'The World To Come' and The Limits of Imagination
'The World To Come' and The Limits of Imagination
On The Function of Tragedy
This is the Sunday edition of Paging Dr. Lesbian. Plus, this week’s dispatch from the lesbian internet. If you like this type of thing, subscribe!
Editors note: The following contains spoilers for the film The World To Come (2020), particularly as it concerns the general framework of the film’s ending.
In Mona Fastvold’s film The World To Come, the tragedy is the point. This is perhaps unsurprising, given its subject matter. The film takes place somewhere around the mid-1800s in the rural northeast and focuses on two groups of homesteaders there. Abigail (Katherine Waterston) is married to the sensible but dispassionate Dyer (Casey Affleck, who also produced the film), and is wallowing in grief after the recent loss of their daughter. Tallie (Vanessa Kirby), who is married to the hot-tempered Finney (Christopher Abbot), is Abigail’s neighbor. Upon their meeting, the women have an immediate connection, first becoming confidantes, and eventually, lovers. Their love story is sweet and tender – until it isn’t.
As you may have guessed, this film does not have a happy ending. I won’t go into too much detail here (though perhaps I have already said too much), but the film ends in death – murder, actually. Though it is not overly violent in the traditional sense of blood and guts, it is still shocking, and, obviously, deeply upsetting. Such violence, steeped as it is in homophobia and misogyny, is emotionally resonant, yes, but also cruel. (As Rachel Charlene Lewis notes, there are actually three deaths in the film, all of which are the deaths of women or girls). What does it tell us that we haven’t already imagined, or seen, or felt before? If such tragedy is indeed the point, then how does such a narrative serve us as viewers?
Writing around the 4th century BC, Aristotle was one of the most vocal defenders of poetic tragedy. He believed that tragedy, like all kinds of poetry, is a type of mimesis (or imitation), which depicts things not as they are, but as they could be. Unlike other types of art, however, Aristotle believed that tragedy serves a serious metaphysical purpose. In Poetics, he writes that “tragedy is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete and of a certain magnitude…through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.” What Aristotle is describing here is his theory of catharsis, which as he puts it is the necessary process of “purging” one’s emotions as an emotional response to the dramatic arts. He also called this process “tragic pleasure,” further highlighting the gratifying nature of such an effect. Importantly – and this was in direct response to Plato, who condemned poetry and believed it to have an immoralizing function – Aristotle argued thus that tragedy has a moral purpose, as well as an artistic one.
What I am struck by in Aristotle’s treatise on the topic is not only the connections he makes between tragedy and morality, but also his definition of mimesis – a depiction of an imaginary world that is still rooted in some essence of reality. Imagination, in fact, is one of the central themes of The World To Come. Actress Vanessa Kirby describes the film as being about “two women trying to find a way out of their pain.” They find it, at least temporarily, in each other, but they cannot reach beyond the small worlds in which they exist. Kirby suggests that one of the tragedies of the film is that these women have had their “imagination snuffed out.” They quite literally cannot see beyond the trees that surround their respective homes.
As such, the two women cannot imagine a world in which they could be together happily (or, perhaps Abigail can, but Tallie will not allow herself such dangerous hope), and perhaps neither can we. As far as our understanding of history goes, this is probably a factual limit – in many of the most material ways, Abigail and Tallie would quite literally not be able to survive without their husbands. The world to come, as it were, had not yet arrived. But can we imagine a different ending for them? The misery of their lives may be in a sense “truthful,” but what is the function of such bleakness? It is affective, yes, but is it instructive, or expansive? Does it tell us anything we don’t already know?
It’s not as if I am opposed to movies that come off as bleak or almost entirely without hope. Kitty Green’s utterly cheerless The Assistant comes to mind here as a film that skillfully wields such hopelessness to a horrifying effect. (You might even call it a horror movie where all the violence happens off-screen). Nor is it necessary that lesbian period pieces, or lesbian films in general, need to have happy endings. Here I am reminded of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which, though it technically ends in heartache, also highlights the joys of loving and being alive. And, no one dies. In The World To Come, such hope is quite decisively foreclosed. “Death,” as Audre Lorde once put it, “is the final silence.”
Despite its fatalistic ending, this notion of expanding one’s world is one of the film’s most poignant and stirring motifs, and it is in fact imbued in the film with a lot of beauty. As Katherine Waterston notes in an interview, Abigail begins using nautical language in her diary once she starts to fall in love with Tallie, perhaps as a means to extend her world beyond the one she knows. This is undoubtedly a beautiful notion, and such poetic details are arguably one of the most successful elements of the film. (The dialogue between the two women is often simultaneously halting and tender – Abigail whispers “you smell like a biscuit” after their first kiss – and the diary entries that structure the film have a similar poetic mundanity).
There are indeed many elements of beauty in the film, despite its bleak environment. Even when tragedy strikes, these sequences are on their own quite beautiful, in a deeply haunting way. (One scene sees Abigail witness someone burn to death in a house fire, and the horror and chaos the scene captures is cavernous as it fills the screen). The World To Come was beautifully shot on film which makes the (largely untouched) natural world the women inhabit feel all the more tactile and proximate. The wonderfully composed shots of Tallie’s striking red hair surrounded by a backdrop of wintry browns and greens are enough to make even the cynics among us take a steadying breath. What’s more, Waterston and Kirby have a penetrating chemistry, imbuing every scene with a sense of quiet urgency that is at once romantic and foreboding, anchoring the broader tone of the film.
What then, is the function of tragedy in this instance? As Aristotle argued, tragedy can engender a type of catharsis among viewers, productively excising us of bottled-up emotions. But what exactly needs to be excised here? Is it still cathartic if it simply repeats the harms we have already confronted? The killing of sapphic characters on television and in film has become so common it has now been categorized as a fictional trope, one with a long list of regrettable antecedents. And while The World To Come does give Abigail and Tallie some wonderful moments of joy and exploration, in the end, it is not enough. Perhaps it falls short because witnessing the events of the film is not really cathartic, or perhaps it is because we are no longer in need of such catharsis. Either way, there is a lack of imagination at play here that need not be reiterated. At a certain point, a “tragic pleasure” is just a tragedy.
Welcome to this week’s dispatch from the lesbian internet.
On Sunday evening, the Grammys took place. Surprisingly, this year’s awards were perhaps the only successful awards ceremony to take place in the last year. The Globes and the Emmys were both gloomy Zoom events, and the digital audience of the VMAs made them feel like a dystopian nightmare. Thankfully, the Grammys actually pulled off a physical event, with artists performing only to one another inside the Staples Center and the actual awards ceremony itself taking place outside. Fiona Apple won an award but was apparently asleep when it happened, Houston hottie Megan Thee Stallion won three awards and got to share the stage with Beyoncé, HAIM and Phoebe Bridgers went home empty-handed, and Billie Eilish pulled an Adele and said her award for Record of the Year should have gone to Beyoncé. Speaking of Beyoncé, she broke the record for most Grammy wins of any singer (though some have noted it is highly suspect she has never cinched an Album of the Year award), a fact which Trevor Noah awkwardly interrupted her to share. Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B scissored live on stage which ignited another hilarious and anatomically-incorrect conservative uproar about WAP. Taylor Swift won album of the year for Folklore, and obviously wore a matching floral dress and mask. Read Craig Jenkins in Vulture on why the Grammys were more successful this year than they have been in years past.
On Tuesday, AMC announced the Killing Eve’s fourth season will be it’s last. After the mess that was last season (I’m looking at you Emerald Fennell), it seems like the only options we have left are they either bang each other or die. Fans are not optimistic about either.
On Wednesday, it was revealed through court documents that Angelina Jolie has suffered from domestic violence at the hands of her husband Brad Pitt, and that she and her children are willing to testify to this claim in court. This is obviously deeply upsetting news, particularly for those who might see some of themselves in Jolie’s story. I can only hope that Jolie and her children get some modicum of healing or closure from the coming proceedings.
I forgot to mention this earlier because keeping track of time is #Hard, but Canada’s delightful western/sci-fi series Wynonna Earp returned for its “mid-season premiere” earlier this month. Adorable sapphics Nicole and Waverly (#WayHaught) are finally engaged, and soul-altering, body-snatching events continue to occur in their town of Purgatory. If anyone is still reeling from the (most recent) revelations about Joss Whedon, I would recommend the series as a Buffy-esque salve for that particular hurt. Plus, it’s gay from like, day 1. (Or day 2).
Lastly, some places you might consider donating to this week: Red Canary Song, “a grassroots collective of Asian and migrant sex workers,” Asian Pacific Environmental Network, which helps Asian communities fight for cleaner and safer environments, and Stop AAPI Hate, which works to track and respond to Asian hate crimes.
That’s all for this week, folks! Stay tuned for next week’s adventure. I will leave you with these timeless images of Sarah Paulson and Holland Taylor admiring Zoe Kravitz’ “tattoos.”
