The song continues to play as the camera moves farther and farther away from the spooning lovers and higher and higher into the night sky that cradles them. Having proceeded from katabasis to catharsis to catastrophe, this firework of a film ends with a grand finale: a katasterism. When they are no more than a glint at the center of our screen, Adam and Harry become a star in the night sky.
* * *
Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers (2023) is among the latest in a long line of stories about a son’s encounter with his parents’ ghosts. When, in Book 11 of the Homeric epic that bears his name, Odysseus speaks with his mother’s shade in Hades, thus does she relate the cause of her untimely death:
The goddess did not shoot me in my home,
aiming with gentle arrows. Nor did sickness
suck all the strength out from my limbs, with long
and cruel wasting. No, it was missing you,
Odysseus, my sunshine (Od. 11.198–202)
Odysseus, my sunshine: What more beautiful way to render the adonic “φαίδιμ’ Ὀδυσσεῦ” (shining Odysseus) than as Emily Wilson, with a maternal warmth absent from other translations, does here? And yet what more piercing words for a son to hear? Thus does Odysseus recount his reaction:
Then in my heart I wanted to embrace
the spirit of my mother. She was dead,
and I did not know how. Three times I tried,
longing to touch her. But three times her ghost
flew from my arms, like shadows or like dreams. (Od. 11.204–208)
Some seven centuries later, Vergil twice tries to embrace the spirit of his poetic forebear’s lines by having his own epic hero attempt to hug first his wife’s ghost and later his father’s:
Three times I tried to throw my arms around;
three times the image flew from my embrace
like light winds and most like a winged dream. (Aen. 2.792–794 & 6.700–702)
Note the differences between the two similes: Vergil’s light winds dispel his precursor’s shadows, while his “most like” intensifies the oneiric atmosphere.
Whereas the Odyssey and the Aeneid fleetingly capture the dreamlike quality of a man’s encounter with his departed loved ones, All of Us Strangers rather miraculously sustains the reverie. In this regard, Haigh’s film is more akin to Shakespeare’s Hamlet than to either of the aforementioned epics. Visited by his father’s ghost, the Danish Prince famously loses – or at least seems to lose – his grip on reality. Too much in the sun (but hardly his father’s sunshine), Hamlet responds thus to the memorable line “Adieu, adieu, adieu. Remember me” (1.5.91):
Remember thee?
Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee?
Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmixed with baser matter. (1.5.95–104)
Adam, the protagonist in All of Us Strangers, is not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be. However, Andrew Scott, the actor playing Adam, has recently and brilliantly performed the role. Much as Vergil brings his memory of Odysseus to bear on Aeneas, Scott brings his memory of Hamlet to bear on Adam, whose mother (Claire Foy) and father (Jamie Bell) were killed in a car crash when he was just eleven years old. Having spent much of his life trying to forget his childhood trauma, Adam, now in his forties, spends the film trying to remember his parents and to reconcile his past and present selves. Rather than wipe away all trivial fond records, Adam opens his heart to (and with) mementos of all kinds – musical records not least.
Both the first and the last track to play in the film is “The Power of Love” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Shortly before we hear it for the first time, we see a shirtless Adam emerging on the left side of the screen just as the sun sets and evening is spread out against a cloudy London sky.
If this opening tableau is meant to remind us of the Sistine Chapel fresco featuring Adam’s biblical namesake, conspicuously absent is any figure corresponding to God the Father. Adam is alone. We, staring at a screen, witness him, a screenwriter, staring at a blank screen, grasping for inspiration much as Michelangelo’s Adam reaches toward God.
After a fire alarm forces him outside, Adam returns to the celestial ennui of his apartment and begins to listen to “The Power of Love.” We hear the crooning of “Ay ay ay ay” when the doorbell unexpectedly rings. Before Adam hits pause and opens his apartment door, we hear three more lines from the song: “Feels like fire / I’m so in love with you / Purge the soul.”
Standing outside with a half-empty bottle of whisky in his left hand is the film’s manic pixie dream boy (Paul Mescal) who, after some drunken rambling, finally says, “I’m Harry.” Adam, uttering his own name in response, extends his right hand in greeting. The camera then lingers on hands that do the same.
Is this, we wonder, Adam’s divine inspiration incarnate, clad in a pink reminiscent of the robe worn by God in Michelangelo’s fresco? If so, Adam is far from ready to throw his arms around his visitor’s neck – not even after Harry, rather adorably adapting a line from the Frankie Goes to Hollywood tune to which Adam had just been listening, whispers, “There’s vampires at my door.” Instead, Adam shuts the door on his inebriated neighbor.
Later in the film, when he enters his childhood bedroom, we see that he has been guarding the gate for decades. A rainbow-like sign on his door reads No trespassing. A G.I. Joe doll on his bookshelf wears a breastplate, but his lower body has been stripped of any such protective gear. A Frankie Goes to Hollywood poster adorns the wall next to the desk atop which rests the same group’s debut studio album Welcome to the Pleasuredome (whose penultimate track is “The Power of Love”). As an eleven-year-old, Adam was clearly already both gay and guarded. As a grown man, the door of his apartment may lack a sign forbidding trespass, but for Harry it might as well bear the inscription found on the gates of hell in Dante’s Inferno: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” As we learn later, this is precisely what Harry proceeds to do.
But let’s rewind a bit.
On the night of the fire alarm, Harry becomes the catalyst for Adam’s katabasis. The very next day, we hear Adam typing and see these words appearing on the screenwriter’s hitherto blank screen: “EXT. SUBURBAN HOUSE 1987.” The scene is set. To jog his memory about what lies inside this suburban house, Adam removes from underneath his bed a box of memorabilia: Christmas decorations, old photographs, and other such trivial fond records. At one moment, Adam is in his bedroom looking down at a train; the next, he is on a train hurtling toward his childhood home. We journey with him, suddenly thrust into a narrative more like the dream-drama of Finnegans Wake than the comparatively mundane meanderings of Ulysses. We try to track his train of thought and to suspend our disbelief when he encounters his father, who, despite being long dead and gone, feels real. The two meet outside a liquor store, from which Adam’s apparently revivified father emerges carrying in his left hand what turns out to be a bottle of whisky, a spirit whose name derives from the Latin aqua vitae (“water of life”). Perhaps remembering wistfully his last encounter with a whisky-toting stranger, Adam does not decline his father’s invitation home. Dinner with his parents has the feeling of both a first date and a high-school reunion as mother and father interrogate their son about where he now lives, what he does for work, and the person he has become in their absence. The sentimental scene, nearly ruined after Adam’s father with accidental cruelty declares “Enough of that poofy shit,” is saved when Alison Moyet’s “Is This Love?” is set spinning on the record player. As the family takes a trip down memory lane, Moyet’s lyrics grow louder and louder until the line “I choose never to forget” and the song’s titular question rise above the characters’ own voices.
The film’s remaining scenes, departing from what is “real” but not from the emotional truths that Adam and many of us nevertheless feel, alternate between memories of familial love and fantasies of romantic love. They do so in an increasingly dreamlike way, as the boundaries between one scene and the next become blurrier and blurrier, a testament to the dynamic interplay between our childhood experiences and the ever-changing memories through which those experiences are filtered. Returning from his reunion with his parents, Adam encounters Harry outside the elevator of their apartment building. Still basking in the warmth of his parents’ loving embrace, Adam makes clumsy overtures (“I actually do like whisky if you want, um, wanna have a drink or . . .”) before the elevator deposits Harry on the sixth floor and he himself returns, alone once more, to his apartment. The next day, Harry again arrives at Adam’s doorstep; this time, he is invited in. Even before they themselves are touching, their conversation is, especially for any of us who have ever wondered what to call ourselves: “Gay” (as Adam suggests)? “Queer” (which, according to Harry, “feels polite, . . . like all the dick-sucking’s been taken out”)? “Homosexual” (as Adam’s mother, trapped in the eighties, will go on to say)? What follows this terminological debate is unquestionably gay: something has been taken out, but it’s not the dick-sucking. After an intimate scene that feels crushingly real, Adam and Harry discuss their parents.
Having let Harry in, Adam can now come out. And he does, to his mother, in the film’s next scene. Drenched from the rain outside but protected within the walls of his childhood bedroom, Adam looks inside his armoire for a change of clothes. The symbolism is obvious, but not offensively so. (The armoire at least has the decency not to be a closet!) Anticipating his need for clothes that will fit his adult frame, his mum enters and knocks (in that order, belatedly heedful of the door’s colorful sign) before handing Adam some of his father’s clothes. At his mother’s insistence, Adam removes his wet shirt, becoming the veritable (and vulnerable) inverse of the breastplated but pantless G.I. Joe on his bookshelf.
It is soon clear that his mother expects him not only to wear her husband’s clothes but also to have inherited her husband’s hirsute gene: “Well, I thought you’d be hairier, like your dad,” she says, making Adam feel rather self-conscious (much like his postlapsarian namesake who comes to know his own nakedness) and us rather tickled by the pun linking Adam’s father and lover (hairy ~ Harry). Like many an unsuspecting mother, she also expects her son to have inherited his father’s heterosexuality. In response to the question dreaded by many a gay man and every closeted boy (“Have you got a girlfriend?”), Adam, now getting more off his chest than just some wet clothes, finds the words that once felt so unspeakable: “I’m gay.” His mother is incredulous (“Really? . . . Since when? . . . How long?”), unintentionally cruel (“You don’t look gay. . . . What parent wants to think that about their child?”), and understandably, albeit unnecessarily, concerned (“And what about this awful, ghastly disease?”).
Katabasis here begins to pave the way for catharsis. In the words of the Frankie Goes to Hollywood song so near and dear to his heart, Adam, having purged his soul, can now, back in his apartment with Harry, make love his goal. Since, however, he is feeling rather feverish after his mother’s reference to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, he is cajoled into removing his clothes and taking a hot bath. As Adam bathes, Harry confesses, “I was thinking about watching crappy TV with you on a Friday night, eating take-away on your sofa, watching old episodes of Top of the Pops from before I was born.” He then adds, coyly, “I thought about something else, too.” After a brief discussion during which Adam admits that fear had for a long time kept him celibate, Harry finds himself on top of the gay man who lived through the eighties and nineties – on top of pops, as it were. The sex scene is hot, but even more stirring is the lovers’ postcoital conversation about their status as outsiders. “You could say,” Harry does say, “that I have drifted to the edge. . . . I’m edge of the family. My sister and her kids, and my older brother who just got married – they’ve all, they’ve got this spot in the center.” In response to further probing from Adam, he adds, “I’ve always felt like a stranger in my own family. And then, coming out just puts a name to that difference that’s always been there.” For Adam and for all of us – especially those of us who by virtue of our queerness feel like strangers in our own families – the floodgates are now fully opened.
Not until the next scene, however, do Adam’s tears finally begin to fall. Here, at the very midpoint of the film, he and his father have a heart-to-heart. Before they do, another record is set spinning: “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire” by the Ink Spots. Adam’s father prefaces the song with these remarks: “This was your granddad’s favorite. I never really liked it much at the time, but it’s grown on me.” What are we to make of his reluctant adoption of his own father’s musical tastes? Is he slyly suggesting that Adam should start to take up his interests: alcohol, women, the whole shebang? Or is he just trying to melt the ice before the topic turns, as it inevitably will, to Adam’s sexuality, a subject about which his wife has already informed him, albeit once again unnecessarily, for he always knew that his son was “a bit tutti-frutti.” Though it begins lightheartedly enough, their conversation takes a heavier turn when Adam’s father confesses to having heard Adam crying in his room after school, thereby prompting his grown son to inquire, “So, why didn’t you come into my room if you heard me crying?” The answer, it turns out, lay in his father’s unexamined homophobia. Suddenly conscious of how his casual cruelty has hurt his son, he sobs and apologizes: “I’m sorry I never came into your room when you were crying.” Tears beget tears. The two weep and share the kind of embrace that neither Odysseus and his mother nor Aeneas and his father are allowed.
The rest of the film is a blur, and not just because the characters’ tears prove contagious to us in the audience. Fantasies of an unlived past and a longed-for present merge. Liberated by his conversations with his mother and father, a rejuvenated Adam takes Harry clubbing. Their outing begins happily enough, with the lovers dancing to “I Want a Dog” by the Pet Shop Boys. But then they snort ketamine, and Blur’s more ominous “Death of a Party” starts to play. At one moment, we see the lovers living out the fantasy that Harry had described earlier: watching crappy TV, eating take-away on the sofa, watching old episodes of Top of the Pops. The next, we see Adam back at his childhood home, decorating the family Christmas tree as his mother sings along to the Pet Shop Boys’ “Always on My Mind.” At one moment, Adam is lying in bed between his parents, telling his mother’s ghost about the impossible adventures that he used to plot out after she and his father had died: trips with them “to the Whitgift Centre, birthdays, trips to London. . . .” The next, he is back in London, lying in bed with Harry but hearing the sounds that he must have heard on the night his parents died: indistinct radio chatter and police officers’ knocks at the door. At one moment, he is on a train alone, estranged from Harry, who – in a sequence eerily reminiscent of the “Get off my train” scene from Ghost (the 1990 supernatural romance film directed by Jerry Zucker and starring Patrick Swayze) – drifts wraithlike from car to car before disappearing altogether. The next, he is back in bed with Harry, recounting in detail the story of his parents’ death. This dizzying series of scenes culminates in a refreshingly lucid conversation between Harry and Adam about the knot that has formed in the latter’s heart as a result of his parents’ tragic death and his own repressed sexuality.
After this whirlwind, just three scenes remain. In the first and briefest, Adam brings his new lover to his old home so that he can introduce Harry to his parents – a consummation devoutly to be wished, for he is no more successful in achieving this union than Odysseus is in embracing his mother’s shade or Aeneas in embracing the drifting and dreamlike image of his father. There is, however, a subtle embrace that warrants comment here. Harry is now wrapped (as he was in the previous scene as well) in the sweater worn by Adam at the beginning of the film.
The trope of men exchanging clothes (much like that of sons encountering their parents’ ghosts) has a long and storied history. Consider Glaucus and Diomedes’s exchange of armor in Book 6 of the Iliad. In Haigh’s film, however, the Homeric precedent is surely not as relevant as are a couple of more recent cinematic variations on the theme: the brawl-bloodied shirt that Jack takes from Ennis after their first summer together in Brokeback Mountain and the billowy blue shirt that Oliver gives to Elio at the end of their first and only summer together in Call Me by Your Name. In All of Us Strangers, the sight of Harry in Adam’s clothes signals to audience members in the know that the end is nigh.
Sure enough, a farewell scene follows. The time has come for Adam to say goodbye to his parents. The three go together to an American diner, where Adam orders the “family special,” eliciting from the waitress who seems not to see what he sees a somewhat judgmental response (“That’s a lot of food”). As they wait for their food, Adam’s father tells his son that he loves him very much, and Adam responds in kind. His mother then asks him to promise that he’s “going to try with this Harry boy,” and Adam says he will. Fortified by the affirmation of his parents’ love for him and of his own love for his parents, Adam gives up the ghosts.
The film’s final scene is not so much a farewell as it is a heart-rending valediction forbidding mourning. Like the speaker of Donne’s famous poem, Adam, returning to the apartment building where we first saw him, can now say, whether to the universe at large or to Harry in particular, “Thy firmness makes my circle just, / And makes me end where I begun.” He takes the elevator not to his own floor but, for the first time, to Harry’s. After pausing briefly at the door, he opens it and immediately recoils at the stench emanating from within. As he proceeds slowly through the apartment, he sees a denim jacket draped over the sofa. He briefly lifts and inspects its sleeve.
He and the camera continue to rove, but the jacket – like the sweater from a couple of scenes earlier – has done its job, returning all of us gay-cinema-loving strangers to the heartbreaking scene in Brokeback Mountain when Ennis visits Jack’s childhood bedroom and finds hanging in the far corner of the closet his own stolen shirt nestled within his dead lover’s denim jacket. If we did not already suspect that Harry was dead (as I confess, gentle reader, that I did not on my first viewing), we certainly ought to by this point.
Adam, initially on the inside looking out, finally finds himself on the outside looking in. He knocks on the bedroom door, opens it, and recoils at the catastrophe he sees within: Harry’s body, attired as it was the night they first met, and the whisky bottle, now completely empty, the spirit drained from bottle and body alike. Harry, we and his would-be lover conclude together, must have been dead ever since the night of the fire alarm when the door was shut in his face. Nevertheless, Adam reaches out his left hand toward Harry’s right (as Michelangelo’s Adam reaches out his left hand toward God’s right), but their fingers (as in the fresco) do not quite touch. Instead, Adam hears something in the kitchen and heads toward it.
No stranger to ghosts, Adam meets Harry’s, who wants to know whether his corpse is in the other room. Adam lovingly responds, “You’re not in there. You’re not in there. You’re not in there. You’re here. You’re here. You’re here. With me.” After uttering these words, Adam, unlike the thrice-thwarted Odysseus and Aeneas, kisses his beloved ghost. The two then retreat to Adam’s bed upstairs, where Harry puts his hand over Adam’s heart and says, “Don’t let this get tangled up again.” As they try to fall asleep, Harry asks Adam to “put a record on.” Evidently of its own accord, “The Power of Love” begins to play. Before it does, however, Harry, having been asked what he would like to hear, says, “You choose.” This seemingly simple exchange takes on new meaning when we recall that “record” derives from the Latin recordari (“to remember”), from re- (“back, back from, back to the original place”) plus cor (“heart”). Throughout the film, Adam’s heart has been first haunted and then untangled by records both literal and figurative. Now, at its end, he gets to choose his music and his memories. Unwilling to give up the ghost held in his embrace, he whispers – as if in belated response to the final words he heard the living Harry speak (“There’s vampires at my door”) – the song’s first lines and the film’s last: “I’ll protect you from the hooded claw, / Keep the vampires from your door.” The song continues to play as the camera moves farther and farther away from the spooning lovers and higher and higher into the night sky that cradles them. Having proceeded from katabasis to catharsis to catastrophe, this firework of a film ends with a grand finale: a katasterism. When they are no more than a glint at the center of our screen, Adam and Harry become a star in the night sky. While it is “The Power of Love” that plays all the way to the end, the final image with which we are left before the credits roll is perhaps inspired instead by the refrain from Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Welcome to the Pleasuredome.” Wonder-wounded hearers, we see the lovers’ star explode and we sing through our tears: “There goes a supernova.”
Reference
Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Emily Wilson. Norton, 2018.
* * *
All images are screenshots from the film.
