This One Line From The Hours Plays on a Loop in My Head

Not “I seem to be unraveling,” but close.

Spoilers for The Hours follow.

Claire Danes, Meryl Streep, and Allison Janney in The Hours. Photo: Screenshot.

I bought bodega flowers the other afternoon, half-post election pick me up, half-well people are coming over, after all. As the man who sold me the bouquet wrapped it in butcher paper, I thought of Meryl Streep wearing a trench coat and a gray scarf, walking the streets of Meatpacking or Tribeca, roses cascading out of a giant trunk of brown butcher paper. How glamorous that image was: a woman who had somewhere to be, who had people waiting on her, whose day had a shape and a plan. I couldn’t stop thinking about it! I watched The Hours that very night. I’d seen it before, and knew the vague contours: a triptych about Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman) writing “Mrs. Dalloway,” a pregnant woman Laura (Julianne Moore) in the 1950s reading “Mrs. Dalloway,” and Clarissa (Streep) in present-day living out “Mrs. Dalloway.” But that night, I don’t know, the election, my own anxiety, the darkness of night — it’s like I was seeing it for the first time again.

A sort of cherished early movie-watching memory is that The Hours was too old for me. I was eight, I guess, when Auntie rented it at Blockbuster to watch at home. I was sent out of the room when she pressed play. I was deeply hurt! We shared basically everything during that time — and still mostly do — so it was a shock to know that there were themes that could still be considered too adult. 

If The Hours has a big line it’s when, hours before a big party to honor her friend Richard (Ed Harris), a poet and author living with AIDS who has been awarded a lifetime achievement honor, Clarissa putters around the kitchen. Her paranoia and terror and disease fold in on itself, pulling her down to the floor. She’s too closely observed by Richard’s ex, who has come into town for the occasion. Richard, her other half-former lover-closest friend in one; Richard, a relationship that no one in her life seems to truly understand.

Clarissa gets too defensive when the ex says that Richard’s book about Clarissa wasn’t very good. She gets too emotional when she recalls a summer they all spent together in Wellfleet. She gets too nervous with all these memories and emotions and ideas in her kitchen. “I don’t know what’s happening. I’m sorry,” she manages. “I seem to be in some strange sort of mood. I seem to be unraveling…”

That pitiful level of remove is so striking: to feel your emotions and to also observe them so keenly. Clarissa’s day is so fraught, she’s teetered so close to the edge of emotional ruin just in the last twelve hours. She’s throwing a party Richard doesn’t want. She’s hosting not just a function, but their own ghosts: who she was once, who Richard has been, what they were to one another.

But the line that I really love, that I can’t stop thinking about, is earlier in the movie. The audience is introduced to