Ever since Sir Anthony Hopkins came out as autistic, I’ve been able to experience his work at a different altitude. It’s typical of humans with zero degrees of empathy (either cognitive and emotional zero degrees) to be fascinated by the performance of what we call acting, and subsequently making sense of the world that way. Think Abed, from community: the world doesn’t make sense, but if he studies TV and movie tropes closely, he can frame the real world on top of it (e.g. “You two are like Phoebe and Chandler, you never get storylines together). An example that stands out to me (and gives me peak goosebumps and makes my skin come to a screeching claw) is Tilda Swinton’s character in Michael Clayton, towards the end of the movie, preparing for an important lawyerly lawyering activity, and in front of the mirror practices how to sound like an authentic human person. In the next scene, when she executes what she practiced, she succeeds in coming off as authentic to the people she’s addressing, and even to me (hence the crawling skin). An even crawlier skin was achieved in Darren Criss’ performance as the man who killed Gianni Versace in American Crime Story Vol. 2.

I expect I don’t sound like Holden Caulfield complaining about fake people, but instead relaying something I found of note, in the degrees of performative towards normative actions humans take because there is some kind of built in mechanism that makes people want to observe and conform, ostensibly to stay safe via being “well-adjusted”. Contributing to the harmony is likely a good survival strategy, which seems to stay in place even when the harmony in a given environment might be of an omnipresent harmonious toxicity––the price to pay for speaking the truth and disturbing the abusive system would be costly. I think this is how people’s values and behaviors deteriorate in tainted cultural systems.

The channel called Nerdwr1ter has done a fantastic analysis of a single scene Hopkins’ has done on the first season of Westworld, where, as the creator of the park, he is having lunch with Sidse Babbet Knudsen (peak female form, imo), and the breakdown in the video essay celebrates, with admiring teary anime eyes while blasting fireworks, the amount of acting Hopkins does (measured in the amount of information conveyed per word, per facial twitch, per second in dead silence, per change in expression). I’ve probably watched this video twice a year since it came out. It’s orgasmic.

So when I watched Remains of the Day the other day, I had all of these in my mind, shaping the lens of my perspective. In the movie, he plays a man who has not zero degrees of empathy, but zero degrees of emotional availability. The walls he has up around himself are staggering. Maybe I’m used to today’s version of such people with walls up, who still get into relationships of all types and then retreat behind walls when things get scary. Maybe there is some back and forth across people’s walls if they are a consequence of things like neglect, or abusive familial relationships, or getting burned interpersonally. Some malleability, or even a retractable wall that can go up and down. But no, Mr. Stevens, the butler of Darlington Hall, brought to life by Hopkins, has the craziest fucking emotional walls I have ever seen depicted, authentically and realistically. He is exceptionally good at this job, butlering, which is the grand totality of ALL of his identity. And anything and everything outside it is, for him, maximum amounts of terrifying.

People usually develop incredible powers of poker facing to get an advantage, in the world they found themselves in, or in the world that they want to become a part of (e.g. business, law, mafia, etc). People with innately unsavory inner thoughts also try to develop such methods but usually it comes out as in authentic to someone who is even half paying attention. This degree of poker facing, manifested in Mr. Stevens, is usually reserved for the scumbaggiest of business people or the most grotesquely soulless politicians. There is usually something, of significance, to be gained by receiving challenges, taunts, compliments, insults, flirtiations, and invitations for vulnerability, that remain unanswered, as is the case with Mr. Stevens. And this motherfucker does it only because it’s just too fucking scary to exist, emotionally or physically, an inch outside of his tiny world of butlering, that the actual 100% sum total of his personality exists. Maybe it’s harder to imagine someone like this in today’s day and age. There was a time, not too long ago (also in older, more established cultures), where people could have such duty-bound mission driven personalities, built on sacrifice and full devotion. That kind of person would not be left unexploited today, at least not in America or similar places.

That’s partly what makes this movie so anachronistic too. The Nazi-sympathizing Lord of the house is not inherently abusive to the people around him. Not to his terminally devoted butler, not to the women who work in the house, and not to his family. There is no fucking way that this is how that cookie would crumble in today’s world. In the cel phone camera + post-truth world of unabashed belligerence and unapologetic toxicity of today’s western world, we know what fascists also thing and have no problem doing, privately and publicly, and getting away with it because of a lack of shame and lack of societal (or capitalistic) incentive to do anything about it. As a matter of fact, doing the opposite garners more clicks, ad revenue, and usually stock price. I think we draw the line somewhere, which is frequently arbitrary and fickle and changes from industry to industry, but watching this movie from 1993 (which is actually set in the 1930’s) makes it seem like there was even some honor to being a Nazi sympathizer. When Lord Darlington employs two young German refugees (until he realizes they are Jews and has them let go [only to regret down the line, which reinforces the narrative that he was just a gullible rich man who got carried away by ideas he didn’t fully understand]), he has them come into his study so he can practice some German with them like a little nerdy student. We know that things used to be extremely rapey in the past. Like, for millennia, there was only rape. And then we got somehow less rapey, as a consequence (among a few other cultural developments) of normative monogamy spearheaded by the Catholic Church in the 1600’s, at least in the west (I don’t fully know how other parts of the world got less rapey). And we know in today’s social media age, that things are still quite a bit rapey. People really like to talk about it these days. So is it the social sensibilities of writing a novel in England in 1989 that glosses over the Nazi sympathizing Lord as only intellectually fascistic and not perverted like most other unempathetic anti-social humans of hubris tend to be? Or did we temporarily decouple those things in the height of British nobility: “We might be interested holocausting humans we see as vermin but surely we are not savages, my dear”.

I think that makes it easier to connect with Mr. Stevens as an honor bound man of service who is non-judgmental to a shockingly honorable degree, since his master is merely a nerdy man born into wealth who fell into the Victorian library equivalent of the YouTube indoctrination whirlpool algorithm. Outside of that, he was a gentleman who wouldn’t dare be a savage in any shape or form. I guess that’s the British culture, and I suppose I find it believable. Or I want to. I want to believe that even humans who subscribe to some maladaptive values or ideas––whether temporarily or permanently––can stick to some sort of a priori code (personal or cultural) and not devolve increasingly into savagery. I’m probably delusional.

Mr. Stevens loves his cage. Because he is terminally afraid of the outside world that he knows nothing about. Wait, okay, so could that really be identified as a form of love? Obviously, it’s a whole thing to litigate what might count as love experientially. I am of the opinion that it’s about connection––however you can connect. For example, pure psychopaths cannot experience empathy or emotional connection, simply due to the simple math of not having any emotional depth (not even an inch, srsly). Can they still love? Well, they can still connect in other ways now, can’t they? By controlling people, by dominating people, by subjugating them. It appears, from self-reports as well as from literature, that this is their equivalent of love. So just because Mr. Stevens is obligated to the life inside Darlington Hall, because he is convinced that he would die the moment he leaves it, does that mean his only choice would become something he loves. Does love happen without options? Is love easier when you are obligated to it? Do humans’ incredible abilities to see what they wanna see activate like woah in those moments? Most gaslighting happens 6-inches from the bathroom mirror, no?

But he reads romance novels, secretly. Yet when Ms. Kenton, the house manager played by Emma Thompson, politely and appropriately, puts the moves on him, the walls jack up and he can’t move. He evades and deflects. Bobs and weaves. Is he asexual? Not that uncommon after all. And there are subtypes of asexual people who truly enjoy learning about the romance and sexuality regarding others, it even gives them a warm fuzzy feeling to watch it on film or read them in volumes––yet never want to experience it for themselves. Could be. But more than anything, it seems like he just doesn’t know anything about it because he has never considered it. He was born into butlery, and such were the rules––to couple up would instantly destroy the profession he has built his entire identity on. This perception is reinforced several times in the film. The house staff that couple up and run away, requiring interviews and hiring decisions on more staff. Mr. Stevens’ reluctance to hire attractive women, which, according to Ms. Kenton, is because Mr. Stevens would be attracted to them and hence would risk distractions, but I suspect it’s mainly not because of his own distractibility, but because he knows that hiring an attractive female employee automatically guaranteed that the house will lost both her and also one of the male employees, and very soon. Mr. Stevens has been around long enough to know what’s going to happen. So why doesn’t he say anything when Ms. Kenton challenges him on it and wants to hire the girl? It’s a valid and practice reason after all. And that’s because he is also deathly afraid of conflict.

These walls of his, they are so easily threatened, that any and all potential conflict needs to be avoided at all costs as well. He needs to be inoffensive and unyielding but also decisive and run a tight ship. Is this too much? How do you do it? Well you actually do it by not having any opinions. Was he an honorably non-judgmental person like we implied before? I actually don’t think so. I don’t think he was non-judgmental intentionally. He wasn’t thinking “well Nazism is bad, but still I want to respect my Lord’s freedom of speech and self-expression”; instead, I think he just didn’t have any fucking opinions. He simply doesn’t function and think and operate that way. Because, he never developed those muscles in his formative years. We experience his father a bit when Mr. Stevens hires him early in the movie as an under-butler. Mr. Stevens Sr. is kind of an obstinate man, maybe even overbearing––at least disagreeable. He doesn’t have the water like fluidity and softness of Mr. Stevens Jr.

And that’s exactly wassup. Children use their formative years to develop their identity, their sense of self: what they like and don’t like, what right in the world and what’s not. If those all hinge on what someone else said to you, whether it’s a parent, master/Lord, God, culture, the state, etc, then these people don’t know who they themselves are in the absence of that guiding light, that compass, that lighthouse.

And that’s what’s so fucking scary to Mr. Stevens and all such people who underdeveloped (or narrowly developed) sense of identities. They only know who they are, they only feel tethered to existence when those lighthouses are around. You know why he would get so scared at the thought of any other life in any other shape or form? Because, if he lowered his walls and step an inch outside, it felt like he would pop like a soap bubble and stop existing. I think most of us can appreciate that it can be quite scary to consider ceasing to exist. The best he can do is to live vicariously through others who do what he is not equipped to do. To set them free, to hear about their success, or failure––and probably be in awe of them risking failure and continuing to live. To him, it probably looked like dying and coming back. Fascinating, almost like fiction, to be read in private and observed from afar.

Was there doubt in him? Fuck yeah, there was. He always thought he may have made a mistake. At the encouragement of his new American Master, Mr. Lewis, played by Christopher Reeve, he ventures out west to try to reconnect with Ms. Kenton (Now Mrs. Benn) after 20 years. It is a cool touch that the liberal frontiering culturally untied American tells him to just “fuck it” and to “take the Daimler and go wherever you feel like”. Liberty and freedom. E pluribus unum. Screw being a good descendent, let’s be cool ass ancestors. Drive, my ninja.

But it’s too late. While he laid in wait, the life passed him by. People lived entire lives, with success and failure, with happiness and heartbreak. Now it’s too late. The best he can do is understand how he fucked up and make peace with it––which I don’t think is very difficult for a man like him. Mrs. Benn tells him that she wasn’t exactly happy or loved her husband for a long time either, until after she had a baby and while raising her, in that household of a family, she realized that her husband was the person who needed her the most in the entire world––which made her feel love. If that’s the highest expression of love that she has ever experienced, then clearly we are not going to question a psychopath feeling love through domination, or Mr. Stevens loving Lord Darlington and Darlington Hall, and now Mr. Lewis and the family of his new master. Gullible nerd Darlington was the person who needed Mr. Stevens the most, in the entire world, and that was maybe a beautiful and so very lucky opportunity for Mr. Stevens. Can we blame him for jumping on it, putting it behind walls, and cherishing and protecting it from everything at all costs? He had to protect it from romance, from a wife, from children of his own, from a life of freedom or adventure. Any of those things could disappoint him, but Darlington Hall would likely outlive us all. New master, Nazi or otherwise, and Mr. Stevens would be golden. In the voiceover early in the movie, Mrs. Benn expresses gratitude that Darlington Hall was purchased by the American who wanted to keep it as it was, instead of tearing it down, selling it for parts, and giving it to developers. Had that happened, Mr. Steven’s would’ve probably dropped fucking dead on the spot. No cap. Luckily, that didn’t happen. Instead, Mr. Stevens and Mr. Lewis found a bird stuck in the fireplace. They freed the bird and set it out the window, so the bird could live a cool ass bird life of adventure or whatever it is supposed to do. And Mr. Stevens fulfilled his function once again, yet again: to set the people who want to be free free for them to live their best lives in the size of the world they are comfortable with, while Mr. Stevens stays in his golden cage being happy for them from afar, safe from the existential fear of disappointment inside the emotionally prophylactic walls of Darlington Hall.