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The Hours Research Paper

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Immortality in The Hours Novels and films each have their own strengths when telling a story. While books can characterize a character by providing their inner thoughts and intimately describe each detail of the setting, films can clearly portray a scene and add aesthetics such as music and color. In 2002, Stephen Daldry adapted the 1998 novel The Hours by Michael Cunningham into a movie also titled The Hours. The story has the same themes and plot elements; however, the director takes some creative license in order to add music, change dialogue, and adjust the details to create his vision of Cunningham’s work. Specifically, Daldry changes the way the audience sees Clarissa’s fear of morality when she questions her accomplishments on the …show more content…

After buying flowers, she decides to visit her lifetime friend Richard. On her way there, she comes across a celebrity believed to be Meryl Streep. Upon hearing two teenagers discuss the celebrity, she reflects on “actual immortality” (Cunningham 50), and how these two girls will one day be “a few silver fillings lost underground [while] the woman…will still be known” (Cunningham 51). Her thoughts about how life is a boring and predictable cycle for most aside from a select few is a sad, depressing perspective. Clarissa believes her life to be void of any real purpose. Cunningham contrasts this by giving Richard, who is dying from AIDS, the opposite perspective of believing that life centers about the happiness that one has with friends. In fact, Richard makes the people in his life “essentially fictional character[s]” (Cunningham 61) and appreciates them completely for who they truly are. Therefore, his friends become those who depend on his imagination to make them feel important. Clarissa needs this and so she keeps Richard, who is also an ex-lover, in her life. She celebrates him and his award because it gives her a purpose: she must visit him or no one else will. Richard is different from her in that he appreciates life and instead of caring about being immortal, he cares that his books, which will live on, do not include Clarissa and the life they could have had. This only highlights …show more content…

It has Richard moving about, exposing his apartment to light. He tells Clarissa that he still “has to face the hours,” but he is done with the pain and sorrow and staying alive for her. He wants his final moments to be about remembering their youth and what he considers most beautiful thing—an ordinary morning with her. His subsequent fall out the window deeply saddens her. However, this scene rings true to the words of Virginia Wolfe earlier in the film when she said, “Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.” It is after coming to terms with his death, Clarissa looks at her life and sees that happiness that her hours have contained. Subsequently, she chooses to live and celebrate her life and be happy rather than dwell on what she cannot change and be

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