Living with our Terminal Diagnosis
Few things are more quintessentially modern than the anonymous and perfunctory working life of a bureaucrat. The 2022 British film Living—a poignant story of a county bureaucrat in search of ultimate meaning following a terminal diagnosis—powerfully captures the existential challenges of a life shaped by the faceless civic institutions of modern societies. The film’s main character, the aloof and laconic Mr. Rodney Williams (Bill Nighy), will be easily recognizable to anyone who has worked or even interacted with the public service. Williams’ inner transformation is, however, less familiar. Living positions itself within a wisdom tradition of the arts suggesting that the antidote for modern existential malaise is selfless concern and a virtuous embracing of the finitude of human existence. One must die to self and discover a higher purpose in service of others.
Living is an adaptation of the critically acclaimed 1952 Japanese film Ikiru (To Live), directed and co-written by acclaimed filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. The film is directed by Oliver Hermanus and based on a screenplay by Nobel laureate Kasuo Ishiguro, author of The Remains of the Day. A masterful evocation of post-war British life, Living vividly portrays the ‘stiff-upper-lip’ (albeit classy and iconic) world of 1950s London.
The film follows the final months of a public servant, Rodney Williams, as he searches for meaning in his life after a cancer diagnosis. Williams works for the county Public Works department and lives an uninspired life surrounded by overflowing in-trays and unenthusiastic colleagues. He is almost universally known as “Mr. Williams,” aside from one colleague who pejoratively labels him “Mr. Zombie.” The viewer feels exasperated watching Williams and his coworkers as they consciously neglect requests that come through their office and then shepherd the poor patrons of the county hall from department to department, never to receive resolutions to their inquiries. Meanwhile, Williams’ personal life is just as dreary: he is a widower with virtually no social life and a vexed relationship with his only son.
Williams, however, has a fairly dramatic existential journey following his diagnosis—somewhat resembling a journey through Kierkegaard’s three stages on life’s way (the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious). After an initial shock which leaves him even more speechless than usual, Williams—perhaps in an attempt to escape the grim reality of his diagnosis—decides to enjoy the remainder of his life and travels to a beachside resort town. At a cafe he meets a cantankerous and bohemian young man named Sutherland, who agrees to show Williams a good time and takes him out to experience the town’s nightlife.
At one point, Williams and Sutherland visit a local bar, where Williams joins in a singalong of the Scottish folk song “Oh Rowan Tree”—only to become too emotional to finish the song.
... Rowan tree, oh Rowan Tree
Thou’lt aye be dear to me,
Entwin’d thou art wi’ mony ties
O’ hame and infancy.
Thy leaves were aye the first o’spring,
Thy flow’rs the summer’s pride,
There was nae such a bonny tree
In a’ the countryside...
The poignant folk tune speaks to Williams’ unsatisfied existential longings. Besides this fleeting moment of intense meaning, the carnivals, bars, and stripteases that Williams visits with Sutherland only leave him more vacant and distracted.
Williams later reunites with a young colleague, Ms. Margaret Harris (Aimee Lou Wood), who is starting a new job at an upmarket restaurant in London. Williams is taken by the vivacity of Harris and pursues her company—to the extent that Harris eventually raises the concern that Williams has become infatuated with her. Williams eventually admits to being envious of Harris’s joie de vivre and acknowledges his disappointment with his own life. This verbalization of distress is an epiphany of sorts for Williams who only now appears to realize that he would rather leave the world “living” like a child at play, sometimes happy and sometimes sad, rather than like a child “sitting by himself in a corner,” “not taking part [in life], not happy, not unhappy.”
The film then changes key quite dramatically. We find Williams liberated from his existential listlessness and now apparently intent on working with the greatest dedication, to the extent that he spearheads a public works project to build a local playground at a bombsite in metropolitan London. Very soon after that we witness Williams’ funeral and conversations between his co-workers who are stunned and inspired by his remarkable change of character.
The film closes with one of his colleagues visiting the new playground that Williams had constructed. The colleague talks to a constable at the site who once saw Williams sitting on a swing in the cold and singing to himself. The song he sang was, we discover, the same Scottish folk song, “Oh Rowan Tree,” that he sang in the bar in Brighton, except this time Williams sings with joy rather than sorrow. In creating a space of life and play for children in the neighborhood, Williams had found modest happiness.
What might we learn from this poignant exploration of life—and death—in a modern, bureaucratized society? Certainly, there is a conviction in Living that selfless concern is an antidote for the malaise experienced by many in modern life. This seems plausible. The well-ordered and apparently successful lives of bureaucrats can mask an underlying self-centeredness and aloofness from humanity that produces feelings of profound isolation and sadness (we can note the irony in the film that ostensibly most people enter the public service as an act of service to society). An unexpected negative life event, however, such as a cancer diagnosis, can lead one to discover a new mode of existence where otherwise one would have remained trapped in one’s own selfish and isolated world. What’s more, this new mode of existence is the absolute opposite of how people in modern bureaucracies are trained to operate, insofar as one seeks to show genuine compassion for others. They are also the absolute opposite, for that matter, of what the culture of liberalism tells us about freedom. Rather than seeking liberalism’s ideal of endless augmentation of individual choice, one should practice real freedom, which, to quote David Foster Wallace,
involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
This is precisely the kind of freedom that Williams demonstrates at the conclusion of Living. He consciously chooses to apply himself to his work and treat his colleagues with respect when he would have been perfectly within his rights to give up and become profoundly bitter at the world.
The virtue of contentment is also important. Living suggests that what matters is not great achievement but modest satisfaction. The simple joy of a child’s playground is contentment enough for Williams. This is compelling, too. American philosopher David McPherson’s recent book The Virtues of Limits talks of the central role of the virtue of contentment within a flourishing life. Contentment is the opposite of a rapacious, acquisitive, and selfish desire to increase one’s power, prestige, and influence. Contentment, McPherson writes, “is the virtue of knowing when enough is enough, of being properly satisfied, of not wanting more than is needed for a good life.” He quotes another philosopher, Cheshire Calhoun, who notes that contentment involves “a disposition to appreciate the goods in one’s present condition and to use expectation frames that enable such appreciation.” In a letter to a colleague, Williams, having learned the value of contentment, provides some words of inspiration for when one might feel the weight of everyday life particularly heavily on one’s shoulders:
Should there come days when it is no longer clear to what end you are directing your daily efforts, when the sheer grind of it all threatens to reduce you to the kind of state in which I so long existed, I urge you then to recall our little playground, and the modest satisfaction that became our due upon its completion.
Contentment, in other words, requires that one appreciate the good things in the world, particularly those that are the product of virtue. We ought to view reality with a loving, contemplative gaze, as if we were looking at the Rowan Tree.
Some may suggest that there are limitations to this modern wisdom tradition. Perhaps one might see the idea of contentment and a focus on the present as a poor substitute for some more robust religious account of how to deal with suffering and loneliness in human life.
But we need not see Living as quietistic. There is another interpretation available to us, which positions Living in a more hopeful tradition of modern existential thought. Wittgenstein once noted that:
If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.
This kind of reflection, I think, may be more in the spirit of the film. It is not necessarily the case that its message explicitly denies the existence of life after death or seeks to present a form of sanitized nihilism. On the contrary, perhaps the message is that happiness here on earth can only be found in an act of perfect self-giving love, which is the closest thing to an ‘eternal now’ that we humans can experience this side of death.
Xavier Symons is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Human Flourishing Program in the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University.