Passivity and Responsibility in The Comfort of Strangers, Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist and Adam Resurrected
Passivity and Responsibility in The Comfort of Strangers, Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist and Adam Resurrected
In Otherwise than Being, Emmanuel Levinas talks of ethics state as being ‘a passivity more passive than all passivity’, the idea that we want nothing for ourselves and that this is what enables us to be devoted to the Other. The Paul Schrader films that this chapter analyses – The Comfort of Strangers (1990), adapted from the Ian McEwan novel, Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist (2005) and Adam Resurrected (2008), from a novel by Yoram Kaniuk – focus on protagonists who are passive in their wants, desires and relationship with life, and my readings of these films will discuss Levinasian passivity and its ethical importance to film. These protagonists are affected by their passivity in different ways: Colin (Rupert Everett) in The Comfort of Strangers comes up against a man who wishes to murder him; Father Merrin (Stellan Skarsgård) in Dominion faces off against Satan; Adam (Jeff Goldblum) in Adam Resurrected is fighting the trauma of his own persecuted past during the Holocaust and his present-day struggles to control his overactive but fractured sense of self. Schrader shows in these films that ethical engagement has passivity as a necessary component, and that passivity is perhaps the most demanding aspect of Levinas’s ethics.
Keywords: Paul Schrader, The Comfort of Strangers, Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist, Adam Resurrected, Film style, Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics, Passivity
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