Existentialism and Contemporary Cinema by Jean-Pierre Boulé & Enda McCaffrey

Author:Jean-Pierre Boulé & Enda McCaffrey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berghahn Books

Abandonment: ‘Charlotte Can’t Sleep’

Sartre describes the human situation as one of abandonment, and it is clear that Charlotte, who accompanies her husband on a business trip to Tokyo, only to be left alone in the city while her husband continues his travels in an attempt to complete his work, is abandoned in a number of obvious ways. However, consideration of the complexity of Charlotte’s situation, and her actions within that situation, provide an opportunity for increased insight into the reality that is signified by Sartre’s term ‘abandonment’. Sartre most generally describes abandonment, for example, as the fact that ‘it is we, ourselves, who decide who we are to be’ (Sartre [1945] 2007: 34), which stems from Sartre’s ontological claim that ‘we can never explain our actions by reference to a given and immutable human nature’ (Sartre [1945] 2007: 29). While Charlotte has, most superficially, been left alone in Tokyo, a place that she is not particularly familiar with (as evidenced by her need to check maps, for example), Charlotte does make and have friends in Tokyo, and her husband does remain in contact. Charlotte’s experience of abandonment is not projected in such an exaggerated, and unlikely, situation as being left alone on an uninhabited island; rather, Charlotte finds herself in a place where she is forced to realise the contingency of all the sources from which she previously found all meaning and value, including language, art, food, entertainment, and social roles.

It is telling that, in the scene ‘Charlotte Can’t Sleep’, Charlotte calls her friend in the United States, who is within a culture from which Charlotte presumably accepts as being able to give her meaning, in an apparent attempt to make sense out of her experience of ‘not feeling anything’ when she listened to chanting monks. At the end of the conversation, which is brought about quickly by Charlotte’s friend, Charlotte recognises that her friend is not able to give the meaning of the rituals she observed, or Charlotte’s (lack of) reaction to these rituals, and Charlotte is forced to decide for herself the meaning she will attribute to the experience. Charlotte’s response to this situation is an indication that she is beginning to realise that the objective world does not give her meaning, rather it is she that must give meaning to the world.

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