The deliverance from responsibility

Responsibility goes both ways. Sometimes it can be a real bitch - you feel the whole world weighing down on you; you feel trapped, stifled, walls closing in etc; you feel the resistance of every fibre in your soul, against which you are inexorably driven only by the sheer call of conscience, and everything is torn or near collapse from the pressure.

But sometimes it can be a source of strength - that which will *cough* make one a better person. That which calls becomes a rallying cry, from which one derives courage, tenacity and the determination to see things through because it is a responsibility.

The former is, of course, a source of irritation, and most times a great deal of distress. Occasionally, it can be tragic. In an early chapter in Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang, Ned has just escaped from his captor, Harry Power, to whom he had been unwittingly apprenticed by his mother. He rode home not in fear or even to flee, but primarily because he felt responsible for his family and for the land on which they had staked. After a near epic journey, he finally arrives home, hoping for (but perhaps not anticipating, or even daring to anticipate) a joyous homecoming. His younger siblings were ecstatic to see him, but his mother (his father is dead) was distraught at his appearance, and later hysterically demands money from him. When Ned Kelly says he has no money, his mother goes berserk:

You can't come home I paid the b----r 15 quid to take you on. You are his apprentice now.

The mother and the son stood separate in the middle of the home paddock the chooks all droopy and muddy the pigs with their ribcages showing through their suits the waters of the Eleven Mile already receding leaving the spent and withered oats lying in the yellow mud. The son felt himself a mighty fool he'd been bought and sold like carrion.

Ok - now for the movie. I found myself making comparisons to the attitude of the eponymous hero Donnie Darko, who, tasked with the duty of saving the world, effectively winds up killing himself (rather ingeniously) so that the world may not come to an end. It is a responsibility which he takes on with surprising equanimity (but then the dude has been so troubled and distressed throughout the whole film you figure it would take nothing short of relieving his duty to save the world to calm him down). Donnie's voice-over is, at long last, full of hope and, almost, faith:

I hope that when the world comes to an end I can breathe a sigh of relief because there will be so much to look forward to.

While I thought the film in general tended to be a little overloaded with mood and drama, it was nonetheless an extraordinary ending. As the camera pans past the various characters and Tears for Fears sings "And I find it kind of funny/ I find it kind of sad/ The dreams in which I'm dying/ are the best I've ever had", it is almost cathartic: light from darkness, life from death, hope from fear, deliverance from responsibility.