In one of the opening scenes of Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher, two young boys, protagonist James (William Eadie) and his friend Ryan (Thomas McTaggart), play in the canal that runs through their garbage-ridden neighborhood in Glasgow. They splash each other, until James shoves Ryan, who disappears beneath the water. When Ryan fails to reemerge, the camera watches James, as the reality of what he’s done slowly dawns on his face. The next succession of shots plays without dialogue, as James sprints away, and a group of older boys find Ryan’s corpse. With Ryan’s death, Ramsay’s portrait of youth is left with a glaring emptiness at its core.
It is this emptiness that makes Ramsay’s debut feature such a singular depiction of childhood. Rather than affording youth a kind of purity and lightness, as is often the impulse in storytelling, Ramsay instead captures childhood at its most anxious. Following 12-year-old James in 1970s Glasgow during the national garbage strike, the film charts a sort of aimless anxiety specific to youth, a roaming incomprehension that leads its protagonist to spiral inward.
In the midst of their council estate littered with trash bags and scavenged by rats, James’ parents struggle to make ends meet, avoiding rent collectors as they anxiously await news of whether they will be rehoused in newly developed estates. The evidence of their impoverishment lies all around James and his siblings. When the rent collector comes to the door, it is James’ younger sister Anne Marie (Lynne Ramsay, Jr.) who is sent to deter him, informing him that her parents aren’t home, while her mother (Mandy Matthews) crouches in the other room. In another scene, James mindlessly stares at the television as a news program shows images of his neighborhood, while a reporter details the health and safety risks brought by the piles of trash left outside their homes.
Given their youth, they cannot fully grasp their situation. But while James and his siblings may not comprehend their parents’ anxieties, it is clear that they sense their parents’ stress nonetheless. Ramsay illustrates this by paying particular attention to the children’s gazes. Always seen watching from a distance, James is removed from the world around him, attuned to the emptiness in his environment, even if he cannot articulate this. In one scene, James finds Ryan’s mother (Jackie Quinn) crying and dashes behind her, leaving a wide gulf between them so as to go unnoticed. To escape the unexplainable despair that permeates his environment, James continually retreats, creating an ever-widening gap between himself and the people around him.
His sister’s gaze is similarly heavy. Anne Marie watches as her father (Tommy Flanagan) flushes a mouse down the toilet that she had earlier tried to play with. Even as her father disappears from the frame, the shot drags on, with Anne Marie’s back to the camera as she silently wrestles with what she has witnessed. James and his siblings exist on the border of understanding. They know they should worry, but not why, and so they live with an ever-present anxiousness at the back of their minds, with no clear end or resolution in sight.
It’s a kind of anxiousness that their parents and the adults around them cannot share. Though they still carry an overwhelming burden, the responsibilities of adulthood offer a sense of purpose, a place at which to direct one’s stress. There’s also the enormous advantage of knowledge and language that can only be acquired through age, the ability to both sufficiently understand one’s situation and articulate one’s feelings. At minimum, these assets provide a direction outside of the self and remove one’s anxieties from the realm of the unknown. Maturation affords a semblance of control, however tenuous.
Following Ryan’s death, James and his mother stop in the street as they witness a fight between Ryan’s parents. Ryan’s mother breaks down, screaming at his father (James Ramsay) that he is responsible for Ryan’s death, that if he had been around to help her raise Ryan and keep watch over him, he might still be alive. She is unbearably distraught and broken over the loss of her son, but at the very least her devastation can find a target. She can direct her anger and disbelief at Ryan’s father and rationalize an explanation for Ryan’s death. Her overwhelming despair does not have to simply fester within her — it can be put toward something, put on someone else.
For James, however, his grief remains cyclical. Unable to share with anyone his involvement in Ryan’s death, his grief perpetually turns inward. With his shove, James is forced to carry not only grief, but guilt, where perhaps his first encounter with mortality is delivered by his own hand. He returns to the canal again and again, searching for some explanation in its depths, but leaves empty-handed each time.
Unable to articulate or exhume his overwhelming anxiety and guilt, James makes attempts at adulthood, reaching for some semblance of purpose. In one moment, he combs through the hair of an older girl, looking for lice. He imitates his mother from an earlier scene, who had done the same for him and his sisters when they became infested. James shows the comb to the girl, pointing to the evidence of lice on its teeth, a perfect imitation of his mother. Except, however, that there doesn’t actually seem to be anything there. The girl expresses uncertainty that she has lice, but James insists, as if he is trying to convince himself of his own usefulness. If James can remove lice from her hair, then he has purpose; then he can provide a clear, tangible solution to a problem. To acknowledge his own futility would be to succumb to the crushing weight of his guilt and anxiety, to recognize that there is no way out.
Throughout the film, James watches his older sister (Michelle Stewart) make her own attempts at feigning maturity. He sees her hop on the bus heading for locations she won’t disclose, and decides to follow her lead. It’s from that bus ride that James finds a rare solace. As the bus pulls away, James watches through the window as the piles of trash bags are soon left behind. He rides to the end of the line, landing amidst empty construction sites. He roams between the half-built houses, playing with construction equipment. He imagines himself a homeowner as he wanders into an empty house, climbing into a bathtub whose faucets produce no water and urinating in a toilet not yet assembled. In this empty space, James can mime adulthood, where there is no one else around to prove otherwise, no one whose mere presence would dissolve the illusion.
The relief afforded by playing at adulthood is soon overshadowed by the salvation found on the other side of a window. As he climbs down the stairs, James is halted by the sight of a field, seeming to stretch out endlessly behind the house. Without hesitation, James climbs through the window, the camera following James forward until the screen is consumed by the field and any evidence of the house or the world beyond this field disappears from the frame.
It is easily the most joyful scene in the film, as James sprints through the field, suddenly bursting with energy and curiosity. This world bears no resemblance to the one he has just left. In this field that seems to continue infinitely, there are none of the markers of civilization that James is familiar with. The rules and anxieties of his life do not apply in this uncharted territory.
In reaching for adulthood, James seeks a temporary respite from his anxiety, a valve through which to direct his guilt and grief. In the field, however, guilt and grief need not exist at all. James is relieved of his burden, because he is relieved of his identity altogether in this uninhabited terrain that has no need or even pretext for such identity markers. If a boy runs through a field, but no one is there to see him, does he exist?
In the final moments of the film, Ramsay offers two endings. James’ friend Kenny (John Miller) announces to James that he witnessed the scene in the canal with Ryan and declares James a killer. Overcome by guilt, James jumps into the canal. We see him submerge and his body sink further beneath the water. A moment later, the film cuts to a shot of the field. James’ family slowly emerges into frame, carrying furniture as they move into the house James had explored earlier. At the very back of the pack walks James, who stares back at the audience and smiles, suddenly aware of the camera in a The 400 Blows-style ending. But as the credits begin to roll, we again see James submerged in the canal.
Is James dead? Or have he and his family moved into the house amid the field? Regardless of the answer, they offer the same release — an escape from anxiety, from guilt and grief, by surrendering oneself to emptiness, to the spaces without meaning.
Both signal a death of childhood — for the canal, this death is absolute, while the field promises the possibility of building something new. It is Kenny’s admission that enables this death. In speaking aloud James’ responsibility for Ryan’s death, Kenny puts an end to James’ youthful incomprehension. What long festered inside James, once acknowledged, becomes concrete, no longer lingering in the abstract. It leaves James with a purpose to address — to either punish himself or start anew. His look at the camera signals this newfound awareness. He is no longer confined to wander aimlessly and obliviously. At last, he has some control.
