The Ultimate Death Panel
"These days, I spend most of my life not looking forward, but back." These words are not spoken by a wheelchair-bound old bubbie or biddie in a nursing home watching her Diagnosis Murder reruns, nor are they being read by a tear-stained Glenn Beck at his latest rally. They are the words of a roughly 30-year-old woman in Mark Romanek's new adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's award-winning novel Never Let Me Go, as she stands alone at sunset near an endless barren field in front of an old, wooden fence, some fissures of tissue paper clinging in the wind to the razor wire. This girl should have "her whole life ahead of her," and she does -- but in the darkest possible sense.
This being a legit website, I'm not going to do "spoiler space," but I will concede to a new paragraph. If you haven't read the book or looked at Wikipedia and plan on seeing the film (as I advise you do) -- and you don't want to know the score -- then here's the place to get off.
This young woman was grown by the government, along with other children with whom she was raised with at a neo-Victorian British country orphanage called Halisham (perhaps the author thought that "Halcyon" would be too cute) to be live organ donors. (She and her friends were test-tube clones "modeled on" DNA donors, or throwaways from "slags" like prostitutes and junkies.) The grim moral of the movie comes early on, when one of the teachers (who is promptly fired -- or worse) for her troubles, comes out of the closet with her pubertal charges. "Some people will grow up to be actors and go to America... others will be shopkeepers, doctors, salespeople," she intones. "They can be almost anything they want to be. But not you." There is only one fate for them.
While this film is far from a laugh riot, it certainly has some fun with our current euphemisms for death and terminal illness (though the phrase "death panels" is never heard -- sorry, Sarah.) These young men and women grow up to be "donors." They can be euthanized and raided their first time out, or if they want to prolong their Earthly existence, they can go in for three or four "donations" of minor bodily organs before they "complete." Some of the brighter members of the Doom Generation can even prolong their lives to their late 20s or early 30s by being "carers" for their fellow donors, which is what lead character Kathy (Carey Mulligan) does, after her boyfriend Tommy (Andrew Garfield) makes it clear he prefers (or does he?) the duo's more "liberated" (such as it is) schoolmate, Ruth (Keira Knightley).
The film's washed out production design and lethargic, sexily ashen young Britons certainly recall Twilight (and any resemblance is completely intentional.) And like the novel on which it was based, the film's atmosphere is one of understatement, moodiness, and psychological dread, rather than stark "torture porn" shock.
In past movies, from Logan's Run to even Schindler's List and Roots, there was still the context of struggle, of defiance even in the face of death. Here, everyone seems to have already abandoned hope. One looks in vain for someone who really fights against "the system", who refuses to accept meekly the hand that fate has dealt them -- and comes up empty. It seems that escape and defiance have literally been "bred out of them." At least some of them have some outlet, with all Halisham children having been encouraged to learn to paint and draw or play music or sports, with the children's best paintings and photos and journal writings exhibited in the national gallery.
After being locked down at Halisham until their late teens, these donors-in-waiting are allowed to go out to a sort of halfway-house in the country, and even get the freedom to walk around unsupervised and even have some contact with other non-donors and donors from other orphanages. By then, they're even off and having sex (and it was clearly on the minds of the pubescents when they were still at the orphanage, as it would be of any hormonal youngster.) When they're in their 20s, successful "carer" Kathy has her own car and flat, and goes about her life seemingly just like any other young businesswoman -- a Mary Richards or That Girl by way of the movie Coma.
In the movie's most moving scene, Kathy and Tommy, reunited after Ruth's death -- er, completion -- appeal to the now-retired head of Halisham (an always wonderful Charlotte Rampling) at her beachfront cottage for a letter of referral to the government. Of the many urban legends that prevailed at the cloistered English orphanage, the cruelest was that a young couple, if they could "prove" they were truly in love and not just trying to chicken out, could get an "extension" for the pulse-pounding possibility of living to see their 35th? 40th? birthday before going under the knife. But of course, that was just a rumor.
And the artwork and writing and sports they were encouraged to take part in, the Gallery? "We wanted an answer to a question that no one was asking," the headmistress replies, explaining that while the idea of going back to the dark ages of breast cancer, heart attacks, Alzheimers was "unthinkable -- [the public] wouldn't have it," they wanted to do something to prove that the youngsters who gave up their lives so that others could live weren't just pieces of meat. But it wasn't so that the "subhuman" donors could express their souls, she explains. "It was to see whether or not you even HAD souls to express."
That's where Never Let Me Go knocks it out of the park, by proving that there can be far more terror in the dog that doesn't bark than the snarling Rottweiller at the door. In another book or movie, following this final betrayal, the two doomed young lovers would have strangled the old bitch, run off in their cars, faked their way onto a cargo plane or ship, and escaped to some island. Instead, they merely collapse into repressed tears, gather themselves up, and thank the "kindly" headmistress as they go off for one final walk along the barren, sunset beach. The unspoken undercurrent of course, is that if even "civilized" Great Britain and America have accepted organ farming and cloning, then where else would they have to go?
Pro-lifers will see this movie as the logical and validating end of "right to die" and "stem cell" laws, no doubt, and one that could be all too real in our near future (although the movie is far from being a right-wing treatise and far more subtle.) But if anything, it’s real appeal to conservatives is the same song that Barry Goldwater (and in her better moments, Ayn Rand) had always sung -- that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take everything away. It is also a plangent metaphor for brainwash in a totalitarian environment -- the people who really believe that Kim Jong-Il is a "great Leader" would have more than a little in common with the best-behaved Halisham kids.
And while it would be boot-strapping to insert too many political metaphors into this fable, what makes Never Let Me Go relevant is that these young people are just trying to live and enjoy little gumdrops of happiness and beauty from day to day, even though they clearly have no stake in the future, and the future has no stake in them. (Some even look forward to their eventual ends, perhaps seeing death as their life's purpose, just as they were brainwashed to believe.) They escape from the gray living death of their lives by watching too many sitcoms, window shopping, wandering off on long walks -- just like so many of us real people do.
If you can think of a better, subtle metaphor for life in the Tea Party era, I'd challenge you to find it. Of course, these reserved Britons have grimly accepted their fate, while the Tea Partiers rave and screech, but still... living in the past that seemed so much better (whether it actually was or not), fantasizing about other kinds of lives that will never be open to you, looking out into an empty future, abandoning all "hope" in "change", unable to fight City Hall, feeling -- rightly or wrongly -- that the forces in life and government have gotten so far beyond their control, that "Big Brother" always wins...
Like its most obvious forebearers, Beloved and The Handmaid's Tale, Never Let Me Go is a quiet, if deracinated, meditation on what it means to be alive -- and to actually have a life, as opposed to just an existence. (As Anna Quindlen wrote, in a post 9/11 article on St. Patrick's Cathedral and its ancient boneyard of centuries-old graves, though they are long forgotten now, "once someone remembered, once someone grieved," with each jagged gravestone bearing the same essential message: "Forget me not." Never Let Me Go isn't a truly great or forever-memorable film, but it is a passively powerful and occasionally haunting one.
And at least the organ-donor clones in Never Let Me Go do know exactly where they're going and what will happen to them. In our dystopian real-life world, it seems that nobody poised on our foreclosure-era, New Economy precipice -- not President Obama, not Sarah or Newt -- have the faintest clue where we're going, or what will become of us. One can only guess, at the end of the day, which is the more chilling fate to contemplate.