Morvern Callar: Reaching for the Illegible
Our entry to Morvern Callar is the morning of Christmas day, in the apartment of Morvern Callar (Samantha Morton), after her novelist boyfriend has committed suicide. His body is laid across the floor, with Morvern beside him. Entranced, she outstretches her arm and touches his skin. Beneath the pulsating Christmas tree lights, a soft glow emblazons their fragile bodies, and in a bizarrely harmonious display, existence is reckoned with. As Morvern positions herself next to the body, death becomes proximate with life; then with the now.
Morvern inures the loss by tempering it with ordinariness. She steps out into the bleak Scottish port-town to use a pay-phone, she paints her nails, applies eyeliner, unwraps Christmas gifts. Mesmerising in its inexplicability, she leaves the body and heads out for the evening, not before branding herself with a nameplate necklace reading ‘Jackie’. Sowed by the enigmatic response to her boyfriend’s suicide, there is a traceless quality to Morvern’s character, one felt explicitly by others; the pay-phone recipient couldn’t understand her name, her closest friend Lanna attempts to decipher Morvern’s expressions as she dances and drinks, avoiding questions from others about the whereabouts of ‘Dostoevsky’ — referring, of course, to her novelist boyfriend.
This slippage of identity is a recurring quality throughout the film, expressed most potently through its plot. Back at the apartment, a didactic ‘READ ME’ portentously fills a computer screen. It’s the suicide note. ‘Don’t try to understand’, the note tells Morvern. It tells her of a manuscript left on the computer’s disk, to be printed and distributed to publishers. ‘I wrote it for you. I love you’, the note continues. Morvern takes these words literally, repossessing the novel and therein swapping out the name of her boyfriend with her own. In this increasingly embryonic apartment space, to the droning score of the computer screen, a new identity is atomised.
Ramsay’s literary influence is clear, most patently, Roland Barthes’ 1967 essay The Death of the Author. “Literature is that neuter, that composite,” he writes, “that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.” Morvern annihilates the identity of the author; she submits to the idea that the “unity of a text is not in its origin, [but] in its destination”. Sending the manuscript to a publisher actuates this. ‘Your novel has a distinctly female voice’, the publishers ironically murmur to Morvern over the phone, compliments which are eventually substantiated with a £100,000 contract. Corresponding to her new role as a fraudulent author, the complicated ennui of Morvern’s mind is demonstrated through systems alternative to words: atmosphere, affectation, and, most noticeably of all, sound.
Moving beyond the need for character legibility, Ramsay employs diegetic music in order to navigate Morvern’s state of mind and personality. Music, through the form of a mixtape left by her boyfriend, becomes Morvern’s interlocutor. The soundtrack smothers the surreal atmosphere; wordless tracks from Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada coolly distinguish moments of euphoria and anxiety whilst emphasising the film’s dreamlike, extra-linguistic ambiance. Iconic inclusions of The Velvet Underground, Nancy Sinatra, and Lee Hazlewood come to articulate the visceral. The often referenced scene at the supermarket, Morvern’s place of work, sees Morvern walk through aisles of groceries, her eyes scanning unplaceable customers in harmony with the camera’s fluidity as ‘some velvet morning when I’m straight’ sounds moodily through Morvern’s earphones. It is one of the most embodied, confident sequences in the film despite its relative mundanity. Not dissimilarly, when Morvern is dismembering the body of her boyfriend in her bathtub, topless and wearing aviator sunglasses, she listens to The Velvet Underground's ‘I’m Sticking with You’. She costumes a persona for herself, juxtaposing the blood-spattering task at hand with the most whimsical song on the mixtape. She spares it, saves it for when it is needed most.
It feels peculiar to find any element of Morvern relatable, but there is something thoroughly, endearingly human about her experience. At her first acquisition of real money, she flies to Spain with Lanna, indulges in dizzying spells of partying, and moves restlessly through the middle of nowhere. There is a fierce directness to her character, her illegibility is enveloped with exceptionality. We come to recognise carefulness and pragmatism in her unformed, apparitional identity. We bask in the little we can understand of Morvern. We guilelessly allow the minutiae to move us along, towards where exactly, is left uncertain.