Sweet Hereafter

LINK PARA VIDEO
"(...) The reference of the film is, of course, Robert Browning's famous poem The Pied Piper of Hamelin, repeatedly quoted through the film by Nicole, with the longest quote occurring when father takes her into the barn for sex. And the ultimate proto-Hegelian paradox (identity of the opposites) is that it is Stephens himself, the angry outsider, who is the true Pied Piper in the film. That is to say, the way the community survived the loss was to replace the dead child with the dreamed one: "It's the other child, the dreamed baby, the remembered one, that for a few moments we think exists. For those few moments, the first child, the real baby, the dead one, is not gone; she simply never was. What the successful litigation pursued by Stephens would have brought about is the disturbance of this fragile solution: the pacifying specter of the dreamed child would have disintegrated, the community would have been confronted with the loss as such, with the fact that their children DID exist and now NO L0NGER DO. So if Stephens is the Pied Piper of the film, his threat is that he will snatch away not the real children, but the dreamed ones, thus confronting the community not only with the loss as such, but with the inherent cruelty of their solution which involves the denial of the very existence of the lost real children. Is, then, this the reason Zoe lied? In a true stroke of a genius, Egoyan wrote an additional stanza in the Browning style, which Nicole recites over a close-up of her father's mouth after she has falsely implicated Dolores:

"And why I lied he only knew But from my lie this did come true Those lips from which he drew his tune Were frozen as the winter moon."

These frozen lips, of course, stand not only for the dead children, but also for Nicole's rejection of being further engaged in the incest: only her father knew the truth about why she lied at the hearing—the truth of her lie being a NO! to her father. And this NO! is at the same time a NO! to the community (Gemeinschaft) as opposed to society (Geseilschaft). When does one belong to a community. The difference concerns the netherworld of unwritten obscene rules which regulate the "inherent transgression" of the community, the way we are allowed/expected to violate its explicit rules. This is why the subject who closely follows the explicit rules of a community will never be accepted by its members as "one of us": he does not participate in the transgressive rituals which effectively keep this community together. And society as opposed to community is a collective which can dispense with this set of unwritten rules—since this is impossible, there is no society without community. This is where the theories which advocate the subversive character of mimicry get it wrong; according to these theories, the properly subversive attitude of the Other—say, of a colonized subject who lives under the domination of the colonizing culture—is to mimic the dominant discourse, but with a distance, so that what he does and says is like what the colonizers themselves do... almost like it, with an unfathomable difference which makes his Otherness all the more palpable. One is tempted to turn this thesis around: it is the foreigner emulating faithfully the rules of the dominant culture he wants to penetrate and identify with, who is condemned forever to remain an outsider, because he fails to practice, to participate in, the self-distance of the dominant culture, the unwritten rules which tell us how and when to violate the explicit rules of this culture. We are "in," integrated in a culture, perceived by their members is "one of us," only when we succeed in practicing this unfathomable DISTANCE from the symbolic rules—it is ultimately only this distance which exhibits our identity, our belonging to the culture in question. And the subject reaches the level of a true ethical stance only when he moves beyond this duality of the public rules as well as their superego shadow; in John Irving's The Cider-House Rules, these three levels of ethics are staged in an exemplary way. First, we get the straight morality (the set of explicit rules we choose to obey—Homer Wells, the novel's hero, chooses never to perform an abortion); then, we experience its obscene underside—this is what takes place in the "cider house" in which, while on seasonal work there, Homer learns that explicit rules are sustained by more obscene implicit rules with which it is better not to mess); finally, when, based on this experience, Homer acknowledges the necessity to BREAK the explicit moral rules (he performs an abortion), he reaches the level of ethics proper. And does the same not go also for Nicole in The Sweet Hereafter? Is Nicole's act not the gesture of asserting her distance towards both poles, the larger society as well as the "sweet hereafter" of the traumatized community and its secret rules?"
in THE ACT AND IT’S VICISSITUDES by ZZTOP