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The Hours is a semi-biographical American motion picture drama, released in 2002. Based on a screenplay of Michael Cunningham, tracking its roots from Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway, and at the same time from her biography, the motion picture follows the idea of suicide from a dual viewpoint: psychological and philosophical. Laura Brown, as every housewife, is required to fulfil her chores, to attend her husband during his daily routine and to enjoy her post-WWII leisurely life. Living in a wealthy suburbia of Los Angeles, caring for one child, and expecting another one, she has the feeling that all what her life encompasses is just an overwhelming unhappiness, metamorphosed in suicidal depression. Virginia Woolf is not depicted as being the vibrant and influential writer of Bloomsbury, but as living a rather remote and claustrophobic life, under the permanent observation of her husband, who constantly frightened that she would eventually perish by her own hands. She drowned herself eventually, in 1941 leaving two, well-prepared suicide letters, written weeks before her act. Richard Brown is a contemporary successful poet, terminally ill AIDS patient, living wretchedly unhappy, but benefitting from the help of his old friend Clarissa. He kills himself just before the ceremony awarding the prestigious Carruthers prize, claiming that he failed to write about every aspect of the life. Beyond the depression, illness and loneliness, the suicides of Virginia Woolf and Richard Brown have strong philosophical and ethical co-notations, which may raise the question if suicide can be a moral acceptable and understandable act.
Laura Brown is the only non-intellectual main character in the movie and the also the only one who fails to commit suicide. The origins of her depression are to be founded into the morality of the period. She does not question them, she regards them as being axiomatic and she urges herself to obey them. Leading her existence upon those norms, she finds herself married to a proper, caring man, but whom she does not love and she becomes a mother only because this fact was prerequisite for a married woman . Every duty is a burden, every gesture a mere simulation of an universally acceptable act and the application of ethical norms is unquestionable. She collapses into depression, out of self-compulsion, unreasoning the legitimacy or the applicability of such obligation on an individual. For these reasons her depression has a emotional origin and therefore, her psychological context does not confer her legitimacy to conclude such a final act, because she can be able to change the conjuncture she is living in. Her reasons, because they appertain to the emotional sphere, are not sustainable enough to allow her the possibility of suicide. If concluded, her act would be one of cowardice and hereby we are presented the greatest contrast to the intellectual, namely Virginia Woolf and Richard Brown. Furthermore a possible suicide would not bring her or those around her any advancement.
Virginia Woolf lives in an artistically sterile environment and although depressing, it does not have the power to determine her to commit suicide. She is indeed unhappy in the quiet suburb, but she realizes that by changing her life, by moving back to London, she may be able to escape from her depression. Her entire life is guided upon general medical rules, and those rule seem to be pointless to the singular. Clearly aware of her difficult nature, she approaches her recurring crises rationally and does not grant herself the possibility of suicide because of the particular state of affairs, however she eventually kills herself, but from different reasons than initially. Her reasons are deontological: her being is a burden for herself and the ones around her and therefore her extinction would mean liberation. She conceives suicide as duty and obligation to herself and to her husband. The idea of duty was raised not as result of a scanty evaluation of her life or her husband’s, nor of flourishing altruism, but as a result of experience. She knew life and the evolution of facts. Her disease or her suffering could not determine her to commit suicide, but the idea of duty, was decisive. If the comfort of the closest ones depended on her, and therefore her absence would grant them the energy to prosper and to treasure life, then to perish seemed the right to do. Somebody has to die so the others can live on.
Richard Brown’s case can be narrowly interpreted to be in its essence seen before. A poet without physical future jumps over his window to ease his pain. In simple terms this would seem more like a home-made euthanasia of a moribund. However beyond this apparent motivation, the movie develops a second, twofold deontological inquiry of the suicide: deontological, in slightly similar terms like Virginia’s Woolf’s motivation and the second one regarding the condition of the artist. Clarissa, his closest friend, developed a certain dependency on him, mislaying herself from her own life. His cumbrous existence once finished would allow her to focus on with her own life and liberate herself from seeking the ghost of passed happiness. Furthermore, the contrast between two ethical perceptions of duty is emphasized. If Clarissa assumed apparently unselfishly her role of caretaker, suggesting, therefore, her inclination towards a universally accepted norm of ethics, the stronger guarding for the weaker, regarded rather as virtue of social conduct, Richard Brown negates the value of her acts and also the value of her incessant help, claiming that there is a higher duty to ourselves, as singular individual and then to the rest of the world. The duty, that we owe to ourselves stand prior any kind of other social duty, so we do not carry on with existence for the sake of those dear to us. He conceives his artistic life as a failure, and this was in fact the major manifestation of his existence because he has not been able to write about everything than had pertained his being . And hereby we have the second fold of his idea of duty. He, as an artist, has failed to fulfil his responsibility to put in words “everything”, and since he is dying and his time is running out, this lack of accomplishment of artistic duty gives momentum to his motivation to commit suicide.
The movie offers, beyond the excellent comparison between the life of three different people living in rather different periods of time, a very deep reflection on the meaning of duty. Seasoned by the music of Philip Glass, that tranches all the way through the consciousness of the characters, the film is often regarded as depressing. But what is there to be depressing when you discover new entanglements of such a common word as “duty”. Laura Brown takes a pre-given idea of duty and applies is dogmatically to the edge of her extinction, whereas Virginia Woolf and Richard Brown transcend beyond the socially acceptable value of this notion. If death is a duty and possibility at the same time then it can be accomplished. Furthermore if we look at the manner chosen to die, Virginia Woolf drowned herself in a river filling the pockets with rocks so she can experience lucidly death, Richard Brown remained articulate even at the very last moment of his life, whereas Laura Brown opted for narcotics. The fear, the emotion, that everything encompassing life could go on without her impeded her to commit suicide. Where Richard Brown and Virginia Woolf are governed by a reason that constructed the entire morality of their suicide, Laura Brown is inclined by emotion and depression.
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