In Kinds of Kindness, Rebecca (Margaret Qualley) dives into an empty swimming pool. She dies to make a prophecy true. Her twin sister Ruth (also Margaret Qualley) is supposed to be the one—chosen, able to heal and raise the dead. But it’s Rebecca who breaks her body to make the myth real, because the chosen one is supposed to have a dead twin sister.
I can’t stop thinking about Rebecca, sitting alone in a diner on a weekday afternoon, waiting to be called into a story grander than her loneliness. It makes her believable, this desire to matter. Her certainty about Ruth’s gift consumes her until she sees her own existence as an obstacle. She becomes the error, the flaw in the prophecy she must erase. She turns herself into a problem she’s willing to solve.
In the Book of Genesis, another Rebekah schemes for her son. She dresses Jacob in animal skins to trick his father into giving him Esau’s birthright. It is a kind of kindness, I suppose—lying to your husband so your favorite son can inherit a blessing meant for someone else.
In Kinds of Kindness, Rebecca does something similar. She fabricates signs and molds Ruth into what the cult members want. And then she dies for her. It is a kind of kindness. Or it’s something else—a wish to disappear and still be loved.
Kinds of Kindness wears its thesis like a name tag. It opens with the Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams,” the synth-pop anthem of desire, power, and submission:
I’ve traveled the world and the Seven Seas.
Everybody’s looking for something.
Some of them want to use you.
Some of them want to get used by you.
Some of them want to abuse you.
Some of them want to be abused.
The way the film opens reminds me of how I teach my students to start a philosophy paper:
In this essay, I argue that common human aspirations include the search for meaning, the desire to use and abuse individuals, and the desire to be used and abused oneself. I will draw on empirical observations to support these claims.
The song is repetitive, but you don’t mind. Repetition is soothing, especially when you have nothing else to grasp for stability.
Daniel (Jesse Plemons) stops eating. He insists that the woman who returned—who was rescued after being stranded on an island for weeks—isn’t his wife, Liz (Emma Stone). Liz pleads. “Daniel, are you going to eat? Just answer me, yes or no. Why are you doing this to me? You’ll starve to death. Is that what you want? What else can I do? I don’t know what else to do. Talk to me, please. You have to eat something. I’ll make you whatever you’d like. Just tell me what you want, and I’ll make it. Whatever you want.
Suspicious of the woman, he asks for one of her fingers with hatred in his eyes. A thumb would do, too. Cooked with cauliflower. She deliberates, deliberates some more, then cuts off her thumb. The pain makes her faint. We see the dish and the bandaged hand that serves it. He says it’s revolting.
He then asks for something more substantial—her leg, maybe. Or something more nutritious—her liver. This time, there is no deliberation. We immediately cut to Liz as a lifeless body, and at the door arrives the ‘real’ Liz, whom Daniel embraces. The first Liz is still holding the knife, still dripping blood. The liver sits on the coffee table as her final offering. It is a kind of kindness, even if forced. The pool of blood on the floor mirrors the blood gathering under Rebecca’s body at the bottom of the pool.
I keep thinking about Liz and Rebecca. I don’t ask why they do what they do. Instead, I ask why it feels familiar—why the sharp edge of sacrifice feels like possession of secret knowledge, why disappearing can feel like belonging, why vanishing can feel like a promise kept.
In her brilliant paper called “Oppressive Double Binds,” philosopher Sukaina Hirji describes a familiar dilemma for marginalized scholars in academia: they can either assimilate and perpetuate the system that makes people like them unwelcome, or they can try to change it, leading to isolation, burnout, and diminished long-term impact. No matter what they do, they reinforce the structures that exclude them. Agency is twisted into self-negation, and they can’t help but contribute to their own suffering.
I felt this keenly throughout grad school. In a field whose faculty was 82% white and 74% male in 2017, I felt like I had to become palatable. I don’t think my advisors knew I was a native speaker of Korean. I was proud when people were surprised that I grew up in Korea—then ashamed that I was proud. I refused to study Asian philosophy; it would have been just so obvious for me to do that. Instead, I wrote about Plato and Plotinus, played Rachmaninoff’s Second on the timpani, dined at high tables across Oxford, and learned French to read L’Étranger and see how the passé composé reflects Meursault’s alienation. Still, to my bafflement, a colleague told me that I ‘play the race card too much.’ When my white boyfriend from Wisconsin said I received accolades because I fit a profile, I didn’t argue.
Liz cuts out her liver. Rebecca dives into the empty pool. Each act completes a story someone else needs to believe. In Women Talking (2022), there is no prophecy to fulfill. Instead, the women face a reality too brutal to accept.
The film opens with an emotional punch: women and girls in a Mennonite colony wake up dazed with bruises on their thighs, blood on their sheets and dresses. The Elders refuse to acknowledge the truth—that the men had sedated and raped them in the night—and instead accuse the women of hallucinating from the Devil—or worse, lying for attention. “An act of female imagination,” the Elders say.
In one scene, Miep (Emily Mitchell), a four-year-old, walks through a sunlit field as crickets chirp. Autje (Kate Hallett), a teenager, narrates:
It went on for years.
To all of us.
It felt like weightlessness.
It felt like drifting over what used to be real.
It felt like a banishment, as though we had no invitation anymore to be a part of the real.
Some women remain in the colony by abandoning their bodies. Autje describes watching themselves from above, though they’re unsure whether it was through God’s eyes or their own desperate need to be elsewhere. This distance is a cruel kind of kindness, maybe. A way of being spared without being saved.
It took years after my colleague’s comment about ‘playing the race card’ to realize I should do what I want because there is no guarantee that cutting out my liver will be enough. Free of the self-imposed boundary, I begin to roam freely, reveling in the new luxury of following my interests: pre-modern Korean art, North Korean philosophy, comics, memoirs, video games.
But, like the women in the films, my freedom is shaped by constraint. Some days I worry I’m not ‘serious’ enough. I feel like I’m failing some secret test. I still wonder whether the white boys think I have my job because of my ‘profile.’
I don’t recognize the person I’ve become. In third grade, when I lived in a rural ex-mining town, I marched up to the principal and complained about not getting hot water in the school bathroom. In sixth grade, I called out my teacher in Reading class because she was nicer to the popular kids. In ninth grade, fresh out of ESL, I rejected my English teacher’s reading of Wallace Stevens and offered my own interpretation. But somewhere along the way, I lost the courage that used to come so naturally.
In the colony, after being raped by a family member, Nettie becomes Melvin (August Winter) and stops speaking altogether. He never felt like a woman, and after the assault, he could no longer pretend.
Rebecca sees herself as the flaw in the prophecy. Liz becomes the wrong Liz. Melvin disappears into silence.
Ona (Rooney Mara), pregnant from an assault, speaks with quiet longing: “Why does love—the absence of love, the end of love, the need for love—result in so much violence?”
Again and again, women are taught that to become worthy, they must disappear. They’re forced to play second fiddle to a song they didn’t write. A certain kind of kindness and a certain kind of despair start to sound like the same tune.
The sacrifices they make to belong become erasure when the desire to sacrifice is shaped by coercive systems. It’s not kindness, but an unwilling confirmation of the narrative that we were unacceptable to begin with.
* * * *
The women catch one man in the act. He names the others. A few are jailed, and all the men travel to town to post bail. In their absence, the Elders deliver an ultimatum: the women have two days to forgive the men or face expulsion from the colony, and, by extension, denial of entry into the kingdom of heaven.
The women gather to vote: do nothing, stay and fight, or leave. The vote is split between staying and fighting, and leaving. Three families are chosen to deliberate and choose what to do.
So, the women gather and talk in a hay loft. They braid one another’s hair and put their heads on each other’s shoulders.
It takes too much time for them to confront the fear that bound them for so long: if they do not forgive and remain, they risk forfeiting salvation. “How will the Lord, when he arrives, find all the women if we aren’t in the colony?”
The women want freedom, but they dread what follows it. What will they become once they’re free?
Meanwhile, in a different story that demands obedience, Robert (Jesse Plemons) already knows the colony women’s fear. Once Raymond (Willem Dafoe), his boss, lets him go, he doesn’t know what to wear, what to eat, who to be. He had eaten burgers and shakes for lunch because Raymond wanted him to gain weight. He had induced his wife Sarah’s (Hong Chau) miscarriages and let doctors tell her the lie that there was something wrong with her ovaries. He lies easily, naturally, constantly: about almost being done with Anna Karenina; about knowing that Sarah was going to quit her job; about eating two burgers and two shakes; about having a job.
In the colony, women consider the pros and cons of staying and fighting. The first ‘pro’ item for staying comes quickly: “We won’t have to figure out where we’re going or experience the uncertainty of not knowing where we are going.” A reminder also comes quickly: “We don’t have a map.”
Ona raises her hand and speaks: “Would it be a good idea, before we list the pros and cons of staying and fighting, to talk about exactly what we are fighting for?” She continues: “Perhaps we need a statement which describes what we want the colony to be like after winning the fight. Perhaps we need to know more about what we are fighting to achieve, not only what we are fighting to destroy.” The women groan. Some put their heads on the table.
Robert is also without a map, no longer guided by Raymond’s daily instructions. Robert is at a loss. Robert struggles at a bar.
Bartender: Are you ready to order?
Robert: I don’t know, I can’t decide. Could you recommend me a wine?
Bartender: White? Red?
Robert: Whatever is best. I mean, whatever you think.
Bartender: I recommend a white Chardonnay from New Zealand.
Robert: Perfect.
It can be comforting to be told what to do. Kierkegaard said that anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. Loki said that humans want freedom from freedom. When we need to feel like we are okay, following directions is the easiest way to achieve that—even if it feels like one is disappearing, or being disingenuous, or becoming alienated from who they used to be.
People get impatient with Hamlet for being indecisive, but I get him. Ruminating is acting—or it feels like one, and a productive one at that. What do I order, how do I reply to this email, when do I slot in that chore?
Just do what you want, my spouse says.
What do you mean? What does want have to do with anything?
How will anyone find us, once we’re no longer where we were told to be?
* * * *
People talk as if they’re delivering lines in Kinds of Kindness.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” says Sarah, about a smashed-up racquet Raymond gives them. He takes it back later when Robert disappoints him.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” says Liz, announcing her pregnancy. Daniel tells her to leave the house.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” says Emily (Emma Stone), believing Anna (Hunter Schafer) is the chosen one. Anna fails to raise the dead.
Why do we continue to uphold scripts that repeatedly fail us? The thing is, these women aren’t even performing when they say those lines.
When acceptance—and survival of body and soul—depend on scripts, deviation is unintelligible. What will we become, once we are no longer where we were told to be?
Robert was let go because he told Raymond he couldn’t kill a man by crashing into his car. This is his considered judgment. The boss makes him repeat the refusal under different conditions: entering the room and sitting down, entering the room and standing up, back to entering the room and sitting down, with and without the boss’s lover nearby. When Robert continues to deliver his lines without change, Raymond raises the stakes, and Robert continues to refuse:
“Raymond, please. I never denied you anything. Even when you asked me… told me not to have any children. I wasn’t happy about it, but I didn’t say a word. Ask me for anything else you want and I’ll do it. But I can’t be responsible for another man’s death.”
Robert eventually relents because he can’t handle being without directions. He kidnaps the half-dead man, dumps him in the street, and runs him over with his Jeep again and again.
His final words sound like a child’s: “I did it. I did it. I did good.” A plea for acceptance.
The scene ends with Vivian, his boss’s lover, singing: “And it’s me you need to show. How deep is your love? I really need to learn, ‘cause we’re living in a world of fools, breaking us…”
Three hundred years ago, Blaise Pascal said all of humanities’ problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone. Robert would rather become a murderer than be alone.
Salome is filled with rage after her four-year-old Miep is assaulted. “I will become a murderer if I stay.” Her rage is clear enough to be believed. The rest of the women reason: if she will become a murderer by staying, then she must leave for the sake of her own soul. “We are not all murderers. Not yet.”
“We could ask the men to leave.”
“Ask the men to leave?”
“None of us have ever asked the men for anything.
Not a single thing.
Not even for the salt to be passed.
Not even for a penny, or a moment alone.
Or to take the washing in, or to open a curtain, or to go easy on the small yearlings.
Or to put their hand on the small of my back while I try again for the 12th or 13th time to push a baby out of my body.”
“Isn’t it interesting that the one and only request we women would have of the men would be for them to leave?”
The decisions made to preserve oneself and one’s sense of self—to leave, to refuse to kill—are experienced as narrative disruptions. This suggests just whose story was being told.
The first time we see Sarah, she’s squeezing oranges for Robert’s breakfast.
Each of my own days is a plump blood orange. I press it to the last drop until my hands ache. I need to know I made the most of what I was given, that I couldn’t possibly regret anything. A day with any pulp left is a wasted day. I fantasize about climbing into bed in an exhaustion that feels sweet only if I had wrung myself dry. When did depletion become the measure of worth?
But I don’t know who I’m squeezing it for. It isn’t for me.
Still, I keep going. The squeezing became my script, and I don’t even need to perform.
But maybe it’s not even a blood orange.
Maybe it’s not discipline, penance, or sacrifice.
Maybe it’s just hollow compulsion, a grasp at meaning in a game where no one ever feels enough. The need to feel whole, and the deeper need to end the need.
In the last meeting of the academic year, we spend 30 minutes trying to rename the DEI committee for our college.
We can’t use: access, advocacy, belonging, cultural.
We lean on our mascot’s name and land on “Wildcat Support Committee.”
It’s safe because it doesn’t mean anything.
The renaming reminds me of squeezing a dry orange—so much effort poured toward nothing.
The same question, refracted through different characters. What do we do with the old, bleak hope that pain will redeem us? What do we do with the part of us that still hopes the knife will be enough?