Session 3: Hope, Despair and Hopelessness

Session 3: Hope, Despair and Hopelessness
Chair: Dina Lache Lacov
Existential Viewing in the Cinematic Escape: The Language of Hope and Hopelessness in the The Departed
Phil Fitzsimmons
Fiji Practicum, Acting Deputy Director Primary Faculty of Education, University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia

This paper is grounded in Blessing and Tudico’s notion that movies are a reflection of and a reaction to the ongoing search for purpose and meaning in our daily lives. The existential answers to the purpose of life, once found in institutions such as the church, now supposedly resides in popular culture in general and the cinema in particular. As Lyden further suggests the sense of encroaching chaos and meaningless that proliferates in current Western society is tempered by the neat framing of time and focussed overcoming of the ‘uncanny’, evil, death, injustice, pain and suffering that movies provide.
An answer to this problem is not immediately apparent in the movie ‘The Departed’. It is not until the concept of the ‘scapegoat’, a premise touched on visually and linguistically several times in the movie, is applied as a thematic and dialogic foil that the apparent nihilism of this film is seen to be a carefully constructed ruse.
Using ‘language in action’ as a platform of demonstration, this movie will be deconstructed via the notion of the ‘scapegoat’ to reveal how key elements of the dialogue raise the subtext into pivotal ‘definable perspectives’ of hope in a world of apparent mayhem, murder, betrayal and hopelessness.

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At the starting point for my discussion, I am going to present a brief analisis of George Steiner’s disillusionment with the humane power of art (Grammars of Creation). Faced with attrocities of the 20th century, European literature of the post-WW2-period completely lost its purely aesthetic character and testified to the overwhelming sense of despair (vide: Samuel Beckett, Ted Hughes and, among Polish poets, Czeslaw Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert and Tadeusz Rozewicz). Transformation of the artistic paradigm opened ground for philosophic nihilism epitomised by Jacques Derrida and post-modern whirling of signifiers (notably this shift flooded Polish thought as late as in the 1990s, after the fall of the Communist regime).
Still, at the turn of the centuries, it become clear that what initially seemed the expression of utter despair, retrospectively revealed its more ambiguous nature. This might be best illustrated with Peter Hall’s 1997 production of Waiting for Godot, which provoked – above all – outbursts of sheer laughter.
In this paper, I am going to put forward the question concerning traces of hope which are intrinsic part of despair. The research material should reflect my academic interests and cover Polish and English language literature and theatre. The primary focus will be given to artists such as Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Sarah Cane, Milosz, Herbert and Rozewicz. Additionally, I will refer to Polish off-fringe theatrical figures (Jerzy Grotowski, Tadeusz Kantor) and theatrical groups such as Teatr Osmego Dnia, Gardzienice and Wierszalin Theatre.

No abstract is presently available

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