The Crisis of Care and Uncanny Intersensuality in Sally Potter’s The Roads Not Taken

Abstract

Abstract In a world experiencing an ongoing crisis in healthcare, the value of caregiving has become marginalized, the work of carers undervalued and pushed into invisibility. Sally Potter’s film, The Roads Not Taken (2020) brings into the domain of the visible the toil of in-home care of the mentally ill, an instance of a “quiet crisis buried in individual lives” (Bunting 2020, 5). The Roads Not Taken as an illness narrative of a former writer, now suffering from dementia, being taken care of by his daughter, conveys a liminal case of despaired effort to reach for the Other, in an emotionally immersive manner. The paper explores the film’s uncanny sensations of in-betweenness, with special focus on the unhomeliness and heterotopia of the vulnerable male body, trapped between disconnection from the present and mental journeys into the past, traversing sites across geographic and spiritual borders, captured in intimate close-ups that invite “cinempathy.” The female figure of the caregiver emerges as a site of negotiating between self-sacrifice and self-care, between the deep-felt compassion of private caregiving and the objectifying impersonality of public care services, while just missing a work opportunity, thus experiencing the contradictions of capital and care (Fraser 2016). The film foregrounds unspeakable pains, entangled emotions and unbridgeable gaps, and subtly points at profound anxieties around the care crisis of our times (Dowling 2021).1