On freedom, fulfilment and the lives we imagine for others
Sometimes two films watched close together leave something unsettled. Not necessarily a shared subject, but a feeling that lingers somewhere between them, resisting a ready explanation.
In Sundays and Primetime, you encounter two very different claims about freedom, goodness and the lives other people should lead.
In Sundays, a young woman begins to contemplate a life in a monastery, turning away from the university education and worldly experiences expected of her. Her aunt, in particular, seems unable to accept the possibility. There is a whole world waiting: travel, education, sex, drugs, the experiences through which a young person supposedly discovers what it means to live. Why exchange all that for enclosure and a life withdrawn from the world?
There is something understandable in the concern, but also something rather insistent about it. The assumption that a full life must be lived through experience, that fulfilment lies somewhere in the accumulation of encounters and possibilities, goes largely unquestioned. Yet what if fulfilment is found elsewhere? What if the life that appears diminished from the outside opens towards something immeasurably larger?
You are left with neither possibility comfortably resolved. A vocation can be difficult to distinguish from an ideal, just as concern can become difficult to distinguish from the desire to direct another person’s life. Perhaps the discomfort lies in having to entertain both.
Primetime leaves a rather different residue. Men who believe they are communicating with minors are lured into encounters and exposed by a television production ostensibly intent on confronting sexual exploitation. The moral arrangement seems clear enough until you begin to notice the people doing the exposing.
The producer wants ratings. The host performs moral authority while conducting an affair. A young actor appears more interested in securing his actors’ guild card than in the cause itself. Private conversations become public spectacle, vulnerability becomes performance, and humiliation becomes entertainment. You begin to wonder where the concern for goodness has gone.
Even the young characters resist the simplicity of the roles assigned to them. They seem fragile, but not entirely passive; curious, perhaps seeking attention or something else from the encounters. Their motives are not necessarily transparent, although the responsibility of the adult men remains. You can acknowledge the complexity of a young person’s desires without confusing it with the adult’s obligation to maintain boundaries.
What becomes difficult to watch is the pleasure of exposure itself. The cameras, the confrontation, the public unmasking. You are invited to share in the indignation, to occupy the reassuring side of the moral divide. Yet the people conducting the spectacle seem increasingly absorbed by the rewards of their own righteousness.
The two films begin to touch at an unexpected point. In one, you see a young woman being persuaded away from a life others cannot understand. In the other, you see people claiming to defend the vulnerable while becoming entangled in their own forms of exploitation. One raises the question of whether you can allow another person a different conception of fulfilment; the other, whether the pursuit of goodness can survive the appetite for power and recognition.
Perhaps what connects them is the difficulty of leaving another person’s life alone. You want to rescue, persuade, correct or expose. Sometimes there is genuine care in this impulse. Sometimes there is something less generous, a need for the world to conform to the shape of your own convictions.
You can be so certain that you know what freedom looks like, what a good life should contain, or what justice demands, that you fail to notice what your certainty is doing to someone else.
The image of a life behind monastery walls remains alongside the glare of the television lights. One suggests a devotion to something beyond the self; the other, a world in which even goodness can become another means of personal advancement. They seem impossibly far apart, yet neither quite leaves you.
Perhaps there are lives whose meaning cannot be measured from the outside. And perhaps there are moments when the desire to do good asks less of you than the willingness to stand back, uncertain of what you are seeing.
The monastery remains somewhere beyond the frame.
The cameras keep rolling.
Notitia Health — Attending to the lives we encounter, and to what remains beyond our knowing.
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