An Analysis of Goodness and Flourishing in The Secret Life of Words

At the beginning of The Secret Life of Words, the audience is presented with a main character, Hannah, who seems to have nothing in her life but a factory job, chicken, rice and apples for every meal, and and obsessive compulsive relationship with soap. She doesn’t know how to be flourish it seems, although she is desperately trying to be good and continue with life, trying to forget the horrors she has witnessed in her past. 

Hannah turns off her hearing aid as a method of detaching herself from the world and the sorrows which she associates with it, by maintaining this detachment from the world,  she tries to hide from the memories of the horrors it has committed against her. Although, the voice within her head will never truly let her forget. The movie’s heroine can’t even take a vacation willingly because it removes all distractions between her the world from which she is so desperately hiding herself. A vacation would leave her alone with nothing but herself and the world which has wronged her so and because “[she] is afraid that one day...[she] may begin to cry and cry so very much that nothing or nobody can stop me and the tears will fill the room and [she] won't be able to breath” (Coixet).

Furthermore, the oil rig symbolic as a setting in many ways. It houses many, like Hanna, who wish to separate themselves from society and be “alone.” It embodies pain and suffering due to the explosion. And for Josef,  it represents the ending of a marriage the suicide of his best friend. Josef trying to save his friend and nearly killing himself is his struggle for goodness despite the past badness in his life. Hannah too faces this struggle in perhaps this explains the mutual understanding they reach; both are dealing with the fact that they are alive despite the deaths of others and how they can move on and flourish from this place. In order to overcome the badness in their pasts, it seems both must share their pasts with each other which is why as Josef says later in the film they need each other. This occurs in almost an exchange of information and brings out an immediate and visible catharsis in the other. In this sense, each character has to let go of the past by allowing it to be known by another to be able to move on and to flourish. While both characters can be considered “good” at the beginning of the film as they are attempting to live with the badness of their pasts, they can never flourish until they move on and let go of the badness by achieving intimacy with another whom can take the burden from them. Josef and Hannah find this in each other and the epilogue scene, showing them with two sons and a cottage shows that they have indeed come to flourish. However, the child’s voice within Hannah’s head still remains when she is alone which makes the story believable and makes her flourishing more real because there remains the reminder of all she has had to suffer to get to that point.