Produced in two countries halfway across the world from each other and 15 years apart, one film and one limited series offer some of the most compelling discussions of pessimism and despair ever produced.
“At 6 in the morning, come here and call me twice: ‘Mr. Badii! Mr. Badii!’ If I reply, take my hand to help me out. If I don’t reply, throw in 20 spadefuls of earth on top of me. Then take the money and go.” Such is the request of the main character in the film “Taste of Cherry” (1997) to three strangers he picks up in his car.
In Abbas Kiarostami’s renowned philosophical film, the story centers on a man grappling with depression, the cause of which remains undisclosed to the audience. He expresses a desire to be buried if he chooses to end his life, a simple premise that forms the foundation of the narrative. Even though it leaves much open to interpretation, the film offers insight into potential responses to hopelessness and despair.
Badii entreats three men — a young soldier, a seminarian and an old man — to fulfill his request. With the first, Badii reminisces on his experience in the army, which he believes to be the best time of his life. He asks whether the drills and exercises are the same, to which the boy, confused, does not respond and finally runs away from the strange request. In the second encounter, Badii seeks a sincere conversation with someone who can empathize on a human level, free from the constraints of religious doctrines. However, the seminarian instead relies solely on Islamic teachings to persuade Badii to reconsider suicide.
In these encounters, Badii seeks a solution to his internal debate about his past and organized religion, where he hopes to find an answer to his depression. In the first, he appeals to his former happiness as a soldier; but he cannot return to that period. His past flees from him as the boy does, for he has necessarily changed and grown beyond his former self. In the second, Badii seeks out a religious man not for his Quranic quotations, but for whether the seminarian’s experience and devotion offer some heretofore unseen insight. As soon as the man begins regurgitating scripture, Badii knows that this too is a dead end.
The third man shares his own experience of deep depression, which nearly led him to suicide. However, his perspective shifted after he tasted a mulberry, watched children playing and witnessed a sunrise — simple moments that rekindled his will to live. Though he ultimately agrees to fulfill Badii’s initial request of burial, he implores him to reflect on the everyday beauty of life before making his final decision.
This response makes the greatest impression on Badii and, while Kiarostami does not reveal his ultimate fate, the director still provides insight into those despairing and searching for meaning, for oftentimes former duties, past happiness or organized religion do not offer a meaningful answer. Instead, recognition of everyday beauty — simple as the taste of cherry — can be as powerful an affirmation of life as any.
The progression of Rust Cohle in the miniseries “True Detective” (2014) offers a more complete vision of psychological transformation. In one of his first scenes, the quiet lawman unleashes a flurry of pessimistic, even antinatalist, views. Still grappling with personal tragedy and the collapse of his family, Cohle has embraced a bleak, nihilistic worldview, seeing life as devoid of purpose. Yet, as his partner Marty points out, Rust’s very act of continuing to live reveals an inherent contradiction.
Rust explains this as a result of his internal programming, his body mechanically going through the motions of daily life, even as his mind remains fully aware of its profound futility. Behind biological workings and physical desires, he does not believe that the collection of sensations and feelings within a corpus constitutes him as a unique individual. For this reason, he is suspicious of general morality as well as organized religion for exploiting these delusions. But there remains something holding him back from suicide.
Rust holds that notions of fulfillment and closure aside from death are fallacies. As a homicide detective, Rust has spent countless hours confronting the aftermath of death, observing bodies just hours after their demise. He believes that, in their final moments, each of them embraced death as a welcome release from the relentless anxiety of clinging to life. One can just sink into the darkness. But even death offers no escape in his view, for time is a flat circle and will eternally recur as each individual relives their futile existence like a cart spinning around a track.
But in the show’s final moments, Rust explains to Marty his memory of a recent near-death experience. As with the dead bodies into which he formerly projected his pessimism, he accepted death and descended into it. But he does not find relief in the deep darkness, but a total concentration of the love of his departed daughter and father. Once brought back to life, Rust comments on the star-scattered night sky, “Once this was only dark. If you ask me, the light’s winning.”
Beginning the show in utter submersion in pessimism and conviction of life’s futility, Rust encounters death not as the resolution of a hopeless predicament but as an affirmation of the love he once felt but had since abandoned: Life is no mere biological impulse. One can imagine he has accepted life’s contradictions because of the opportunity it provides for love.
Both “Taste of Cherry” and “True Detective” confront the philosophical nature of despair and pessimism in different ways, but in the process produce extremely significant and truly life-affirming art.