Favorite Characters: George (A Single Man)

Oh my goodness gracious, how much do I love George?  This is just a beautifully written character (and, in the movie, stunningly performed,) one of the most poignantly-drawn portraits I’ve seen of someone grieving.  Rich, raw, and so, so real.  Amazing.

It strikes me that we never meet the actual George.  Although there are remembrances of the past, some of which the movie depicts as flashbacks, the George who takes us through the story is eight months on the wrong side of a sudden, life-altering tragedy:  the unexpected death of his partner of sixteen years.  He’s no longer the man he once was.  Instead, he’s an emotionally-battered ghost of himself who “becomes George” every morning, putting on his personality like a disguise so he can drag his shell through another day.  There’s something so exposed about that, the private grief of someone who pretends he’s all right.  In an instant, the lens through which George viewed the world shattered, and now the house he and Jim used to share is a minefield of painful memories strong enough to incapacitate him, but he mildly goes to work, the bank, the gym, the liquor store, and to visit friends, carrying all that heartbreak on his own.

His neighbors don’t even know that Jim is dead.  A few maybe wonder why he’s never returned from the trip he took eight months ago, but no one is really interested enough to pursue it, and George isn’t about to tell them.  Here, you see the ways in which George is a mouthpiece for Christopher Isherwood’s thoughts on homophobia.  It’s not that it’s too painful for George to talk about or that he doesn’t want their pity – it’s that he knows they honestly won’t care.  A generic platitude here and there, but when it comes down to it, they’d think it’s just as well, that maybe now George can find “real” love instead of just thinking he’s found it with a substitute.  They won’t understand George’s grief at the loss of his lover, because they can’t equate George’s relationship with the ones they have.  They view it as something lesser, a pale, deficient imitation of the real thing, and if George’s love wasn’t real, they can’t see his grief as being real, either.

And while, yes, it’s horrifically sad that he’s so alone in this and that he can’t tell the people he passes every day, it’s also a shred of agency for George in the midst of his mourning.  It’s like he won’t let them know the truth about Jim because they don’t deserve it; he won’t let them stain his grief with their apathy.  In this way, it almost serves as a judgment.  I love this side of George.  In his day-to-day life, he’s muted and not quite there, but his mind is so sharp and probing.  While he’s uncompromising in his reproach of a lot of things (from university thinking to freeway construction,) his most penetrating insights are always those concerning the inequality faced by his people.  I like that George doesn’t have to be an activist to have these thoughts.  He’s just an ordinary man who notices overt hostility and microagression alike, and he doesn’t often stand against it, but he also doesn’t just swallow it meekly.  Even if he only denounces it in his head, it takes strength to face the pervasive prejudice ingrained in his society.

I wonder if this fervor is what allows him to hang onto the pieces of himself that scattered when Jim died.  Anger can be just as consuming as grief and, if given free reign, it can do a lot of damage in a life, but George’s indignation is aimed at injustice that seeks to diminish his personhood, and I think it might act as a sort of tether that anchors him in the here and now.  If he stopped getting angry at his second-class-citizen status, I think his anguish would overwhelm him even more than it already is, and I don’t know if he could get out from under it.