<Articles>Finding the Self beyond the Threat of Loss Re-watching Shoplifters and This is England with Cavell and Gadamer

Abstract

In this paper, we attempt a re-interpretation of the apparently pessimistic and misfortunate trajectory of two children protagonists in the films, Shoplifters and This is England. To achieve this, we will draw on the philosophical works of Stanley Cavell and Hans-Georg Gadamer. We will explore, the way these thinkers account for the complex and controversial process of finding the self, and allow us to trace elements of hope and possibilities of redemption in the painful journeys of the film characters and their encounter with recurring events of disappointment. Cavell’s Thoreauvian notion of doubleness, understood as an act of keeping constant nearness of the self to the self and as requiring resolution both to lose and find, opens a way to reconceiving Shota’s loss of his family in Shoplifters, and also helps to shed light on his anticipation of leaving in favour of becoming a decent grown-up. Gadamer’s account of the nature of human experience sheds lights on the invisible transformation in Shaun in This is England who, returned to loneliness and social-isolation, accepts his loss as part of his personal history, and from this accepting and forgetting a new horizon comes to be open. After showing the films as stories of the children characters who undergo a kind of education, this paper closes with the possibility that they become sites of education also for their adult audiences today. The growing power of globalisation sets us in the standing threat of loss, but the films and the philosophy in them also invite us to find ourselves again in a new integrity.