[COLUMN] Alfonso Cuarón’s Disclaimer is About the Limits of Empathy | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Disclaimer, the series that just wrapped on Apple TV+. It discusses the plot - and the ending - in detail. If you haven’t checked it out, it’s pretty good - it certainly watches better in whole than in part. You can bookmark this piece and come back to it. 

Alfonso Cuarón’s Disclaimer just wrapped up this weekend. The prestige miniseries is a fascinating study of the limits (often self-imposed) on empathy.

Now that all seven episodes of Disclaimer have been released, it’s possible to talk about the show. There’s a solid argument that, however impressive the show might be as a whole, it suffered from the modern streaming format. There was a time when Renée Knight’s novel might have been adapted as a two-and-a-half hour late-in-the-year half-prestige/half-pulp feature like David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo or Gone Girl. It would undoubtedly have benefited from that format.

It takes a little while to get a sense of what Disclaimer is actually about. In its opening hours, focusing on grieving widower Stephen Brigstocke (Kevin Kline) mourning his wife Nancy (Lesley Manville) by posthumously publishing the book she wrote about their dead son Jonathan (Louis Partridge) lightly fictionalizing his sexual encounter with documentarian Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett), the series initially seems like a weighty and prestige-y meditation on “grief” and “trauma.”

However, Disclaimer twists and turns – not just in terms of plot, but in terms of tone. As the series reaches its midpoint, it swerves into a pulpier and trashier mode, combining a cheap paperback holiday romance with a heightened airport thriller. Stephen sets about using his wife’s book to systematically destroy Catherine’s life – alienating her husband Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen) and her son Nick (Kodi Smit-McPhee) – while flashing back to Nancy’s account of Catherine’s affair with Nick.

Then, in its final episode, Disclaimer reveals what the series is really about – what it has always been about. The bulk of the episode is given over to a candid and long-delayed conversation between Catherine and Stephen, finally laying bare the reality of the situation. As such, Disclaimer constantly asks the viewer to recontextualize and reframe what they have already seen, not just in terms of unreliable narrators but in terms of the framework through which the story is best understood.

It's an approach that only really pays off at the end of the season. It can also make the first half of the season difficult for the audience to wade through, as they struggle to get a handle on their way into the series. It’s not too different from the way that Gone Girl constantly upends and reconfigures the audience’s expectations. However, there is something to be said for Gone Girl as a narrative that can be digested – or rewatched – in a single sitting. It’s tougher to ask the audience for six weeks.

It also makes it very difficult to talk or write about Disclaimer, a show that deserves to be seen. Any discussion of the substance of the show would mean unpacking events coiled within the middle stretch of the season, while any meaningful analysis of what the series actually is would require some acknowledgement of the way the finale reframes the events of the season. This is why this essay is being published after the finale was released, rather than tied to the premiere.

At its core, Disclaimer is about how human beings are fundamentally unknowable to one another and how shallow most attempts at empathy or understanding truly are, how people often understand one another through the prism of the narratives that they have already constructed, and how easy it is to become alienated from those who know one best. These are big, weighty, abstract themes. They are reinforced by the structure of the show. They are also, by their nature, alienating.

Catherine is an award-winning documentarian. She is renowned and respected in her field for her ability to get to the truth, to turn her lens on a subject and expose it to the world. One evening, coming home from a fancy dinner with her husband Robert, Catherine opens the mail to find a book: The Perfect Stranger. As she reads it, it becomes clear that this is no work of fiction. Instead, it is a fictionalized account of her own life, exposing secrets that Catherine has long tried to hide.

Truth and fiction mingle in Disclaimer. Renée Knight was also a British documentarian like Catherine, who worked with the BBC. Nancy was not present for the events depicted in the book, but reconstructed events from her son’s postcards and photographs. It’s fiction, but it is also what she believes to be true. “That is what great writers do,” Stephen boasts. “They take fragments of reality and weave them together in such a way that they reveal a greater truth.” This is a comforting idea: that Nancy’s truth can somehow be truer than the truth.

Nancy’s novel paints a horrid picture of Catherine: a young mother left alone with her son on holidays after her husband is called home for work, who embarks on a torrid affair with a young tourist. Nancy’s version of Catherine and Jonathan’s seduction is suitably lurid: Jonathan is a clumsy and inexperienced young lover manipulated by the more confident older woman who uses him and then discards him. Jonathan falls in love with Catherine, and dies trying to save Nick from drowning.

Disclaimer employs a very interesting structure. As one might expect, the series has two competing narrators. Stephen narrates his conspiring and plotting to the audience, boasting of the ease with which he destroys Catherine’s marriage and pushes Nick deeper into drug addiction. Stephen’s voiceover is in the first person. Catherine has her own anonymous narrator (Indira Varma), but it is not her own voice. Catherine’s narration addresses the documentarian in the second person.

For most of Disclaimer, the audience remains at a remove from Catherine. The show studies Catherine from the outside, denying the viewer any access to her interior life. It initially seems like this is a case of dramatic irony, the show approaching Catherine in much the same way that Catherine might study one of her own subjects. It also seems like a telling character beat, implying that Catherine is refusing to turn her documentarian’s eye upon herself.

Much of the drama in Disclaimer unfolds in the kitchen of Catherine and Robert’s house, a gigantic class extension which renders much of the drama within visible to any outside observer. However, the residents of the home remain unknowable to one another. At one point, Catherine’s narrator makes the cold assessment of Catherine and Robert’s relationship to Nick, “His parents know nothing about him.” There is little within the show to dispute that observation.

Late in the season, having been kicked out of the family home, Catherine returns to her mother (Gemma Jones). She sleeps in the same bed, in the space once occupied by her father. She considers how little she knows of the woman who gave birth to her. “You know that your mother’s name is Helen, and that Helen must have suffered anguish, loneliness and pain,” the narrator explains. “But you don’t really know about it, because – to you – Helen has always been ‘mum.’”

In Disclaimer, characters are often outside observers. They can keenly watch and speculate about other human beings, but they can never truly know. After a drunken argument with Catherine about the contents of the novel, and the affair that it revealed, Robert rides the bus to work. He considers his fellow passengers, inventing sympathetic back stories for them that express his own upper-class anxieties. He acknowledges that these fictions are condescending and self-serving.

Despite his almost cartoonish villainy, Disclaimer retains a strange sympathy for Stephen, understanding the scheming widower as a man who has been cut off from even basic empathy by sheer overwhelming loneliness. It is, after all, difficult to acknowledge the agency and complexity of other human beings after being completely shut off from them. He wraps himself in Nancy’s sweater, acknowledging that – though she only died recently – he  lost her the same day they lost Jonathan.

Stephen is truly lonely. Jonathan was buried in one of the twin plots that Stephen and Nancy had bought for themselves. Nancy opted to be buried beside her son. “I’ll be buried alone,” Stephen concedes. After Catherine assaults him, Stephen acknowledges how good it feels to be treated by a doctor. “It had been such a long time since a woman had shown me concern,” he narrates. “I liked feeling her hands on me, taking care not to hurt me, being careful with my pain.”

This idea is key to Disclaimer. Can pain be shared or understood? At one point, Catherine tries to de-escalate by reaching out to Stephen with a clinical, carefully-worded and pre-prepared statement. “You feel you did the right thing, that what Steven Brigstocke needed was your acknowledgement,” the narrator explains. “And it helped you as well. Writing those words and saying them has forced you to think about his pain. Perhaps some balance was restored between the two of you.” It assumes acknowledgement and empathy are interchangeable.

Stephen rejects Catherine’s overture. “I was not interested in her acknowledgement of my pain,” Stephen bitterly narrates. “It was too late for that. She needed to feel it.” Disclaimer is full of characters who treat suffering as a spectator sport, something to be consumed and used to generate content. When Catherine is fired from her collective of filmmakers, the young staff gather around to watch. They film it on their phones. Nancy’s novel becomes the source of gossip and voyeuristic speculation.

Then there are the explicit photos of Catherine, the rolls of film that Nancy recovered from Jonathan’s hotel room after his death. Disclaimer features a number of explicit sex scenes between Catherine and Jonathan, as imagined by Nancy. However, even Nancy’s reconstruction of the photoshoot is presented as an explicitly sexual act. Jonathan’s long lens is almost comically large, even before he starts placing it between Catherine’s legs.

The final episode of Disclaimer hinges on the reality of that night between Catherine and Jonathan. It reveals that the night was not an adulterous fling, but a sexual assault. Jonathan had broken into Catherine’s room and raped her, threatening Nick to get her to comply. This possibility had never occurred to Nancy or Stephen. “Your wife wrote very accurately about my hotel room and what I was wearing, but she couldn’t fathom what I was feeling,” Catherine tells Stephen about the events.

It’s a bold choice, radically recontextualizing the entire series up to that moment. It implicates the audience. Did the audience jump to the same conclusions about Catherine that Nancy, Stephen and even Robert did? Did the viewer assume some unearned understanding of Catherine’s internal psychology? Why was it so easy to assume the worst of Catherine, despite the fact her silence had ultimately been an effort to protect Nancy and Stephen’s memory of their son?

The big twist of Disclaimer is that Nancy had no real understanding of either Catherine or Jonathan. Instead, she had simply constructed fictional versions of these two people to craft a story that she would like to believe. It’s voyeuristic, exploitative and ultimately cruel. In this sense, Disclaimer feels like a pointed commentary on so much modern culture: the reduction of human beings to “content”, the exploitative true crime boom, the whole “post-truth” era.

For all that Roger Ebert claimed that film was an “empathy machine”, Disclaimer suggests that mediation can drive people further apart and make human beings even more alien and unknowable to one another, to rob them of agency, to render them as reflections of one’s own feelings and turn them into nothing more than characters in somebody else’s narrative.