I
recently had the veritable pleasure of watching Tom Hardy in a car doing an
extended impression of Anthony Hopkins. Slightly unconvincing Welsh accents
aside, Locke (dir. Steven Knight) was
possibly the best film I’ve seen at the cinema all year, and Tom Hardy’s screen
presence was engrossing, as was the simply beautiful cinematography. But, me
being me, I did spend much of the film and the crème de menthe accompanied
conversation afterwards considering the philosophical themes present.
Hardy,
who is the only character we see on screen, plays Ivan Locke, a ‘concrete
farmer,’ a builder who specialises in laying foundations. He has just finished
work the night before a major consignment of concrete is due to arrive, with
which he is to lay the foundations for a new skyscraper. However, our hero made
an error of judgement some months ago and got a woman named Bethen (voiced by
the ever-delightful Olivia Colman in their phone conversations) pregnant.
Trouble is, he already has a wife, and Bethen has just gone into premature
labour before he is able to tell her what has happened. An interesting point of
discussion might be whether-or-not he ever intended to tell her, we do only
have his word on this, but perhaps we should leave that question to one side.
Locke
is one of the most fiercely moral characters I can recall ever seeing on the
film screen. We might, perhaps, begin to think of the noble heroes of many fine
and entertaining films, risking everything for the sake of right, but Ivan
Locke is just a man, a normal man. He has a wife, a job and two kids. He has
the air of the everyman about him. This is where his power as a character lies,
his utterly ordinary life and personality mingled with an extraordinary sense
of morality and duty.
The film
follows Locke’s conversations over the phone in his car, as well as slightly
badly judged conversations with the imaginary ghost of his late father (these
asides, though essential in many ways, could have been handled better in my
humble opinion). Over the phone, he is simultaneously attempting to hold his
family together while breaking to his wife the news of his sole infidelity
(again, we only have his word for this but I am inclined to believe him…call me
gullible), organising his work team to be in a position to deal with the
approaching consignment of concrete, and reassuring the mother of his
illegitimate child that he’ll be there as soon as he can be.
And, in so
doing, he more-or-less ruins his life. His wife tells him he isn’t welcome back
home and, because he has abandoned them when they need him the most (it will be
the largest non-military or nuclear concrete delivery in Europe), he gets the
sack.
I feel that
there are two principle questions to be asked about the character of Locke:
1.
Is this a spontaneous ethical act or simply a reaction?
2.
Is this the right thing to do, and if so, why?
Originally, I was also going to
address a third question, ‘Is Locke simply a narcissist?’ but, as this post has
already trundled on past the 1,300 word mark, that might be left for another
time.
*
Throughout,
Locke is struggling with freedom and destiny. We learn through his imaginary
conversations with his father that he himself is illegitimate, that he was
unwanted by his father (who he never even met until he was in his 20s). This
begs the question- is Locke’s single-minded, uncompromising determination to
see right by this woman and their child an authentic (used in the existential
sense) act or is he just being propelled by the sins of his father? Or, more
properly, by an overwhelming desire to prove to the world that he is not his father? He certainly makes a
point of how much he wishes that he could show his father how unlike him he is,
telling his wife that he is doing exactly the opposite of what his own father
did, making sure that he is there to deal with his ‘fuck up,’ as he puts it.
Wording it in such a way certainly suggests that he has little affection for
the potential child, but having an appropriate emotional response is not the
entirety of the ethical act.
All this
being said, however, we need not necessarily view Locke as simply reacting to
the ghosts of his past, entirely motivated by outside agency (‘fallen’, to use
Heidegger’s turn of phrase); rather, we can read his actions as being a
transcendental ethical act, in which he risks everything to do the right thing because he has first-hand experience of how
damaging doing wrong in this situation is. At one point he tells one of his
co-workers about the importance of ensuring that the right kind of concrete is
used in the foundation, as a flaw at the beginning of the structure will become
a flaw with the whole thing: the parallels here ought to be obvious to the
reader.
*
Locke has
found himself in an impossible position. His ethical duties are pulling him in
a variety of different directions, and it is going to be a tremendous amount of
work to satisfy the demands that the Good is making on him. He must,
simultaneously, do right by: his wife, his unwanted child and his employers
(perhaps, more properly, his co-workers). The most frequent ethical act we see
Locke engaging in is his almost naïve honesty (he seems virtually unaware of
the difference between telling his wife he had sex with another woman and
telling her that it isn’t a road closure he’s arranging for work, but a
‘stop-and-go’!); he insists on telling people the truth to an almost absurd
degree. For example, when Bethen asks him if he loves her he responds by saying
‘No, how can I? I don’t know you.’ Interestingly, he gives this same response
when she asks if he hates her…
Does he do
the right thing?
I would
argue that what needs to be recognised is that he is in a situation where no
action can satisfy all parties. Every course of action he can take is
ultimately going to result in someone being harmed: if he goes home to watch
the footy with his sons and wife, and goes to work the next day, he has let
down a woman he did wrong by (though he frequently tells us that he only slept
with her out of pity, itself an at least ethically ambiguous action) and a
child he is responsible for. In this regard, the film resembles the
often-marched-out thought experiments of moral philosophy lectures. ‘If pulling
the lever dooms one man but saves three, ought I do it?’ The simplistic answer
the baser Utilitarians offer us (although, I’m not sure I’ve ever met one who
was entirely comfortable with answering such a question, which I personally
take as a good sign for their ethical development) is that ‘Yes, in such a
situation the right thing to do is to end the life of one to save the lives of
many.’
That we
express discomfort at this formula is evidence enough that treating moral issues
in such a simplistic way is at least an incomplete
approach, or that it warrants further discussion if nothing else (I reiterate
my point that I have doubts that any morally-healthy adult would be wholly comfortable
with the ‘logical’ solution, but that opens a whole new can of philosophical
worms…), though that is not say that the hedonic calculus ought never to be
deployed. However, I fear we are digressing from the topic at hand. This is a
glorified film review, not a Prolegomena to Any Future Moral Philosophy.
I do not
have an answer to the question ‘Does Locke do the right thing?’, and I don’t
believe that an answer is actually available for that question. Morality is not
a matter of reducing situations to easily quantifiable pleasure-pain ratios.
That Locke causes more people immediate grief than he would if he had ignored
Bethen is simply not the end of the story here (nor is it when we start talking
about long-term felicity, the actions of the agent in the moment warrant the attention of the philosopher). There are
moral demands made upon us by life, in all its sticky, smelly, messy ambiguity,
than any single ethical theory is ever likely to render as a simple formula. Locke as a film might be spoken of as
being about the impossibility of the purely ‘right’ action, and this is its
philosophical interest and importance.
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