Euphemism and Responsibility

Ratcatcher (Lynne Ramsey), In Defence of Lost Causes (Slavoj Žižek), The Gift of Death (Jacques Derrida) 

I have been thinking about the ethics of euphemism. Or euphemism as ethics.

According to the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, (in his 2008 book In Defence of Lost Causes) civility in speech is a strategy that keeps the internal life of other human beings off limits. As such, it defies the language of fundamentalism. What is more conceited than one who speaks the truth? Who is more dangerous than the fanatic?

In contrast, what is more welcome than the semantic and logical breathing space opened up by indirect speech, allusion, euphemism? 

Sometimes the truth is too much to bear and repeating its mantra increases the weight. Literalness, plain speaking, telling it like it is; sometimes this is nothing more than suffocation.

So tonight I’m watching a film about the death of children: Ratcatcher (1999), directed by Lynne Ramsey.

This film's civility, its euphemistic power comes from two sources: on the one hand, its technical strengths (photography, montage and music) and on the other, the characterisation of the main protagonist.

Its photography is realistic to a point that avoids any hint of trendiness. It never looks retro or stumbles into cheap pastiche of the colours, fashions and shadows of early 1970s working class Britain.

The montage is seamless and varied. For example, Ramsey’s constant use of windows as framing devices in key scenes is impressive.

In the opening scene, James, the early teenage protagonist is wrapping himself inside a net curtain, a noose/shroud metaphor that points to the deaths that will take place in the story.

 

The window – framed view from inside a newly-built council house looking out onto a wheat field appears at different points in the film as a contrasting metaphor: that of the unrealised utopian escape from the ugliness of life in the Glasgow tenements. 

The music is restrained and, while the film uses contemporaneous pop music it is subordinated to the needs of the plot. Ratcatcher never slips into that stupid music video mode that characterises some films about the 1960s and 70s.

The story of the film is bleak. There is no civility, no euphemism deployed.  Two children die. At the beginning, James and a friend, Ryan are playing in a dirty, disused canal in the Glasgow slums. James pushes Ryan and runs away. Ryan drowns and James has to live with the guilt through the film.

At the end of the film, James, too drowns. Having been rejected by his drunken, petty father and witnessing the rape/sexual abuse of his girlfriend, Margaret Anne, he commits suicide.

The characterisation of James counteracts the ugliness of the plot. 

He is a shown to be a sensitive boy. He sees a group of bullies/rapists (the casualness of their violence and the director’s euphemistic representation of their sexual violence doesn’t and shouldn’t change the facts of what they do) but he does not imitate them. The gang invite him to have sex with a girl (Margaret Anne) whose glasses they’d thrown into the canal and who they’d coerced into having sex with them but he just lies down with her. In another scene he goes to her house to clean her hair of fleas and wash her. Later he goes to her, she asks if he loves her and he says that he does.

Compared with his inadequate/alcoholic father, James is really the only responsible man in the family. He treats his sisters and his mother with respect. Unlike his friend Kenny, whose respect for animals is no deeper than his RSPCA badge, James does not try to kill any of the army of rats infesting the slums during the waste collection strike. James is the only one who treats Margaret Anne with dignity.

In his book The Gift of Death Jacques Derrida traces (following the work of the Czech philosopher Jan Patocka) the development of just this phenomenon – responsibility. For Derrida, responsibility is irreducibly responsiveness towards others, a way of living such that the mystery of individual human beings is neither assumed nor erased. For Derrida and Potocka, responsibility is the result of two ‘conversions’: from the demonic or orgiastic into the Platonic and then, from the Platonic elevation of the Good to the Christian elevation of God as love.

The pagan mindset does not recognise the difference between human, animal and divine. There can be no respect or responsibility because other human beings are already known as such. The Platonic mindset is one that elevates the Good as knowable, graspable. This is not responsibility to others; rather it is responsibility to an ideal.

The Christian mindset is one that affirms that the good is the non-knowable absolute other of love. This ‘absolute other’ is, of course, God, but it is also the absolute 'other' of other people.

James does not seek to control, does not seek to know, does not use or abuse Margaret Anne. He is responsible towards her; he is loving towards her, asking for nothing, kind, patient.  James is an incarnation of Corinthians 13.  

Following Slavoj Žižek, James is also an incarnation of civility in speech. In his relationships with others he says very little.  His (lack of) speech is euphemistic in the literal sense of speech as the pure expression of happiness. Unlike his father, unlike the local bullies/rapists James’s speech  is responsible and loving.

Of course, he does not live in a world where this is reciprocated. After watching Margaret Anne being abused again he runs away in despair. Realising too, that his family’s dream of getting a new house from the council is fading away and having lost another friend (Kenny, who turns out not to have James’s fortitude and responsibility and who sides with the bullies) he jumps into the canal and drowns himself.

His suicide is juxtaposed with a fantasy scene of his family walking across the wheat field to their new home, an obvious metaphor of his sacrifice.