The Hours Essay
The Hours
The film “The Hours” is Stephen Daldry’s adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Michael Cunningham. The movie analyses the universality of existential human issues such as love, sexuality, sadness, hope, daily routine, loneliness and depression. The storyline unfolds these issues through showing three women of three different generations facing the same similar problems in different times and contexts. The negative tone of the movie reflects the mental states of the main characters, which have arisen from their unsatisfying lives. Death, more specifically suicide, is the central theme of the Hours, and it is portrayed as one of the tempting ways to end the undesirable existence. Through the focus on three different characters it is shown how the thoughts of suicide, fuelled by conflicting internal states and external situations, can culminate in either ending your own life, or in the decision to end and change the situation that is ultimately causing hopelessness and depression.
Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman), lives in Richmond in the 1940s. She feels trapped: she hates Richmond and wants to move back to London. At the same time she also realises that moving back to London would mean the worsening of her depression. The Richmond-London conflict in the movie also represents the conflict of sexual identity. Virginia is trapped in a heterosexual marriage (Richmond), when she is longing for a different kind of sexual experience (London), but knows that this is impossible in the climate of those times. She sees suicide as the only way to end her suffering.
The scene where Leonard, Virginia’s husband, finds her on the train platform and the argument that they are having is a representation of the fight that Virginia goes through with herself everyday. The empty platform symbolises the in-between state of the internal negotiation, the outcome of which will determine if Virginia is going to be sensible and continue to live the life that is
The film “The Hours” is Stephen Daldry’s adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Michael Cunningham. The movie analyses the universality of existential human issues such as love, sexuality, sadness, hope, daily routine, loneliness and depression. The storyline unfolds these issues through showing three women of three different generations facing the same similar problems in different times and contexts. The negative tone of the movie reflects the mental states of the main characters, which have arisen from their unsatisfying lives. Death, more specifically suicide, is the central theme of the Hours, and it is portrayed as one of the tempting ways to end the undesirable existence. Through the focus on three different characters it is shown how the thoughts of suicide, fuelled by conflicting internal states and external situations, can culminate in either ending your own life, or in the decision to end and change the situation that is ultimately causing hopelessness and depression.
Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman), lives in Richmond in the 1940s. She feels trapped: she hates Richmond and wants to move back to London. At the same time she also realises that moving back to London would mean the worsening of her depression. The Richmond-London conflict in the movie also represents the conflict of sexual identity. Virginia is trapped in a heterosexual marriage (Richmond), when she is longing for a different kind of sexual experience (London), but knows that this is impossible in the climate of those times. She sees suicide as the only way to end her suffering.
The scene where Leonard, Virginia’s husband, finds her on the train platform and the argument that they are having is a representation of the fight that Virginia goes through with herself everyday. The empty platform symbolises the in-between state of the internal negotiation, the outcome of which will determine if Virginia is going to be sensible and continue to live the life that is