Breaking the Waves
Why Radical Love Might Be the Hardest Thing We Do
Film spoiler alerts: Breaking the Waves, Hamnet
One of my favourite films is the 1996 release Breaking the Waves. Why? It’s the kind of film that rises up and slaps you in the face and the red hand mark, or probably the film reel with its sprocket holes, stays and stays and stays.
The mark is a wake up and smell the coffee moment. It’s an invitation to question what our small world and society shoves in our face as truth. Morals and values demanded equally by age-old institutions, religion, media, or even the loudest of the lefties or the deemed far right. I’m not saying what is right, or what is wrong. I am stepping back from judgment, of others and myself, and proposing questioning the seemingly unquestionable.
I followed this pathway of thought back to Breaking the Waves from the new film Hamnet. It was because Emily Watson, who plays Bess in Breaking the Waves, turned up as the mother of Shakespeare in Hamnet.
In Breaking the Waves, she rejects the rigid, life-denying dogma of her insular Scottish community in favor of a personal, sacrificial, and, in her view, divine form of love. She defies both society and religious authority by choosing to act on her own, unconventional interpretation of goodness to save her paralysed husband, Jan.
To “save” him, she embarks on a bizarre and dangerous spiritual project—having sexual encounters with strangers on ships to bring him joy (because he can’t have sex), which she believes is a sacrifice in God’s name. As the community condemns her, brands her a whore, and excommunicates her, Bess refuses to abandon her path. She embraces this stigma as a crown of thorns necessary for her mission, showing a strength that challenges the town’s conformity.
Bess ultimately chooses to follow her inner voice and childlike naivety over the judgment of elders, effectively “breaking the waves” of tradition to define her own reality through unconditional love.
We doubt her choices when she dies at the hands of brutal sailors. But Jan recovers against all odds and the final, surreal scene, in which bells ring in the sky, serves as a divine validation of her choices, overturning the church’s judgment of her damnation.
In Hamnet, Emily Watson appears again, this time as Mary Shakespeare. A strict, traditional and religious woman who values tradition and conformity. Having already lost three children, she urges Shakespeare’s wife Agnes to let go, to stop trying to save her son Hamnet, who is violently ill with pestilence, because children die and it’s the way it is. Yet Agnes (Jessie Buckley) refuses this. She fights with everything she has to save him. He dies anyway, and yet, in a way, he is resurrected, living on as Hamlet in the play his father writes.
The slap of Breaking the Waves carries with it many punches to the gut. The hopeful among us hold out for a miracle, believing Bess’s road-much-less-travelled actions might somehow manifest one. But by the end, after one dark truth after another, even the hopeful are exhausted. Hope is abandoned. Bess dies horribly. Then, in the wasteland, the miracle happens. The church bell emanates from the heavens and announces it so.
Going against the tide of popular belief is difficult, and these days can result in the ostracising societal excommunication we now call getting cancelled.
I think the director of Breaking the Waves, Lars Von Trier, (controversial in his own right, but I’m not going there) used an extreme example in Breaking the Waves. But what if we need something that extreme to wake us up and make us smell the coffee? What if that’s what we need to stop being sheep, to stop believing whatever the other righteous people believe without question?
I always say there is so much judgment in the world. We judge ourselves and we judge others. Judgment is an uncomfortable, corrosive emotion we foist on ourselves and on others. It eats us up and I feel it is eating up society and the world.
I catch myself judging the judgers. I feel it rise, sharp, righteous, certain. Every time, the result is the same: a tightening in my chest, a sourness that doesn’t resolve anything. It rams the slap home, over and over. Judgment doesn’t bring me closer to truth or peace. It only widens the distance: between me and others, between me and myself. That’s when I wonder whether being “right”, or even being seen as “right” has become more important than anything else.
Lately, I’ve noticed how loudly certainty announces itself, on walls, posters, chants, declarations. Moral positions reduced to slogans. I understand the need to speak out, to rage, to demand justice, to speak for those who cannot. Yet something in me grows uneasy. Not because I disagree, but because I see judgment forgetting complexity, forgetting the humanity it claims to defend, and in a way forgetting self.
What stays with me about Bess isn’t her extremity, but her refusal to outsource her moral compass. She listens inward, even when the cost is unbearable. In a world that rewards alignment and punishes deviation, that kind of inner listening feels almost subversive.
I feel that amid all the speech, slogans, protests, and declarations, we are missing some silence. Not the silence of indifference, but the silence of introspection. The quiet space where we might hear ourselves, hear others, and notice the humanity beneath the slogans.
What if we stand back and let go of judgment for a moment? What if we gained some perspective? What if we instead look to develop radical acceptance of ourselves and others? What if we see that we, and everyone else, have inherent worth and we don’t need to think the same as others and wear it on a tshirt, to belong or be seen as good and worthy?
What about a radical unconditional love, compassion and care for ourselves and for others? What could that do in the world?
I truly believe it would have far more power than all the judgment. A miracle. The bell would chime in the sky.
Image source: Photo by Amin Hasani on Unsplash