Light of My Life (Casey Affleck, USA, 2019)

To those who expect that a movie that tells a story that is set in a post-apocalyptic world - the apocalyps being caused by nuclear warfare, alien invasion or a lethal virus, as in this film - is almost by definition a fast-paced, special effects laden action movie the very first scene of Casey Affleck's film LIGHT OF MY LIFE (USA, 2019) will give sufficient cause to leave the cinema. Probably more than any other film has ever done before, the opening scene of this movie offers the spectator an explicit foreboding of what is to come and what is and what is not to be expected. In a position that remains unchanged for about twelve minutes, the camera offers a perpendicular view on a father (Casey Affleck) and his seven year old daughter Rag (Anna Pniowsky) who lie closely together in a sleeping bag, while the father, lit by just a small flashlight, tells his daugher a long and convoluted story that is loosely inspired by the biblical story of Noach's arch (one of the oldest apocalyps sagas).  This scene states in a clear and unambiguous way that the film that you're going to watch will not be your typical apocalyps movie, but something completely different.

More than in most classical Hollywood movies, the first scene  already contains all the main elements that will be elaborated in the remainder of the film. As Rag asks her dad if it isn't very unlikely that after the apocalyptic flooding in Noach's story only two specimen of each species survived, she not only questions the premise of the story he is telling her, but also the very premise of the movie itself. Indeed, it is quite unlikely that a rapacious virus would only kill females and all females on earth on top of that. As dad (who remains nameless throughout the movie) explains that this is possible because Noach's arch is in the end just a story, he also hints the spectator that since this movie is also 'just a story', its premise does not necessarily have to be likely. And as he also explains to Rag that stories are important, because they bring people together, expand their world, and are fun to tell or to listen to, it becomes clear that the film is not only a story itself, but that it will also offer reflexions on the functions of stories, and, perhaps even more importantly, on the very stuff stories are made of: language.

As in this opening scene, (spoken) language is the only medium of communication used in the rest of the film: there are no telephones, no laptops, no internet, or other electronic or digital devices in this story world, although going by the cars and the scarse images of a town Dad and Rag visit to do some shopping, this world must be more or less contemporaneous to the actual one. It is through language that Dad teaches Rag, indeed, language (as he makes her spell out a number of 'difficult words' during one of their first trips in the woods); through language Dad gives Rag instructions, and scolds her if she doesn't follow those; through language he transmits knowledge to her as he explains to her where babies come from and how they are made; through language he tries to describe her mother to her; through language he misleads the few other men they encounter about Rag's gender; and it is through language that conceptual differences as those between morality and ethics - another major theme of the film - can be made in the first place (and  language allows for more subtle and nuanced differences than the rigid binary yes/no options of the digital programming languages, since, as the film will later on demonstrate, the answers to ethical questions can not simply be logically derived from moral principles). It is, in short, through language that knowledge, stories and memories are transmitted from generation to generation, and it is through - or, as Lacanians would say, 'into' - the symbolic order of language that children become integrated into the chain of generations. It is by assuming the word 'love adventure' that according to Dad Rag's mother (Elisabeth Moss) used to turn all adventures and misadventures into joyful and shared experience, that Rag in the very last image of the picture takes over her mother's position. And indeed, as he arrives at this grandparent's home and is welcomed by three men who have moved into - or, in more contemporary parlance, 'squatted' - this house four years ago when they found it abandoned and empty, it turns out that these men literally live by the Word: it is the Word of the Lord that makes them hospitable, supportive and protective.

In many, if not all respects, LIGHT OF MY LIFE  opens up towards a past that most future oriented and technology based science fiction and apocalyps movies seem to want to 'overwrite' and erase. With its absence of modern electronic and digital communication media and it's use of rather primitive 'analogue' techniques such as the alarm system made of tin cans that Dad 'installs' around their tent or the houses they temporarily stay in, and it's focus on traditional forms of story telling and it's references to biblical stories, this film is an plea for the revaluation and redemption of ancient and fundamental, if not archaic building blocks of human civilisation and society. This goes for the style of the film as well: long uninterrupted shots that make the intimate relationship between Dad and daughter almost palpable, wide shots that give ample space to the landscapes they pass through, an almost Hitchcockian close focus on the perspectives of Dad and Rag which makes the spectator share the uncertainties and fears of these protagonists, all these elements of style and content make LIGHT OF MY LIFE  the opposite of the action and special effects laden blockbuster and super hero movies that Hollywood  has been spawning over the last three decades.

The film is contemplative, rather than action oriented, reflexive more than narrative (the story itself being very simple and meager), philosophical and questioning, rather than practical and solution oriented (as most classical and modern Hollywood movies are), dialogic rather than monologic, because it allows the spectator the time and space to reflect on what happens on the screen and therefore, paradoxically, more 'interactive' than many hi-tech modern scifi or super hero movie. Even when, at the end of the film, Dad gets engaged in a fight with three intruders of his grandparents' home who had already killed Tom, the man of the Word and his companians, a large part of this violent altercation is shot from one point of view, but, more importantly, this scene serves to demonstrate the issue of morality and ethics raised in the very beginning of the film. Although Dad has earlier in the film stated that he would not harm people - men, in this context - who might assail him, however mad he may be, he abandons this moral principle for the ethically justified sake of the life of his daughter. The function of this most violent action scene of the film, then, is to drive this philosophical point home.

However, in all its archaism and restoration of some of the arch-values and practices of mankind, there is certainly one major question to be raised. As already said, the premise of the film - only and all women have been killed by a mysterious virus - may seem unlikely and only justified by the fictional nature of the movie, but it certainly allows to picture a world from which women are absent and where men, because they are feeling 'lonely, sad, and scared' as Dad explains to Rag, become aggressive. Even the Word of the Lord - which is, after all, the Word of a Man - does not suffice to compensate for the absence of women and to rain in the aggressive urges of men, as the cruel murder of the faithful Tom and his companians shows. As was already presaged in one of the stories Dad told Rag, in which it was not the smart male fox but his female partner that eventually saved the day (without getting the credits for it, though), in what seems to be 'a man's world' (to quote James Brown) it are the women who bind communities by raining in the aggressive urges of men and taking care of their own and other people's needs. 

Without women, a society falls apart and into a Hobbesian natural state of 'war of every man against every man'. In the film, it is Rag who eventually saves the day by shooting down the intruder who is on the brink of killing her father, and because by saving her father she also at the same time goes his rules because earlier he explicity prohibited her to touch Tom's gun -thus offering another example of the difference between morality and ethics - this scene is also a re-enactment of an archaic theme: Rag, who also wounds her father, metonymically 'kills' him and thus enters the symbolic order. And, as already described above, by assuming the word 'love adventure' from her mother, she takes (symbolically) her place. Contrary to Freudian or Lacanian theory, then, it is not men, but women who are the guarantees of law and order, and of civil society in general. And since Rag stops the violence by using violence herself, this seems to suggest that the era of male dominance is definitely over: Rag exemplifies the transformation of women from the weak, vulnerable - and virgin - creatures that need to be protected by men into the stronger and smarter personalities that will turn the adventures and misadventures of man-kind into 'love adventures', thus preventing men to fall back into the Hobbesian state of nature.

Although this might seem an emancipatory view on and acknowledgment of the role of women of society, one still wonders if this also rather archaic typology of women as well as of men, corresponds to the realities of today's societies. Of course, as is made abundatly clear in the film, fictional stories are at liberty to depict societies in any way they deem fit and that does not have to have any connection to the 'real' world at all. However, the film brings too many cultural, biblical, philosophical and - yes - societal issues into play to plausibly maintain that there is no relationship at all. And at some point in the film it seems as if the maker is very much aware of the unease that the depiction of a close and intimate relationship between a father and a daughter may raise in contemporary culture. When Dad and Rag are lying on their sleeping bag in their tent, Dad says to Rag that he likes very much being with her. And Rag responds: "Me too". By inverting the meaning these two words nowadays have in the public debate, the movie may not only pre-emptively ward off possible criticism, but may also very well, al be it covertly, take a position in that debate. And hasn't Affleck been sued twice for alleged sexual harassment (both cases were settled out of court)? The film certainly still leaves a lot to think about.

All in all  LIGHT OF MY LIFE  turns out to be a very ambiguous movie but its ambiguities and ambivalences are consistent with the in-between world the movie depicts. The story world of LIGHT OF MY LIFE is caught - and maybe even trapped - in a state in which  ancient and archaic values have been submerged by the dust of history, as is demonstrated quite literally by the family pictures Dad and Rag find in their temporary home and that show already yellowed images of the classical family that once lived there and never will return (Rag finds the corpses of the mother and daughter in the barn). But it is a world in which a future is glooming in phantasies about technologies in which science and technology replace humans in even the ultimate act of love: the act of procreation, as in the words of the store keeper from whom Dad and Rag receive their supplies and who says that babies are being engendered in laboratories in China and California (and it is hard not to see a clear reference to Silicon Valley in this premonition). And here the film most certainly touches upon a much discussed paradox of contemporary culture and society: will the wonders of science and technology that are promised to take over many if not all of human activities not at the same time undo those activities and efforts from what makes them most human: their affective, binding, and communicative dimensions and turn mankind - and that word seems to be most appropriate in this context - into lonely, sad, scared and ultimately aggressive creatures? Or will there be eventually a light in our lives?