Description
Discussion Question 1:
In “An Unfinished Mourning,” Angell makes a case for the intentional meaning of the setting and landscape in the film (149-151). Not only does Angell suggest this is a trademark of the director, Kenneth Lonergan, but Lee’s movement through place — from Boston to Manchester, and back again — is crucial to the decisions he is working through and symbolic of the ambivalence in his grief.
Using the “Unfinished Mourning” article to build your ideas, analyze the significance of the setting in this film. How is Boston presented, together with or distinct from Manchester? How does this compare with other depictions you’ve encountered so far? What techniques does the film employ to present the physical settings, season, time period, etc. and how does this add to the film’s themes and overall meaning?
Feel free to agree, disagree, extend, push back, etc. on the ideas from the article by focusing on a primary quote.
Your response should also refer to specific details and scenes from the film.
Discussion Question 2:
In contrast to Mystic River, Manchester by the Sea presents masculinity through a rich emotional landscape triggered by loss, grief, and mourning. In many ways embodying a Boston type as the white, working-class man, the protagonist Lee also conveys emotional complexity through difficult relationship dynamics. As Angell analyzes in “An Unfinished Mourning,” Lee is caught in a grief that translates as “numbness” while still communicating deep feelings, which are reflected through his roles as father, (ex)husband, brother, and guardian.
Using the “Unfinished Mourning” article to build your ideas, analyze the presentation of masculinity in Lee. What kind of man is he? How does this reflect his background and environment? In light of other characters in the film or in contrast with Mystic River what questions and themes does Lee’s character raise?
Feel free to agree, disagree, extend, push back, etc. on the ideas from the article by focusing on a primary quote.
Your responses should refer to details from the film and article, and use at least one quote.
Your responses should be at least 8 sentences.
Link to movie Manchester:
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NCJCF 15 (2) pp. 141–155 Intellect Limited 2017
New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film
Volume 15 Number 2
© 2017 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/ncin.15.2.141_1
Silvia Angeli
University of Westminster
An unfinished mourning:
Kenneth Lonergan’s
Manchester by the Sea (2016)
Abstract
Keywords
This article considers the notions of grief and mourning in Kenneth Lonergan’s
Manchester by the Sea (2016). The analysis centres on three moments characterized by the coexistence of two opposite states: numbness and an abundance
of feelings; immobility and mobility; infidelity and fidelity. To understand each
moment, I draw on three philosophical approaches to mourning elaborated by
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. In the first moment,
I posit an analogy between the grief experienced by the film’s protagonist Lee and
the grief described by Emerson in his essay ‘Experience’. In both cases, grief takes
the form of numbness that only masks an abundance of feelings. In the second
moment, I apply Barthes’s account of psychic immobility after his mother’s death
to the film protagonist’s experience. In the third moment, I analyse Lee’s mourning in relation to Derrida’s concept of ‘possible’ (or ‘successful’) and unsuccessful
mourning. Finally, this analysis turns to the question of the bereaved’s loyalty (to
the departed, to those who survived and to one’s own grief). Together, these three
perspectives reveal a complex, nuanced portrayal of mourning in Manchester by
the Sea, which departs from the widespread Freudian understanding of grief and
mourning.
mourning
grief
Emerson
Barthes
Derrida
Manchester by the Sea
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Silvia Angeli
A conversation between Massachusetts-born actors Matt Damon and
John Krasinski inspired Manchester by the Sea (Lonergan, 2016). Damon
intended to star in and direct the production of Kenneth Lonergan’s script
but, due to ongoing engagements, eventually gave up the film, leaving it
in Lonergan’s capable hands (Mead 2016). A trained, accomplished playwright, Lonergan can hardly be described as prolific director, releasing only
three films in sixteen years. Manchester by the Sea was preceded by You Can
Count on Me (Lonergan, 2000) and Margaret (Lonergan, 2011). Margaret is
rather unfairly better known for its post-production odyssey than its undeniable artistic merits. Shot in 2005, it was not released in theatre until 2011
(in a 150-minute version) and on DVD until 2012 (both the 150-minute
version and a 178-minute extended cut). Despite its limited theatrical circulation, the film impressed critics, and Richard Brody (2012), writing in The New Yorker, dubbed it ‘nothing short of a masterwork’. Recently,
the BBC (2016) ranked it 31st among the ‘The 21st century’s greatest films’.
Lonergan, though, has not received the scholarly attention he deserves, a
perplexing oversight that will hopefully be rectified in the success of
Manchester by the Sea, for which earned his second Academy Award nomination (the first was for You Can Count on Me) and his first win for best
original screenplay in 2017.
The film, like all Lonergan’s works, has a fairly simple plot. Lee Chandler
(Casey Affleck), a janitor working in the Boston neighbourhood of Quincy, is
forced to move back to his small Massachusetts hometown after his brother
Joe (Kyle Chandler) dies of congestive heart failure. Joe leaves behind his teenage son Patrick (Lucas Hedges) and alcoholic ex-wife, Elise (Gretchen Mol).
Unbeknownst to Lee, Joe has left him as Patrick’s guardian. In Manchester,
Lee must come to terms with the tragedy that befell him a few years earlier
when he accidentally started a house fire that killed his three young children.
His ex-wife Randi (Michelle Williams), who still lives in the area, has remarried and has a new child. Despite Lee’s best efforts, moving back proves to be
an insurmountable challenge for him. Unable to overcome his personal tragedy, he decides to transfer Patrick’s guardianship to a family friend and return
to Boston.
Despite narrative and stylistic differences, Lonergan’s three films explore
the same existential question: how do human beings behave when faced with
loss and grief – whether the physical loss of loved ones in You Can Count on
Me and Manchester by the Sea or the loss of innocence in Margaret? This topic
deeply fascinates Lonergan because it highlights ‘the disparity of experience,
the variety of human experience, how one person can have one kind of life
and his neighbor will have a completely different kind in every respect’ (Eagan
2016). Tragedy hits all of Lonergan’s protagonists, although at different stages
in life. Sammy and Terry, the protagonists of You Can Count on Me, are children
when they lose their parents to a car accident. As a teenager, Margaret’s heroine Lisa experiences a traumatic, life-altering event as she is partly responsible
for a stranger’s accidental death. Manchester by the Sea’s Lee is in his 30s when
he loses his three children. These characters need to find a way to go on and
to mourn and come to terms with the losses that have so strongly influenced
their lives.
However, in the case of Lee, his grief is so deep and vast that he can find
no way forward or a happy ending. Although critics have described the film
as ‘devastating’ (Brody 2016) and ‘heart-breaking’ (Kermode 2017), I argue
that it is precisely this lack of resolution that makes Manchester by the Sea one
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An unfinished mourning
of the deepest, most powerful cinematic reflections on grief and mourning.
Lonergan’s most recent work moves away from the Western tradition originating from Sigmund Freud that believes that grief should be overcome as
swiftly as possible and that our emotional well-being depends on our ability to sever our bonds with the deceased (Klass et al. 1996). In contrast to
this reductive view of grief and mourning, I relate Manchester by the Sea to
the more articulated and complex responses to grief of Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida.
Manchester by the Sea as reading mourning
I centre this analysis on three moments characterized by the coexistence of
two opposite states: numbness and an abundance of feelings; immobility and
mobility; infidelity and fidelity. In discussing these three moments, I do not
intend to establish a chronological order – they exist simultaneously – nor do I
wish to suggest a progression or evolution. Similarly, the coexistence of opposite states does not imply a dialectical argument but accounts for the complex,
nuanced experience that characterizes this mourning process. In Manchester
by the Sea, Lee’s grief appears to result in numbness, immobility and infidelity. Not only does he seem stuck in a perpetual state of apathy and disengagement, but his decision to leave Manchester and give up his obligations
towards his nephew might, at first glance, appear to be a cowardly attempt to
overcome his grief and to betray the trust put in him by both Patrick and Joe.
However, each state is complemented by its opposite: an abundance of feelings, mobility and fidelity.
To understand these three moments, I rely on different theoretical perspectives on mourning elaborated upon by Emerson, Barthes and Derrida. In the
first moment, I draw a parallel between the film’s portrayal of Lee’s grief and
Emerson’s portrayal of grief in his 1844 essay ‘Experience’ (1983a). The similarities exceed biography – both men mourn the deaths of their children – and
extend to the nature of their grief. Lee’s and Emerson’s grief does not elevate
or transform them, nor does it teach them anything; rather, it takes the form
of stupor and numbness. However, under the protective wall of numbness
and stupor lies an abundance of feelings that Lee struggles to contain, which
manifests as outbursts of anger and violence in pubs and bars.
The idea that grief and pain cannot teach anything is also taken up in
Barthes’s (2000, 2012) expression of sorrow for the death of his mother,
considered in the second section of this article. Unlike Emerson, however,
the French theorist does not hesitate to describe this experience as a crippling, paralysing loss and a life-altering event. In Barthes’s account, everything
seems immobile, frozen after his mother’s death. It is the same for Lee –
a state visually conveyed in the film through snow and ice. However, here
too this state of psychic immobility is accompanied and complemented by its
opposite: mobility. Indeed, although it is certainly plausible that Lee suffers
from ‘complicated grief’, or a ‘prolonged and intensified acute grief’ due to
‘complications [that] derail or impede healing after loss and lead’ (Shear et al.
2011: 105), it is inaccurate to presume he remains a static psychological entity
throughout his ordeal. How he relates to those around him, from his nephew
to his customers, undergoes a gradual yet obvious transformation. By the end
of the film, he is able to be emotionally present and engaged in conversation.
He can look past his personal plight long enough to show empathy to others,
without, however, disavowing his own grief.
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The third moment recalls Derrida’s reflection on the aporetic nature
of mourning. In Memoirs for Paul de Man (1989), the French philosopher
observes that in the process of mourning, we are caught in two infidelities,
between what he calls a ‘possible’ (or ‘successful’) and an ‘impossible’ mourning (Derrida 1989: 6). The first entails a narcissistic interiorization of the dead,
failing to respect their alterity, while the second refuses or is incapable of
doing so. Nevertheless – in a tension between what something first appears
to be and what it turns out to be – a possible, successful mourning cannot
but fail, whereas an impossible mourning, an ‘aborted interiorization’ (Derrida
1989: 35), can succeed. This proves true in Lee’s mourning: only by leaving
Manchester can he finally grieve for his loved ones in a respectful way, maintaining a relationship with them in an ongoing, unfinished and unfinishable
process of mourning.
Numbness
In an introduction to the screenplay of Margaret, Tony Kushner (2013) points
out that the fictional, progressive Upper West Side school attended by the
film’s protagonist, Lisa, is named after the father of American transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Kushner considers this detail to be of extreme
significance, highlighting a thematic connection between the film and
Emerson’s understanding of grief, as elaborated in his essay, ‘Experience’. I,
though, argue that, if Margaret indeed recalls elements of Emerson’s philosophy, it is more the praise of independent thinking and criticism of social
conformity expressed in his 1841 essay, ‘Self-reliance’ (1983b). The representation of grief and mourning in Manchester by the Sea presents clearer parallels
with ‘Experience’, which Emerson wrote two years after losing his 5-year-old
son Waldo to scarlet fever. The illness was as sudden as it was unforgiving,
and the boy was dead within four days (Richardson 1995). In an often-cited
passage, the father of American transcendentalism describes his loss:
The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is. […]
Grief too will make us idealists. In the death of my son, […] I seem
to have lost a beautiful estate – no more. I cannot get it nearer to me.
If to-morrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my principal
debtors, the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience to me,
perhaps, for many years; but it would leave me as it found me – neither
better nor worse. So is it with this calamity: it does not touch me: something which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away
without tearing me, nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from
me, and leaves no scar. […] I grieve that grief can teach me nothing.
(Emerson 1983a: 29)
To readers of Emerson, the seemingly dismissive words – ‘a beautiful estate’, ‘a
great inconvenience’ and ‘it does not touch me’ – with which he addresses his
sorrow appear nothing short of puzzling. They seem, at best, a poor attempt to
create intellectual distance between himself and this crippling loss; at worst,
they reflect a callous, indefensible disposition towards the death of his own
son. That Waldo’s passing disappears from the essay after this short passage
does little to dispel the confusion. However, the issue is more complex than it
first appears. The letters written by Emerson during Waldo’s short illness and
right after his death (Richardson 1995) attest to the authenticity and depth
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of the father’s pain. So why does Emerson adopt such a dismissive tone in
‘Experience’? Has his outlook on grief truly changed so substantially? Has his
sorrow morphed into indifference?
In an essay, Sharon Cameron (1986) argues that Emerson’s seeming
emotional detachment actually masks grief of unplumbed depths, which
manifests in dissociation and stupor: ‘Although it may seem, then, that
Waldo’s death is set forth and set aside, in fact the essay is a testament to
the pervasiveness of a loss so inclusive that it is suddenly inseparable from
experience itself’ (Cameron 1986: 18). More recently, Susan Dunston (2010),
building on Cameron’s reading, offers a thought-provoking account of the
text and Emerson’s mourning. She concentrates on the line ‘I cannot get it
nearer to me’ and argues that the author ‘cannot get Waldo’s death nearer to
him because it is already so close, so intimate and visceral a loss, that there is
no place “nearer”’ (Dunston 2010: 159). That is, the loss of his child is deeply
embedded within him; it is a second skin, which can never be shed. In this
sense, Emerson laments not his inability to mourn but that no amount of grief
seems proportionate to a loss of such magnitude.
Arguably, the desire to dispel this stupor drove Emerson to decide to open
Waldo’s coffin in 1857, some fifteen years after the boy’s death. In his journal,
Emerson notes:
The sun shone brightly on the coffins, of which Waldo’s was wellpreserved – now fifteen years. I ventured to look into the coffin. I gave
a few white-oak leaves to each coffin, after they were put into the new
vault, and the vault was then covered with two slabs of granite.
(1978: 154)
Emerson’s choice of words (‘vault’, ‘granite’) denotes his son’s inaccessibility. Despite the open grave, Waldo remains unreachable and unattainable.
Similarly, the author’s focus on natural elements (‘sun’, ‘white-oak leaves’)
and materials (‘granite’) once more highlights the materiality and physicality of death. This reality becomes evident in another of Emerson’s accounts.
He previously opened another coffin, that of his first wife Ellen, who had
died of tuberculosis in 1831, only two years after they married. Her death
affected him deeply; not only did he visit her grave daily, but he opened her
coffin more than a year after her premature death (Richardson 1995). In both
cases, Emerson did not offer any explanation or insight into the reasons for
his seemingly morbid gesture. However, it is safe to assume that the writer
desired to be confronted with the ultimate reality and physicality of death. He
needed to see for himself, to ground his numbing grief in the undeniable truth
of decomposing flesh.
A similar moment occurs in Manchester by the Sea, when both Lee and
Patrick, at different times, go to see Joe’s body. Lee is adamant, even impatient,
when he asks the hospital staff to show him to the mortuary. Nevertheless,
as soon as he enters, he becomes hesitant. The camera stays on him as the
orderly takes the body out of the freezer and prepares it. Lonergan wants to
make sure that the scene’s focus remains on Lee, on his experience. The janitor approaches the body slowly and rather timidly. He touches it, as if to make
sure it is real, and then awkwardly hugs it. Before leaving, he presses a delicate
kiss on his brother’s cheek.
Patrick, in contrast, is unsure whether he wants to see his father’s body.
‘What does he look like?’ he asks. Lee gives a matter-of-fact reply, hardly
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reassuring to his teenage nephew: ‘He looks like he’s dead. He doesn’t look
like he’s sleeping or anything’. Then, Lee quickly amends himself: ‘But he
doesn’t look gross, either’. When Patrick finally enters the morgue, he leaves
as soon as he catches a glimpse of the corpse. The boy’s experience of his
father’s dead body remains important throughout the film. Indeed, the only
time the otherwise remarkably collected Patrick melts down is when he thinks
of the corpse kept in a freezer as the cemetery ground is too hard to dig into
until the spring. In an endearing and disarmingly honest sequence, the boy
suffers a panic attack after opening the kitchen freezer. Its contents fall down,
one after the other. Patrick, increasingly agitated, tries to put them all back
in and shut the door, but the freezer simply will not close. When his uncle,
worried by the noise, goes to check on him, Patrick flees to his room, demanding to be left alone.
Patrick’s panic attack is one of the very few episodes in which we witness the
characters crumble under the weight of their sorrow. For a film with a narrative
filled with so much drama, Manchester by the Sea has a remarkably undramatic
tone. Indeed, the ‘economy of this motionless and anything but spectacular
mourning’, to use Barthes’s words (2012: 231), develops around the dull routines
and bureaucratic obstacles encountered by two characters who go about their
daily life with little complaint or clamour. In this sense, Lee’s demeanour, in
particular, is initially rather perplexing to viewers. We simply do not know what
to make of the aloofness with which he regards his tenants’ complaints, the
morose attitude he adopts towards his boss and the sudden rage sparked by the
looks he receives from bar patrons. His resigned, quiet reaction to the news of
his brother’s passing is confounding. Only when the deaths of his own children
are revealed, a good 50 minutes into the film, do we understand his silence for
what it is: an expression of an intense grief that will never subside. His reserved,
dejected behaviour suddenly makes sense, and Emerson’s lament ‘What opium
is instilled in all disaster!’ comes to mind (1983a: 28).
The extent of the Massachusetts janitor’s detachment and disengagement
with the outside world is evident in his awkward interactions with the opposite sex, especially in how he relates to Jill, the overly enthusiastic mother
of Patrick’s girlfriend. Oblivious to Lee’s discomfort and lack of interest, she
insists on making small talk when he picks Patrick up and tries to invite him in
for dinner or a drink. In one scene, Lee finally accepts, as a favour, if anything,
to his nephew, who is trying to spend some time alone with his girlfriend.
However, the atmosphere is incredibly strained. Lee is unfailingly polite yet
so remarkably uninterested that he soon sends Jill running out of the room,
complaining to her daughter that she cannot bear his silence anymore. If Jill
were a bit less self-absorbed, she would understand that his disengagement
has nothing to do with her, and everything to do with him. This scene recalls
an earlier sequence in which a girl flirts with Lee at a bar. She spills a drink
on him, using her clumsiness as an excuse to introduce herself. One look at
Lee’s face, though, is all it takes for her realize that not only that is he not in
the least curious about or intrigued by her, but he does not feel much at all. As
he later says to his ex-wife Randi, ‘There is nothing there’.
Nevertheless, underlying Lee’s numbness are tremendous depths of feeling,
so that, in fact, he always filters and tries to contain his emotions. As Lonergan
explains in the DVD audio commentary: ‘He’s so full, emotionally, in every
scene, even if he’s a bit closed-mouth in terms of how much he talks. […] He’s
just holding back this wall of feeling, no matter what he’s doing’ (Manchester by
the Sea, 2017). Only rarely do these feelings spill out, and when they do, they
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certainly reveal the depth of Lee’s grief. For example, both fights he starts in
the film follow difficult conversations with women, first, after the girl flirts with
him and, second, after the heart-breaking conversation with his ex-wife Randi,
when his hidden feelings become most evident. Lee takes refuge in a pub,
presumably to drink himself into stupor. When a man accidentally bumps into
him, Lee punches him straight in the jaw, starting a brawl. Outnumbered, Lee
cannot contain himself and, despite his friend George’s efforts to break up the
fight, keeps throwing himself into it. When George’s wife later tends to him,
her gentle touch is all it takes to make the affection-deprived Lee crumble,
sobbing into her shoulder as she tenderly hugs and consoles him.
Quite evidently, there is a direct correlation between Lee’s inability to
articulate his complex feelings and the blind rage he frequently flies into. As
American psychotherapist Alexander Lowen points out:
The ability to contain anger is the counterpart of the ability to express
anger effectively. The conscious control necessary for containment
is equivalent to the coordination and fluidity of the action expressing
anger. Therefore a person cannot develop the ability to control unless he also
develops the ability to express.
(1995: 120, emphasis added)
Lee seems indeed caught in a vicious circle: his numbness – his inability, or
unwillingness, to perceive, address and communicate his own grief-stricken
status – cannot but fuel his rage and desperation, which in turn translate into
attempts at heightened self-control and distancing of himself from everyone.
Lee does not necessarily want to be alone; he seeks out public places and
takes comfort in the background noise of pubs and bars. Once there, though,
he wants to be left alone. As C. S. Lewis famously writes in his account of his
grief for his wife’s death:
[I]t feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what
anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting.
Yet I want the others to be about me […] If only they would talk to one
another and not to me.
(2001: 3)
Lewis’s words perfectly capture the ambiguity of Lee’s feelings and his liminal
state. The janitor wishes to be surrounded by people yet remain anonymous,
indistinguishable from the background. Lee simply sees nothing of interest anymore, nothing that deserves his undivided attention or appreciation.
Niceties and formalities are but a distraction; much like palliatives, they bring
no lasting relief. If anything, they stand between him and the full experience
of his pain, eliciting discomfort and irritation. There is no doubt that if Lee
were to choose words over silence, he would repeat Barthes’s words: ‘I ask for
nothing but to live in my suffering’ (2012: 174).
Immobility
Dissimilar in tone but very similar in content to Emerson’s writings are
Barthes’s reflections on the death of his mother, Henriette. Her loss was a
lacerating, life-altering experience, and the French theorist does not hesitate
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to describe it as such. In his seminal work Camera Lucida, he gives us one of
the most insightful, unapologetic elaborations of mourning:
It is said that mourning, by its gradual labor, slowly erases pain; I could
not, I cannot believe this; because for me, Time eliminates the emotion
of loss (I do not weep), that is all. For the rest, everything has remained
motionless. For what I have lost is not a Figure (the Mother), but a being;
and not a being, but a quality (a soul): not the indispensable, but the
irreplaceable. I could live without the Mother (as we all do, sooner or
later); but what life remained would be absolutely and entirely unqualifiable (without quality).
(Barthes 2000: 75, original emphasis)
This passage is as dense in meaning as it is precise in description. As
Woodward observes: ‘Barthes insists on the particularity, the historicity, of his
loss. He refuses to assimilate his loss to an abstraction, a generality, or even
to the family structure’ (1990: 98). It is easy to picture the author in a frustrating search for the most accurate definitions, discarding inadequate and vague
formulations. He first seemingly grants priority to the abstract concepts of
‘Time’, ‘Figure’ and ‘Mother’, capitalizing the terms, only to later create his own
personal hierarchy of emotional values and juxtapose them with more particular, specific elements. ‘Figure’ is pitted against ‘being’ and ‘being’ against ‘soul’ in
an effort to reach the prime, irreducible factors of this very peculiar equation.
For the purposes of this article, the most important terms are the two
adjectives ‘unqualifiable’ and ‘motionless’. Indeed, Barthes writes, his mother’s
passing has rendered life ‘unqualifiable’. After the death of the mother – a soul
whose presence is not ‘indispensable’ but rather ‘irreplaceable’ – life, although
still liveable, is stripped of its essence, of what makes it life, and is all but a
shell. Once again, this description can all too easily be applied to the protagonist of Manchester by the Sea.
The term ‘motionless’ is equally relevant. Echoing both Emerson’s words
and Lee’s predicament, Barthes reiterates the term a few pages later, observing: ‘I suffer, motionless. Cruel, sterile deficiency: I cannot transform my grief’
(2000: 90, original emphasis). The film’s protagonist’s grief heavily affects his
notion of time. While physical, real time may pass, Lee’s inner hourglass is
all but still. After his children’s deaths, time has become circular to him: in
an eternal present – characterized by the re-occurring and re-presenting of
Lee’s life-defining moment, that is, his children’s deaths – there is no difference between ten minutes or ten months ago. This experience of the passage
of time as simply ‘duration’, without alternation or progression, is once again
well captured by Barthes:
There is a time when death is an event, an ad-venture, and as such mobilizes, interests, activates, tetanizes. And then one day it is no longer an
event, it is another duration, compressed, insignificant, not narrated, grim,
without recourse: true mourning not susceptible to any narrative dialectic.
(2012: 50, original emphasis)
This time compression is rendered in Manchester by the Sea through the continuous intercutting of flashbacks: throughout the film, present and past overlap
and intertwine. While this narrative device obviously delivers key information about the characters to viewers, it also conveys Lee’s own perceptions
148 New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film
An unfinished mourning
of time, which are made evident numerous times during the film. For example,
he refers to Randi as his ‘wife’, without even noticing that he does, and the
shots and flashbacks of his apartment in Boston show that it looks exactly the
same as it did when he first moved in.
The film further creates the sense of immobility through snow and ice.
Joe dies in winter, and Patrick is literally on thin ice – he plays hockey – when
he receives news of his father’s passing. The knowledge that his father will
not be buried until spring but kept in the mortuary’s cold storage torments
him, and the sight of frozen food causes his breakdown. Through flashbacks,
we learn that it was also winter when Lee accidentally caused the deaths of
his three children. Despite the undeniable visual impact of flames engulfing the house against a white carpet of snow, aesthetics are certainly not the
only reason Lonergan decided to set the accident in the coldest months of
the year. In this sense, the director seems to have truly internalized Sergej
Eisenstein’s lesson that ‘landscape is a complex bearer of the possibilities of
a plastic interpretation of emotions’ (1987: 355). Indeed, the Massachusetts
winter that stunts growth and inhibits progress serves as a perfect analogy
for the characters’ emotional paralysis, and snow, covering the world in a
thick blanket, muffling sounds and creating a cocoon-like environment, reinforces the sense of immobility and quiet mourning. While the use of landscape to mirror the characters’ psychological state is hardly a particularly
creative rhetorical device, it remains worthy of attention for the conspicuous
role it plays in Manchester by the Sea, as can be inferred from the fact that the
film is in fact named after a place.
The incorporation of landscape into the storyline for dramatic purposes is
a trademark of Lonergan’s work. In Margaret, especially the extended version,
New York City assumes the role of a co-protagonist. New York continuously
breaks into the narrative through often-disjointed images and sound. The
camera pans on the crowd in the urban landscape, and we hear snippets of
bystanders’ conversations and phone calls. These shots serve a double purpose.
They trace a rather explicit connection between the traumatic event of Lisa’s
life and the larger trauma experienced by New York on 9/11. They also remind
us that Lisa is an integral part of a whole; her personal struggles are not more
or less important than those of anyone else around her. This perspective is at
once comforting and extremely humbling. As Lonergan puts it:
[W]hile this is happening to [Lisa], there are five or ten thousand other
people within walking distance of her, all doing something equally
important, less important, much more important, going through things
far more tragic, going through things completely frivolous.
(Brody 2012)
The landscape plays a more peripheral role in Manchester by the Sea but still
has a very poignant relationship with the narrative. The frequent intercutting
of serene New England landscapes serves a double purpose: on one hand,
it mirrors Lee’s psychic immobility, much like snow and ice; on the other, it
testifies to the ongoing beauty and meaning of life. The only scene of a stormy
sea accompanies the flashback of the deaths of Lee’s children, as if to say that
not even nature can remain impassive to a tragedy of this scale.
Manchester by the Sea shows that changes in the grief process do not
always lead to healing. Demonstrating an affinity with Emerson’s perspective,
especially his lament that grief cannot ‘teach us anything’, Lonergan observes:
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‘The character doesn’t learn to live with and move on from what happened.
It’s part of him for the rest of his life’ (Mead 2016). Lonergan adds: ‘It’s good to
have a forward-thinking attitude – and I wish I had more of one – but I don’t
think it’s so bad that some people can’t’ (ibid.).
It is as simple as this: some losses are so substantial, so debilitating, that
there can be no coming back from them; there is nothing to be gained, no
resolution to be reached, no higher plane of existence to which to ascend. The
pain cannot simply be sublimated into a transcendental experience, nor can a
higher cause or providential plan be divined.
It, however, would be wrong to conclude that, when Lee leaves Manchester,
he is the same person who arrived a few months earlier after his brother’s
death. He might have not healed – he most likely never will – or resolved
his grief, but he has undergone a slow transformation. To say that Lee will
never heal is not to say that his views and attitude have remained unchanged
throughout his ordeal. This is clear if we compare how he relates to Patrick
at the beginning of the film and announces his departure at the end. At this
point, without losing his characteristic bluntness, Lee is able to reassure the
boy that their relationship will continue, and he does so with a sense of presence, strength and empathy unimaginable for him at the beginning of the
film. Similarly, Lonergan offers another episode to gauge the extent of Lee’s
transformation by inserting another scene in which he works to repair a boiler.
Unlike at the beginning of the film, Lee engages with his customer, answering
his questions and making small talk. Although Lee’s grief remains fundamentally unresolved, the time he has spent in Manchester nevertheless has initiated a change – which we shall not call progress – in the way he relates to it.
This change also becomes evident in the film’s very last scene. In a
sequence that mirrors the prologue, Patrick and Lee fish from a boat, sitting
