I recently watched the film The Remains Of The Day. Although my love for Hugh Grant served as my motivation to do so . It struck me as a possible film within which to explore our theme, conflict in context.
The Remains Of The Day follows Stevens, a devout Butler in a stately English home on a road trip across the english countryside. The film also follows a past narrative in which he recounts his days serving Lord Darlington. He considers these the best days of his life, which is reflective of his blind devotion to his duties.
As the film progresses, Stevens’ views shift from being strictly dutiful and respectful of his employer to being able to step back and consider the role of Lord Darlington, and how he fell prey to manipulation by the Third Reich. The Lord hosted international conferences, and convinced the British Government to negotiate an appeasement treaty in the German’s favour, which contributed to the outbreak of World War Two.
Stevens’ travels allow him to interact with people outside the manor who come from a different social class than the lords and servants he has surrounded himself with. Perhaps it is that Stevens is now finally exposed to the people who were affected by the Darlington’s actions. Or the physical distance from the estate, that allows for Stevens to finally outgrow his sense of subservience and to question rather than blindly follow the actions of his employer, and those in social class above him.
This film served as a reminder to me that many accounts of war and conflict are deeply affected by their context. Stevens’ role as a butler served to bar him from being able to question the changing political landscape. He was constricted by his inability to question his employer and upper social classes. I think that sitting through a two hour film, of which a predominant theme was Stevens’ outgrowing of such values. Even his acceptance and suggested regret that he had played a part in Lord Darlington’s actions through his blind subservience. Was important in highlighting how individuals’ positions and a multitude of variables such as social class, affect their views and experience of conflict. That it required such a journey, for Stevens’ to be able to reflect over a 20 year period and to realise his own biases and mistakes. Helped me to realise how hard it is to accept and understand one’s own biases, and how crucial it is that we factor these in when reading texts and accounts of war. After all, biases serve as context to conflict.
Interesting read-and ho doesn’t love Hugh Grant! Was wondering whether there is a suggestion that responsibility ought to be claimed despite circumstance of external control: with Stevenson mirroring those soldiers who commit horrendous acts compelled by their superiors. It got me thinking about the Milgram Experiment with people wanting to be absolved of responsibility by transferring it to their superiors. Here, with the social class themes, it might equally be relevant to those ordinary citizens facing conscription feeling like they have no other choice when faced with sanctions
I remember watching The Remains of the Days for an only slightly different reason. The movie is based on a book. It wasn’t Hugh Grant, but the novel’s author, Kazuo Ishiguro, who drew me to it. Ishiguro has a Nobel Prize in literature, and surely, I thought, this adaptation had to be better than the one they did for Never Let Me Go, another of his novels. Speaking of his Nobel Prize, Ishiguro spoke about The Remains of the Day in his Nobel lecture, and I thought the part of the transcript that I read quite relevant. (I didn’t read it all; it’s practically another novel.) He talks about focusing on how a person remembers something like a war, and over time begins to think broader, about groups and relationships rather than individuals. A particular quote seemed like it would have fit seamlessly with focus questions for some of our sessions: “Does a nation remember and forget in much the same way as an individual does?”
I said I came to watching the movie from reading Never Let Me Go. It is rather haunting, although only spoilerifically and tangentially relatedly to war. I can recommend it if you want to feel crushed, although the book and certainly not the movie.
Ishiguro’s Nobel lecture, which I started reading from the first mention of The Remains of the Day: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2017/ishiguro/25124-kazuo-ishiguro-nobel-lecture-2017/