"Never Let Me Go" Reaction: The (Teen) Love Regime Prevails

In the credit sequence for Mark Romanek's Never Let Me Go, subdued colors flash across the screen. The film, like the Kazuo Ishiguro contemporary classic novel, is, indeed subdued. It is a subdued science fiction dystopia in which bodies are farmed in order for their organs to be used to be implanted in those not farmed, promoting their lives to never before seen lengths. Central to the story are three children who grew up at the Hailsham school. The students, with no parents, develop with each other and their instructors as guides. They are raised with the expectation that the world outside Hailsham is scary and unsavory, a doctrine that is challenged and quickly censored when it is espoused by a new instructor.

The three children we follow most closely, Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth, are like all the other students at Hailsham except for the fact that they are involved in a young love triangle. Kathy had intentions on Tommy but was thwarted when Ruth went in for the kill and was received warmly by Tommy. Eventually, the students realize their role in the world, and in the film, the child actors (Isobel Meikle-Small, Charlie Rowe, and Ella Purnell) become the adult actors (Carrie Mulligan, Andrew Garfield, and Keira Knightley) in a wonderful set of casting decisions. They go out into the world, living on a commune shared by students at other schools who went through similar upbringings. There, our three protagonists meet Rodney and Chrissie, who have convinced our heroes that the harvesting of organs can be prolonged if love can be proven, so the grapevine says.

Life goes on, and harvest time comes. Kathy, though, is delayed in her own harvesting by her temporary assignment as a carer, one who oversees and encourages the donator emotionally and spiritually. And as Kathy and Tommy continue to get one organ at a time plucked out at them, the three realize that their youthful coupling took the altogether wrong course. In a film, which (teeny spoiler alert) preaches the gospel of the universality of human emotions, it is an unbelievable move to privilege pre-teen love to the status of immutable truth and destiny. Kathy and Tommy go back to the Madame, the woman who was seen as the school's evaluator to use their artistic spirit and apparent love and affection for each other to justify the need for a delay to their expiration. But as one of the only people I know who have read the book and been left mostly unaffected by the melodrama of the formulation of these arguments I realized watching the actors, with precision, care, and restraint (save for a few moments when, for no good reason as far as I can tell, tears run down cheeks but no sobs are heard), depict the story of beings who believe in what seems to be a terribly vapid fiction of love as destiny, destiny as love. If there is a certain degree of verisimilitude proposed by this measured dystopia, the reliance on love as immutable and as real at twelve years old as ever, is an unfortunate crutch to rely on. And all this becomes all the more troubling when, especially the readers of the source text, become utterly enraptured in one seems to me a highly nonsensical romance. We are only furthering our blind devotion to and idealization of love in wrapping ourselves up in the resolution of this otherwise bold story -- which ends, as it should, with a quiet meditation of the human condition.

-- bryce j. renninger