to live a meaningful life, especially if that life is short and limited. Ironically, the setting he used to explore this was a society that has discovered the secret of a long and disease-free life. But the technology this secret depends on is a program of human cloning, developed for no purpose other than to allow the clones’ organs to be harvested when the appropriate time came to keep others alive and healthy.
To Ishiguro, the clones were simply a plot device. Nevertheless, the characters he created and the circumstances of their lives reveal a dark side of how technologies like cloning can, if not used ethically and responsibly, lead to quite devastating discrimination and abuse.
Never Let Me Go is set in a fictitious England in the 1970s to 1990s. On the surface, it reminds me of the England I grew up in; the settings, the people, and the culture all have a nostalgic familiarity to them. But, unlike the England I remember, there’s something deeply disturbing under the surface here. What unfolds is a heart-wrenching story about dignity, rights, and happiness, and what it means to have value as a person. And because the movie is not focused on the technology itself, but on the lives it impacts, it succeeds in providing a searing insight into the social and moral risks of selling our collective souls as we unquestionably embrace the seeming promise of new technological capabilities.
At the center of Never Let Me Go are three young people, bound together by a common experience. The story starts with them as young children, at what looks at first glance like an exclusive private school in the English countryside. They seem like ordinary kids, with all the usual joys, pains, and intrigues that accompany childhood. Except that these children are different.
As the movie unfolds, we begin to learn that these particular students have been “bred.” They don’t have parents. They don’t even have full names. Instead, they’re destined to give their short lives for others as part of the National Donor Program, “donating” their organs as they become young adults until, around the third or fourth donation, they will “complete” and die on the operating table.
As the students get older, they are made increasingly aware of their fate. They’re taught that they need to look after their bodies, that this is their purpose in life—that their role is to die so others can live. And most of them accept this fate.
Yet, despite their being treated as a commodity by the society they’re created to serve, we begin to learn that not everyone is comfortable with this. Their principal, Miss Emily (Charlotte Rampling), is concerned about the ethics of the National Donor Program. But, as we discover, she is less concerned about the existence of the program than about how it’s run. She wants to find evidence supporting her gut feeling that her students should be treated as people, rather than walking organ donors. It turns out that her school, Hailsham was set up as a progressive establishment to explore whether these clones have that (apparently) quintessential indicator of humanity, a “soul.” This, from the perspective of Miss Emily and her supporters, is essential in determining whether the students are worthy of being treated with the dignity and respect afforded other members of the human race.
Against this backdrop, a deeply moving story of love, empathy, and meaning plays out. Ultimately, the three clones we follow become a yardstick of what constitutes “being human” against which their creators are measured.
Standing at the core of Never Let Me Go is the relationship between Kathy (played as a child by Izzy Meikle-Small, and as an adult by Carey Mulligan), a kind, empathetic young woman trying to make sense of her life, and Tommy (Charlie Rowe/Andrew Garfield), a troubled young man whom she cares deeply for. Then there is Ruth (Ella Purnell/Keira Knightly), a sometime-friend of Kathy and Tommy’s who desperately wants to fit in with those around her, and who selfishly robs those close to her of what’s precious to them as she does.
As the three children grow toward adulthood, they begin to hear talk of a “deferment program,” a means of delaying the start of their donations. It’s rumored that, if a couple can show that they truly love each other, they can request a deferment from donating. This would provide them with a short stay of execution before they give up their organs and ultimately die in the process. And, according to rumor, Miss Emily, their former principal at Hailsham, has some influence here.
As they enter adulthood, the three young people move on from the small community they live in together, and lose touch. Kathy becomes a “carer,” looking after other donors as they move toward completion. But some years after the three of them have gone their separate ways, she runs across Ruth. Ruth is recovering from a donation which hasn’t gone well, and Kathy steps in as her carer.
As the two rekindle their old relationship, they reconnect with Tommy, who has also begun his donations. Ruth has been keeping track of both Tommy and Kathy, in part because she is wracked with guilt about how she treated them. She admits that she was jealous of the deep bond between Tommy and Kathy when the three of them were together and, because of this, stole Tommy away from Kathy.
As she nears completion, Ruth’s guilt becomes all-consuming. To try to set things right, she provides Kathy and Tommy with what she believes is the key to the rumored deferment program.
Ruth completes on her next donation, and after her death, Kathy checks out the information she passed on about deferment. Ruth has given her the address of a woman simply known as Madame, who used to visit the now-closed Hailsham, and is possibly the person one needs to approach to be admitted into the rumored program. Filled with hope, Kathy and Tommy decide to visit her and request a deferment. But there is a problem.
While at Hailsham, the students were encouraged to express themselves through art. Periodically, Madame visited the school and selected the best of what they’d created. Kathy and Tommy deduce that Madame holds the key to deferment, and convince themselves that the way Madame tells whether two donors are truly in love is through their art. The trouble is that Tommy never had any art selected by Madame. It seems that their fragile hope is about to be dashed because Tommy didn’t do enough when he was younger to prove his worth.
Despite this, the two lovers think they see a way forward. Tommy starts afresh developing his art portfolio, so he has something (he believes) to demonstrate his “worthiness,” and the two of them set out to visit the address provided by Ruth. Yet, on getting there, the couple are devastated to discover that Madame has no ability to grant a deferment; she never did.
It turns out that Madame and Miss Emily were working as a team at Hailsham, but not to seek out evidence for true love. Rather, they were using the students’ art to determine if they had souls, if they had human qualities worth valuing beyond a working body and healthy organs.
The two women earnestly wanted to find a way to show that these children were capable of human feelings, and that they had validity and worth beyond the organs they were carrying. Yet for all their moral angst, Madame and Miss Emily turn out to be all mouth and no backbone. They lament Kathy and Tommy’s plight. But they also dash their fragile hopes, claiming there’s nothing they can do to help.
As Kathy and Tommy return to the care home that night, Tommy calmly asks Kathy to stop the car, and gets out. The whole weight of the despair and injustice he’s carrying crushes down on him, as he screams and weeps uncontrollably for the hope and the future that society has robbed him of. In that one stark, revealing moment, Tommy shows the full depth of his humanity, and he throws into sharp relief the inhumanity of those who have sacrificed him to the gods of their technology.
As Tommy and Ruth complete, and Kathy becomes a donor herself, we realize that asking whether they have souls was the wrong question. We’re left in no doubt that these young people deserve respect, and dignity, and autonomy, and kindness, irrespective of what they have achieved. And we realize that, through them, the society that created the technology that produced them has been judged, and found wanting.
Never Let
