Reader's Request Week: The Hours (2002)

1 year ago

Reader’s Request Week: The Hours (2002)

TO LOOK LIFE IN THE FACE AND TO KNOW IT FOR WHAT IT IS

by Erica U.

Halfway through The Hours, I scrawl this irritated thought on a motel receipt:

When women want a bigger life, find themselves rising under an appetite that cannot be ignored or tricked, they are ingrates. They are difficult. The same quality earns men titles and cross continental monuments. Why is dissatisfaction a mark of drive and innovation in a man but a character flaw in a woman?

By the end I am unsure of my knee-jerk diagnosis and subdued. Is it relatable dissatisfaction in these women? Is it the demon of a restless mind, is it depression, is it merely the state of womanhood for a certain kind?

It’s an intimidating thing to write about such a literary film. A foreward seems necessary to assure you that I understand its roots in Mrs. Dalloway and that work’s commentary on grand subjects like homosexuality and mental health and its care. And surely someone could recognize their reappearances here and pontificate upon them.

But these are not the themes that send me to a long hot shower after finishing the movie, staring at the white back wall of a narrow stall and thinking. They are the not the thoughts that could make a certain kind of woman fall away from her companion and the day before her and into that old remote quiet, delivered by wordless recognition.

The Hours is both hard to watch and a relief that heats you. It is proof that maybe it is not just you, maybe it could be all these women, across these years, sewn together by those very hours that won’t let us be.

Like the Virginia Woolf novel that inspired the Michael Cunningham novel upon which the movie is based (are you following?) The Hours tracks a single day in the life of three different characters – this time separated not by class but by eras.

Early 20^th century Virginia Woolf is caged miserably in a suburb of her longed-for London, by her husband’s terrified fretting over her sanity and her doctors’ trite prescription for the countryside. The unhappy failure at two suicide ventures, Woolf lives – just barely – and writes and waits in a house by the woods for life to begin. Or end.

Nicole Kidman’s Virginia Woolf, for my money, is wonderful. Some critics will tell you she is flittering, unbelievably helpless, flaccid. But that is not what comes through to me. I see the strongest of women standing at the edge of this unbearable sadness we know. And if you have ever walked up to this echoing maw, toes at its edge and cried for it all and none of it, you know her. If you’ve ever left your body and returned here briefly, despite your good life, and wondered how everyone else stays away and does not stare off here for miles, she is your kind of woman.

Equally trapped but seemingly less cunning, Post World War II Laura (Julianne Moore) is tending to her young son in the final months of her second pregnancy. We meet her planning a small birthday celebration for her preternaturally happy husband. Quiet housewife Laura stares at her son Richie like an enemy, considers him from across that flecked Formica table top in a silent southern California rambler. Perfectly groomed and stoic Laura kisses her lovely neighbor woman unexpectedly and reads Mrs. Dalloway and contemplates her own life and death with a vital unhappiness so heavy it seems it might drown her regardless of her acquiescence.

Modern day Clarissa (Meryl Streep) is preparing with her partner Sally for a grand dinner party in honor of her dying former lover Richard. And we are smart enough to understand that this Clarissa is a sort of alternate-universe Mrs. Dalloway. One who loved and lost Richard and ended up with Sally and a sperm donor baby and still, still shadow boxes the questionable choices and the losses and the potential lives we will all bury along the way to here. Clarissa carries a tin pail full of flowers down the street – professionally successful enough to consider the color but not the price – and tilts a porcelain smile against her face. Teetering but covering the wailing inside until it falls in the kitchen with near strangers and drags her down to her heels, to cold ceramic floors and despair. Poised until she lies beside her university student daughter and talks of how it felt once to identify the beginning of happiness with such a thrill of discovery. And later – so so much later – to realize it wasn’t the start, it was happiness.

Someone passed through the room halfway through my viewing and later asked, with sensible trepidation but genuine curiosity: Why is Laura so sad?

And all I could do was sigh. Not condescendingly at all. But, just as in, how could I even ever begin to tell you why any of them are so heartbroken? And isn’t that the point? This unthinkable dissatisfaction. This ungrateful sadness.

Ostensibly, we’re meant to see Laura with everything a woman like her should want. With the life that someone else lifted her up and placed her into - a lucky figurine in a dollhouse. But the audience this film is really meant to reach assumes Laura is lying in bed at night wondering who ever said she needed to be saved. And ironically, needing nothing more now than salvation. Eventually she’ll find it by fleeing. Packing her bags in the morning light in the room next to her infant daughter and sleeping son and husband maybe smiling at his orderly flock of pressed business shirts. And then taking a bus to a new city, to a job, to a life that isn’t two sizes too small. So how did that frail high school Laura age into a monster? Did this life happen to her because women had less ability to choose an individualized path back then? Or was she simply negligent in her own best interest?

And isn’t this possible just as much 60 years hence as it was then and maybe it has nothing to do with culture or the times or feminism at all.

Maybe her misery and resultant crime has to do with the weakness of civilized humanity, acquiescing to the ageless current. Complying because it would be so much harder to swim against it in a direction we can’t understand – whether that is living alone and choosing not to rebel against the mind that keeps us tormentedly thinking and reading and writing. Or embracing charmed brevity with 100 instead of one constant your parents and boss would prefer. Or loving a woman instead of a man. Or the wrong man. Or two children instead of a man at all.

The river runs down stream because it always has and always will, maybe. And along it, the masses throw each other bon voyage parties and we help each other down in to boats, lined with accoutrements for the trip and we will only stop for babies and anniversary celebrations and new homes and maybe promotions if there is room beside us after all the other luggage is added. So we line up, and advance, pulled by the force of the one before us and the one before her.

Because how much harder would it be to turn and walk away from what is bequeathed to us all before we can ever be sure if it suits us. Or not.

So maybe we play along and we don’t understand for all those hours and hours that this is our life. This is the span and depth and richness of our entire life. This is the sustenance and the taste, the feel of 16 hours and how they roll over on to themselves, barely changing. These are the expectations that weigh on you and what you are allowed to expect in return. This is what is reasonable. That part is important to understand. This is how grateful you must be for your lovely country home and your faithful partner and your son. These are the miles you are allowed to wander. And the conversations you may have and the time that will be left for just you. The safe confines of time like a leash that unravels no further than you are permitted to travel. This is what you are allowed to want.

Virginia is on that boat, traveling with the current but panicked. A husband she loves well enough beside her but no children. No disposition for children. Stuck halfway now and horrified at all the other lives being left behind on the banks, mile by mile. And you can understand this kind of woman, who presses her face up to the dead feathers of a dead dead bird and wears an ache on her face for it. For herself.

And just writing this feels like drowning because it is so hard now to recognize the joy in what feels predestined. From here, it feels like stones added to Virginia’s pockets…even as I understand that if this is what you are meant for, and genuinely want, these partners and children are hallowed and maybe enough. Surely they can be enough?

But this is not a movie about those women. This is a movie about how women are tangled – by our families, by our lovers, by our therapists, by our own galloping, greedy want, by possibility. Doomed by all the things meant to save us.

You watch The Hours and if you are a woman even a little like this, still you understand that dissatisfaction is a sort of flaw. Of course it is. What else would you call a state that drives a woman to walk out on her children, even if they were the children she never wanted to have? And later, Laura calmly admits she probably ought to regret this choice but how can she?

I have said lines close to this myself.

How can you regret leaving where you never belonged when the resulting freedom made your whole life? How can you regret that independence that yes, was every single thing you thought it might be despite its collateral cost and its spiny underbelly, drawing blood on your hand every time you catch it.

Maybe we leave, maybe we die, maybe we stay and fake it. Maybe we find a way to make it real.

And still, I wonder if any of those decisions account for the space in the hours and years your mind will find regardless. Remember when Virginia Woolf’s sister comments, so condescendingly, to her children “Your aunt is a lucky woman. She has two lives – the one she lives and the one she is writing.” Is it luck or is that the curse of us all? Not us all. Not us all. I watch The Hours and I suspect it is made for, is made of, a certain kind of woman. The kind who doesn’t know how to fill just one life. The kind that carries a trail of memories and possibilities beneath her skirts and unravels and restitches them, feels the purls in the dark and wonders at them.

Take Clarissa and her one summer with Richard. It must have been 25 years ago, mustn’t it have? And all those seasons later, she is ten years now with Sally and we can feel the heavy consecration with which Sally loves Clarissa and it isn’t quite enough. And you start to fear that the love we feel for those who love us more will never ever be enough to satisfy. Might be the end of us. Clarissa can’t let the wrong love be. Returns to that summer every morning, leaving Sally and nursing Richard in his illness in his age in the decimation of his ego. Despite his furious despair at having become just This. At his own loss, at the raging tragedy of the one he left Clarissa for leaving him to tend to his own dissatisfaction.

Toward the end of the story, we learn that Richard is Laura’s young son back in that 1950’s day. The boy with the saddest eyes in the whole world, who watched his mother pirouette around her tiny stage, looking for a way to continue the show, looking for a stage hand’s secret exit. So maybe it is a birthright, not a trait of gender. Have we all got one parent who wanted to be elsewhere or am I counting Richard and me and rounding it up to the whole world? Perhaps.

What else could Richard be but uneasy. Dissatisfied and removed from the ones who wanted him and were guaranteed to stay. Pulled to the ones who would leave. To the things that will fade too quickly from gold to green to gone. And it goes on and on and on.

So is this all a simple set of circumstances or inherent, you wonder again?

Is it a psychological inheritance? Or heartbreak fallout or modern greed for life?

Is the cure a matter of choosing a different life – Laura leaving for a librarian post in some Canadian institution. Virginia’s momentary conviction that it was London, that “jolt of the Capitol” that would be her purpose, her salvation. Clarissa’s decision to finally live without Richard (though you might observe she has no other choice after his theatrical suicide) and be grateful for and committed to her life with Sally.

Whose antidote was right? Laura who reinvented or Clarissa who rediscovers satisfaction or Virginia who finally resigns. Virginia, who chooses to let this life, these brief years and hours, be enough?

Of course the optimist and the stubborn drifter in me screams Laura or at least Clarissa. Of course there is more, is another option, is nothing but miles and time and new lands in which to find ourselves. Literally, in which to find ourselves and rejoice in that territory and snub the sponsoring monarchy and keep it for our own.

But Virginia, Virginia. What did you suspect? Did you finally understand that It was in us, this dissatisfaction, this colossal weight of knowledge that our small and constant happiness would never be enough? That this world cannot be enough.

Hold these women up, flanking each other in their cross century misery and I’ll tell you what they have in common: The hours they spend in their heads. Tell me a way to live outside of our minds, at least some of the time, and perhaps you’ll have found a way to be satisfied. Because I wonder whether our thoughts ever constructed a single stable happiness. What could these hours of portent analysis and memory grow in us but dissatisfaction?

And yet I wonder at how you could ever choose to live without this mental agitation because what else would there be at midnight? At the end of all the hours.

Like you Virginia, we were made to sit by windows in all these rooms of our own and write. And maybe there is someone asleep in the next room and we are writing around them. Over them. Into some life bigger than them. Or maybe this house is vacant of a lover and we write cut free from a knowing reader, weaving without guilt into a story about what they said on that balcony before they kissed the side of our neck which maybe seemed like a promise. The night they declined exclusivity or we did – the night one of us said “But what if the woman of my dreams sits down beside me?” Or “I don’t know how to be as big as you deserve right now. I don’t have it in me.” And like Laura and Clarissa and Virginia, you’ll learn to keep more and more of your real self to yourself. Trained or by instinct, you’ll know that mostly this is all for us. Up to us.

And you’ll think and write your way right past those men and women back to trips alone and coffee shops on evenings meant for smoking zealously and the India you’ve yet to see and every idea for which there simply isn’t time.

You could write all night because these thoughts kept in could ruin you. You could think and write all day and choose a different sort of life several times over because to not do so would be death already. Because you understand: Respecting the dissatisfaction and the life it spurs and this studio in your mind is its own sort of happiness.

And these are the sorts of women for which the hours matter.