“Daddy, can’t you see we are burning?” Traumatic Time and Parental Responsibility in Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea

In Kenneth Lonergan’s film Manchester by the Sea, screened in 2016, Lee commits a life-changing mistake: on his way to the mini-market, he forgets to put the screen on the fireplace. Upon his return, he becomes a numbed witness to the spectacle of his own family tragedy as the authorities remove his children’s bodies from the burning house scene. This significant event is represented through a sequence of flashbacks, which designates said cinematic device as one of the film’s most important features. Indeed, in The Trauma Question, Roger Luckhurst approaches the flashback as “the cinema’s rendition of the frozen moment of the traumatic impact . . . flash[ing] back insistently in the present because the image cannot yet or perhaps ever be narrativized as past.” Years after the incident, and still unable to address the wound of his parental negligence and child-death trauma, Lee dreams of his dead daughter suggestively asking, “Daddy, can’t you see we are burning?” The question echoes the one from Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, where another father dreams of his dead child being burnt. In Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Cathy Caruth examines Freud and Lacan’s analysis of this question as to the significance of grief articulation, trauma coping and trauma persistence in sleep and awaken reality. The purpose of this article is to examine anachrony as a feature which exalts the dysfunctional inertia of a present life and of a traumatized mind afflicted by events which have been impossible to either register, integrate or narrate. Secondly, the article will try to unearth the mechanics of Lee’s grief and guilt via his daughter’s question. Emphasis will be placed on Lee’s inability to assume what Caruth calls the “ethical burden of survival” when asked to be his orphaned nephew’s guardian. This will be viewed as a reminder of Lee’s failure as a parent and as a challenge and invitation for the character to recover from the vacuum of his current death-in-life.