DISCLAIMER: A RECONCILIATION BETWEEN UTOPIA AND DESPAIR

The dark fantasies we attribute to others are part of our own identity.

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The miniseries Disclaimer (2024), yet another masterpiece from Alfonso Cuarón, concludes with an outstanding case of a Hegelian reconciliation, although its narrative relies on multiple superpositions without a clear final collapse—how can this be? Here is a (simplified) summary of the narrative:

Catherine Ravenscroft, a famed documentary journalist, discovers she is a prominent character in a novel, Perfect Stranger, that appeared under a pseudonym and purports to reveal a secret she has tried to keep hidden. The novel paints Catherine as a terrible mother and wife whose self-absorbed affair with a 19-year-old stranger, Jonathan, while on vacation in Italy led to his death and the near-death of her own 4-year-old son. This story, full of juicy sexual details, disturbs the life of Catherine and all the people around her: her husband Robert, her son Nicholas, and her coworkers. We gradually learn that the book published by Jonathan’s father, Stephen, was written by his wife Nancy, the deceased mother of Jonathan; it is a fictional account of how Nancy perceived her son’s final days.

In the finale, Catherine—when she finally speaks in her own voice after being silenced and vilified—opens up to Stephen in a harrowing monologue about the horrific night before his son’s death when he brutally raped her for over three hours. So the following day in Italy, when Jonathan seemingly became a hero and ran out into the ocean to save a young Nicholas from drowning and Jonathan ended up drowning in the rough seas instead, Catherine didn’t shout out to help her rapist. She explains to Stephen (and to viewers) that his death meant she never had to speak about that night, so she let fate take its course. She’d never had to relive her trauma out loud until now when she is forced to share because of Stephen’s relentless and misguided pursuit of vengeance.

This brings us to the true meaning of the title: although Perfect Stranger begins with an inverted disclaimer (“any resemblance with actual events and persons is not accidental”), does the fact that the book is full of Nancy’s fantasies not prove that the disclaimer is to be taken in its standard form (any such resemblance really is contingent)? The scenes of Catherine flirting with and seducing Jonathan on the beach and later in her hotel room are staged in a ridiculously exaggerated non-realist way; however, such staging is justified given that we are dealing with Nancy’s imagination.