Why drive? Psychoanalytic reflections on the film Never Let Me Go

Abstract

The author presents a psychoanalytic interpretation of Mark Romanek's film Never Let Me Go, which concerns a society in which young adult clones have their internal organs ‘harvested’ for transplantation. Following some general remarks on the method of psychoanalytic film interpretation, strongly emphasising the aesthetics of form and artistic elements specific to film, the author develops the notion that through its cinematic perspectives and shots, Never Let Me Go dramatizes a specific relationship between the sublime and solitude. The film therefore deals with a particular intrinsic difference between expanse and constraint, as well as the limited and the eternal. This leads the viewer to participate directly in a film‐specific way in the inner conflicts at work both in the film's theme and in its protagonists.

In terms of aesthetic content, these conflicts are revealed as those of an inescapable thanatological theme that is essentially intertwined with an erotic one. The film shows how love, sexuality, and internal and external images arise from thanatological forces, and it simultaneously provides a way of sublating them (Hegel's Aufhebung) – that is, the film itself represents a benign drive fusion. The film's protagonists, however, struggle with a lack of early parenting and thus with the helplessness of facing individual drive development and the longing for a holding object. Hence, in formal terms, the film deals with the sublime, and, as I will show, it also deals with sublimation at the level of its content.

1. Translated by Sophie Leighton.

2. Edited by Catherine Humble

1. Translated by Sophie Leighton.

2. Edited by Catherine Humble

Notes

1. Translated by Sophie Leighton.

2. Edited by Catherine Humble

3. cf. Storck 2010; 2015; there are important similarities between my approach and those of Mahler‐Bungers & Zwiebel (2007), Schneider (2008), Reiche (2001) or Zeul (2007); cf. 2003Sabbadini (2003; 2014), Gabbard (2001).

4. cf. Storck (2015) on the differences between psychoanalytic interpretations of artistic works according to their specific media.

5. Here I will not address the complex question of the status of desexualisation in the context of sublimation or the sublimation of aggressive impulses (cf. Storck & Soldt, 2007).

6. cf. the ‘psychic attacks on linking’ described by Bion (1959); there is also a connection with Green's (2001) reflections on the disobjectalising function.

7. Although I refer to an opposition between the erotic and the thanatological and will address the Freudian representation of a fusion or defusion of the drives, I would like to emphasize that I am also concerned here with an opposition or mixing of two components of one drive, i.e. two opposing forms of expression of an economic, inherently differentiated force (and so with drive impulses that sometimes form and sometimes destroy bindings).

8. As a reminder, the irritation is defined as the experience of a puzzling affect, provoked by the work of art, and which demands further exploration and reflection. The irritation is the first glimpse of a latent, unconscious structure of the work of art, as well as our relation to it, and are unconscious elements that work on a cultural level.

9. On the significance of unbinding and re‐binding and cathexis with regard to the psychodynamics of psychosomatic illnesses, cf. Smadja (2001)

10. Here I am omitting an aspect, in that a special, possibly dysfunctional processing of these very aspects—incompleteness, finitude, loss, the need to mourn—could be imputed to the organ recipients. They are ‘completed’ by the organ donations, which suggests the scenario of a social pathology that is even more intricate than the evisceration of the clones.