Remains Of The Day Essay

For our next section on war films, in class we viewed and discussed the films Paths of Glory by Stanley Kubrick, The Remains of the Day, by James Ivory and the documentary A Painful Reminder. I think that there are many similarities between these three films, and while they take place during different places and times, I think they all carry with them the same examples of the consequences of war on society. For this reason, I will discuss the consequence within these films and how they relate to the society that the films take place in, as well as how the filmmakers use techniques to show these consequences on society. One of the biggest similarities that I found between these films was their depiction of class among the characters, and how

The film shows a division between the lower class, with the butlers and maids, and the higher class through Lord Darlington, who the lower-class servants work for. In this film, we learn that the servers are trained to perform their jobs and services to Lord Darlington and his guest, without any regard to their own personal lives and beliefs. I think this view is very similar to how soldiers are trained to perform their duties assigned to them from higher up the chain of command, without taking into consideration their own beliefs. This is a similar theme that we see in many societies, that politics will divide us up, and when war comes, the lower class are used to fulfill the agenda of the upper class. This is the biggest consequence of war. We see an example of this in The Remains of the Day, as the servants continue to work for Lord Darlington even as he begins to negotiate with the Nazi’s and in the end, we see the society of the working class in his estate crumble after the war and Lord Darlington’s reputation is ruined. The filmmakers show us this by showing the estate before and after Lord Darlington’s death. We see the struggle of the society within the estate to acknowledge what was happening around them, and in the end, the estate fell