All Of Us Strangers, is about...
You know a film's good when you've word-vomited over a blogging site within 10 hours of walking out of the cinema.
SPOILERS, SPOILERS, SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS.
DON’T SAY YOU WEREN'T WARNED.
All Of Us Strangers, is a story about…
Loneliness and isolation… The film tackles loneliness both from factors beyond ones control - parental death, being brought up by a grieving grandparent in a new country, ‘She wasn’t OK,’ and also self-imposed isolation. Adam shuts everyone out. He’s built up walls. Why? Because he was bullied? Because he suffered a huge trauma losing his parents so young? Because he was gay and therefore ‘different?’ Because the puberty years, where he was working himself out, took place in a country where homosexuality was still illegal when he was growing up. All reasons for the need to repress and keeping himself safe.
Dealing with trauma… So much trauma! The trauma of losing both parents so suddenly, the trauma of being abandoned, the trauma of being gay in the 80s, the trauma of AIDS, of death, of sex killing you and your friends, the trauma of trying to function in a world that has not enveloped you and supported you, nor helped you find your place.
The parent/child relationship… It shows all the positive and negative aspects of this. Adam starts to feel more positive when he’s able to see his parents again. He feels their love – he’s not had that since he was 12. He grows in confidence and shows visible happiness in their presence. Later he’s able to come out to them – something that couldn’t happen in real life. His mum’s generationally expected response, stings. He’s got his parents back but that doesn’t mean they’re perfect. Nor does their presence make him feel complete every time. We see his parents lie to him. It’s a white lie. The type lots of parents make – when they tell him they’re going to bed and not going out. He knows they’re lying and as a child he probably did too. They’re lying because they want him to feel safe. This is mirrored back when he lies to them in the diner. ‘Yes, it was quick.’ It wasn’t quick for his mum, but it’s to make them feel calm and safe. They lie to each other, to make each other feel better. Isn’t that what we all do? No parent can/should know everything about their kid. The kid keeps the reality to themselves or shares it with a partner. Likewise, the parent keeps the reality of their human adult life away from the kid. No one wants to know about Mum’s sex life. But she has/had one. She’s human. We tell lies all the time. For kindness.
Death… The film plays with the idea of ghosts, an afterlife, or imaginative manifestations. Adam is writing about 1987 and so conjures up his parents in 1987. It’s the year they die. It’s the year his life changed forever. It’s where his trauma – that he’s carried ever since – is rooted. He also conjures up Harry. Harry is alive the first time we meet him and then not for the rest of the film (in my interpretation). It’s once Adam’s met his parents that he approaches Harry ‘I do like whiskey’. By revisiting the roots of his trauma, he also starts the healing process. Manifesting Harry is part of another trauma that Adam needs to deal with. His fear of intimacy.
Fear of Intimacy… This film tackles, in the most lightly of ways, the generational trauma of AIDS. It’s not the main trauma in Adam’s life. But the loss of his parents and his closing himself off, is aided and abetted by the scars of growing up gay. Not only gay, but gay in the 80s, when TV, adverts, and tabloids screamed GAY DEATH PLAGUE on a daily basis. With that on top of his orphan status, why would Adam ever risk opening his heart to another person? They’re either going to die or kill him. Far better to live alone in a flat, away from the city’s bustle, living in his head, writing his scripts, and existing in the shadows. Like many writers, he observes but doesn’t partake. He can see the bright lights of London from a distance. He’s safe in his tower block cocoon, but he’s stifled by it. It’s sterile. There’s no nourishment or sustenance. He’s as dead as his parents.
Is Adam dead? I don’t think so, although some people do. The vague dream state of the plot gives us permission to interpret it the way we might interpret our own dreams – any damn way we like. There are no wrong answers. I felt Adam was alive at all times. He’s a writer, he lives in his imagination. With the personal weight of his current project being set in 1987, his imagination has become super-strengthened and spilt into something verging reality. He summons his parents and has ultimately healing conversations with them. He is afforded the chance he was never given when he was 12 - to say goodbye. As his mum says, ‘I suppose we don’t get to decide when it ends.’ Later, in the diner, the waitress can’t see his parents, as she comments on the large amount of food. The implication being there’s only Adam there. For real.
And now to Harry. Adam summoned the image of Harry after his first visit home. The healing journey - or at least the idea of confronting his trauma – had begun then. At this point, he’d only had one real interaction with his neighbour. That was when Harry turned up pissed at the door. So now, in his head, Adam plays out the steps of starting a relationship with him. They’re baby steps at first. Talking, gentle touching. Adam is allowing his mind to accept that he might want to try this for real one day. When we see both men lying side by side after their first hook up, we see jizz on Adam’s chest. It’s where it might be if he’d had a wank. He’s alone. He’s summoned the idea of a person he’d like to try intimacy with, but he’s only rehearsing it now. Harry isn’t really there. Harry’s actually dead in his own bedroom, not being found for a while longer. When Adam does eventually find Harry’s body, he’s ready to face the truth. Sort of. He’s just back from the last talk with his parents. The one where he gets to say goodbye. He’s now accepted that they’ve gone. He’s healing. So now he’s starting to accept that Harry isn’t real either. When Harry turns up in the flat, talking about the fact he was so lonely that night, Adam says, ‘I should have let you in.’ He’s talking both specifically about that night, and past opportunities in general. At this point the audience may be reeling. Harry has been dead all along? Adam is still alone? How heartbreaking!
Is the ending sad? No. Not for me, although other interpretations are both valid and correct for those that have them. For me, it’s uplifting. I feel hope for Adam. He’s turned a corner. No more lying on his couch, daytime napping, and eating biscuits. Since that early scene, he’s proactively been trying to fix himself. His past trauma – whilst not fully healed – has been confronted instead of repressed. He’s started the journey. Whilst talking to Harry in the final scene, Adam is smiling. He appears to be the stronger person in that moment. He comforts Harry, he reassures him. He’s always known on some level that Harry isn’t real. That their relationship isn’t real. But the desire for a real relationship is now within him. Adam spoons Harry in bed as they fade away to nothing. Almost nothing. They remain a shining star in the sky, just as we all are. We’re all dealing with trauma, letting in people or not, dealing with parents or not, living in the shadow of history and heartache and pain. And we can choose to deal with that or not. At the end I feel Adam is dealing with it. He’s seen a way he can embark upon real intimacy after practicing it with Harry. As Harry says about Adams’s heart, ‘Don’t let this get tangled up again.’ Adam isn’t going to. He’s learned how to untangle.
Adam’s story, told through a deliberately vague narrative, soundtracked by gay men of the late 80’s who have all survived to date, is about survival. It’s about confronting trauma and taking down walls. It’s about mindfully mending, about developing ways of self-care through receiving care from others. About being open to care from others. It’s about letting go and allowing yourself to accept you need. What that need might be, is different for everyone. For Adam, he needs to feel he’s worth loving. By the end of the film, I believed he did. No wonder I found it uplifting.