What Does It Mean To Be Truly Alive?

On the nature of comic storytelling and its relation to our quest for personal transformation

Rodney Williams (played by the incomparable Bill Nighy) has terminal cancer. His doctor has given him some six-to-eight months to live. How should he spend his remaining days?

Too Late for Mr. Zombie?

His first thought is suicide. But unable to go through with it, he attempts to drown his sorrows in booze and partying. That doesn’t feel right, either.

Williams has spent his career as a bureaucrat for the County Council in post-war London, a bureaucracy which resembles nothing so much as the Circumlocution Office in Dickens’ Little Dorrit. Here Williams has measured out his life, not in coffee spoons, but in forms and files. Some of these files, those which ask too much of his justice and generosity, have been discreetly tucked away at the bottom of his inbox. “It’ll do no harm,” Williams has always assured his staff.

One day after his diagnosis, while “skiving” off work (i.e. playing hooky), Williams runs into a young woman, Margaret Harris, who used to work in his office. She reminds him of a promise he had made to write her a letter of reference for a new position. He says he’ll write it over lunch if she’ll join him. At lunch Margaret divulges the nickname she always had for him: “Mr. Zombie,” and Williams does his best to laugh. Afterwards he and Margaret spend a pleasant afternoon together walking in the park and talking.

A day or so later, Williams visits the restaurant where Margaret works as a waitress. He asks her to the movies. Afterward they go to an arcade. When Margaret declares that it’s time for her to go home, Williams asks her to join him for just one drink at the pub. A few minutes, no more…

Is Williams falling in love with her? After all, he’s old enough to be her father, if not her grandfather. At the pub, Margaret presses the question herself: “Someone might suppose you were becoming…infatuated!” Sheepish, defeated, Williams replies: “Infatuated. I suppose, in a way, I am.” But after a beat he adds: “But not quite as some might suppose.”

What Williams has become infatuated with is Margaret’s zest for living. He tries to explain this to her:

“You see, after receiving my news, I took to looking around myself a little. At that office, that life. And I realized how, since you arrived, how very different it’s been. I confess I did at time worry if your attitude was, well, appropriate. But then I came to appreciate you. Not simply for your youth. There was some other quality. Your appetite for life. The way you always make everything jolly and gay. Even whilst working there, with us. And that day I saw you, in Piccadilly. I thought, look at her, look at Miss Harris. If only to be alive like that, even for one day. And I suppose I hoped you might show me. Teach me how to be like you—”

A few moments later Williams reflects:

“When the time comes, when my Maker calls me, I wish at least for him to find me…living. The thing is, I don’t see how to change it now. I’ve tried my best these last few weeks. Even went to the seaside…”

The screenplay then reads:

“Suddenly, he’s stopped by an idea opening within him. Beat.

Williams starts to laugh. Secretively at first, then his laughter seems to shake his whole being—a laughter filled with relief, revelation, and the appreciation of having missed something staring one in the face.

Margaret looks at him, alarmed, puzzled.”

Williams, after another short laugh, declares: “Perhaps it’s not too late after all for Mr. Zombie.”

Williams has experienced a moment of insight, which leads him to what Aristotle calls a peripeteia, a reversal of his situation. One of those files he has buried in his inbox (“It’ll do no harm”) has to do with a request by a group of mothers to turn a bombed-out corner of their neighborhood into a playground for their children. Williams sees the mothers’ request, a request that had been staring him in the face, as the opportunity for change he has been looking for. Margaret always makes things “jolly and gay” because, Williams now sees, she isn’t full of herself. She pours herself out for others. That, now, is what Williams aims to do.

The film is called Living (2022), directed by Oliver Hermanus from a screenplay by Nobel-Prize winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day). The screenplay, for those interested, is available online at sonyclassics.com.

Comedy and Man’s Ultimate Concern

What kind of story is Living? Its inciting incident is Williams receiving a terminal diagnosis. Yet it is not a tragedy. It might have been a tragedy if Williams had not had his moment of insight in the pub, but that insight, and the resolution Williams makes in light of it, diverts the story from what might have been its tragic destination. Living is a comedy.

Comedy is not essentially about laughter; it is about reversal and personal transformation in light of what is truly good. Playwright-screenwriter-author David Mamet, himself the winner of a Pulitzer Prize for his play, Glengarry Glen Ross, observes: “Comedy and tragedy are concerned with morality, that is, our relations under God; drama with man and society” (see Mamet’s essay, “Theatrical Forms,” in his book, Theatre). In other words, comedy and tragedy have to do with man’s ultimate concern and how well, or ill, he comports himself to it. A drama (e.g. the current PBS reboot of All Creatures Great and Small) has to do with the struggles of everyday life with the folks at home and in the neighborhood. In a drama, man’s ultimate concern is, at best, a side concern.

Comic reversal and personal transformation, just as much as tragic reversal and personal defeat, depend upon an order that human beings do not make, an order that the comic protagonist, whether it be Rodney Williams or Dante or Mr. Bean, must learn to measure up to. This order has been established by God, man’s ultimate concern. Thus, comedy is a picturing of human resistance, but ultimate conformity to, the divine. As Mamet puts it using a theological metaphor, the comic interchange “is a communion between the audience and God, moderated through a play or liturgy constituted by the dramatist.”

Just before his moment of insight, Williams refers to his ultimate concern: “When the time comes, when my Maker calls me, I wish at least for him to find me…living.” The ideal of “living” stands in for what Mamet calls “morality,” “our relations under God,” and what I have called “the order that human beings do not make,” that which is established by, and leads us back to, God. More specifically, “living” is constituted by pouring oneself out for others, building the kids a playground, which makes possible the joy Williams admires in Margaret.

The last image we see of Williams is him on a winter’s night, in coat, scarf, and fedora. He sits on one of the swings in the park he has pushed hard to see constructed, singing. The screenplay reads: “We now see Williams’s face. His expression is illuminated by an inner triumph. A glowing contentment that seems to warm the snow falling over him.”

Becoming Truly Alive

Storytelling is a form of moral persuasion. It is an attempt to convince us of a moral truth through delightful and compelling imagery. Living attempts to persuade us that “living” consists in living for others, and intimates that this understanding is endorsed by our Maker.

Living is in fact an adaptation of a 1952 Japanese film, Ikiru (“To Live”), by the acclaimed director Akira Kurosawa. Living tracks Ikiru fairly closely, but what is interesting is that Ikiru itself is based loosely upon Tolstoy’s 1886 novella, The Death of Ivan Iliych. In the Tolstoy, the ultimate concern of the protagonist is far more explicitly Christian than what we find in Living. For it is around the dying Ivan Ilyich Golovin’s insight into the meaning of the Eucharist that his life turns in its final moments.

My novel, The Good Death of Kate Montclair, also begins with the protagonist, Kate Montclair, receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis. My novel also is a comedy in the sense I have defined, as the story is about Kate Montclair’s struggle to measure up to the demands of God’s providential order. Like Rodney Williams, Kate must learn how to pour herself out for others. And, like Ivan Ilyich Golovin, she must learn that Christ’s sacrifice, re-enacted in the Eucharist, is the hermeneutical key to understanding all the apparently disconnected, meaningless, and painful events of her life.

What we, the audience, experience in comedy is what Aristotle calls katharsis, a cleansing. Our emotions are given a “workout” that leaves us, in a way, purified. We feel pity and fear at Williams’s dire situation, his failure to live, but we also feel, in the story’s climax and resolution, renewed hope that tragedy need not have the final word.

This cleansing insight doesn’t guarantee that we will get off the couch and live as one “truly alive.” But it is a powerful emotional experience that can lead to comic reversal and personal transformation—if we follow it up with the same kind of commitment to others made by Rodney Williams in Living.

P.S. If you’d like to pick up a copy of my novel, The Good Death of Kate Montclair, it is available here on Amazon and at Chrism Press. My deepest thanks to all The Comic Muse readers who have already read it! If you have read the novel, please consider leaving a review on Amazon. Reviews help keep the novel “sweet” to Amazon’s algorithm.