Never Let Me Go

One of the most emotional things I’ve ever seen is a video of an honor walk, where someone who has been declared brain dead is wheeled by their loved ones through hospital hallways lined with doctors, nurses, friends, and family on the way to the operating room, where their organs will be removed for donation. It’s such a moving display of tragedy, generosity, community, respect, and gratitude that makes me cry even just thinking about it. So many aspects of death are treated like a terrible secret. The euphemisms: “passed away,” “no longer with us,” “I’m sorry for your loss.” The funeral rituals that comfort no one actually grieving. The dark thought we’ve all had: relief that it happened to someone else, not us. Honor walks are aptly named because there is no shame in dying, and the best anyone can hope for is that their death might help someone else.

Never Let Me Go is the antithesis of an honor walk. It pushes our euphemisms about death to the extreme. In this world, clones are raised from childhood to become organ donors before they turn thirty. They’re kept apart from society in boarding schools, then move at eighteen to group homes, and finally to Completion Centers, where they’re looked after by other clone Carers while they make one, two, three, or even four donations until they Complete.

This system exists so that regular humans, their Originals, can live past 100. Some try to fight it, collecting the clones’ artwork to prove that they have souls and shouldn’t be used this way. But after gaining immortality, regular people don’t want to return to an age of disease and early death. So the system continues: clones are created, raised, and harvested so that others can live long and healthy lives.

This movie follows three of these clones, Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth. When they are about eleven years old, a teacher tells them, “None of you will do anything but live the life that has been set out for you. You will become adults, but only briefly. Before you are old, before you are even middle-aged, you will start to donate your vital organs. That’s what you were created to do.”

The three have very different reactions to this information. Kathy, played by Carey Mulligan, accepts her fate with quiet dignity. Empathetic and kind, she becomes a Carer, doing small acts of kindness for other clones like bringing them their favorite cookies to eat after they come out of their next donation surgery. And whenever one of her Donors completes, she fills out paperwork. She’s been in love with Tommy, played by Andrew Garfield, since they were kids. He’s sensitive and prone to having tantrums until he figures out how to control his feelings. He loves her too and gives her a cassette of a sad love song called “Never Let Me Go” that Kathy cherishes. Kiera Knightley’s Ruth, though, is different. When she hears that her fate is outside of her control, she’s pissed. She kisses Tommy and begins dating him, despite knowing that he and Kathy love each other. She continues this relationship for years, cruelly rubbing it in Kathy’s face. She’s furious at the injustice of her life and believes she must have been cloned from “gutter trash” and is incapable of love.

They eventually break up and the three lose touch for years, until Kathy has become a Carer and visits Tommy and Ruth after they’ve begun donating. Continuing to mask his true feelings, Tommy pretends he’s healthier than he is, running and then hiding to catch his breath. Ruth is visibly frail after her second donation and a doctor tells Kathy, “I think she wants to complete, and as you know, when they want to complete they usually do.” Brutally honest as ever, Ruth apologizes to Tommy and Kathy for keeping them apart, saying “It was the worst thing I ever did.” She confesses that she did it because she’d hoped to get a rumored deferral for romantic couples–if you can prove you’re truly in love, you might get a few extra years together before your first donation. She wanted to have this time with Tommy even though she knew they weren’t in love like he and Kathy were. So she encourages Tommy and Kathy to apply for the deferral themselves and gives them the address of the person she thinks can grant this to them. Then she goes in for her third donation and completes, all alone.

Kathy and Tommy finally get together and, as she undresses and gets into bed with him for the first time, he loves her so much he cries. But when they apply for a deferral with stacks of artwork they’d made over the years, they’re told that the rumor isn’t true. Their school’s mysterious art gallery had been an attempt to prove that clones have souls, but no one wanted to hear it because no one wanted to go back to the time of disease and early death without the benefit of prolific organ donations. Their love is not enough to save them.

So, Kathy is forced to watch as the person she loves is wheeled into surgery, anesthetized, and butchered. And before she herself begins her own donations, she thinks, “I was lucky to have had any time with him at all.”

This movie is about how our society exploits those with the least power to benefit those with the most power. Children, immigrants, workers are told that if you follow the rules, go to college, join the military, go to church, make money, pay taxes, raise families, celebrate the Fourth of July, you will be rewarded. But the billionaires, the CEOs, the politicians, the elites hoard everything, enriching themselves with the labor of everyone else. So what can we do about it? Should we tamp down our rage and live a passive life like Tommy? Should we work within the system with dignity and grace like Kathy? Or should we be like Ruth and call bullshit on it all, resisting in any way we can, kicking and screaming, striving to improve our situation and, when we fail, lashing out with bitterness and rage? I know which one I relate to most.