One by one, we are all becoming shades. Better to pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. How long you locked away in your heart the image of your lover’s eyes when he told you that he did not wish to live. I’ve never felt that way myself towards any woman, but I know that such a feeling must be love. Think of all those who ever were, back to the beginning of time. And me, transient as they, flickering out as well into their gray world. Like everything around me, this solid world itself which they reared and lived in, is winding and dissolving. Snow is falling. Falling in that lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lies buried. Falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living, and the dead.
James Joyce (1915) (based on the final monologue of Gabriel Conroy, from “The Dead,” in Dubliners, quoted by Almodóvar in The Room Next Door)
When someone enters the cinema to see The Room Next Door, they expect the film to deal with euthanasia, dignified death, and other serious and pressing issues of traditional bioethics. Since the film is directed by Pedro Almodóvar, we are prepared to see a great work. The viewer is not wrong: this is an exquisite, enormous film.
However, this film is not limited to perspectives about euthanasia or a dignified death, if by that we mean the procedure by which a human being makes the decision to end their suffering caused by an incurable disease. The film goes further. Perhaps beyond what Almodóvar himself managed to conceive from his work.
Indeed, this is the talent of Almodóvar, who, as Freud pointed out, knows how to extract from his unconscious-fantasies the material for his works. A material that, behind the image or the explicit story, always carries resonances that are not so obvious.
The Room Next Door points to something more than the mere experience of Ingrid accompanying Martha, who has decided to put an end to her end-stage malignancy. The crossroads to which the film guides us is the sad spectacle of witnessing the parallel, dizzying deterioration of the planet as we know it.
The natural panorama surrounding the house where these very special days take place gives us a clue in this regard. The landscape is almost another character in the film. Almodóvar’s enormous cinematography makes nature shine, whether it is the trees, plants, fruits, bodies, faces, coasts, sea, or rain. The snow becomes an additional existential character and is alluded to by the passage from James Joyce’s Dubliners’ stories. [1] Almodovar’s choices are not by whim or coincidence. His subtle use of environmental images reveals a cosmic vibration, whereby death stops being “the bad guy,” and the audience experiences an enhanced recognition and gratitude of life’s inherent gifts.
Against this backdrop, Almodóvar offers us all the clues to recognize and formulate a bioethics of contemporary, global devastation. Hence, Martha’s career as a war correspondent; her relationship with her daughter and her peculiar choice of vocation. Hence, the references to Bosnia and other sites of human horror. This explains the dialogue between these two women who, among many other shared experiences, were –each, sequentially – with the same man; an expert in climate change who gives lectures on the debacle from which the health of the planet is suffering.
The occasional presence of this bitter, defeated male character makes Ingrid express, in a sublime dialogue, a key and surprising point based on her unique experience: how and where are we to position ourselves in the face of the crime that human beings are inflicting on the planet, each other, and therefore on themselves.
We conclude by saying the madness (without metaphor) that the planet is suffering today, given the denial of climatic and war catastrophes, coincides with the visceral rejection of our own finitude. Temporary survival of oneself and the survival of our planet become entangled. By ignoring our own mortality, individual life experiences risk becoming transformed into transactional, consumer goods. Almodóvar reminds us humanity is in the next room... our ignorance is not knowing which side of the door we are experiencing.
NOTE
[1] Joyce’s story "The Dead", whose final monologue we have included as an epigraph to this article, operates as a mis en abyme. The French expression "mis en abyme", is a double-mirroring concept that refers to a work within another, when the second establishes a dialogue with the first and sheds a new light on it. A film within a film, a play within another – like the famous scene of the comedians in Hamlet, which ends by revealing the King’s murderer. In Almodóvar’s film, a literary passage within a film, invites us to reflect on the meaning of the finitude of life.
FORUM
What we could call the "biopolitics of extinction" highlights how death ceases to be merely the end of an individual’s life and becomes the shadow that looms over the horizon of our civilization. It is not just the disappearance of a being, but the dissolution of an order, the collapse of a world that, by denying its own limits and the finitude of its resources, plunges toward its inevitable end. The logic of instrumental reason, which reduces everything to a matter of utility and efficiency, has been one of the driving forces behind this process. By prioritizing control and exploitation of the environment without regard for its limits, we have detached our existence from its broader context, and thus, humanity now faces the collapse of a planet that has been managed with a blind disregard for its own fragility.
This Almodovar film deeply captures life confronted with its own shadow and, at the same time, allows us to think about the vitality of some shadows. The ending, far from crushing desire, redefines what has been lived.
Ι teach ethics, including bioethics, and philosophy and cinema and I am looking forward to watching the film and to participating in discussions about it.
I have been teaching ethics, including applied ethics and particularly biothics at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and I am also going to teach a course on Philosophy and Film at the University of Crete.
I am interested in watching ’ The Room Next Door’ and in having a chamce to discuss it with colleagues.
Mi piacerebbe vederlo in italiano se possibile, grazie mille
Film:The Room Next Door
Original Title:The Room Next Door
Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Year: 2024
Country: Spain
Other comments by the author: