Never Let Me Go (2010) leaves one with the chilling wonder of love’s pursuit, amidst the inevitable and sterile unfolding of what your living has been made out to be. It estranges you from the idea of hope — is it worth having at all?. This reflection is part of the Revisiting Cinema collection and looks back at the film Never Let Me Go. You can watch the film here on Amazon Prime Video.
This post is about the movie Never Let Me Go, directed by Mark Romanek. Starring Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield, and Keira Knightley.
We All Complete
A Reflection on The Desperation of Hope Among Despair
There were days when merely existing in of itself was the presiding force to live, with discovery serving as the venturing glance to move forward towards meaning. To satisfy your pressing curiosity you ask questions with answers readily presented. Yet you resign to a half truth akin to desire and the undesired. In the end you are left with choices and the lack thereof. A being made whole or a shell of what could have been.
How are you to live when the end was made immediately true when beginning?
What We Are Told When Untold
As a child you’re like a sponge. Externally met with information in which you give credence through the act of its use. Truths are warped by perception, in which comes a disingenuous presentation of a larger context. The capacity to discern partially prevails on the account of time, and that of something more.
In receipt of what is revealed, a genuine truth can be a liberation or the pathway to pain all the same. What you do with the information stands as a testament to the person you were and have yet to become.
What is found at the other end of such experiences; those that alter the course of our lives? Might it be healing or pain? Courage or the lack thereof? It is the unbelief that often we fall victim to; skepticism conforms to what is and you make due an unsolicited new norm. At times there are glimpses of what could have been. Yet what is, remains in sight watching afar, reminding you that hope is to remain within the abyss it was thrown into long ago.
In Search of Your Original
So you search for answers to your lingering questions, in aim to be made anew by understanding what had been. You confide with that, that has made you all that you are and while its pain does not escape you, neither does it hinder the delight of the ventures to come. As through the looking glass, either triumph or its antithesis awaits.
In the face of disappointment, what truly matters awakens from what has already been known. Some may first meet their own needs, in effort to ease the pain that follows, even at the expense of those you hold dear. Whereas others seek the unbridled peace of isolation. The consequence is not the relief you aimed for, but your cross to bear.
In time you grow accustomed to what you set in motion long ago. Believing what was, may never come to be again. Which, ironically then, all you wanted to do was be exactly where you are now. This weight takes its effect in full, you drag all the more. Reminiscing now turns the past to a pleasant escape, and rekindling what lived is an embraced excitement in the present.
Completion
We are the bi-product of our choices, and choices are all you have left to think about in the end. As the past has all but gone, all that can be now is the effort to bring forth a better tomorrow. Nuzzle what you had always felt to be right and true. The time spent living in truth matters now more than ever. You may not know how long that lasts with untold truths watching from afar, waving its terrible rage with no deferral.
Take the boy who was last to be picked, and the first to be picked on. With the lack of autonomy, he’s grounded by love, surrendering to what he never called upon but longed for all the same. In the end he finds himself howling to the wind yet again when life was almost all he had wished it to be.
What do you have to show for in living, when life unveils suffering to be both experienced and inescapable? How do you live when the course of your life seemingly has paved its way?
To The Believer
“Remember him—before the silver cord is severed, and the golden bowl is broken; before the pitcher is shattered at the spring, and the wheel broken at the well, and the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.”
Ecclesiastes 12:6-7
Further Reflections
How Beale Street Could Talk and The Passage of Love
An awakening to a social world that aims to cage a love in earnest.
Train Dreams: A Faint Understanding
A quietly somber and solemn piece about the world, our place in it, and the echoes of the experience onward.
Avatar Way of Water: Nothing Is Lost
A story that takes heart in blissful stillness in what was, and the awakening in knowing where you now stand.
Credit: Select script and imagery used in this post are from Never Let Me Go (© Fox Searchlight Pictures). Included for reflective commentary and thematic analysis.
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This post was all about the movie Never Let Me Go.
