The PANY Bulletin

Psychoanalytic Association of New York
Volume 41, #3 Fall 2003

Film Essay

Death and Reunion in The Hours
Herbert H. Stein, M.D.

The Hours, a film adaptation of Michael Cunningham's book (which I have not read) brought divergent reactions from viewers. Many came back saying that it was very depressing, while others, critics included, heralded it as one of the best pictures of the year. Seeing enough depression in my work, I approached it with trepidation as I watched it for the first time at a showing by the local analytic film discussion group; but, I was surprised at how deeply it affected me.

The Hours is a very complex film, not easy to disentangle, or even to describe to those who have not seen it. It focuses on a day in the life of three women, separated by decades and miles. Virginia Wolf is feeling trapped in her suburban home in 1923, where her husband tries to shelter her from the stimulation of London life that was believed to have contributed to her psychosis, suicide attempts and hospitalizations. She is beginning to write a new book, Mrs. Dalloway, about a woman who plans her suicide, then decides against it. Laura Brown is a housewife in 1951 L.A. She is baking a cake for her husband's birthday, reading Mrs. Dalloway, and leaving her son with the baby sitter so that she can go to a hotel to kill herself and the fetus she is carrying. Like Mrs. Dalloway, she will change her mind. Clarissa Vaughan is living in New York in 2001 with her woman partner, preparing a party to honor her old friend and one time lover, Richard, who has won a prestigious poetry prize. Richard is living alone in a seedy building, dying of AIDS.

This is a film that affects our moods, not always in a clear linear way. It is a weave of lives and themes, making it difficult to find the right strand to begin to pull it apart. The film begins with a suicide, as Virginia Wolf, in 1941 (the only deviation from the three days of focus), leaves her husband a note, goes to the river, fills her pockets with stones and wades into the deep water. We go under the river with her to see her body floating downward, weighted by the stones in her pockets. The film depicts two suicides and two near suicides (including Mrs. Dalloway's). Those who found it depressing were certainly not without foundation. This is clearly a film about depression and suicide. The affective meaning that it attaches to suicide will be the subject of this probing.

The second obvious theme is that of confinement. Each of the three women, as well as Richard, the dying poet, are trapped in their lives. Virginia Wolf is described as an eccentric, brilliant young woman who is clumsy, like a recently arrived immigrant to ordinary human society. She is bored living in their suburban home with her printer husband and their two servants. She longs to get back to the excitement of the city, even as she retreats into the book she is writing. Laura Brown is a housewife doing her duty to her husband, recently returned from the war, trapped in the life that fulfills his dream but not hers. She is clumsy in her attempts to bake a wedding cake, appears not to fit the role she has been assigned in pre-sixties suburbia. Clarissa Vaughan feels a constant ache of unhappiness, yearning to get back to a moment, a morning in the country with Richard many years before. She sees her confinement in a more depersonalized way, through Richard's eyes. "He gives me that look ... to say, 'You're life is trivial, you are so trivial.' Daily stuff, you know, schedules and parties and details." In this, she appears to recreate the plight of Mrs. Dalloway, herself, capable, like Clarissa (who shares her first name) of making a grand party and organizing other people's lives, but caught in a world of details. It also links her with Laura caught in her own world of trivial events. Finally, Richard is dying painfully of AIDS, with obvious brain involvement as he struggles with pain killers and "voices". For him, the life remaining is just a succession of painful hours. He is confined in life itself.

Virginia Wolf is direct and articulate about her confinement as she confronts her anxious husband at the suburban train station. He is very caring, and wishes to keep her protected from the dangers of psychotic relapse and repeated suicide attempts. She convinces him with her determination and her eloquence. "My life has been stolen from me. I'm living in a town I have no wish to live in. I'm living a life I have no wish to live. ... I'm dying in this town. ... If I were thinking clearly, Leonard, I would tell you that I wrestle alone in the dark-in the deep dark-and that only I can know, only I can understand my own condition. You live with the threat, you tell me, the threat of my extinction, Leonard. I live with it, too. It's my right, the right of every human being. I choose not the anesthetic of the suburbs, but the violent jolt of the capital. The meanest patient ... is allowed some say in the matter of her own prescription. Thereby she defines her humanity. ... If it is a choice between Richmond and death, I choose death."

I think more is suggested than geography. She suffers the confinement of a creative woman who does not react to things like other people. She appears to have less of the protective, defensive covering (Freud's stimulus barrier) of those of us who manage to go through our days cushioned from the full emotions of what we experience. She cannot dissemble, to others or to herself. She appears strange to her sister, Vanessa, and her three children, with her dreamy removed states. Vanessa explains to her daughter, "You're aunt's a very lucky woman, Angelica, because she has two lives. She has the life she's leading, also the book she's writing. It makes her very fortunate indeed." We get a sense that Virginia feels some communion with the young girl, Angelica, who unlike her hyperactive brothers, feels true empathy and curiosity about a dying bird that she and Virginia lay to rest. After the girl leaves, Virginia lies her head on the ground, looking at the bird, as if trying to imagine what it is like to be dead. The film does not shout out about this particular form of confinement, the creative artist's "difference." Her thoughts and feelings, so out of place amidst the commonplace events of daily life, can be expressed fully in her writing, where they appear not odd, but important, where they can touch others, like Laura Brown.

Mrs. Dalloway's ambivalent longing for escape obviously touches a chord in Laura Brown. She is not an artist, as far as we know, but clearly experiences the same confinement in the world she inhabits. She could echo Virginia Wolf's words, "My life has been stolen from me. ... I'm living a life I have no wish to live." On that day, she is living a life chosen for her by her husband, who explains to their son at the dinner table about the girl he thought about while he was in the South Pacific, "the sort of girl you see mostly sitting on her own. ... I used to think about bringing her to a house, to a life, pretty much like this. And with the thought of the happiness, the thought of this woman, the thought of this life, that's what kept me going. I had an idea of our happiness." Towards the end of the film, we learn that Laura left her family, on another day, and explains it. "There are times when you don't belong, and you think you're going to kill yourself. ... It would be wonderful to sense you regretted it. It would be easy. But what does it mean? What does it mean to regret when I had no choice? It's what you can bear. ... It was death. I chose life."

There are hints that the confinement is related to a third theme, homosexuality. We see the day in 2001 New York through the perspective of a homosexual community. Clarissa has been living with her partner, Sally, for ten years. We meet Richard's former long time lover, Louis Waters, and are probably to presume that Richard's AIDS is the result of homosexuality. Homosexuality is expressed fleetingly in Virginia Wolf and Laura Brown. At the end of her sister's visit, Virginia hugs her sister, Vanessa, and then kisses her with feeling on the lips. Nessa appears to be upset, although we are not told how. This is repeated with Laura. She has a visit from her friend, Kitty, who is to go into the hospital for exploratory surgery of a mass in her uterus. Kitty becomes tearful and Laura comforts her, then kisses her full on the lips. I have been told (no written source) that the director, Stephen Daldry, has said he put these passionate kisses into the script (along with one other towards the end in which Clarissa kisses her lover, Sally, in the same way) because he thought they fit, with no stated purpose. However included, they become an important part of the film, not easily ignored. They suggest a passion that overcomes convention and, in Laura's case, an underlying unfulfilled homosexual passion that is buried in her straight, exaggeratedly ordinary life.

But The Hours transcends this one particular form of entrapment. Clearly, this is a film that offers a channel of expression for those who ache, perhaps without having been aware of it, for something beyond the daily routines of modern life, for those who feel stifled in their role and place in time even if they find it satisfying, those who feel that somewhere there has been something more fulfilling, something lost, possibly to be regained.

Loss is implicit in the central themes of the story. Suicide is an escape and escape is freeing; but both also confront us with painful separation. The film alludes to fears of death and separation when Laura's friend, Kitty, tells her about the tumor in her uterus, alluding to both fears of death and fears that she will never be able to bear a child. We touch upon death in a bittersweet way in the fall of the sparrow (ornithologists forgive me if my literary allusions have gotten me to the wrong bird) lying peacefully on it's bed of leaves. Virginia Wolf's suicide note alludes to that separation even as she explains the need for it. "To look life in the face, always to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it, to love it for what it is, and then to put it away. Leonard, always the years between us, always the years, always the love, always the hours." Laura Brown has also ultimately found that she had to leave those who loved her. She expresses it as survivor guilt after the last of them, her son, Richard, has died. "It's a terrible thing, Miss Vaughan, to outlive your whole family. ... Obviously, you feel unworthy. It gives you feelings of unworthiness, that you survived and they didn't."

Although the film appears to focus on those who leave their loved ones behind, it also shows us the desperation of those who are left. We see it earliest when Virginia Wolf's husband, Leonard, panics, first in the opening scene when he sees her suicide note in 1941 and a little later in the film when he discovers that she has suddenly left the house in the middle of the day in 1923. He races after her, fear evident on his face, and ultimately confronts her angrily at the railroad station. We experience it late in the film when Clarissa Vaughan watches helplessly as her friend, Richard, dives out the window, having just expressed his love for her.

We sense it in Clarissa's daughter, Julia, who hints at being jealous of her mother's attachment to her lover and fears being seen as a burden or an afterthought. We momentarily share a moment in which they are together, mother and daughter, lying on the bed as Clarissa shares the shining memory of her life, the bond broken by the ring of the doorbell. That pain of separation from her own mother explains a warm hug she gives to Richard's mother, whom she meets after his death.

We even get a sense of that longing for union from the maternal side, through Laura Brown's friend, Kitty, childless, presumably because of her uterine tumor, who tells Laura how much she envies her her ability to have children, and even through the older Laura, seen in 2001, who tells Clarissa that she envies her for both having "so wanted a child" and been able to gratify the wish.

We experience the pain of loss and separation most poignantly through the eyes of Laura Brown's little boy. We see Laura fill her purse with pill bottles from her medicine cabinet along with her copy of Mrs. Dalloway. She takes her son, Richie, to the babysitter so that she can go on her errands.

But the boy protests, and protests with intensity. We see him screaming at the separation, pulling himself from the babysitter to chase after his mother's car as she drives off. This is one of the beauties of film and of fiction. We might easily detach ourselves from the separation pains of a four or five year old boy being taken to the baby sitter. We could look at it clinically.

But the film creates an ambiguity that allows us to empathize fully with the boy's fears and pain. We know that his mother is not just leaving him for a couple of hours with the baby sitter. She intends to kill herself. From what he ostensibly knows, this is only a fantasy on his part; but, we suspect that he suspects the truth.
We have seen that Laura is very gentle with her son, keeping close to him, sharing her whole day with him, calling him pet names, like "Bug". She appears to be much closer to him than to her husband, and on her return from her aborted suicide attempt, she tells him, "You're my guy."
Yet, we know that she intends to kill herself, abandoning him and killing his soon to be baby sister. Richie has also seen her passionately kiss her friend Kitty as he sat there, a primal scene of unknown effect upon him. Through Richie, we can feel a painfully intense attachment and fear of separation.

The Hours has an important secret, trick if you will. We see little Richie screaming for his mother in 1951 and then fade to her black and white wedding picture being touched by Richard, the dying poet, in 2001. Little Richie is the poet, Richard Brown, abandoned after his sister's birth by the loving mother who shared so much with him, who called him "My guy", an abandonment he had anticipated on that day in 1951.

This turns the entire film on its head. Now, we can experience these three days not through the eyes of the women, but through the eyes of Richard, the little boy who became a famous poet and a tortured dying man. We can suddenly experience this film as a story of a young boy holding desperately to his beloved and hated mother. Throughout the film, he calls Clarissa "Mrs. Dalloway." We see that it is not a coincidence, that he was aware of the book that his mother was reading and of its significance for her. We more fully understand his suicide as he turns, himself, and dives out of his
window with Clarissa watching. There is an element of revenge for his mother's abandonment as well as an escape from his pain of eternal separation.

Through little Richie's screams, we reexperience being torn from our mother, however or whenever we first experienced it. This is what is felt as so unbearable; a sense, not even a memory, of having had something wonderful once and lost it. It is a feeling evoked by this film that our lives are a trap, keeping us from what we most desire.
The film gives us a glimmer of that fantasied bliss. Clarissa describes her remembered moment of happiness. "I remember one morning, getting up at dawn. There was such a sense of possibility. You know that feeling? And I remember thinking to myself, 'so this is the beginning of happiness. This is where it starts, and of course there'll always be more.' It never occurred to me, it wasn't the beginning, it was happiness, the moment right then."

Richard recalls it as well, sharing the moment with her, just before he plunges to his death. "Like that morning when you walked out of that old house and you were 18 and maybe I was 19. I was 19 years old and I'd never seen anything so beautiful. You, coming out of a glass door in the early morning still sleepy. Isn't it strange, the most ordinary morning in anybody's life. I'm afraid I can't make it to the party, Clarissa. ... You've been so good to me, Mrs. Dalloway. I love you. I don't think two people could've been happier than we've been."
What does it mean when we long for a return to some particular moment of happiness, a screen memory seemingly emblazoned with light? In this context, it suggests a fantasy of return to a blissful reunion with mother, to that moment (surely not one moment, but a series of moments coalesced into a platonic ideal of happiness) which we seek over and over, a moment we cannot return to that leaves us feeling locked in our world of detail.

A moment sought in a passionate kiss on the lips, or a descent into the water. When Laura contemplates suicide, she sleeps and dreams that the room is filling with water. She touches her belly, evoking for me an identification with the baby in her womb. She is thinking of her own unborn child that she will not kill while imagining that she is reentering the watery womb. The film ends with Virginia Wolf's suicide. We see her methodically walk into the river about to drift beneath the surface where in the film's opening, she half floats, half sinks under the river, in the quiet that may also evoke fantasies of the womb. Her words that accompany her descent into the water complete the fantasy of reunion: "... Always the years between us, always the years, always the love, always the hours."

In the last issue of this Bulletin, I wrote about the Chinese film, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. That film ends with a teenage girl
diving off a high mountain into the cloud filled valley below. Her dive into the abyss was based on a legend that having the faith to make such a flight would grant her wish to be returned to her moment of greatest happiness with her lover.

In these films, suicide, death, is both an escape and a return. Whether we see The Hours as depressing, as simply well done or as liberating a deep hidden pain may depend on how we have each dealt with the loss of the loving bond with our mother at the moment we view the film. The Hours has the potential to evoke in us a particular pain, a frustration at the confinement and lack in our lives. It reminds
us of something wonderful that has been lost and that we long to regain; and, through death it offers both that terrible loss and the fantasy of reunion.