Marxian Rating:

"Father can't you see...that you are blind?"

By Gabriel Tupinambá

What is an edge? A border, a limit, a dividing line. An edge, though, differently from any generic limit, tends to refer specially to a border which separates something from some sort of nothingness: You are not the on edge when you are facing a wall, though that is a border and a limit. You are on the edge when you face an abyss.

Many things can function as this bottomless opposition, near which anguish and vertigo are all we experience. In this film, we are on the edge of darkness - so it is not the body that is on the edge, almost falling, but the eyes that are on the brink of not-seeing, of not knowing or believing. The main character, Thomas, also suggests this: St. Thomas, after all, is the saint who had to see it to believe it.

Edge of Darkness (2010) is the film adaptation of a very successful british TV series from the 80’s, by Martin Campbell, who also directed the original version. It tells the story of Thomas Craven (Mel Gibson), a Boston police detective, who seems to have been the target of a killing, but who loses his daughter Emma instead, shot in his place accidentally.

As Thomas investigates the murder, we find out that Emma had discovered that the company she worked for, Northmoor, was not only secretly manufacturing nuclear weapons, but also doing it to foreign specifications so that the dirty bombs would be traced to other nations - She was the true target all along. Revenge is all that is left for Thomas.

Detective stories always dwell within the dialectics of the known and unknown. We start off with a question - usually a body turned into an unknown, asking us ‘Who is the killer?’ - and we move from question to answer, through what we know, towards dark and awful truths.

This is also why detective stories, and mystery tales in general, are such great ideological mechanisms. If you have a question and you look for an answer, and you find one, the question of if it being the right answer will hardly come to mind. If the structure is that of a journey towards discovery, the fact that something is discovered already justifies its veracity.

In Edge of Darkness, the investigation of the murder is followed and intertwined with the discovery of who Thomas’ daughter really was. Besides, every move deeper into the conspiracy also prompts flashbacks of old memories of his daughter, looking up to him, giving detective Craven the strength he needs to keep up the investigation.

In the last chapter of Studies on Hysteria (1895), Freud gives a description of how memories seem to be organized:

“I have described such groupings of similar memories into collections arranged in linear sequences (like a file of documents, a packet, etc.) as constituting ‘themes’. These themes exhibit a second kind of arrangement. Each of them is - I can not express it in any other way - stratified concentrically round the pathogenic nucleus. (...) The deeper we go the more difficult it becomes for the emerging memories to be recognized, till near the nucleus we come upon memories which the patient disavows even in reproducing them. It is this peculiarity of the concentric stratification of the pathogenic psychical material which, as we shall hear, lends to the course of these analyses their characteristic features.”

So the deeper we go towards ‘the nucleus’, the stronger the resistance to recognize ourselves in what we already know. No wonder that one of the classic detective story’s catch phrases is ‘It was him all along’.

But was is there to know here? Things are a bit more complicated in this film. Though the basic thread of the plot is finding out who killed his daughter, when Thomas Craven actually does find out it seems like a minor detail in the narrative. He might not have known who the actual assassin was, but he knew who had sent him for a long time already.

It is through this strange redundancy that we find out what the actual ‘nucleus’ of the discourse is. Neither the thug who killed her, nor Jack Bennet (Danny Huston playing the same role as in The Constant Gardner (2005), the pragmatic president of a company involved in dark conspiracies), were untouchable for Craven - finding out who they were and killing them was never the issue. The issue was an ethical one. How far could he go?

The film quite early on presents us with four different men around which the narrative develops. Through each men’s conversations with Craven, we quickly realize that their position is defined against his - but not only that: they are defined by their notion of what paternity is.

Let’s start with Jack Bennet, Danny Houston’s character. There is a moment in the first dialogue he has with Craven, the first time he appears to us as well, in which he says:

“BENNETT: As a parent I can guess at your pain. I think.

Though I am sure I cannot imagine its full dimensions. (...)What does it feel like?”

Bennet is later on rewarded with a gun on his head for his “polite” question and, by the end of the film, his second question, ‘after what [will you rest]?’ is answered with a bunch of bullets to his already poisoned body.

But before that, the film builds a relation between Bennet’s position regarding paternity and his pragmatic stance - the way he talks and deals with the government, without any worries of approaching the ‘un-official’ side of his business in between the lines, simply stating what should be done in order to solve the problems Craven is creating. Bennet’s position is also mirrored in a couple of other characters, all of which meet more than once to decide how to disperse ‘the heat’ out of the situation, how to turn the story around in the media, and how to dispose of Craven.

What is behind his question to Craven? What does it mean to ask a father who just lost his daughter “What does it feel like?” when one is a father oneself? Bennet makes it very clear that though he is a father, he cannot imagine the ‘full dimensions’ of Craven’s pain. It is not a matter of picturing his child and then imagining his life without him/her. There is something else at stake. What makes the questioning truly perverse is that Bennet already knows that in a fundamental level, Craven doesn’t feel anything. His insight is succinctly described by Jacques Lacan:

“(...) no one can say what is the death of a child - except the father qua father - that is, no conscious being”

(J. Lacan, 1973, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis,)

Bennet is a man that knows there is a split between the father and the man. There are aspects of the function of the father that the man who fills the function cannot reach. It is because he knows of this gap, of this abyss which “no conscious being” can cross, that he can expose Craven to its edge.

Since this unfathomable dimension of the father is not within the subject’s conscious grasp, it is also the source of an irreducible lack, one which prompts the subject to try and fill it, causes the subject to desire. Bennet’s knowledge of this dimension is also the source of his immorality: instead of trying to fill the impossible function of paternity, he simply disavows it, not worrying about the moral consequences of his position - after all, he is not the father, he shouldn’t have to answer to the impossible responsibility of one.

Craven is thus defined in opposition to Bennet as the man who feels morally responsible for the consequences of being the support of his daughter’s desire. And as we learn with the story’s developments, his daughter’s sense of moral duty was precisely what she inherited from him.

Once Craven starts unveiling the conspiracy, the branches of the government that are involved with the whole thing (Senators, National Defense people etc) decide to hire a ‘consultant’ to assess the situation and, if needed, get rid of the detective: Mr. Jedburgh.

Mr. Jedburgh defines his job as being the guy who doesn’t allow us to ‘connect A to B’. Like most characters who are supposed to transit between the ideological surface and its inner-workings (‘A’ and ‘B’), Jedburgh is a very refined man (like Armin Mueller-Stahl in The International, for example) who does the dirty work, but at the same time keeps a moral sense of what is right.

When he first meets Craven, and is very impressed with the man’s commitment to finding the killer of his daughter, he calls himself Diogenes, “the one who went around with the lamp, looking for an honest man”.

But Jedburgh has a secret of his own, he is dying of cancer. He knows he won’t be around for much longer. And when he meets Craven, he decides not to kill him right away, and just see how far the detective is willing to go. When they meet for the second time, him and Craven have the following conversation:

“CRAVEN: So what’s that like...being no one in particular?

JEDBURGH: I don’t know what it means to have lost a child.

But I know what it means never to have had one.”

If Bennet is the man who disavows his position as a father and its consequences (‘father’ understood here in the broad sense of guaranteeing the space for ethics and for desire), Jedburgh seems to be a man defined by the impossibility of fatherhood.

He’s comparison between having lost a child and not having one is an answer to Craven’s question regarding what it was like “being no one in particular” - what it was like not being defined by one singular idea. His answer is that he is defined by the very unfathomable function he does not fill. He identifies with Craven precisely because he, like Bennet, knows there is a gap between man and father, and he defines himself by the very contradiction of the two, by this uncertain core of fatherhood. He is not a father, but exactly because of it, he feels responsible for an aspect of fatherhood most man turn away from. Pater semper incertus est.

Craven looks back at Jedburgh from the supplementary position. He is defined by being all the father he can be - and this circumscribes the father he cannot be, ‘the nucleus’ of the film’s discourse, so to speak.

This aspect becomes even more evident when compared to yet a fourth man, Bill Whitehouse. Bill is Thomas Craven’s friend in the police department.

By the time Craven knows what is going on, things are not looking good for him - he just found out that his daughter was poisoned with radioactive milk and it seems like he has just been poisoned himself. When he gets back home, after just outsmarting two of Bennet’s security guards who had been following him, he meets his friend Bill, who sold him out to the bad guys. They talk:

“WHITEHOUSE: I got kids Tommy.

CRAVEN: I don't.

WHITEHOUSE: And even if you did, right? Even if you did?

CRAVEN: ... Even if I did.”

Bill Whitehouse is the man who identifies totally with his function as a father. But how is that possible? The answer to that comes through his sad acknowledgment of Craven’s position - “Even if you did, right?” - Bill can pretend being a father is being a man who ‘has children’ as long as Craven keeps the difference between the two open. He knows very well, but...

At this moment, in a strange way, Bill, the man who was ‘just a father’ and Bennet, the father who was ‘just a man’, meet in their perverse disavowal of what fatherhood is.

A bit later on, after Bennet was killed by Craven - who is now on his deathbed at a hospital, dying from the radioactive poisoning - Jedburgh meets with the Senator who was responsible for the law which authorized Northmoor to go on with the secret armament testing and with three other government figures.

They are discussing how the whole situation will appear in the media, and they can’t decide the best solution. Jedburgh interrupts them and describes a full strategy, explaining that the whole thing should look like the Senator (who had met Thomas Craven at a certain point) had escaped from Craven’s mad attempt at killing him. It’s a perfect plan. Jedburgh knows his métier. But after this display of clarity about the system inner-workings, he stands up and shoots all of them. And before his turn comes up, the Senator gets up in fright and says “I’m a United States Senator.” To what Jedburgh calmly answers: “By what standards?” and then shoots him.

But as he goes for the door, one of the Senator’s guards stops him. The young insecure police officer just stands there, scared as hell, holding his gun, staring at the armed man who just shot four of the most powerful people in the country. In the tension of the two facing guns, Jedburgh breaks the silence and asks the policeman if he has a family. The man nods positively. Jedburgh holds his gun aside, like a gentleman refusing fire in a duel, and the young man takes him down.

After this necessary detour - looking at the different characters based on the same ‘theme’ that appear throughout the film - we can finally determinate with some precision what is this nucleus around which these characters organize themselves - for what is paternity in the film's vocabulary if not the signifier of any ethical stance?

In his Traumdeutung (1900), Freud tells of a man who lost his son. The father was watching the dead body of his son when he fell asleep and had a dream. Outside of his dream, a candle had fallen from the bed side table and the bed sheet as well as his dead son’s arm caught on fire. Inside his dream, the man saw himself standing in a room where his son suddenly appeared and told him “Father, I am burning”. And then asked him “Can’t you see it?”. The father woke up and put the fire out.

Freud then wonders what happened: If the actual incident was repeated inside the dream, it means that the father’s mind picked up on what was happening. But still he didn’t wake up. He kept on sleeping. But then, what did wake him up? Freud’s answer could only be one: the question “Can’t you see it?”.

In the same way the father couldn’t wake up to the horrible truth that his son was on fire, now he also couldn’t keep on dreaming - it would mean facing a dark and awful truth, an even more traumatic “waking up” to the horrifying answer to the son's question. He wakes up to reality in order to keep on sleeping on another register. He wakes up in order to avoid the answer that he cannot see it. The place from which he should be watching has no eyes. He cannot speak from that position.

Through his analysis of this dream, Freud drew a very brilliant definition of this edge we’ve been speaking about. It is a border between two realms, but if you cross it, it disappears. When on the edge, to move out of the dream into reality is simply to turn away and return.

The Edge of Darkness is exemplary because it functions both as a father’s desperate fantasy, his “waking up” to the reality of “facts” as well as a mapping many different positions towards the abyss of an impossible question - “Can you answer from the place of an Ideal?”. These same positions, when undressed from their family-drama semblance, are the very stuff of any ethical commitment.

Isn’t Bill the man who confuses the Idea with his own shortcomings as a man? And Bennet the one who takes his personal failures as a proof that the Idea is not worth it? Isn’t Craven the man who only trusts the Idea insofar as it is justified pathologically in reality? The definite confirmation of this comes when, faced with the killer of his daughter (whom he knows committed many other terrible crimes) Craven stops for a moment, holding the guy down, and asks him to repeatedly scream his [Craven’s] name, so he can compare it to the scream that accompanied the murder shots. At first it seems like he wants a confirmation of the murderer, but the repetition of his demand points towards a confirmation of him as a father. That’s what he needs. The answer to his demand is ‘Craven!’, but the question might just be...‘Who’s your daddy?’

And finally, wasn’t Jedburgh the one who, by giving up his body for the sake of “a standard”, somehow understood that the only possible answer from the place of the Ideal comes from the commitment of the son ?

His dead body is not like the dead body of the main hero - who in the end of the movie walks out of the hospital happily reconnected to his daughter, in spirit. The dead Hero is a dead father. With him the Idea goes to another world, it is stuck to him. But the dead Jedburgh is a dead son. In his death something lives on. Thomas Carven died in the name of his child. But Jedburgh died in the name of the father.

The moral question of the film - “Can you go to the end for justice?” - which shines a light into the darkness of the things the father didn’t know, pushing him forward and deeper into the mystery, serves as a cover up for the much darker insight that he cannot know: if you go to the end and cross the edge, you lose the spectral appearance of the abyss itself. It is Jedburgh, who stopping at the edge when faced with a shot he could not take, who stills keeps the reference to an Ideal alive.

Still, if the edge of paternity coincides with the edge of the ethical act, it is not in the subject’s death that the Ideal should be sustained, for even if Jedburgh’s act costs him only his own body and not someone else’s, it is still a death that ‘warns’ us to the danger of ‘going too far’ so that death is the only ethical way out.

The true edge - the abyss which Hollywood keeps away with fierce disavowal - is defined by the clear impossibility of re-imagining this film in a way that the Ideal wouldn’t be something to die for, but to live by.