In Bruges: Morality In Dialogue – Transcript

00:00In the very first line of the script to In Bruges, the writer and director Martin McDonough

00:23describes this medieval town with its gothic churches and narrow canals as otherworldly. This is our first hint to the kind of presence that Bruges will impose on the characters of this morality tale about two Irish hitmen.

00:40The hitmen in question are Ken, a seasoned pro, and Ray, his brash, juvenile, young partner who's just fucked up his very first job by accidentally killing an innocent child. Their boss has sent them both to Bruges to hide out and await judgment.

00:58In this way, these two events, the crime and the judgment, bookend the film. For the duration, we're stuck with Ken and Ray in purgatory. For McDonough, Bruges as purgatory, purgatory as Bruges, is the perfect, really the only kind of place for this story to be staged.

01:18Like much of his previous work in the theater, McDonough is concerned with investigating morality in a postmodern world, a world that finds it exceedingly difficult to invoke traditional measures of right and wrong.

01:34Indeed it's usually those characters with rigid inflexible moralities that McDonough portrays as the cruelest of all, and they also happen to be the ones who like to talk about it the most.

01:54In this movie, that character is the boss, Harry, whose code of honor among thieves enacts a morality of mechanical cause and effect. Looking at that smile, it's obvious that Harry takes pride in this code. His devotion to it is unyielding, even religious.

02:12And at the end of the film, when he himself triggers this mechanism, his own action appears to him merely as an observation of a force that's beyond him.

02:29Now it's fitting that Harry has these qualities, because as he's the one who sends Ken and Ray into purgatory and decides their judgment, he works as a parallel for another kind of inflexible morality, one that saturates Bruges, the city, and in Bruges, the film.

02:45Catholic imagery is everywhere here. Indeed it's hard to imagine a town more traditional in this respect. Bruges is one of the best preserved medieval cities in the world, its existence and even some of its architecture dating back to the 12th century. In one church, there is even a file that contains a cloth with the blood of Jesus himself, or so some believe.

03:08Ken and Ray visit this church in the film, but the Christian symbolism is even more apparent in a later scene when the Hitmen visit a local museum. McDonough puts three critical scenes back to back here to maximize their resonance against each other, and it's worth it to look at all three.

03:25First we have the flashback of Ray's botched murder, which it's not insignificant to note is the murder of a Catholic priest. The boy he accidentally shoots is holding in his hand a paper that lists his sins. Being moody, being bad at maths, and being sad.

03:42And though these are obviously not punishable, they're all applicable to Ray. He's moody and sad throughout the film, and in a darkly comic way matching this film's very black humor, he should have killed one person instead of two, which some would call being bad at maths.

03:59But just introducing the idea of religious sin will be important for the following two scenes. After this we find Ray and Ken in the Groening Museum, looking at three paintings. The first is Death and the Miser by Jan Provost, described in the script as, the skeletal death come to collect his due.

04:17The second is The Judgement of Cambesus by Gerard David, which depicts the flaying alive of an ancient Persian judge who accepted bribes. And the third painting is The Most Famous, Hieronymus Bosch's tryptic painting The Last Judgement, which depicts Jesus Christ presiding over a bunch of monstrous demons punishing the wicked in various gruesome ways.

04:39The things you're taught as a child, they never really leave you, do they? The lesson of these paintings of punishment and retribution, the lessons of Catholicism for those who were raised in that tradition, never really leave you entirely. And the same is true for Western society collectively, negotiating the transition from a world founded on divine morality to one built by human morality.

05:03The former lingers, like being stuck in a city where the monuments of history tower all around you. Well, because of the choices I made, and the course that I put into action, a little boy isn't here anymore, and I'll never be here again. I'm here in the world, not here in Belgium.

05:25Although these final lines feel like a bit of a comic throwaway, I think they're actually central to McDonough's message. In all of his work, McDonough has characters repeat their phrases multiple times. I know the way, Jesus, the way, hey, the way.

05:41Or incessantly qualify what they say. Besides being funny and lending rhythm to the work, McDonough I think is trying to point out the fact that morality in the new world is discursive, which is to say that it happens in language. For this reason, McDonough frequently encourages us to consider the language of his film, the discourse of the script.

06:01It's not a coincidence that In Bruges takes place on the fringes of a film set. A film in midgets. And that the film in question is a remake of Nicholas Rogues Don't Look Now, another movie about a city, Venice, that imposes a strong influence on its characters.

06:17Of course, it's not quite a remake. It's a pastiche of Nicholas Rogues Don't Look Now. Not a pastiche, but a homage is too strong and none of the head. Again, we have characters searching for the right word. In this way, McDonough forces us to analyze the work he's written, because that's what this kind of new morality requires.

06:40Thank you. I need to weigh up all your options and get your conscience to decide, Ken. We all have to be the authors of our own morality. As Ray stumbles through the film set at the end, peopled by characters out of Bosch's last judgment, pursued by the inflexible morality of Harry, he's shot and is pulled away on the stretcher.

07:02In his voiceover, he says, I really, really hoped I wouldn't die. Which is grammatically a very strange thing to say. Hoped is in the past tense, while wouldn't is in the future tense. But where exactly is this narration coming from?

07:17From Heaven or the afterlife? Or is Ray alive for calling the events from some time in the future? The film leaves it ambiguous, which of course means that we have to decide. Martin McDonough is trying to show us that whether it comes to language, or purgatory, or morality, or bruge,

07:39Ray and the film, and all the rest of us, never get to leave. Hey everybody, thanks for watching and thank you to Squarespace for sponsoring this video.

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