All of Us Strangers: a comment

All of Us Strangers (2023), a film that I found absolutely amazing...

Alexander Haigh is the cute-bearish writer and director of Weekend (2011), which was also amazing, in a way that had some parallels – layered, complexly real dialogue, a love of men who are in love, bodies and feelings and memory and loss, and an extraordinary awareness of how important all these things can be.

And Andrew Scott, who is wonderful (I still think of him as the extraordinarily scary Moriarty in his first short but astounding appearance in Sherlock), and Paul Mescal, whom I hadn't really thought much about before (despite Aftersun, which is remarkable of course).

But those are all just credits.

I wept, a lot, at this one; but was also more deeply comforted than I've been since... well.

Haigh said in an interview that the feeling of the film was connected to growing up during the time of AIDS, but he was careful to separate it from that, as though he couldn't possibly understand the intensity of being an adult gay man in that time, or being infected. I think he's too careful: this film understood everything it needs to about death and love; for me it was like Urbania – not about AIDS, but clearly written in its shadow.

Anyway. What do I really want to say.

For one thing, some people were focused on exactly what is real and what isn't – as though such a thing must be clear, or is worth making clear. I know I'm still, even now, terribly postmodern, and becoming a Jungian has made me even more so – every philosophy, religion, worldview, even scientific theory is clearly based on previous assumptions, postulates. Though I know the world is filled with people who are certain of one system or another, I doubt any of them can prove anything to my entire satisfaction.

And so: death, vision, dream, fantasy – reality – who is dead and when – I don't mind considering these things as essentially... uncertain.

That's something that makes this film different from those of, for instance, Shyamalan, whose plot twists are fairly definite – when he shows that what we had thought isn't what's going on, he clarifies the new rules, as in most science fiction. Clarifying rules is useful for religious sects and philosophical analyses, as well as in squabbles over superhero movies, but I find it slightly childish – for me it is the ego reasserting its ideas of the universe, sometimes with desperation.

Haigh doesn't do that: he purposely blurs boundaries and possibilities.

It makes sense to me. Who is ever sure that the dead are gone, or that they are present? Who is entirely sure that they are themselves awake and alert, or in a vision?

It does look to me as though only one person is alive at the end – two may be imagined, or real though dead; one must be real, though dead – I insist on that, though I know I'm insisting partly because I want it to be that way (I can't prove it, as if anything can be proven in this film). And the one who is living can comfort the dead, with passionate kindness and a certainty that it is the right thing to do.

Which is, of course, the really strange thing – and what is important to me about it is –

well, some background: I think and write about death a lot, and in the past decade reorganized my thoughts into: death is one of the largest of complexes and/or archetypal structures, and though every philosophy and religion (see above, note the parallel) is largely focused on explaining it in some way, we are never really certain, never really done with it. It's too big, and every answer leaves gaps and flaws; and people in hospices usually travel through a variety of uncertainties.

So, I've told myself that I'll never entirely know what I think about death, and I'll never be done with it. But, even when I have come to this conclusion, even that hardens into a concept, and I lose the reality of it – and so I fall into the illusion that I do know what I think of death –

and so it was an especially remarkable surprise to realize that I did not expect what happens at the end – and in fact I've never really thought through love and death in quite this way –

and that changed me: it actually changed some of the deep meanings of the past forty years, at least since Reid died on 2 December 1983, or even before that.

Yes, that huge, for me. Exactly that huge.

•••

The book the story is taken from isn't all that special – the parents do appear, but this astounding shift in the relationship of the living and the dead isn't in the book. I think Haigh keeps making a point of mentioning the original in order to be polite, and legally safe – the book reverts to the usual world of Japanese ghost stories at the end, as the protagonist is so drained by contact with a female ghost that he spends weeks in the hospital. As in many traditions, ghosts are scary and/or dangerous; they are always more about the threatening world of death than they are about the person who was lost. This fits all those anthropological and psychological discussions that show that not speaking ill of the dead, and elaborate funeral preparations, have more to do with an ancient fear of the dead than with respect or love for the people that they were – the dead generally don't remind us of themselves, they remind us of the world that they have entered.

But Scott's character has several instantaneous, knife-edge choices, and in each, rather than retreating in terror or self-preservation, he stays, and comforts (even lies, kindly), and holds – he stays with the dead, not in a desperately clinging way, not in a way that is about himself, but with love and increasingly assertive kindness: you're here, with me.

•••

I don't know why that seems so new to me: do I know books, or plays, or myths, where someone does that with the dead? I can't think of any.

And the idea that it could be that way changes me, at a deep level, which also amazes me.

What if our love for the dead doesn't need to be clinging or mystical – what if it is just love, a love that doesn't plan on giving up or falling into fear?

That could change everything – even our own deaths....

Comments

[Andrea Christianson]

I have not watched this film yet, it is on my list since you first mentioned it.
Now, reading your thoughts pushes it up to the top of my list. In some way I have believed that those lost come to us if we/they have unfinished business. And so should we be thankful they done come to us and yes, accept they are ‘here’. And your mentioning Reid brought tears and for a moment a wish the death and dying had not been so shouted in silence sure those years. That silence and the loss of a dearly loved cousin catapulted me is an era of advocacy that encompassed many injustices. As so many of my friends in Minneapolis died surrounded by love, it also prepared me in an unknown way for the sudden loss of my adult son. And so I find comfort in acceptance of the love that just is, and perhaps also prepares me for my own future death, that in my late 70’s seems might be closer than I might hope for. That to is / will be just what is.
Thank you for words that poke my thinking❤️