Sarah Goldfarb's Despair : From the Ab-surd life to the loss of herself

Sarah Goldfarb is the perfect illustration of the hidden despair, the person who doesn’t know that she is despaired: her fall into drug addiction is not the beginning of her despair it is just the logic result of her long time denying of despair.

Sarah’s failure to become her TV Show self: possibility’s despair which led to the loss of herself

Kierkegaard says that the self is the relation relating itself to itself but the fact is the self doesn’t know what itself is.  So, the person just supposes what he is and tries to relate to it. The situation of a person who doesn’t manage to become the self he wanted to be is a case of despair. This is what happens to Sarah.  Sarah’s self has changed, herself is alone, it is not anymore a self with her husband and her son. Moreover her body has changed so the relation between her body and her soul that tries to relate to herself has changed to.  The possibility of her participation of a TV show makes her realize the change.  So, she can’t stand this change anymore and wants to be a self that she is not, her twenty years ago self. Imagine herself in the TV makes her feel like herself but she feel like herself in a way that is not herself: because she has never pay attention to herself. She tries to destroy her actual self by beginning a drug diet. She thinks that with a weight lose she will be able to destroy herself to become the new self she wants to be.  But her destruction of her body and her mind doesn’t enable her to destroy herself and to become the power that established the relation that relates herself to herself. The scenes that best depicts her inevitable failure is when she imagines her wanted self into the TV show and the wanted self goes out the TV to make fun of Sarah’s apartment and then of Sarah herself. (For those who are strong enough or psychopath enough to want to watch the scene again, there is the link : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DR6PiX367WA). Then everybody inside the TV show makes fun of her and Sarah tries to justify why she didn’t become her wanted self: the beautiful, charismatic and interesting woman on the TV. She says “Could you do better?”; “I am old” she starts being aware of her incapacity to change herself. But she has already lost herself into the possibility, she has followed her desire to be someone else and she is not able anymore to find the way to return to herself. She, at the end, doesn’t realize her dream but persist to live in the illusion.

Sarah’s Ab-surd life

The interesting fact is that she didn’t start being desperate when she fails to change herself. She was already under another kind of despair before she starts to want to change herself, before she sees herself into the mirror and doesn’t manage to put her red dress. Indeed, she lives an AB-SURD life from the first minute of the movie. Her son when he tries to find a gift for her says that her “fix” is television. She loses herself into distractions. But that is a kind of unconscious lack of infinitude despair: When her son and her husband were there she thought that she was the self that look after them, she existed for them but when they are gone she tried to forget her existence, she thinks she is nobody. She doesn’t pay attention to herself; she pays attention to how the persons see herself. Herself doesn’t become itself but it let itself being “tricked out by the other”. That is why as long as nobody is able to see her she doesn’t mind about herself, she doesn’t look at her reflect in the mirror. To relate to Kierkegaard theory it is not just that she doesn’t know what herself is, it’s that she doesn’t seek for herself so she is not able to know that she is a spirit in front of god. She never had an insight into her existence: that is why she thinks that the point of existing is to exist for the other; that is why she falls even more into despair when she has to confront herself.