The opening conversation about watches suggests that Steven’s hands are quite separate from the work that they do. Indeed, his preoccupation on “water resistance” even goes so far as to suggest that Steven believes in insulation and compartmentalisation. To Steven, everything is self-contained. There are no real obligations and connections beyond the self, no causal links that create a tether of responsibility to another human life.
To be fair, The Killing of a Sacred Deer suggests on some level that Steven understands the absurdity of this argument. He develops a relationship with Martin, knowing that the boy’s father died on his operating table. Steven showers Martin with gifts, buying him watches and offering to pay for lunch. Steven even tries to fold Martin into his own family. There is a sense of guilt in that dynamic, even is Steven would never explicitly acknowledge it as such.
Steven repeatedly denies the details of his relationship to Martin. He instructs Martin not to visit the hospital, and lies about Martin’s identity to both Matthew and Anna. Steven does not acknowledge the truth about the death of Martin’s father until forced. Even then, Steven refuses to explicitly take responsibility for the death of a man on his operating table.
“Had you been drinking that day?” Anna demands. Steven shrugs it off, “Only a little bit. But it didn’t make a difference.” However, despite the fact that he claims it didn’t make a difference, Steven has still been sober for three years and has still fostered a familial relationship with Martin. For his part, Martin clearly believes that Steven was responsible for the death of his father. “He should have come out of that surgery alive.”
The Killing of a Sacred Deer repeatedly emphasises the hypocrisy of Steven’s attempts to avoid taking responsibility for his failures. Steven’s protestations about the innocence of surgeons are reflected back when Matthew discusses the Lang case with Anna. Matthew similarly refuses to acknowledge any responsibility for any loss of life on his watch. “You know that an anaesthesiologist is never to blame for the outcome of an operation,” he defensively asserts, a nice reflection on Steven’s insistence that Matthew has been responsible for the death of patients.
In the world of The Killing of a Sacred Deer, responsibility and blame are to be apportioned to other people. When the hospital proves unable to help Bob and Kim, Steven very vocally dresses them down. “I would feel like a total loser,” he complains to the experts drafted in to work on the case, making it clear that he holds them responsible.
As much as they might deflect responsibility for their failures, Steven and Matthew certainly seem willing to take the credit for his successes. Steven speaks at fancy dinners to an awed audience. When contemplating buying a watch, Matthew suggests that that they might get a good deal from a former patient. “Both the owner and the son have been patients of mine,” Matthew states.
When it comes to the moral dilemma at the heart of the story, Steven is just as paralysed as Bob and Kim. The choice that Steven faces over the course of The Killing of a Sacred Deer could be seen as a variation on the classic “trolley problem”, the archetypal ethical dilemma that has been explored in pop culture like The Good Place or The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt or Orange is the New Black. The trolley problem is a fixture of fiction, because it is so potent and emotive.
The trolley dilemma asks the audience to imagine a train car careening towards a group of innocent people. The audience have access to a switch that will change the train car unto another line. However, in doing so, they will be directing the train towards one specific individual. As such, the audience is put in the situation of having to choose between passively allowing the death of several innocent people or making a conscious choice to kill one specific individual. It serves as an interesting prism, both into a variety of moral philosophies and into individual decision-making.
Steven faces a variant of the trolley problem over the course of The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Does Steven kill one member of his family in order to save the other two? Is it more morally justifiable to take one life, or to simply let three innocent people die? Of course, The Killing of a Sacred Deer is not particularly invested in the ethics of this choice, tethering this sadistic dilemma to moral decisions outside of this particular framework. However, the film uses the basic outline of the dilemma to explore notions of personal responsibility and choice.
For most of the film, Steven refuses to make a choice. In fact, The Killing of a Sacred Deer even goes so far as to suggest that Steven refuses to make a choice at all. Steven only takes action towards the climax of the film, when Bob starts bleeding from the eyes. This is the penultimate stage of the mysterious affliction. It marks the point of no return. So Steven gathers the family into the sitting room, takes up his gun and decides to take action.
CinÉireann / November 2017 17