, the
teacher asks whether there is something she should know: but Marieme does
not reply. She is not able, or willing, to tell the teacher about her home circum-
stances, her responsibilities and the abuse she suffers.

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 198 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

Figure 7.4 Marieme (Karidja Touré) realises she cannot go to high school, in Girlhood (2014),
directed by Céline Sciamma.

As she leaves the meeting, she meets three members of a girl gang, Lady
(Assa Sylla), Adiatou (Lindsay Karamoh) and Fily (Mariétou Touré), and
decides to join them when she realises they are friendly with Ismael (Idrissa
Diabaté), the boy she likes. Marieme seems to grow more and more into liking
what the girls do, whether it is looking at clothes, bullying and harassing other
girls, dancing on the Metro, or getting into fights. The film does not endorse all
the gang’s activities. As So Mayer writes, ‘Marieme both enjoys and questions
the stakes in being one of the gang’ (2016: 137). For Mayer, Marieme is ‘one
of Sciamma’s watchful, thoughtful, powerful leads, defining herself through
interaction with a magnetic group of peers’ (ibid.). This watchfulness, con-
veyed by Touré’s restrained, intelligent performance, and the film’s patient,
contemplative style, enables us to keep a balanced view of the gang as offering
Marieme camaraderie, fun and strength, alongside its threatening, violent and
criminal aspects. As Wilson observes, ‘the gang is seen with a mix of adoration
and painful skepticism’ (2017: 15).
In a set-piece scene that conveys all that the girls stand for in Marieme’s
eyes, they dance together in a hotel room to Rihanna’s ‘Diamonds’. They have
saved up, stolen for and looked forward to this night, where they do each oth-
er’s hair and makeup, eat pizza, smoke dope and dance together, wearing stolen
clothes, complete with security tags, and creating a fleeting fantasy of glamour
and belonging. Lady gives Marieme a necklace saying, ‘Vic – as in Victory.’
Again this is an ambivalent scene. The girls have had to go to great lengths for
this freedom, which so many more privileged teenage girls can do in their or
their friends’ bedrooms. Such is their desire for this time together, however,
that they have made it happen, even if it means ignoring a phone call from her
brother which she knows will lead to trouble later. The lyrics to ‘Diamonds’
add further poignancy, conveying how much they love and admire each other,

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 FILM AND WOMEN’S STORIES 199

and how, in this place, now, they can fulfil their potential to each other: ‘You’re
a shooting star I see, a vision of ecstasy; Shine bright, tonight, you and I, we’re
beautiful, like diamonds in the sky.’ The palette of the dance sequence is blue
and silver, lighting the girls’ skin as if in a nightclub, with the camera moving
around them, joining in like a member of the group.6 Vic’s face shows her joy
and her sorrow, ‘her eyes full of pleasure and grief ’ (Wilson 2017: 16), as she
appraises the others dancing, before she joins in, moving gracefully and sexily,
loved by the others and loving them. This is a moving sequence of escapism
and fantasy, which has to end, and the girls return to their normal lives.
Angry at her overnight absence, Djibril, whisperingly, takes his sister in a
chokehold. It is a sinister, menacing assault, and the sadness of her home life
is evident again in her traumatised, desperate eyes. There is an arranged fight
between Lady and a member of another gang, and Lady comes off worse. The
other girl stands over her and says, ‘I wasted you, slut.’ Marieme tries to care
for her, but Lady just says, ‘Get off me.’ But then Ismael holds out his hand to
Marieme, and they go off together and kiss. Marieme begins to change more
rapidly now. She goes to where her mother is cleaning, because she has a ‘try
out’ for work there. She dresses in the cleaning clothes and helps, but she phys-
ically intimidates the cleaning boss to tell Asma (Binta Diop), her mother, that
she doesn’t need her for the summer after all. Marieme rejects her mother’s
work, and, through the physicality of the girl gang, she has learnt to use vio-
lence and intimidation as a means of getting by.
As she stands alone, surveying the city at night, inspirational electronic
music conveys the impression that Marieme is making plans. She thinks of the
fight and of Lady’s body on the ground. The girls meet in the park. Lady is
low, and Fily has brought her sisters, saying her mother ‘dumped’ then on her.
They want to do something different. They go to play in the park, with a golf
club and a model Eiffel tower, and they argue about how to play the ball in an
environment that looks too square and unadventurous for them. Lady looks
young and vulnerable; her hair is not straightened, it is short and scraped back
off her face. A group of boys taunt Lady and it turns out that her father cut off
her hair to shame her because of the fight. Other girls mock them in the café,
and they all tough talk each other. Then the previous ‘fourth one’ from the
gang, the girl who Marieme/Vic replaced, arrives in the café, and it emerges
that she left because she was pregnant.
They meet another gang for a fight, and this time it is not Lady fighting in
their name, it is Vic. She fights fiercely, punching and kicking, wins, and cuts
off her opponents’ bra with a knife she secreted from her home kitchen earlier.
The girls are full of joy and happiness and go splashing water over each other
in the fountain in the park. As she waves the scarlet bra like a trophy, Wilson
observes that she is ‘more than Victory here: she is Liberty leading the people,
brandishing red fabric’ (2017: 16). Lady arrives, and Vic says she did it for her:
Lady believes Vic did it for herself, but she still hugs her. Djibril is really happy

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 200 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

with her and, for the first time, plays a computer football game with her. He
offers her the team of Brazil, but Vic chooses France: perhaps indicating that
she has ambition but also wants to belong and achieve.
She is now calling herself Vic, and has become far more assertive. She has
become sexually empowered too. She orders Ismael to undress, and he does
what she says. She undresses too, and we infer they make love. We next see her
smiling face, as she is with a group of women dancing at La Défense: she and
Lady are dressed the same and do a double act. Vic is confident, at one with
the leader, and happy to share the spotlight. She sees her sister Bébé robbing
a girl with a gang, scolds her, hits her and tells her to go home. Bébé says back
to her, ‘You’re just like him.’ They both realise the pain this comment causes,
and what it means, and Vic says let’s go home, and they go together. She is
curt and non-committal with Lady as they leave, showing that Vic is no longer
keen to please her. Back at the flat the sisters hold hands and Vic strokes Bébé’s
hair. Her brother calls her, her little sister tries to help; but he beats up Vic for
‘doing it’ with Ismael, and calls her a slut. She goes out to a diner on her own,
where Abou (Djibril Gueye), a local drug dealer, approaches her because of the
wounds on her face, and flatters her for her fighting win. He recruits her to
work for him. Consequently, she moves out of the family flat. Her little sister
hugs her from behind as she leaves, and Vic’s face registers the pain she feels at
leaving Bébé and Mini in Djibril’s hands.
Vic is assertive and tough with the other girls who criticise her choice to
work for Abou. She sees selling drugs as a move up. ‘What else can I do?’ She
says she won’t work as a cleaner, or ‘get hassled as a slut’. They all cry and
hug and it turns out Lady is actually called Sophie. Vic has moved beyond the
leader of the gang and now sees her as she really is. We next see Vic in a short
red dress, high heels and a platinum blonde wig, completing a drugs drop-off
at a party. Aside from this glamorous costume, Vic appears to be dressing and
moving in a far more masculine way. She moves into a flat with some men
who know Abou, and who say to her, ‘Playing the guy doesn’t mean you’re
not a bitch.’ She’s with them all, laughing and joshing, as they lean on a wall
and casually torment the girlfriend of one of them. Alone with Ismael, as she
undresses, she reveals that she has been binding her breasts. Ismael is really
angry and asks her why, and says he’s had enough. She says, ‘There’s a hooker
next door’ if that is what he wants. She gets made up for another drugs job,
looks very glamorous and older than her years. She goes to Abou’s party, where
she dances sensuously with another girl. Abou tries to bully her into kissing
him. She hits him and he goes mad, and she leaves. In these scenes, Vic is
exaggerating and disguising her gender as she sees fit, adopting both feminin-
ity and masculinity as masquerades to ease certain situations, but not looking
comfortable as either.
She goes to see Ismael, and he apologises for what he said last time. He asks
her to stay with him, to marry him, saying, ‘You’re a decent girl if we marry.’

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 FILM AND WOMEN’S STORIES 201

But she doesn’t want ‘to be a “little” wife and have kids’. She asks if he really
means it, and he says he’d marry her tomorrow. This does make her happy and
she kisses him, but she says she can’t do that, because she doesn’t want that life.
She goes home to her old family flat and buzzes, but she cannot face going
in. She knows she cannot go back. She stands and cries, and this feels like
rock-bottom for Marieme: she has lost her name, her school identity, family
identity, boyfriend and friends, and has moved through adolescence, to girl
gang, to androgyny, to glamour girl, to this. Where does she go now? Her tears
and her slow, heavy movements suggest how depressed and lost she might be.
Wilson observes how ‘as she slips out of the frame, the film shows blurred,
tearful images of trees and towerblocks’ (2017: 18). But the film defies this
ending for Marieme, and she re-enters the frame, determined, crossing the
frame from right to left, heading off towards something, as the inspirational
electronic music replays, suggesting she is making a plan.
Marieme’s demeanour and striding pace suggest determination and posi-
tivity: in relation to what, we do not know. For Wilson, the film ‘is an ongo-
ing riposte to the teacher who shut her out of education’ (2007: 18), but that
teacher alone is not to blame for Marieme/Vic’s situation. The film does not
hold any one individual responsible, but rather shows, through criss-crossing,
matrix-filmmaking, how structures and conventions, realities and personali-
ties, construct and imprison us. Marieme can be understood as a Murdochian
individual through thinking about education and her family, as well as her race
and her gender, but most particularly as somebody on her way to learning
about herself, what matters to her and what she needs to do. She cannot seek
solace in family or in work, and wants more than a conventional marriage has
to offer. We leave her at the point where she breaks away, and we do not know
what she will do next. We have seen her watchfulness, her experimentation
with her gender and her physicality, and her arrival at decisions about others
and herself. We have seen Marieme’s conceptual framework change rapidly, as
she has moved through the various stages of the film. Marieme may be socially
and economically disadvantaged, but she could not be considered to fit a ‘virtu-
ous peasant’ archetype, as Altorf describes it. And, Marieme’s life is not unex-
amined. Girlhood shows the fallacy of conflating low socio-economic status
with the unexamined life. Marieme is examining her life, her conscience, her
friends and her family throughout the film, but has other factors that dictate
her choices and her decisions as well as this reflection. This is why her face
is so often a picture of the ‘mixed emotions’ that Murdoch knows a face can
show: ‘spirit and matter intensely fused’ (OTC: 98). For Marieme, the spirit is
expansive and ambitious, but the matter is circumscribed and oppressed.
Murdoch writes ‘since reality is incomplete, art must not be too much afraid
of incompleteness’ (AD: 295). Marieme’s story is incomplete, but this final
scene is what Murdoch describes when she writes of how individual conscious-
ness ‘is a place where the moral and the aesthetic join’ (MGM: 245). Marieme’s

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 202 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

consciousness is a site of moral challenge, not merely for her, but also for us, as
we have to accept the inconclusiveness of the ending and the limited hope that
it offers. We have been through the ambiguities of Marieme’s experiences with
joining and leaving the gang, and so have been led to a place where we view her
with realism, compassion and respect, whilst being aware that her next move is
limited. And with this, we have to be satisfied.
Looking at these films overall, and the women in them, we have a collection
of characters who are seeking various things. Whether it is to understand their
world, to escape from it, to find love within it, to atone for their wrongdoing,
or to find a way to live, these are human stories, about searching:

We can only move properly in a world that we can see, and what must be
sought for is vision. (MGM: 303)

We are all the time building up our own value world and exercising, or
failing to exercise, our sense of truth in the daily hourly minutely business
of apprehending, or failing to apprehend, what is real and distinguishing
it from illusion. (Ibid.: 304)

The specificity of each vision sought by Laura, Gina, the rancher, Jenny and
Marieme is an ongoing, ever present activity, revealed in the minutiae of their
daily lives. Cinema can show us this activity, like no other art form, and in this
way is truly a fresh vision of Murdochian moral philosophy.

NOTES

1. Gary Browning explains the significance of Murdoch’s incorporation of homosexuality

into her novels and how it performs a political role (2018: 127). Also, in her 1964 essay
‘The Moral Decision about Homosexuality’, she argues in favour of the liberalisation of
the law on homosexuality, which was not made legal in Britain until 1967.
2. Judith Buchanan’s edited collection, The Writer on Film (2013), explores various aspects of
the ways in which gender stereotypes play out in the depiction of, amongst others, female
writers and male poets.
3. See detailed discussion at p. 62.
4. The fact that Murdoch uses a capital ‘L’ for Liberalism suggests she is referring to the
individual of classical Liberalism. For a discussion of the various types of individual, see
MGM: 350–8.
5. This is a reference to the compulsory state-sponsored Belgian health insurance scheme.
6. I am grateful to Alice Pember for her insights into the camerawork in this scene and the
film’s politics as a whole, in her as yet unpublished PhD research.

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 CHAPTER 8

Metaphysics as a Guide to Movies

A philosophy cannot be a total system because the world is contingent

and infinitely various, and systematic philosophy is often made more
readable as well as more reasonable by the personal interests of the phi-
losopher, by the way in which his analyses and examples stray toward
particular matters which have amazed him or frightened him or pleased
him; so that his book may have turned out to be more personal and acci-
dental than he intended. (SRR: 38)

‘Truth’ is something we recognise in good art when we are led to a juster,

clearer, more detailed, more refined understanding. Good art ‘explains’
truth itself, by manifesting deep conceptual connections. Truth is clari-
fication, justice, compassion. This manifestation of internal relations is
an image of metaphysics. (MGM: 321)

There are worse ends than the pursuit of an unexacting happiness; it

is better to be cheered up by a silly magazine than by plans of revenge.
(It is also of course true that we often ought to be out helping our neigh-
bour rather than reading Proust or Tolstoy.) (MGM: 86)

R eading the first epigraph above is unnerving as I look back over the
previous chapters and see how many of the films I have discussed are
concerned with death and coping with grief and guilt. My inclusion of the
personal and accidental is indeed unintended, and yet I have been amazed,
frightened and pleased by the films I have written about. It is also the case
that some of the films could have featured in more than one chapter. For
example, The Unknown Girl/La fille inconnue could have been discussed
in light of existentialism, goodness or morality, but I chose to focus on Dr
Davin’s experience in light of Murdoch’s thinking about women. Similarly,
Dr Cemal could have featured in the chapter on morality and goodness, as

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 204 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

well as the existential hero. These films, like their protagonists and their
moral world views, are multi-dimensional and overflowing with detail that
make them almost inexhaustible resources for film philosophical enquiry.
This is both an indication that, and a reason why, my investigation of
Murdochian film philosophy cannot be a total system.
The first part of the same epigraph is important in relation to Murdoch,
since her work is not a total system, and this is because she is committed to the
reality of the contingent and infinitely various world in which we live. Her final
work of philosophy, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, which I have drawn on
throughout this book, has been described as a baggy monster, running hither
and thither, heading off in all directions. Stephen Mulhall’s analysis of the
book accords with my understanding that this approach to philosophical writ-
ing is entirely Murdoch’s intention. Mulhall considers that, to a reader, a first
encounter with MGM is likely to give the impression that it is ‘a bewilder-
ingly dense and impenetrable confluence of several seemingly distinct ways of
addressing its central concerns’ (Mulhall 1997: 219). As Mulhall explains, ‘To
put it more bluntly: the trouble with Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals is that
in general its sentences, its individual chapters and its overall structure appear
to be extremely disorganized’ (1997: 220). Mulhall argues, however, that this
appearance is deceptive, and that the form of the text is ‘a carefully calculated
achievement or work of its writing’, proposing:

The form of this text is internally related to its content, that to present
a discussion of these kinds of themes in any other kind of way would
amount to a betrayal of the moral and philosophical vision the text aims
to communicate, and that warnings to that effect are scattered liberally
throughout its pages. (1997: 220–1)

Murdoch refers to the difficulties of the book when she warns: ‘In the later
part of the book we should recall the warning in the Preface that we shall have
to travel over a wide field criss-cross in every direction’ (MGM: 277). Mulhall
sees that Murdoch is conveying to us, precisely through the style and form of
the book, that traditional linear philosophical argumentation and reasoning are
not suited to her conceptual thinking. Understanding this means letting go of
the temptation to plot out and systematise Murdoch’s philosophy, which does
make it a challenging read but also compels us to draw on other, more figura-
tive and contemplative elements of our imaginations. As Mulhall describes,

She offers orientation to her reader by means of an image or figure, the

idea of a field of force or tension; this not only suggests that the kind of
unity she detects in moral experience is highly provisional or limited,
but also indicates that images are part of the tissue of her thinking – not
an ornament or optional extra but the thing itself. (1997: 221–2)

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 METAPHYSICS AS A GUIDE TO MOVIES 205

For Murdoch, philosophical thinking is creative thinking, and this involves

more than language and words; images, pictures and metaphors are at the
heart of our imaginations and our contemplations. Mulhall writes that, for
Murdoch, ‘Concepts depend upon the human faculty of imagination just as
much as does imagery’ (ibid.: 231). The role of the artwork is both to take
us out of ourselves and then to challenge us to assess its limitations and its
possibilities:

When we are confronted by one particular ordering or patterning of our

moral and metaphysical concepts, we must respect both its unity and
the limitations of that unity. This means, on the one hand, attending to
the internal relations that hold it together as a system; and on the other,
attending to the phenomena and the concepts that this systematisation
leaves out. (Mulhall 1997: 232)

We can think of a film in this way. It presents an ordering of the world, with
physical and metaphysical concepts, images, of course, and a moral vision.
We experience this, and are taken to a particular realisation or assessment,
which we can then consider in light of the film world and in terms of our
world, our lives, and the lives of others. In this way, film is using pictures
and images in ways that penetrate our thinking and our own imaginaries,
just as they did for Plato. Murdoch refers to ‘Pictures, yes (such as Plato
used, declaring them to be pictures), but explained, used, related to human
life, surrounded by clear plain language’ (MGM: 267). As Mulhall argues,
‘any such pictures must always be regarded as limited or provisional wholes,
as likely to impose a false unity on the reality they claim to represent. Any
adequate analysis of them must question the neatness of the internal rela-
tions they crystallise, and unearth the concepts and the values they exclude’
(1997: 234). This enables us to see how film can be both a limited whole,
and ‘a hall of reflection’ (MGM: 296, 422), where ‘ideas and intuitions can
be unsystematically nurtured’ (MGM: 422). This lack of a system, and
lack of structure, throws emphasis on images, people and instants, and also
invites fictional worlds to have as much relevance and value as our real world
experiences to our moral progress as individuals. This viewpoint, aided by
Mulhall’s creative understanding of MGM and his acknowledgement of the
importance of images, enables us to see clearly the relevance of Murdoch’s
thinking to film philosophy. There are some tensions and difficulties, such
as when a certain film might be considered to be bad art, or poor philosophy
(what Murdoch might call ‘idea play’ (L&P: 19)). In the rest of this chapter,
I want to propose succinctly how Murdoch might become a significant voice
in film philosophy, and make some overarching observations about what this
book has shown, as well as suggest some ways to develop this relationship
with other films and areas of thinking.

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 206 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

MURDOCHIAN FILM PHILOSOPHY

What does the philosophy of Iris Murdoch specifically bring to the field of
film philosophy? I suggest there are at least three ways that Murdoch can
make a significant contribution, as I have shown in this volume. Firstly, as
a towering individual voice to rival those of ‘the usual suspects’: Carroll,
Cavell, Deleuze, Derrida et al. Murdoch’s body of work ranges from the
1950s to the 1990s, and as such can be positioned in relation to all of these
thinkers, on both sides of the Atlantic. Murdoch is a unique voice for film
philosophy: British, female, and working in the fields of philosophy most
relevant to film, namely morality and aesthetics. Also, she was constantly
grappling with philosophy in an interdisciplinary context; that is, how it is
different from literature and how it relates to art. This has some parallels
with the ‘film as philosophy’ debates, about how the disciplines connect, and
enables Murdoch’s voice to be more relevant than many. Secondly, and con-
nected to this, she is a voice that encompasses both analytic and continental
philosophical traditions, and indeed Eastern thought and Buddhist philoso-
phy, and so is able to bridge some of those divides and take thinking in a
fresh direction. Thirdly, her concept of attending to art as being practice,
or training, for attending to reality, and as encouraging the same faculty of
respectful, just discernment that is required to approach the Good, is con-
sonant with cinematic ethics. Murdoch’s proposals clarify the way in which
films can affect us emotionally, cognitively and physically, as she explains
how art, like nature, can pierce our self-centred veils and help us see beyond
ourselves with compassionate vision. I have shown how some of the more tra-
ditional modes of moral philosophical thinking can be brought into dialogue
with contemporary cinema with the twofold aim of showing the relevance of
Murdoch’s philosophical thinking, in tandem with showing how contempo-
rary cinema is replete with ethical challenges, moral reflexivity, and means
for us to ‘grow by looking’.
Along with these aspects, there are many other ways in which Murdoch’s
thought can enrich our thinking about film. Her metaphysics, including talk
of the Good, the soul and the spirit, provides a vocabulary and a frame-
work for examining those aspects of cinema that can be hard to account for
by formal analysis alone, and which we all know affect and move us to joy,
tears and contemplation. The idea that Altorf develops from Le Dœuff, of
Murdoch’s philosophical imaginary, identifies the way in which philoso-
phers have an array of images, myths, metaphors and stories that they use
to explain their thoughts, and that we too have a similar range of visual
examples and moments in our imaginations. As she says, ‘Art work and value
judgement are everywhere in self expression. Our evening story about the

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 METAPHYSICS AS A GUIDE TO MOVIES 207

events of our day is a little evaluative work of art’ (MGM: 94). These words
encapsulate how art and imagination constantly infiltrate our minds, and are
part of how we speak to others, tell stories, recount anything and create for
ourselves. As Murdoch says, ‘our perceptions, which so largely constitute
our experienced-being, are intensely individual and polymorphous. Seeing,
thinking and “interpreting” are mixed’ (MGM: 278). We are in a constant
state of adding to our inner visions, and our story-forming, and storytell-
ing, imaginaries. This solves the problem that Murdoch poses here: ‘The
problem about philosophy, and about life, is how to relate large impressive
illuminating general conceptions to the mundane (“messing about”) details
of ordinary personal private existence’ (MGM: 146). According to Murdoch,
‘This process of relating and fusing takes place largely instinctively when we
attend to a work of art’ (ibid.). Cinema is enfolded in the way that Murdoch
links philosophy, life, art and the everyday. But where precisely is the phi-
losophy going on?
Murdoch was resolute about her position that novels should not contain
philosophy. In response to the question she was asked most frequently, about
the difference between philosophy and literature, she expresses clearly that
she has ‘an absolute horror of putting theories or “philosophical ideas” as
such into [her] novels’ (L&P: 19). She says that she can only think of one
good philosophical novel, which is Sartre’s La Nausée (L&P: 20). However,
she also states repeatedly how the novels of the nineteenth century, by Tolstoy
in particular, are great works of art and how much we can learn from them;
and she clearly believes that film can be a major art too, and that we can hone
our moral thinking through our attention to art. So, the step to attending to
film as being Murdochian moral training is a consistent one. This book argues
that film can be more than part of that exercise, and that it can exist in a state
of philosophical thinking, as do we when we watch it, and travel on a journey
with it, and think about it afterwards. The filmic reality, as Rushton would
name it, enhances our enduring connections with the films we watch, as they
form part of our own moral imaginary, as images of dilemmas, decisions and
processes (2011: 2). Dr Cemal’s decision to lie about the autopsy, Dr Davin’s
decision to not let Julien answer the door, and Lisa’s decision to lie about the
red light, are more than isolated moments. They are the result of actions in
the film world or lead to consequences that the film examines. These actions
may be more extreme than some of us have encountered, or hopefully will
ever encounter, but they resemble everyday matters and they engender every-
day moral reflection. Importantly, through attending to these individuals, our
thought processes investigate, assess and probably judge them, but the expe-
rience of the film as a whole hopefully enables us to do so with realism and
compassion.

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 208 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

The question then is how this extends to our real lives, as we go about
everyday as constantly occupied moral beings. The question itself suggests that
there is a difference between how we relate to film lives and ‘real-world’ lives,
and I suggest that Murdoch enables us to elide this difference. By showing
how the change that happens when we experience the moral vision of cinema
happens in us, then that change has occurred no matter that the prompt, or
catalyst, is fictional and on-screen. We are doing the work: ‘the (daily, hourly,
minutely) attempted purification of consciousness [is] the central and funda-
mental “arena” of morality’ (MGM: 293). Like M, as we perform the moral
activity of travelling with the film, and assessing what we think of it, we are
changed, no matter that there is possibly no outward evidence. Seeing the kes-
trel out of the window takes us out of ourselves and pierces the veil of our self-
centred ego. Seeing the rancher’s face as she rides the horse to and from the
diner, with Elizabeth sitting closely behind her, compels us to consider her joy,
and the depth of the meaning of this encounter to her. I have shown through-
out the range of films and concepts in this book how Murdochian thought and
filmic imagery can work together to explain and enhance the meaning of such
moments.

We are constantly puzzled by ambiguous ‘perceptions’ or ‘seeings’, we

‘interpret’ our surroundings all the time, enjoying as it were a multiple
grasp of their texture and significance. We are doing it continuously
and this includes intense imaginative introspection, evaluation, focusing
upon an image, turning thoughts into things. Shall I do it? becomes a
picture of it done. (MGM: 279)

This conveys the way in which we can envisage ourselves or a state of affairs
as a way of thinking towards its completion, in the manner of creative visu-
alisation techniques. Murdoch’s notion of attending to art and images in our
lives, coupled with the richness and complexity of film, enables us to under-
stand how profoundly insightful and expansive cinema works to affect us at
the time and beyond the end of the film. And Murdochian film philosophy
is not limited to the films and concepts in this book, as I will now begin to
demonstrate.

G O O D A RT I N G E N R E C I N E M A

The selection of films in this book are from international cinemas, and vary
from mainstream fare (Jackie, Blue Jasmine) to festival circuit favourites
(Stories We Tell, Compliance) and independent or arthouse cinema (Under

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 METAPHYSICS AS A GUIDE TO MOVIES 209

the Skin, Graduation). Murdoch’s philosophical imaginary could certainly

take in more conventional genre film, however, and productive encounters
could be staged between Murdoch’s thinking and romance, war, horror,
comedy and science fiction. Keeping in mind the need Murdoch stressed for
good art to not console, films that are reworking genres, or updating them
to investigate or reflect contemporary concerns, could readily be in dialogue
with Murdoch’s thinking. For example, Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2014),
is a conventionally set-up film (based on a ‘mad scientist in his castle’ sce-
nario), but challenges us to consider the possibility of artificial intelligence
and the basis on which we form relationships. Through the intermingling of
familiar relations with other humans, and ground-breaking confrontations
with artificial beings, achieved through special effects as well as story and
character, this film is able to lead us perplexingly through a philosophical
minefield of ethical and psychological questions. Murdoch’s thinking might
lead us to consider what makes a life human and how the delusions of the
protagonist, Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), about the humanity of Ava (Alicia
Vikander), ask questions about our perception of others and perhaps what
makes us fall in love.
The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014) is a visually stunning and atmospheric
film, resembling German Expressionist films such as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari
(Robert Wiene, 1920) but set in contemporary Adelaide, and centred around a
child’s sinister story book. Amelia (Essie Davis) wrestles with her grief for her
husband and managing her challenging son, while the idiosyncratic little boy
in turn has to manage his grief-stricken mother. Through the invocation of a
terrifying creature arising out of the mysterious book, the film creates a vision
of overwhelming and damaging grief, and invents a metaphor for coming to
terms with powerful, dangerous, but ultimately controllable bereavement. The
film ends with Amelia in charge of the Babadook, but it still lives in her cellar:
they learn to live with him, rather than conquer him or make him go away. This
figuration of learning to live with the omnipresence of grief, and the idea that it
can be reduced but will persist, is a powerful way to imagine and picture grief
in our own lives that perhaps resonates with our experience. ‘These visual cases
also have a metaphorical force. We instinctively dodge in and out of metaphor
all the time, and in this sense too are fed or damaged spiritually by what we
attend to’ (MGM: 301).
In relation to love, Murdoch recognises that ‘Eros may be wilful, but he
is also said to be ingenious, and there are very many ways in which love
between persons can exist and endure’ (MGM: 346). This is something that
is explored in less conventional depictions of marriage, such as Certified Copy
(Abbas Kiarostami, 2010). This film explores the painful differences between
husband and wife as they assess their relationship in terms of their different

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 210 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

needs. Taking art and authenticity as a central concept about which they
disagree, the film works around this concept to highlight the couple’s dif-
ferences in relation to companionship, romance and duty, and suggests that
while she (Juliette Binoche) encounters and remembers life through images
and the visual, he (William Shimell) is immersed in language and sound.
Their differences, and their inability to really see each other, cause funda-
mental dysfunction between them as a couple.
Films about love, of course, need not be about romantic love, as I explored
in Chapter 5. Love between parents and children, friends, and within fami-
lies are all spheres where ‘really looking’ might improve relations. In Still
Alice (Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, 2014), we are shown the
devastating loss of cognitive ability for linguistics professor Alice (Juli-
anne Moore) due to early onset dementia. The film explores the progress
of Alice’s illness within the context of her family. Her husband is initially
supportive but struggles to cope; one daughter is prickly and selfish about
it, but another daughter is interested and unafraid to be with her mother as
her faculties lessen. Murdoch’s examples of the love of the family, M for D,
and the woman who has to juggle family needs, resonate with this type of
supportive love between women in a family. The film depicts strong, lov-
ing devotion and explores the basis of the connection between mother and
daughter, and the changes both women have to go through for the relation-
ship to strengthen.
I have taken concepts and elements from Murdoch’s work and discussed
them in relation to film in order to open out the possibilities for connections.
There are many more fruitful possibilities, not least in light of her non-theo-
logical metaphysics, and her political philosophy. In Gary Browning’s book
Why Iris Murdoch Matters (2018), he demonstrates her contemporary rele-
vance and the breadth of her thinking, explaining how, ‘Murdoch strikes a
subtle balance between the styles and objects of thinking to which she attends.
She does not dismantle the borders, but takes them to be open and mutually
accessible’ (ibid.: 2). Browning proposes that, in this post-metaphysical age,
Murdoch’s metaphysics ‘does not shirk the dissonance and fragmentation of
late modernity but maintains a continuing commitment to orient personal and
moral development by attending to unifying notions of truth and goodness
that are evidenced within lived experience’ (ibid.: 7). So, religion can be val-
ued ‘for its orienting capacity to value experience as a whole rather than for its
supernatural claims’ (ibid.). Browning has examined the as yet unpublished
Heidegger manuscript that is held in the Iris Murdoch archives at Kings-
ton University.1 In it, Murdoch uses the fabulous phrase, ‘In philosophy, we
go where the honey is’ (Heidegger ms: 69; Browning 2018: 44). Browning
discusses this briefly in light of Murdoch’s use of Plato and Heidegger in

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 METAPHYSICS AS A GUIDE TO MOVIES 211

Figure 8.1 Iris Murdoch refers to film in an annotation on a page of her copy of Gilbert Ryle’s
The Life of the Mind. Photograph is author’s own. From the Iris Murdoch Collections in
Kingston University Archive. Copyright Kingston University.

the discussion of her own commitment to modernity and metaphysics, and

this is also an apt description of what I have done with this book, in relation
to Murdoch and cinema. I have looked for the ideas, passages and concepts
that resonate with film, and used these to develop an approach that can be
considered to be Murdochian film philosophy. I sensed honey in Murdoch’s
philosophy for enlarging our thinking about film, and I have discovered this
to be the case. Other material that might supplement the published works I
have looked at in this book include annotations to the books from Murdoch’s
Oxford libraries. These range from Murdoch’s annotations or reactions in the
margins, to detailed notes which can be found in the pages at the beginnings
and ends of her books (Figure 8.1).
There are notebooks, including the notes taken at the Sartre lecture.2
There is her extensive correspondence with a variety of individuals, including
Philippa Foot, Brigid Brophy, Raymond Queneau and Elias Canetti. These
letters have been collected into an anthology by Avril Horner and Anne Rowe,
called Living on Paper (2015), which reveals insights into Murdoch’s intellec-
tual and personal relationships and perspectives on life. And, of course, there
are her twenty-six novels, which are so frequently interpreted as putting her
thinking about the world into action, through the individuals and particulars
that she writes about. All of this material, as well as further study of the philo-
sophical works that I have drawn upon in this book, offer a life’s work which
has potential for original and illuminating connections with film and the visual
arts. There are two important areas where Murdoch’s work can undoubtedly

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 212 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

have a significant influence and which I do not have space to investigate fully
in this book. The first is theology, and the second politics. I will consider both
of these briefly in turn.

THEOLOGY

We must stop thinking of ‘God’ as the name of a super-person, and

indeed as a name at all. Can we then be saved by a mystical Christ who
is the Buddha of the west? (MGM: 137)

For someone who did not believe in God, Murdoch wrote a lot about Christi-
anity and religion. She was also very interested in Buddhism, and considered
a combination of the two to be the ideal spiritual state. Murdoch considers
herself to be ‘a neo-Christian or Buddhist Christian or Christian fellow travel-
ler’ (MGM: 419). As discussed in Chapter 5, Murdoch considered religious
contemplation and meditation to be akin to the type of Weilian attention that
she was interested in. Also, she was tolerant of religious devotion, even envying
those who believe in Christ, but was certain that she could not. She considers
that addressing God is a means of consoling oneself, but does not criticise those
who have faith and who pray: ‘who can say, when a man prays, whether this is
“mere superstition” or “something casual” or “the real thing”?’ (MGM: 416).
For Murdoch herself, however, her position on religion is clear and consistent.
In 1977 she said:

I am not myself a Christian believer, but I was brought up as a Christian

and I feel close to Christianity. I believe in religion, in some sort of non-
doctrinal sense – in a Buddhist sense. I think people miss this particular
steadying influence, this spiritual home and spiritual centre. (Dooley
2003: 62)

This is a major difference between Murdoch and Weil, who was profoundly
committed to religious thought. Murdoch approved of the moral character-
istics of Jesus, and wanted to retain him, but denied the metaphysical asser-
tion that he was both fully human and fully divine: ‘Can the figure of Christ
remain religiously significant without the old god-man mythology somehow
understood? Can Christ, soon enough, become like Buddha, both real and
mystical, but no longer the divine all-in-one man of traditional Christianity?’
(MGM: 136). Murdoch describes God as a ‘super-art-object’ (MGM: 81),
meaning that ‘he’ has been created by centuries of Christian art and this

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 METAPHYSICS AS A GUIDE TO MOVIES 213

has formed our cultural imaginary. As she argues, ‘There has always been a
dangerous relationship between art and religion, and, where theology hesi-
tates, art will eagerly try to explain’ (F&S: 447).
Murdoch mentions the ‘Motherhood of God’ as discussed by Julian of
Norwich (MGM: 84),3 and the way in which ‘the image-play of theology . . .
has always been an important part of religion but cannot be all of it’ (ibid.).
She opens up a path for feminist theology, calling on us to separate iconogra-
phy and imagery from the spiritual contemplation that religious thinking can
be, and this has significant potential for thinking about cinema. Firstly, when
thinking about the terms that Murdoch uses such as ‘virtue’ and ‘the Good’,
we are challenged to come up with new images and objects for these concepts.
We might look for these notions in action rather than in abstract, or tied to
stories from traditional religious texts. Also, cinema can rework these stories
so as to provide fresh visions that can change how such concepts are conceived
of in culture. For example, Mary Magdalene (Garth Davis, 2018) offers a fresh
vision of the eponymous protagonist. There is none of the sexuality or nudity
associated with the Mary Magdalene depicted by Christian art of the last two
thousand years, which has directly fed into previous cinematic depictions,
such as those by Barbara Hershey or Monica Bellucci.4 This Mary (Rooney
Mara) is an intelligent, unconventional and spiritual young woman who fol-
lows Jesus and has a unique understanding of him and his message. When
Murdoch describes ‘the woman who broke the alabaster box of very precious
ointment’ (VCM: 91), she is touching upon one of the New Testament stories
that is often, wrongly, taken to refer to Mary Magdalene (Bourgeault 2010:
17–23). By not calling this woman Mary Magdalene, she is, knowingly or not,
freeing Magdalene of the associations of crawling at Jesus’s feet and anoint-
ing them with expensive nard, and is thereby opening up a space for Mary to
be identified anew. Mary in the 2018 film understands Jesus to be preaching
about a possible state of mind which is available to all, in this life, grounded in
forgiveness. The disciples, however, are waiting for him to rise up and bring a
new world, or a next world, that will answer their questions and win their bat-
tles. In this way, Mary Magdalene is a figure who preaches a spirituality that
could be conceived of as Murdochian: it entails care, attention and forgive-
ness, and is spirituality understood as intellectual and practical (Figure 8.2).
For Murdoch, we picture concepts, because ‘picturing is so natural’
(MGM: 36): ‘In thinking about abstract matters one instinctively produces
images, such as duty being like a laser beam coming from above; an image
which may itself elicit figurative rejoinders’ (ibid.). Murdoch considers that
philosophers are artists, ‘and metaphysical ideas are aesthetic’ (ibid.: 37). It is
clear that cinematic images can be Murdochian metaphysical ideas, and that
the duty is on us to explore them.

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 214 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

Figure 8.2 Mary Magdalene (Rooney Mara) as a spiritual leader, in Mary Magdalene (2018),
directed by Garth Davis.

POLITICS

We argue about how far religion and art should play political or ‘social’
roles. Should the church be enlivening personal spirituality or defend-
ing the poor? Should the artist create his own best work of art or advo-
cate a better society? (MGM: 350)

The role of the church is relevant in contemporary Britain, in its involvement

with food banks, the homeless and overseas charities in today’s society. The
question of ‘personal spirituality’ is less a part of public discourse in relation
to the church, but concepts such as mindfulness and meditation are prevailing
discourses in popular psychology. Perhaps Murdoch’s call for compassionate
vision is something that could be considered as a way of lifting us out of our
self-centredness and towards considering others. In this way, Murdoch can be
seen to be calling for imagination in politics: ‘to imagine the consequences of
policies, to picture what it is like for people to be in certain situations (unem-
ployed, persecuted, very poor), to relate axiomatic moral ideas (for instance
about rights) to pragmatic and utilitarian considerations’ (MGM: 322). This is
perhaps a way of thinking about the individual and the collective, the personal
and the structural. Murdoch writes with vigour about the effects of television
on our imaginations and consciences:

We should also reflect upon the deep effects of television, for instance
upon the fact that so many citizens go to bed at night with their
heads full of overwhelmingly clear and powerful images of horror

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 METAPHYSICS AS A GUIDE TO MOVIES 215

and violence. Television can show us beautiful and fascinating things,

distant landscapes and works of art, detailed pictures of animals and
revealing close-ups of human faces, but it can also commit terrible
crimes against the visible world. I am inclined to think that it blunts
our general sense of colour and light and reduces rather than enhances
our ability to see the detail of our surroundings. It is an instance,
and indeed an image or parable, of how the packaged services of our
increasingly perfected technology reduce our ability to think and
imagine for ourselves. (MGM: 329–30)

Murdoch wrote this in the early 1990s: one can only imagine what she
would make of the advances in technology since then, and our reliance
upon smartphones and apps to tell us what to think and imagine. Her use
of words such as ‘colour’, ‘light’ and ‘detail’ again calls attention to the
need she perceives for us to really look; to study, and to attend. And she
sees this as a moral matter, just as for her television ‘commit[s] terrible
crimes against the visible world’. This seems to be a matter of mediation
and selection; the problem being that we are shown snippets, or ‘structured
glimpses’, without the opportunity to make our own selection of both con-
tent and focus.
In language that is fitting for our time, especially in relation to certain indi-
viduals in international politics, Murdoch speaks about the fact that certain
people rise to power, and that we elect them.

A dominating figure is that of the demonic individual. Perhaps the

individual liberated or created by capitalism had a golden age of inte-
gral being and virtuous idealism, reflected in the great art forms of the
nineteenth century, but now, it is said, has disintegrated and become
unconfident and even corrupt. We see (it may be argued) his demonic
descendants in ruthless tyrannical regimes and persons, and, in west-
ern democracies, in egoistic materialistic ‘go-getters’, in pursuit of
money, fame, prestige and sex, who are now our most conspicuous
citizens . . . Tyrants’ subjects may even admire and value the egoistic
anti-moralism of their leaders. That someone very grand exists who
can satisfy every caprice may, while causing scandal, produce a warm
feeling, and patriotism too can feed on such images. Neither public
cruelty nor riotous private living need make a tyrant unpopular in his
lifetime or later. Our best-known, best-loved, monarch is Henry the
Eighth. (MGM: 352–3)

Murdoch describes the way in which swathes of a populace can be intoxicated

by the excesses of a demonic individual and their ‘anti-moralism’. This rings

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depressingly true for our current times, and Murdoch expands with great
insight into the functioning of states.

Of course the satisfaction felt at the overthrow of tyrants is a stronger,

and better, emotion! That exceptional (for whatever reason) people are
often valued and not hated for living lives of exemplary luxury and self-
ishness is perhaps a general feature of human societies, such people may
be felt to live vicarious lives for the rest of us. In this way film stars, pop
stars, television personalities, tycoons, and so on may be expected to live
with obvious luxury and even disorder. To take a different though similar
example, a majority of people in Britain value the Royal Family, and even
like to see them dressed up and riding in their coaches. They are not
envied. Here the advantages of a hereditary monarchy and head of state
are evident. We (now) expect them to observe traditional moral standards
but the odd one who is out of line does the institution no harm, rather
the contrary. They play a popular symbolic role, and a beneficent political
role in so far as by being ‘mock tyrants’ they are a protection against real
tyrants. (MGM: 353)

At a time when the royal family in Britain is enjoying a resurgence in global

popularity, it is pertinent to consider their contemporary appeal. The concept
of a ‘mock tyrant’ is perhaps insightful. Unelected, the family’s roles and func-
tions are social, ceremonial and charitable, and, although non-political, their
role in society is interesting to compare to that of politicians. Given the tra-
dition of heritage films featuring British royalty (Mrs Brown, Shakespeare in
Love, The King’s Speech) and the international popularity of royal family sagas
on television (Wolf Hall, The Crown), it is an area that merits attention in the
way it has peaks and troughs of popularity, and also how certain members of
the royal family are discussed and reported, given the increasing number of
documentaries and biopics that are produced.5
The concept of the moral conduct of those in office, whether royal or
political, is relevant here. Murdoch believes that,

The machinery of the decent state is continually serviced by an atmo-

sphere of moral good will and high ideals which is essential to its survival.
This thoroughly mixed-up continually changing atmosphere is kept
fresh by innumerable lively moralists, not least artists (especially writers)
and their clients. (MGM: 358)

This language conveys Murdoch’s conception of citizens as political beings,

of which she considered herself to be one. As Browning argues, ‘She

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 METAPHYSICS AS A GUIDE TO MOVIES 217

does not disqualify herself entirely from politics, and as a citizen she
takes politics seriously and it informs her philosophical and literary work’
(2018: 117).
Murdoch’s private political allegiances are well covered in other texts,
notably Peter Conradi’s authorised biography (2001), but, as with her
feminism, it is important to remember the social and political times in
which she lived. A member of the Communist Party at Oxford, she gave
up membership after the war, when she worked for the Treasury. She
changed in this post-war period, when, as Browning explains, ‘morals and
politics become mechanisms promoting and responding to burgeoning
individualism’ (2018: 122). In MGM, she reflects, ‘We should recall how
much popular existentialism meant to the post-1945 generation; and also
ask why, as a popular philosophy, it has now waned’ (MGM: 354). For
Murdoch, real lived experience is inextricably linked with politics and
morals. She is subversive in her support of civil disobedience, and philo-
sophically questions the mechanics of the state:

When is a bad law a law, is it always a law? The idea of ‘natural law’
belongs especially in this discussion. (MGM: 356)

(Is it all right to cheat the Income Tax authorities? If one can cheat them
is it not their fault?) (MGM: 357)

She also does write about social change and the realistic ways in which this can
come about:

A high moral as well as intellectual level of political debate is to be hoped

for, and lip service at least is paid to its importance. Lip service is not to
be despised. The triumph of good causes partly depends on people, at
some point, becoming ashamed of saying certain things. (For instance of
making anti-Semitic remarks or talking about women in certain ways.)
(MGM: 358)

Murdoch is concerned with the relationship between axioms and private

thought, such as when she notes that, ‘Arguments about capital punish-
ment involve a more evident appeal to axiom, when people argue (as I
would) that the state should never (legally, in cold blood, etc.) take life’
(MGM: 359). She is here expressing political and moral opinions, with
an admittedly limited engagement to the actual workings of political sys-
tems or collective action. She is interested in the idea of ‘natural law’ and
human rights, as a ‘general ethical viewpoint which is separate both from

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 218 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

politicised social theory and from traditional personal morals’ (MGM:

361). She includes in this

the promotion of women’s rights, black rights, animal rights, the rights
of the planet (ecology), one could even add liberation theology where
the identification of Christ with the poor inspires a passion for justice
which is sui generis and not a subsection of either Marxism or dogmatic
Christianity. The flag of natural rights or natural law has often been that
of revolutionary change. (MGM: 361)

Murdoch approaches political issues from the perspective of moral philoso-

phy in MGM, and this opens up a range of creative, imaginative possibili-
ties for exploring and envisioning political ideas. She wants to examine the
welfare state, and does so with the question, ‘When does a nanny become a
tyrant?’ (MGM: 363). She challenges the connection between freedom and
happiness, always acutely aware of the threat of the totalitarian state who
would deny human variety ‘and the rights which the fact of variety carries’
(MGM: 363). Murdoch calls for resistance to totalitarian reasoning, and its
false reliance on scientific reasoning, and the despair and ignorance it leads
to. She recounts,

When I was in China I asked a question about ‘homosexuality’, a word

with which our otherwise excellent interpreter was unfamiliar. When
I explained its meaning in other terms, I was told that there was no such
thing in China. So if homosexuals do not exist they clearly cannot have
rights. (MGM: 364)

Murdoch’s concern for the rights of minority groups, and the infinite vari-
ety of human beings, makes her philosophical analysis of political thinking
a fertile ground for developing in relation to diverse identities and com-
munities. As Browning observes, the political dimension to her philosophy
and her novels has been overlooked. There is ‘honey’ in Murdoch’s ideas
about politics, however, perhaps particularly in the problems she poses, and
these are reflected in her philosophical critique of the relationship between
individual choice and the common good. Films that might be considered in
light of these questions of rights and law might be Selma (Ava du Vernay,
2014) which recounted Martin Luther King’s campaign to secure equal vot-
ing rights by way of the Selma march in 1965; or Milk (Gus Van Sant, 2008)
which told the story of Harvey Milk’s fight to secure political office as an
openly gay man in San Francisco in the 1970s. These films tell stories about
historical political campaigns within structures of oppression; but the way

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 METAPHYSICS AS A GUIDE TO MOVIES 219

in which individuals in the films are shown to us, in the maelstroms of their
decision making and prioritisation, enables us to attend to some of the philo-
sophical questions that their stories raise, as well as engendering affective
emotional engagement with the issues that concerned them. This might well
be a Murdochian way in to analysing this type of political cinema, which is
not documentary or straight biopic.
In the last filmic example in this book, I am turning to something perhaps
unexpected in this context. Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch, 2013) is a
vampire film that is not only beautiful to look at and listen to, with an exqui-
sitely detailed mise en scène and an atmospheric soundtrack, but also has con-
temporary geo-political resonances. It sets the lead characters, the vampires,
in philosophical, literary and aesthetic histories. It challenges the conception
of vampirism and juxtaposes this with modern Detroit and Tangiers, calling
into question how history will judge our modern age, what will endure and
what will disappear. Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton), have
spent the centuries of their lives rubbing shoulders with the great and the
innovative in the worlds of literature, art, music and science. Adam’s wall
is adorned with photographs of Oscar Wilde, Christopher Marlowe, Buster
Keaton and Joe Strummer. But, as Adam repeats, he has no heroes: it is the
vampires who are the creators. Adam gave his adagio to Schubert to pass off
as his own, just as vampire Christopher Marlowe’s (John Hurt) work was will-
ingly attributed to the ‘illiterate zombie philistine’ Shakespeare. Zombie is the
term these vampires use to describe humans, and the neat conceit here is that
the vampires would draw too much attention to themselves if they published
under their own names. They allow inferior zombies to pass off the work as
their own, so that the vampires might keep to their shadowy liminal lives and
stay undetected by society, under the radar. Their motivation is to ‘get the
work out there’.
Adam is depressed because of the zombies and their – our – treatment
of the world. Ruled by fear, dry of innovation and skill, Adam feels that
‘all the sand’s at the bottom of the hourglass’. For Eve, however, a self-pro-
fessed survivor, this self-obsession is ‘a waste of living’, when Adam could
be appreciating nature, nurturing kindness and friendships, ‘and dancing’.
These exchanges get to the heart of this peculiarly reassuring film. Adam
and Eve are cultured aesthetes, with a sense of bafflement and isolation that
makes it easy to identify with them whether as outsiders in a foreign city,
or physically vulnerable bodies. Eve samples the riches that each era has to
offer. Here is a vampire who relishes life and the living of it, from the rela-
tionships that endure with her to the contemporary updates on culture and
the long view on how the world works. For example, the film shows Detroit
to be like a wasteland, with closed factories and desolate streets. Detroit, she

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 220 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

says, will rise again because ‘it is a city that has water’. As Eve assembles her
travelling library she scans the volumes with her eyes and fingers, devouring
every image, character and letter, ‘seemingly reading them with her hands’
(Hastie 2014: 66). As she lowers the needle on the forty-five record of Char-
lie Feathers’s ‘Can’t Hardly Stand It’, the riffing chord changes sound like
the pinnacle of musical achievement. As Adam executes scales on his violin,
strums the strings on his 1905 Gibson or caresses the wooden bullet he has
commissioned for the suicide he toys with, his exquisite sensory and intel-
lectual acumen is enviably realised.
This playful fable aims to convey the need to embrace the cosmos in
all its beauty in order to endure. Eve observes that red-spotted fungi are
emerging at the wrong time of year and tells them that they are too early.
The idea that the world and what matters in it has a very long history and
an uncertain future is hardly original, but the notion that vampires have the
cultural high ground as a result of their longevity invites us to indulge our
pleasures and yet also to realise that they don’t have to worry about the little
matter of death.
What does this have to do with Iris Murdoch? Well, she believes in enjoying
life, whether it is a silly magazine, Proust, Tolstoy or a Danny Kaye movie. In
1962 she said:

The cinema upsets me terribly when it’s sad. Life is sad enough without
that too. Crying at music is a kind of pleasure, but in the cinema I just
get filled with a dangerous sort of self-pity. The only films I go to now
are Danny Kaye’. (Dooley 2003: 4)

As I noted in the introduction, Murdoch’s own cinema-going decreased

despite her admiration for its potential as a transformative art. She clearly
did still get pleasure from the Danny Kaye films, however, and the impulse
to indulge is not one that she would deny us. In Only Lovers Left Alive,
the lovers do not just love each other, but they love beautiful words, notes,
fabrics and textures. Their long view saddens Adam, but frees Eve, and the
film invites us to contemplate our place in relation to what matters: what
we can change, what we should worry about, and what beautiful things we
can enjoy. As Hastie observes, the film ‘offers a model for spending time,
even if it is one seemingly outside the time of everyday life’ (2014: 67). We
can all achieve what Eve recommends to Adam, however, when she observes
that his self-obsession is a waste of living, which, she says, could be spent on
‘surviving things, appreciating nature, nurturing kindness and friendship.
And dancing!’ (Figure 8.3).

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 METAPHYSICS AS A GUIDE TO MOVIES 221

Figure 8.3 Eve (Tilda Swinton) encourages Adam (Tom Hiddleston) to dance, in Only Lovers
Left Alive (2013), directed by Jim Jarmusch.

C O N C LU D I N G WO R D S

There is . . . something in the serious attempt to look compassion-

ately at human things which automatically suggests that ‘there is more
than this’ . . . [which] must remain a very tiny spark of insight, some-
thing with . . . a metaphysical position but not metaphysical form. But
it seems to me that the spark is real, and that great art is evidence
of its reality. Art indeed, so far from being a playful diversion of the
human race, is the place of its most fundamental insight, and the cen-
tre to which the more uncertain steps of metaphysics must constantly
return. (OGG: 359–60)

Thinking about film as Murdochian art shows it to be a place of fundamental

insight, but also one that can effect lasting change in us. This change happens
as a result of the images we see, and the characters and stories on-screen, but
also as a result of our sustained attention to the film and our contemplation
afterwards. Film’s renowned ability to ‘take us out of ourselves’ is given fresh
significance if seen in this light, as unselfing and material for moral change.
The concepts and language that Murdoch uses to discuss moral philosophy
and our own moral journeys provide a rich vocabulary for understanding how
we take films seriously. If we understand film as Murdochian moral thinking

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 222 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

in action, this enables us to study, think and reflect anew, and to realise the role
that film can play in our consciences, imaginations and relationships with oth-
ers. Murdoch may say she has a man in mind, but we know she is speaking to
all of us, about everyone else:

The man I have in mind, faced by the manifold of humanity, may feel,
as well as terror, delight, but not, if he really sees what is before him,
superiority. He will suffer that undramatic, because un-self-centred,
agnosticism which goes with tolerance. To understand other people is a
task which does not come to an end. (SBR: 283)

NOTES

1. Murdoch prepared ‘Manuscript on Heidegger’ for possible publication in 1993, but, as

Browning explains, she decided against publication and it has not yet been published
(2018: 44).
2. See Chapter 1, note 1.
3. See Revelations of Divine Love, Julian of Norwich (1998: LIX, LXXXVI).
4. Barbara Hershey plays Mary Magdalene in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of
Christ (1988), and Monica Belluci plays her in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ
(2004).
5. Mrs Brown (John Madden, 1997); Shakespeare in Love (John Madden, 1998); The King’s
Speech (Tom Hooper, 2010), Wolf Hall (Peter Kosminsky, six episodes, 2015); The Crown
(Philip Martin, Benjamin Caron, Stephen Daldry, Julian Jarrold and Philippa Lowthorpe,
two seasons so far, 2016–). Topics such as costume, politics, melodrama and television are
investigated in the anthology The British Monarchy on Screen (Merck 2016).

6062_Bolton.indd 222 16/05/19 5:50 PM

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 Filmography

Atomic Blonde, directed by Davie Leitch. Germany, Sweden: 87Eleven, 2017.

Babadook, The, directed by Jennifer Kent. Australia: Screen Australia, 2014.
Birth, directed by Jonathan Glazer. UK, France: New Line Cinema, 2004.
Black Swan, directed by Darren Aronofsky. USA: Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2010.
Blue Jasmine, directed by Woody Allen. USA: Gravier Productions, 2013.
Box, The, directed by Richard Kelly. USA: Warner Bros, 2009.
Brief Encounter, directed by David Lean. UK: Cineguild, 1945.
Cabinet of Dr Caligari, The (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari), directed by Robert Wiene. Germany:
Decla Bioscop AG, 1920.
Certain Women, directed by Kelly Reichardt. USA: Film Science, 2016.
Certified Copy, directed by Abbas Kiarostami. France, Italy: MK2 Productions, 2010.
Clockwork Orange, A, directed by Stanley Kubrick. UK, USA: Warner Brothers, 1971.
Clouds of Sils Maria, directed by Olivier Assayas. France, Germany: CG Cinéma, 2014.
Compliance, directed by Craig Zobel. USA: Bad Cop Bad Cop Film Productions, 2012.
Days of Heaven, directed by Terrence Malick. USA: Paramount Pictures, 1978.
Death of Stalin, The, directed by Armando Iannucci. France, UK: Quad Productions, 2017.
Edge of Heaven, The (Auf der anderen Seite), directed by Fatih Akin. Germany, Turkey: Anka
Film, 2007.
Elle, directed by Paul Verhoeven. France, Germany: SBS Productions, 2016.
Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise), directed by Marcel Carné. France: Société
Nouvelle Pathé Cinema, 1945.
Ex Machina, directed Alex Garland. UK: Universal Pictures International, 2014.
Girlhood (Bande de Filles), directed by Céline Sciamma. France: Hold Up Films, 2014.
Gladiator, directed by Ridley Scott. USA, UK: Dreamworks, 2000.
Good People, directed by Henrik Ruben Genz. USA, UK: Millennium Films, 2014.
Graduation (Bacalaureat), directed by Cristian Mungiu. Romania, France: Canal+, 2016.
Hours, The, directed by Stephen Daldry. USA, UK: Paramount Pictures, 2003.
Indecent Proposal, directed by Adrian Lyne. USA: Paramount Pictures, 1993.
Innocence, directed by Lucile Hadzihalilovic. Belgium, France: Ex Nihilo, 2004.
Italian Straw Hat, The (The Horse Ate the Hat), directed by René Clair. France, Germany:
Films albatross, 1928.
Iris, directed by Richard Eyre. UK, USA: BBC Films, 2001.

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 230 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

I’ve Loved You So Long (Il y a longtemps que je t’aime), directed by Philippe Claudel. France,
Germany: UGC YM, 2008.
Jackie, directed by Pablo Larraín. Chile, France: Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2016.
King’s Speech, The, directed by Tom Hooper. UK, USA: See-Saw Films, 2010.
Last Temptation of Christ, The, directed by Martin Scorsese. Canada, USA: Universal Pictures,
1988.
Magnificent Ambersons, The, directed by Orson Welles. USA: Mercury Productions, 1942.
Manchester by the Sea, directed by Kenneth Lonergan. USA: Amazon Studios, 2016.
Manifesto, directed by Julian Rosefeldt. Germany: Bayerischer Rundfunk, 2015.
Margaret, directed by Kenneth Lonergan. USA: Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2011.
Mary Magdalene, directed by Garth Davis. UK, USA: See-Saw Films, 2018.
Milk, directed by Gus Van Sant. USA: Focus Features, 2008.
Miserables, Les, directed by Tom Hooper. UK, USA: Universal Pictures, 2012.
Mrs Brown, directed by John Madden. UK, Ireland: BBC Scotland, 1997.
Murderers Among Us (Die Mörder sind unter uns), directed by Wolfgang Staudte. Germany:
Deutsche Film, 1946.
Nocturnal Animals, directed by Tom Ford. USA: Focus Features, 2016.
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da), directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan.
Turkey: Zeynofilm, 2011.
Only Lovers Left Alive, directed by Jim Jarmusch. Germany, UK: Recorded Picture Company,
2013.
Passion of the Christ, The, directed by Mel Gibson. USA: Icon Productions, 2004.
Ratcatcher, directed by Lynne Ramsay. UK, France: Pathé Pictures International, 1999.
Sang d’un poète, Le (The Blood of a Poet), directed by Jean Cocteau. France: Vicomte de
Noailles, 1932.
Selma, directed by Ava du Vernay. UK, USA: Pathé, 2014.
Seven Samurai, directed by Akira Kurosawa. Japan: Toho Company, 1954.
Shakespeare in Love, directed by John Madden. USA, UK: Universal Pictures, 1998.
Still Alice, directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland. USA, UK: Lutzus-Brown,
2014.
Stories We Tell, directed by Sarah Polley. Canada: National Film Board of Canada, 2012.
Streetcar Named Desire, A, directed by Elia Kazan. USA: Charles K. Feldman Group, Warner
Bros., 1951.
Under the Skin, directed by Jonathan Glazer. Switzerland, Poland: Film 4, 2013.
Unfaithful, directed by Adrian Lyne. USA, Germany: Fox 2000 Pictures, 2002.
Unknown Girl, The (La fille inconnue), directed by Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne,
Belgium, France: Les Films du Fleuve, 2016.
We Need to Talk about Kevin, directed by Lynne Ramsay. UK, USA: BBC Films, 2011.

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 Index

Note: illustrations are indicated by page numbers in bold

abortion, 52, 102 and politics, 214

Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues (Murdoch), 6 and religion, 213–14
Adams, Amy, 33 and truth, 203
Affleck, Casey, 155, 160, 165 ‘Art and Eros’ (Murdoch), 27–8
‘Against Dryness’ (Murdoch), 51, 176–7, 201 asylum, 114
Alias Grace (Attwood), 38 Athenaeum Club, 168–9
Allen, Woody, 61 Atlas, James, 169
Altorf, Marije, 26, 167–8, 170, 173–5, 201, 206 Atomic Blonde (2017), 30
Andrici, Rares, 99 attention
animals, 52, 109, 144–6, 148, 173, 178, 180–6, 218 to art, 12, 18, 21, 128, 132, 143–4, 154,
Anscombe, Elizabeth, 3, 5 206–7, 221
Antonaccio, Maria, 77, 107 in Blue Jasmine, 60–7
archetypes, 10–11, 13, 184 and the close-up, 31–2
Arendt, Hannah, 136 Murdoch on, 8, 12, 18, 62–3, 66–7, 77–9,
Aristotelian Society, 3, 4, 8 95, 106, 108, 116, 128, 132, 143–4, 154,
Arletty, 14 206–7, 221
Arnheim, Rudolf, 24, 31, 49 Weil’s concept of, 4, 7, 8, 63, 66, 77–9,
art 171, 212
attention to, 18, 12, 21, 128, 132, 143, 154, 206, Attwood, Margaret, 38
207, 221 Auberjonois, Rene, 180
cinema as art, 8, 9–19, 22–5, 33–50, 207, 221 Auclair, Zoé, 31–2
and comedy and tragedy, 132, 135, 142–3, Auf der anderen Seite see Edge of Heaven
161–6 authority, 68–74
distinction between high art and mass art, 23 Ayer, A. J., 3
function of, 29
good and bad art, 26, 28–33, 143, 162, 186, 203, Babadook, The (2014), 209
205, 208–12 bad art, 28–33, 162, 205
and goodness, 25, 108, 109, 128, 176, 206 Balázs, Béla, 49
and morality, 58, 73, 143 Balsom, Erika, 152
in Murdoch’s novels, 26, 28 banality, 12, 91, 134, 135, 136
Murdoch on, 3, 7, 9–19, 21–2, 25–33, 58, Barthes, Roland, 33
128, 132, 135, 161–6, 169, 176, 203, Barton-Fumo, Margaret, 153
206–7, 221 Baryshnikov, Anna, 158
and philosophy, 25–8, 206 Bayley, John, 5

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 232 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

Bazin, André, 2 Christianity, 52, 77–8, 108, 120, 133, 212–13, 218
BBC Radio, 3–4, 5 CinemaScope, 12
Beale, Simon Russell, 137 Clair, René, 49
Beatles, The, 17 Clockwork Orange, A (1971), 23
Bellamy, Michael O., 168 close-ups, 13, 31–7, 69, 71, 92–3, 117, 182, 215
Bellucci, Monica, 213 Clouds of Sils Maria (2014), 76, 81–90, 88
Benjamin, Walter, 22–3, 33 Cocteau, Jean, 13, 15–16, 31
Bergman, Ingmar, 2 comedy, 13, 14, 130–1, 136–44, 153–4, 161–2,
Bergson, Henri, 130, 141, 154 165–6; see also humour
Berkel, Christian, 146 communism, 136, 217
Berling, Charles, 146 compassion, 60, 62, 94–5, 118–21, 125, 132, 176,
better person, becoming, 6–7, 18, 107, 132, 171, 175 196, 206, 214, 221
Bible, 123, 173, 175, 186, 213 Compliance (2012), 51, 53, 68–74, 70
Biles, Jack I., 168 Concept of Mind (Ryle), 3
Binoche, Juliette, 76, 81, 88, 210 Conradi, Peter, 4–5, 6, 77–8, 217
Birsal, Taner, 91 consciousness, 9–10, 28, 53, 76, 131, 171, 201–2
Birth (2004), 31–2, 32, 33 Considine, Paddy, 137
Black Swan (2010), 34 Consigny, Anna, 145
Blanchett, Cate, 32–3, 60–1, 65 consolation, 28–30, 44, 76, 80, 95, 109, 112, 117,
Blood of a Poet (1932), 15, 15–16, 31 161, 209
Bloquet, Jonas, 148 convention, 95, 173
Blue Jasmine (2013), 51, 53, 60–7, 65 Cooper, Sarah, 49
bodies see human body corruption, 60, 98–102, 215
Bonnaud, Olivier, 187 Cosar, Emre, 114
Bordwell, David, 24 Cox, Lara, 153
Bowes, Geoff, 39, 43 Critchley, Simon, 130, 142
Box, The (2009), 73 Crowley, Dermot, 138
Breger, Claudia, 115, 117–18 Crown, The (Netflix), 216
Brief Encounter (1945), 8, 14 Crudup, Billy, 34
Broackes, Justin, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Cunningham, Michael, 11
Broadbent, Jim, 5
Broderick, Matthew, 159 Davis, Essie, 209
Brophy, Brigid, 16–17, 211 Davrak, Baki, 110, 119
Browning, Gary, 210–11, 216–17, 218 Days of Heaven (1978), 12
Buddhism, 52, 77–8, 133, 206, 212 de Beauvoir, Simone, 167–8
Bugnar, Liz, 96 death
Burns, Heather, 158 in Blue Jasmine, 62, 64
Burton, Richard, 35–6 in Clouds of Sils Maria, 82, 84, 86
Buscemi, Steve, 137, 139 in The Death of Stalin, 137–40
in The Edge of Heaven, 105, 111–12,
Cabinet of Dr Caligari, The (1920), 47, 209 115–18, 120
Cambridge University, 3 in Elle, 149–50, 151, 154–5
‘Camelot’ (Burton), 35–6 and grief, 34, 116–17, 128, 157, 158, 160,
Camp, Bill, 70 163–4, 203, 209
Campion, Jane, 2 in I’ve Loved You So Long, 121–2
Canetti, Elias, 211 in Jackie, 33–7
Cannavale, Bobby, 60 in Manchester by the Sea, 155–65
Carroll, Noël, 24, 206 in Margaret, 54–6
Cavell, Stanley, 2, 11, 12, 206 by murder, 90–5, 111–12, 115, 121–2, 124–7,
Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies, 5 137, 149, 151, 154–5
Certain Women (2016), 167, 177–87, 182 in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, 90–5
Certified Copy (2010), 209–10 by suicide, 62, 64, 82, 84, 86, 88, 93–4, 150, 194
Chandler, Kyle, 155 and tragedy, 131
Chaplin, Charlie, 14, 16, 31 in The Unknown Girl, 188–95
Chichester University, 5 in We Need to Talk about Kevin, 124–7

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 INDEX 233

Death of Stalin (2017), 130, 136–44, 139 Faber, Michel, 44

Deleuze, Gilles, 206 ‘Face of Garbo’ (Barthes), 33
Dench, Judi, 5 faces see human face
Deren, Maya, 2 family, 37–44, 56, 96–102, 110–18, 121–7,
Dern, Laura, 177 146–50, 155–65, 179–80, 186, 210; see also
Derrida, Jacques, 173, 175, 206 fatherhood; marriage; motherhood
despair, 13–14, 76, 89, 116, 161 fantasy, 8, 26, 29–30, 44, 77, 95, 109, 117, 164,
Diabaté, Idrissa, 198 176, 199
Diamond, Cora, 66–7 fatherhood, 39–44, 92–4, 96–102, 110–12, 118–20,
Dickens, Charles, 25, 143 148, 150
Dijan, Philippe, 152 female beauty, 15–16, 45
Diop, Binta, 199 Feminine Mystique, The (Friedan), 167
Dipple, Elizabeth, 73 feminism, 45, 167–77, 196–7, 213, 217
disaster movies, 162 Fiddes, Paul S., 105
distance, 10, 22, 30, 33, 49 Fille inconnue see Unknown Girl
Doane, Mary Ann, 31 film noir, 81
Dowd, Ann, 68 film phenomenology, 25
Dragus, Maria, 96, 100 film philosophy, 2–3, 7, 18–19, 51, 174–5, 205–8
dreams, 9, 11, 30, 89, 108–9 film studies, 2–3, 24
Durham University, 5 ‘Fire and the Sun’ (Murdoch), 6, 21, 130, 142–3,
duty, 79, 115, 124–5, 195, 210, 213 164, 213
flashbacks, 34, 60–1, 155–8, 162
Ebert, Roger, 72 Foot, Philippa, 3, 5, 17, 211
Edge of Heaven (2007), 13, 105, 109–20, 119, 128, 133 Forsberg, Niklas, 2
editing, 22, 24, 41 Freeland, Cynthia, 22–3
education, 96–102, 111–12, 120, 168, 185, 196, 201 French cinema, 17
Edwards, Natalie, 122 Freud, Sigmund, 142, 175
Efira, Virgine, 146 Friedan, Betty, 167
ego, 21, 30, 66, 76, 77, 80–2, 86, 89, 90, 108, 122, Friend, Rupert, 138
143, 171, 208, 215
Ehrenreich, Alden, 61 Gabin, Jean, 14
Eichmann, Adolf, 136 gender, 122–3, 167–202
Eidinger, Lars, 83 gender equality, 167–9
Eisenstein, Sergei, 2 genre cinema, 208
Elle (2016), 130, 144–55, 150 German cinema, 17, 209
emotional affect, 25, 47–8, 206 Gerwig, Greta, 36
empathy, 25, 30, 95, 105, 121 Girlhood (2014), 167, 196–202, 198
Enfants du Paradis, Les (1945), 18–19 Gladiator (2000), 12
entertainment, 9, 14 Gladstone, Lily, 180, 182
Epstein, Jean, 2, 31, 33, 49 Glazer, Jonathan, 44–5
Erdogan, Yilmaz, 91 Gleeson, Domhnall, 209
escape, 9, 199 God, 80, 104, 107, 108, 120, 165, 212–13
ethics, 51–2, 77, 106 good art, 26, 28–33, 143, 162, 186, 203, 208–12
euthanasia, 52 Good People (2014), 73
everyday life, 6–7, 57, 63, 106–8, 116, 123, 128, goodness, 4–5, 7, 18–19, 25, 66, 67, 79–80, 102,
134–6, 161–2, 184–6, 207–8 104–28, 136, 175–6, 184–5, 203–4, 206
evil, 28, 95, 108, 117, 127, 135–6, 143 Goulehi, Ange-Déborah, 189
Ex Machina (2014), 209 Graduation (2016), 76, 96–102, 100
existentialism, 4, 7, 75–102, 175, 203–4, 217 Grévill, Laurent, 121
‘Existentialist Bite’ (Murdoch), 75 grief, 34, 116–17, 128, 157, 158, 160, 163–4,
‘Existentialist Hero, The’ (Murdoch), 6 203, 209
existentialist heroes, 80–1, 89, 94 Guardian, 54
‘Existential Political Myth, The’ (Murdoch), 75 Gueye, Djibril, 200
Existentialists and Mystics (Conradi), 6; see also Gulkin, Harry, 39–41, 43, 44
individual essays Gyllenhaal, Jake, 33

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 234 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

Haenel, Adèle, 30, 187, 194 Innocence (2004), 31–2

Haffenden, John, 29 intersectionality, 167, 196–7
Hale, Sheila, 169 Iris (2001), 1, 5
Hämäläinen, Nora, 167, 170–3 Iris Murdoch: A Life (Conradi), 5, 217
Hampshire, Stuart, 3, 175 Iris Murdoch Archive, Kingston University, 3, 5,
happiness, pursuit of, 79, 203 16, 210–11
Hare, R. M., 3, 4, 5, 106 Iris Murdoch Research Centre, 5
Harris, Jared, 178 Iris Murdoch Review, 5
Harris, Sue, 197 Isaacs, Jason, 139
Haskell, Molly, 152–3, 154 Isaaz, Alice, 148
Hastie, Amelie, 220 isolation, 76, 78, 80–1, 121, 164, 180, 184
Hathaway, Anne, 13 Italian Straw Hat, The (1928), 14
Haubruge, Bérangère, 31–2 Ivanov, Vlad, 96
Haunts of the Black Masseur (Sprawson), 18 I’ve Loved You So Long (2008), 105, 120–4, 123,
Hawkins, Sally, 60 128, 161
Hayward, Kara, 156
Hazanavicius, Serge, 120 Jackie (2016), 33–7, 36
Hegel, G. W. F., 25, 79 Jacobowitz, Florence, 92, 94–5
Heidegger, Martin, 210–11 James, Nick, 152
Hershey, Barbara, 213 Japanese cinema, 15
Hiddleston, Tom, 219, 221 Johansson, Scarlett, 45–6, 48
Hobbes, Thomas, 142 Johnson, Celia, 14
Hobson, Harold, 168–9 Jour se lève, Le (1939), 14
homosexuality, 52, 169, 218 Julian of Norwich, 213
Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 56
Horgan, Cara, 138 Kafka, Franz, 135
Horner, Avril, 211 Kant, Immanuel, 135, 142
horror, 47, 135, 141, 148, 155, 214–15 Karamoh, Lindsay, 198
Hours, The (2003), 11 Kaye, Danny, 220
Hours, The (Cunningham), 11 Kennedy, Jackie, 33–7
‘House of Theory’ (Murdoch), 136 Kermode, Frank, 169
Howard, Trevor, 14 Kern, Laura, 72
human body, 13, 30–1, 44–9, 197 Kidman, Nicole, 31–2, 32, 33
human face, 13, 15–16, 30–7, 48, 49, 92–3, 117, Kierkegaard, Søren, 78, 142
120, 215 King, Martin Luther, 218
human rights see rights King Lear (Shakespeare), 130, 131–2
humility, 58, 90, 119, 195 King’s Speech, The (2010), 216
humour, 14, 61, 91, 130–1, 135, 136–44, 153–4, Kingston University, 3, 5, 16, 210–11
161, 165–6; see also comedy ‘Knowing the Void’ (Murdoch), 78–9
Huppert, Isabelle, 145, 150, 152–3 Koehler, Robert, 72
Hurt, John, 219 Köse, Nursel, 110
Krishnamurti, Jiddu, 169
Ide, Wendy, 184 Kubrick, Stanley, 23
‘Idea of Perfection’ (Murdoch), 1, 7–8, 62–3, 67, Kurtiz, Tuncel, 110
73, 78, 80, 81, 106–7, 116, 175–6 Kurylenko, Olga, 137
images, 133–6, 143, 173–4, 204–5, 206, 210, 213
imagination, 9, 23, 58, 109, 132, 134, 204–5, Lafitte, Laurent, 146
206–7, 214–15 Lane, Diane, 13
incongruity theory, 142 language, 8, 27, 58, 67, 175–6, 210
Indecent Proposal (1993), 73 Larec, Yves, 190
individuality, 4, 7–8, 28, 53, 76–81, 89, 106–7, Laverty, Megan, 172
132–3, 144, 154, 168–9, 171–3, 176, 184–7, Le Dœuff, Michele, 173–4, 206
201–2 Leeson, Miles, 5
inner life, 3, 13, 28, 57–9, 95, 102, 105, 107–8, LeGros, James, 177
171, 173 Leigh, Vivien, 61

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 INDEX 235

Lepkowski, Gerald, 140 on everyday life, 207–8

Levi, Mica, 33–4, 45 on goodness, 104, 122, 125, 128
Lim, Dennis, 153 on images, 133–6, 143, 205, 213
Lita, Ana, 78 on individuality, 78, 144
‘Literature and Philosophy’ (Murdoch), 21, 25–7, on love, 104, 109, 115, 209
205, 207 on moral vision, 201–2
Living on Paper (Horner & Rowe), 211 Mulhall’s analysis of, 204–5
Locke, John, 9–10 on natural law, 217–18
loneliness, 76, 78, 80–1, 165 on politics, 214–18
Lonergan, Kenneth, 53, 55, 56, 157 on religion, 78, 104, 107–8, 212–14
love, 14–15, 79, 95, 104–9, 115, 118–27, 171, 175, on rights, 217–18
176, 187, 209–10 on spirituality, 128, 133, 144, 165, 195,
Lovell, Joel, 54 212–13
Lovibond, Sabina, 79, 80, 170–1, 174, 185 structure of, 6, 204
loving gaze, 8, 63, 95, 106, 108, 125–6, 171 on television, 134, 162, 214–15
Lumière brothers, 49 on transcendence, 165
on truth, 202, 203
McDowell, John, 5 on tyranny, 215–16, 218
McGill, Hannah, 72 on Weil, 78–9
McLoughlin, Adrian, 137 and women’s stories, 173
Magee, Bryan, 25, 26, 169 Meyers, Jeffrey, 169
Magnificent Ambersons, The (1942), 8, 10, Midgley, Mary, 3, 5
13–14 migration, 109–16
Manchester by the Sea (2016), 130, 155–66, Milk (2008), 218
160 Milk, Harvey, 218
Manifesto (2017), 33 Miller, Lee, 15, 15–16
Mann, Michael, 81 Minnella, Louka, 191
Manovici, Malina, 96 minority groups, 52, 196, 218
Mara, Rooney, 213, 214 Miserables, Les (2012), 13
Margaret (2011), 51, 52–3, 54–9, 55, 133 Mrs Brown (1997), 216
Marks, Laura, 25, 45 Mrs Dalloway (Woolf), 11
marriage, 38–9, 52, 60, 62, 96–7, 100–1, 126, 167, Moi, Toril, 106
179–80, 209–10 Moll, Gretchen, 155
Married Love (Stopes), 167 moments, 9–10, 11–12
Marxism, 75, 79, 218 Moore, G. E., 66, 106
Mary Magdalene (2018), 213, 214 Moore, Julianne, 210
Mayer, So, 198 Moore, Scott H., 27
Mazet, Arthur, 145 moral experience, 53, 107, 135–6, 204
meditation, 7, 58, 105, 107, 108, 212, 214 moral fables, 51–74
memory, 41–4, 45, 76, 134, 157, 162 moral realism, 6, 95
Mendy, Cyril, 196 moral relevance, 51, 52–3, 58
Meszaros, Julia, 78–9 moral responsibility, 73
Metamorphosis (Kafka), 135 moral training, 6, 19, 207
‘Metaphysics and Ethics’ (Murdoch), 3–4, 66–7, moral vision, 7–8, 18, 28, 49–50, 52–3, 57, 62–3,
75, 106 67, 73, 95, 128, 175–6, 202, 205
Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (Murdoch) moralism, 51–2
on art, 28, 30, 73, 131, 143, 162, 187, 203, 205, Moretz, Chloë Grace, 83
206–7 Morgan, David, 16
on attention, 66, 79, 207 Morin, Edgar, 49
on comedy and tragedy, 130, 131, 133–6, 141, motherhood, 62, 97, 110–18, 121–7, 146, 148,
143, 144, 161–6 149–50, 210
critique of Derrida, 173 Mulhall, Stephen, 204–5
on death, 117, 131, 163–4, 209 Münsterberg, Hugo, 31
on despair, 161 murder, 90–5, 111–12, 115, 121–2, 124–7, 137,
on duty, 195, 213 149, 151, 154–5; see also death

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 236 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

Murdoch, Iris ‘On “God” and “Good” ’ (Murdoch), 51, 73, 104,
academic background, 3 108–9, 123–4, 125, 176, 221
academic interest in, 5 ‘On the Cinema’ (Murdoch), 8–16, 21–2,
Alzheimer’s disease, 5 30–1, 201
annotations and marginalia, 211, 211 Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011), 76, 90–5, 93,
on art, 3, 7, 9–19, 21–2, 25–33, 58, 128, 102, 133
132, 135, 161–6, 169, 176, 203, Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), 219–20, 221
206–7, 221 Orange, Michelle, 184
on attention, 8, 12, 18, 62–3, 66–7, 77–9, Oxford University, 3, 5, 7, 106, 217
95, 106, 108, 116, 128, 132, 143–4, 154,
206–7, 221 Palin, Michael, 137
on cinema, 8–18, 207, 220 Paquin, Anna, 54–5, 55
biographies, 1, 5, 217 Payne, Stephen, 69
civil service career, 3 Pears, David, 169
on comedy and tragedy, 13, 130–6, 141–4, Pearson, Adam, 48
154–5, 161–6 Penn, Sean, 81
correspondence, 16, 16–18, 211 Perkins, Victor, 24
and existentialism, 4, 7, 75–81, 89–90, 175, 217 Philadelphia Story, The (1940), 27
and feminism, 167–77, 196, 217 Philosopher’s Pupil, The (Murdoch), 18
on goodness, 4–5, 7, 18–19, 25, 66–7, 79–80, philosophical imaginary, 173–5, 206
102, 104–9, 112, 118–28, 136, 175–6, Plato, 4–5, 6, 9, 25, 27–9, 73, 77, 107, 109, 130,
184–5, 206 142–4, 175, 205, 210–11
Heidegger manuscript (unpublished), 210–11 politics, 136, 214–20
influence of Weil, 4–5, 7, 63, 66, 77–9, Polley, Diane, 38–44, 42
171–2, 175 Polley, Johnny, 38, 39, 40, 41
interviews, 17–18, 19, 25–6, 130, 167, Polley, Michael, 38–44
168–9, 173 Polley, Sarah, 37–44
key philosophical concerns, 6–8 Portman, Natalie, 33–7, 36
on love, 115–17, 123–7, 171, 175, 176, 209–10 poverty, 52, 165
and moral fable, 51–3, 56–9, 62–3, 66–7, 73 power, 64, 69, 122, 141–2, 171, 215–16
notebooks, 3, 211 prayer, 105, 108
novels, 3, 5, 19, 26, 27–8, 169, 207, 211, 218; prison, 60, 85, 111, 114, 119, 120–1, 124–5, 146,
see also individual titles 150, 184
philosophical works see individual titles Prisor, Lucas, 145
and politics, 136, 214–20 private realm, 170
and religion, 6, 52, 58, 77–8, 108, 127, 133, 210, prostitution, 110, 191–2, 193–4
212–14 psychoanalysis, 2, 175
review of Haunts of the Black Masseur, 18 public realm, 170
review of Notebooks of Simone Weil, 4 Puchner, Martin, 25
and women’s stories, 122–3, 167–77, 185–7 Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 49
music, 12, 33–4, 37–8, 45, 54, 59, 70, 85–7, 110,
157, 159, 198–9, 201, 220 Qian, Ruibo, 155
mystical heroes, 80–1, 94 Queneau, Raymond, 16, 17, 211
Quick, Diana, 138
narrative, 10–11, 37–44, 58–9, 133, 206–7
natural law, 217–18 Ramsay, Lynne, 124
nature, 21, 30, 86, 108, 109, 180, 185, 186, 206 rape, 23, 96–7, 130, 140, 144–55
Nausée, La (Sartre), 207 Ratcatcher (1999), 12
New York Times, 54 Reichardt, Kelly, 2, 177, 184
N’Guessan, Chance, 196 relief theory, 142
Nocturnal Animals (2016), 33 religion, 6, 52, 58, 77–8, 105, 108, 127, 133, 149,
Notebooks of Simone Weil, 4, 117 151–2, 159, 210, 212–14
Renier, Jérémie, 192
O’Brien, Ben, 156 Republic (Plato), 9
Olympic Games, 18 Riefenstahl, Leni, 18

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 INDEX 237

Righelato, Rowan, 81 Soumaré, Simina, 196

rights, 79, 196, 214, 217–19 sound, 14, 33–4, 37–8, 45, 47, 94, 162, 183, 210,
Rin Tin Tin, 16 219; see also music
Riseborough, Andrea, 138 Sovereignty of Good, The (Murdoch), 6
Rodier, Sara, 179 ‘Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts’
romanticism, 4, 7, 76, 77, 161 (Murdoch), 6–7, 30, 66, 81, 118–19, 122,
Rowe, Anne, 5, 26, 28, 211 126–7, 130, 132, 143–4, 176, 195
royalty, 216 Spectator, 4
Rushton, Richard, 176, 207 spirituality, 4, 13, 28, 107, 117, 128, 133, 143–4,
Ryle, Gilbert, 3, 106, 175, 211 165, 195, 212–14
Sprawson, Charles, 18
Saint and the Artist (Conradi), 5 ‘Spring and Fall’ (Hopkins), 56
saintliness, 122 Stalin, Joseph, 136–44
Sang d’un Poète see Blood of a Poet star bodies, 45
Sarsgaard, Peter, 35, 64 star faces, 32–3, 34, 120
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 3, 4, 7, 23, 25, 30, 75, 76, 78, 79, Steinbauer, Anja, 142
89, 175, 207, 211 Stevens Heusel, Barbara, 173
Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (Murdoch), 1, 6, 7, Stevenson, Charles, 106
23, 75–9, 89, 203 Stewart, Kristen, 81, 180
satire, 141–2 Still Alice (2014), 210
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 142 Stopes, Marie, 167
Schrader, Paul, 81 stories see narrative
Schwartz, Michael, 73 Stories We Tell (2012), 33, 37–44, 42
Schweiker, William, 107 Streetcar Named Desire (1951), 61
Schygulla, Hanna, 113, 119 ‘Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’ (Murdoch),
Sciamma, Céline, 197 81, 222
science, 67, 78, 92, 94–5, 175, 218 ‘Sublime and the Good’ (Murdoch), 132, 133, 154
Scott Thomas, Kristin, 105, 120, 123 suicide, 62, 64, 82, 84, 86, 88, 93–4, 150, 194;
Scruton, Roger, 24 see also death
Sea, the Sea (Murdoch), 5 Sundance Film Festival, 72
Second Sex, The (de Beauvoir), 167–8 surrealism, 11, 12, 22, 91, 135
self-delusion, 44, 63–4, 78, 94, 95, 108, 112 Swinton, Tilda, 124, 126, 219, 221
self-forgetting, 8, 23, 25, 30, 172 Sylla, Assa, 198
self-reflection, 4, 57–9, 172
Selma (2014), 218 Tambor, Jeffrey, 137, 139
sentimentality, 28, 143, 164, 165, 174, 183, 185 Tanis, Firat, 90
Sesonske, Alexander, 24 Taubin, Amy, 72
Seven Samurai (1954), 8, 10–11, 13, 15, 24 technology, 22, 24, 215
Severed Head, A (Murdoch), 5 television, 134, 162, 214–15, 216
sexuality, 48, 52, 96–7, 110, 121, 144–53, 156, theology, 212–13; see also religion
158–9, 167, 169, 177, 197, 200, 213 Theron, Charlize, 30
Shakespeare, William, 25, 130, 131–2 ‘Thinking and Language’ (Murdoch), 3
Shakespeare in Love (1998), 216 Thomson-Jones, Katharine, 24, 30
Shaw, Dan, 51 time, 9–10, 91, 220
Shimell, William, 210 Titieni, Adrian, 96, 100
Shoard, Catherine, 61 Tolstoy, Leo, 26, 207
silent film, 14, 24 totalitarianism, 29, 136–44, 218
Singer, Peter, 51–2 Touré, Karijda, 196, 198, 198
Sinnerbrink, Robert, 53 Touré, Mariétou, 198
slapstick, 14, 61, 137, 138 tragedy, 13, 130–6, 155–66
Slaymaker, William, 29 tragic fragments, 131, 162
Snow, Nancy E., 95 transcendence, 7, 18, 78, 105–8, 119, 124, 129
Sobchack, Vivien, 25 travel films, 11
solipsism, 4, 75, 76, 81, 89, 90 truth, 41–4, 67, 95, 121, 144, 203
soul, 49, 125, 132–3, 206 tyranny, 136–44, 215–16, 218

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 238 CONTEMPORARY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

Under the Net (Murdoch), 3 Weil, Simone, 4–5, 7, 51, 63, 66, 77–9, 117, 171–2,
Under the Skin (2013), 33, 44–50, 48, 133 175, 212
Under the Skin (Faber), 44 welfare state, 218
Unfaithful (2002), 13 Welles, Orson, 10, 13–14
universality, 52, 57–9 Wendy and Lucy (2008), 184
Unknown Girl, The (2016), 30, 167, 187–96, 189, Why Iris Murdoch Matters (Browning), 210–11
194, 203 Widdows, Heather, 106, 107
Unofficial Rose, An (Murdoch), 169 Williams, Esther, 18
unselfing, 8, 23, 25, 30, 77, 95, 170–2, 221 Williams, Michelle, 157, 179, 184
Uzuner, Muhammet, 90, 93 Wilson, C. J., 155
Wilson, Emma, 197, 198, 201
vampirism, 219–20 Winslet, Kate, 5
Verhoeven, Paul, 152–3 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 3, 6
Vikander, Alicia, 209 Wolf, Susan, 125–6
Vincendeau, Ginette, 152 Wolf Hall (BBC), 216
virtuous peasant, 174, 185 women’s stories, 122–3, 167–202
‘Vision and Choice in Morality’ (Murdoch), Woolf, Virginia, 2, 10, 47, 49
4, 6, 7, 8, 52–3, 56–9, 73, 176, work, 184–5
186–7, 213 ‘Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
visual metaphors, 7–8, 18, 206 Reproduction’ (Benjamin), 22
Vogue magazine, 8–16, 30–1 World Viewed, The (Cavell), 11
voiceover, 39, 40, 41–2
Yesilçay, Nurgül, 112
Walker, Dreama, 69, 70 Young, Iris Marion, 172
Warnock, Mary, 3
water, 17–18 Ziolkowska, Patrycia, 13, 113
We Need to Talk about Kevin (2011), 105, 124–7, Zobel, Craig, 72
126, 128 Zylberstein, Elsa, 120, 123

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